Set Backs

Why is there a trailer for the movie "Temple Grandin" at the top of the page on a blog about foreclosures? First, because I couldn't figure out how the Hell I could plant it anywhere else in the this blog template, so I've got that going for me, and second because when I have a setback in my moving forward process I will look for ways to change my perspective.

The other day I had a mini nervous breakdown. It didn't feel too mini at the time, it does now but it didn't. My primary focus was on how broken I felt inside. I felt like there was nothing I could do to "fix" and that I would always, always feel the same way about myself and my life. I felt literally, "foreclosed upon". And Dag Nab it, I felt sorry for myself and pissed off at the world for allowing parents like mine to procreate, or in my case adopt.

It could or should be obvious to most people, (myself included), that what I am experiencing is no "little" thing and that it is okay for me to breakdown and cry and cry and cry, but it wasn't obvious to me, because I must always prevail. I must always be the strong one, the perfect one, the one who, "never let's em see you sweat", because I can't be weak. If I am weak no one will like me and if no one likes me . . . (insert your own truth here).

During this self inflicted mind f--k I felt again, as I often do that I simply wanted to jettison the planet, escape, take the cowards way out, or go to sleep for 50 years and wake up in a world I know can exist. The truth is I just didn't want to deal with the pain. I didn't want to sit with the pain of it all. The pain of my past errors in judgment. The pain of the realization that everything I have known is about to be extinguished. The pain of letting go. I just didn't want to be present in it. I also knew that if I was present in it and let it come up I would lose a day or a week of "getting stuff" done. And, I can't have that. So rather than just letting it happen I had to punish myself, hate myself and pull everyone else into my own misery. What a crock of shit!

Then I decided to do something I would not have done in the past. I decided to listen to Maia and actually do what she said. She gave me permission to cry. She gave me permission to let the pain come up and to be by myself with it. Yup, no distractions. No talking on the phone. No eating. No computing. No writing. No running. Just sitting. Just crying. It's so freeing and so uncommon in a world where sitting with ourselves and letting the feelings come up without trying to stop them is frowned upon, often pissed on as a show of weakness. When I was a child if I cried I was punished and sent to my room. I know now that my parents were wanting to teach me how to be in the world, but I think it back fired

So why the video trailer of an Autistic woman who develops a solution to cruelty in slaughter houses? Because she came into a place where people don't think like she does, even though she's a genius and since she wasn't quote normal her journey was fraught with the same pain and anguish we all experience times a gazillion, and the cruelty and closed mindedness of others was highlighted to a spectacular degree. I cried just watching it and asked myself why? Why do we as a species reject that which we don't understand? Why are we so afraid of what we view as different? At the same time I saw the miraculous in her thinking process. I saw the miraculous in those people who seemed to show up out of nowhere in her life. I saw the love in her mother's eyes and the determination it inspired in her and I realized how human suffering can act as a catalyst to creation and I can use my own to change my life.