Universal Lovebox.

My friend Renee, the depth hypnotherapist, came by again yesterday. She asked how I was, and I said, I felt exhausted. Depleted on levels all, soul, physical, mental. All. I have no more resources. And don't know how to refuel.

She said I have trouble asking for, and accepting, help. I didn’t know it was that obvious. In fact, as habitual as it is, I didn’t really realize that I do it. She said she’s known me well for quite some time. Which is true.

We looked some at my resistance to accepting help. How I feel that to allow help (and we can substitute love, as it’s the same thing, really) is to allow in a Trojan horse. She said that was an interesting thing to say; to me, it sounds normal, and obvious. I guess it’s not.

When I spoke in the previous blog about allowing people to set up house on my “lawn” and that I just retreat farther inside myself, this is the same track. To allow someone in, is to allow them to harm me, step on my grass, or burn my house down.

Better to stay shut and shuttered.

We talked about the 25 and 75 per cents again. I realized this morning through some meditation that ultimately, I have been presenting only 25% of myself to be available for love, because to allow the rest to come forward is too dangerous.

I went back to this event when I was 15 or 16 when I suddenly and traumatically learned or interpreted that there was only one thing that “they” (read: guys, but extrapolated to “the world”) wanted to see of me. I retreated inside myself very harshly and drastically at that moment. In my meditation, as I stood next to that car, parked on the dark side-street of my suburban charming town, in real life, I bawled.

This was not okay.

And so I learned that to prevent myself from being truly harmed, I would give you what would be “approved of,” what I thought you wanted to see, and the rest of me, the color part of me, would remain shut up. You will get my 25 per cent. This is what garners your approval. The exterior. The surface. I won’t allow myself to get burned.

Surely, unfortunately, I had plenty more experiences to support the idea to that to let people in is to get hurt apocalyptically. After the decimation of my first love experience, I started smoking. After the second, I started using psychedelics. Anything to not feel how betrayed and wounded I was by you. Or how betrayed and wounded I was by myself, for again allowing that larger part of me to be vulnerable.

To shut down the majority of myself has had major consequences in my life. The refusal to ask for help/allow for help is just one manifestation. Because I interpreted that I could only be or use or share or show the 25 per cent of myself, I’ve been stymied in most areas of my life.

We spoke about my job. And tentative though I am to write about it, as I know my coworkers read this. … I cannot go back to doing that work, I sobbed on the couch yesterday. I have been trying to get out of the secretary world for some time now, and I always seem to find myself back in it.

Renee told me that we, alone, cannot construct the new ideas. That I have to be willing to trust that if I dismantle my own ideas, the box of the 25%, that something else will construct itself in its place. A new container. But that I don’t have to figure it out. That if I try to figure out how to let these old fallacies go, and try to figure out what to put in its place, I will simply construct what I’ve always known.

I have to be willing to let it get messy, and believe that it will recorrect. To eliminate a container of water, the water will spill all out over the table. Can I allow it to spill, and believe that something else, something more accurate healthy will create itself?

Romance and Finance are what seem to plague most of us. And this abuse and crippling of myself have affected me in both these areas. In both I feel empty. Because I have been working on the presumption that I must only be and show this limited portion of myself.

The fallacy of the employment tack has been as follows: If I have a stable, steady job, my dad will approve of me, and therefore I will be whole. However, it is only that 25% that is being approved of, and the rest of me is stifled, I feel horrible and not whole at all. Great, workable equation, eh? So, the question is, am I willing to let go of this impossible quest for my dad’s approval of this tiny portion in order to allow air to the whole of myself?

Structurally, I have been in a system where only this small, active, visible part of myself has been supported. I have no idea how to support the rest of me. But, as Renee said, I don't have to support me. I have to let go of the idea that I somehow need to know or give or figure or create. This is my problem, and my challenge/invitation. 

And again, it will come back to letting it, others, in. Letting myself, allowing myself to look for support. To look at people showing up for me now as a show of Universal support, no longer interpreting the “Santa Claus” rewarding/punishing G-d.

People are showing up for me. They are, out of the goodness of their hearts, offering me love in the form of laundry, dvds, tupperware, texts. “Be careful not to trust,” says the fearful part of me. “You know what happened last time.”

In fact, “last time,” was a long time ago. Evidence that love is harmful is an outdated concept. With little to support it.

Sure, I can look at the events with my dad lately, or I can look at my last relationship. But these are two out of, say, a hundred people who have shown up for me during my illness.

I’m scared. But I want to be a grown up. I want to stand forward with the whole of myself. I want to be more than a goddamned secretary. (Not that there’s anything wrong with being one, if you are one! It’s just wrong for me.) I want to be more than perpetually single, and afraid.

I’m afraid anyway, this way. Why not try to be afraid of the something new then? Or, rather, try to be afraid, and do it anyway. Open myself to the intention of letting in more light. More life. Open myself to the intention of receiving. And allow myself to stay out of the way as “it” constructs a new, useful, and healthy container for -- you guessed it -- Universal Love.