This article made me realize how far I’ve gone in healing myself. My mother abused me. As a coping mechanism when I was about 15 years old I became disattached from pretty much everything I have/can have, in order to not feel much of a loss when it is taken from me. In order not to grieve.
And the fragment about two kinds of grief after a relationship ended made it even more clear. I never imagine the future. I tell myself I live so much in the present that it just doesn’t occur to me, but the thing is that I learned not to. Because anything I imagine or want—can be taken away from me, and I would look stupid for being angry at the world/fate for taking away from me something that was not even yet mine. There are parts of my life where this seems a reasonable thing to do, for example my son has a diagnosis of a genetic disease that kills 90% of affected people in infancy. He’s almost 7 years old, so he’s already an outlier. Any day the disease can activate and the dying will start. Not planning a future for and with him feels reasonable. In autumn I finally visited local association of deaf people with a vague intention of giving him a community, in which he’ll be able to feel compatible in the future, but that doesn’t count as a plan. It’s a vague intention. “I’ll put him in one place with the people that are a bit more like him than me and he’ll have a better chance of fitting in”.
Last year, for the first time in my life I bought for Tadek and me a week-long holiday in Greece. And when it was close to the end, I started planning: I want to do that again, maybe a bit closer to the season than mid-May. And in two years I want to take the kids with us for this kind of holiday. I keep that thought, I return to it. It’s very strange to me, I’ve never had one like this. I’ve never made plans for me or my family and here I am making them. Making it. One plan.
Recently another plan has shown up. About owning a flat, provided that my parents give me a lot of money once they sell their valuable house (one version of this plan has them not giving me money, but buying a flat and then renting it to me at no charge for a few years until we move out of the area). There is a proverb in Polish: nie dziel skóry na żywym niedźwiedziu (do not divide the skin of a live bear), warning against planning too far in the future or basing your plans on something that is not particularly likely to happen. This plan feels a lot like a live bear. Add to that my craving for emigrating caused by gaslighting politics of the new government (I’ve been gaslighted over half of my life and seeing it happen on this scale makes me quite anxious). But I keep it. I’ve even looked at some offers, to get the idea of prices. And just now I realized there is even a third and fourth plan.
So altoghether it seems that I’m finally allowing myself to care. I’m finally allowing myself to get attached and (at least to some extent) ignore the all-pervading fear of losing things and people.
I think the first step to this revelation was rephrasing the classic greek “panta rei”. Earlier only temporal permanence could give things reason to exist (since nothing is permanent, nothing had the reason to exist and I was not entitled to “have” anything) and I managed to change that a few years ago. Everything passes. But you know what? For now, for this year and maybe next and maybe even some years more—this boy is mine. Everything passes and everything will be lost, but this is my home now, even if it will not be the last, final home of my life. Impermanency does not make it any less of a home than the final one. There was the thought “therefore I am allowed to attach myself to owning this car/having this child” but I never truly believed it. Until recently, that is.
This article made me realize how far I’ve gone in healing myself. My mother abused me. As a coping mechanism when I was about 15 years old I became disattached from pretty much everything I have/can have, in order to not feel much of a loss when it is taken from me. In order not to grieve.
And the fragment about two kinds of grief after a relationship ended made it even more clear. I never imagine the future. I tell myself I live so much in the present that it just doesn’t occur to me, but the thing is that I learned not to. Because anything I imagine or want—can be taken away from me, and I would look stupid for being angry at the world/fate for taking away from me something that was not even yet mine. There are parts of my life where this seems a reasonable thing to do, for example my son has a diagnosis of a genetic disease that kills 90% of affected people in infancy. He’s almost 7 years old, so he’s already an outlier. Any day the disease can activate and the dying will start. Not planning a future for and with him feels reasonable. In autumn I finally visited local association of deaf people with a vague intention of giving him a community, in which he’ll be able to feel compatible in the future, but that doesn’t count as a plan. It’s a vague intention. “I’ll put him in one place with the people that are a bit more like him than me and he’ll have a better chance of fitting in”.
Last year, for the first time in my life I bought for Tadek and me a week-long holiday in Greece. And when it was close to the end, I started planning: I want to do that again, maybe a bit closer to the season than mid-May. And in two years I want to take the kids with us for this kind of holiday. I keep that thought, I return to it. It’s very strange to me, I’ve never had one like this. I’ve never made plans for me or my family and here I am making them. Making it. One plan.
Recently another plan has shown up. About owning a flat, provided that my parents give me a lot of money once they sell their valuable house (one version of this plan has them not giving me money, but buying a flat and then renting it to me at no charge for a few years until we move out of the area). There is a proverb in Polish: nie dziel skóry na żywym niedźwiedziu (do not divide the skin of a live bear), warning against planning too far in the future or basing your plans on something that is not particularly likely to happen. This plan feels a lot like a live bear. Add to that my craving for emigrating caused by gaslighting politics of the new government (I’ve been gaslighted over half of my life and seeing it happen on this scale makes me quite anxious). But I keep it. I’ve even looked at some offers, to get the idea of prices. And just now I realized there is even a third and fourth plan.
So altoghether it seems that I’m finally allowing myself to care. I’m finally allowing myself to get attached and (at least to some extent) ignore the all-pervading fear of losing things and people.
I think the first step to this revelation was rephrasing the classic greek “panta rei”. Earlier only temporal permanence could give things reason to exist (since nothing is permanent, nothing had the reason to exist and I was not entitled to “have” anything) and I managed to change that a few years ago. Everything passes. But you know what? For now, for this year and maybe next and maybe even some years more—this boy is mine. Everything passes and everything will be lost, but this is my home now, even if it will not be the last, final home of my life. Impermanency does not make it any less of a home than the final one. There was the thought “therefore I am allowed to attach myself to owning this car/having this child” but I never truly believed it. Until recently, that is.