Comfortably settled in the passenger seat next to me, little Anna, freckled and glowing, pushed back a stray lock of her red hair and asked:
“So, what’s your homework?”
“Excuse me?” I didn’t quite understand.
“Well, I think after our meeting, you should do some homework,” she clarified.
“Oh…” I paused, taken aback by this unexpected turn. When I pause to think, my conversation partners often get the impression that I’m not listening or planning to respond. But in reality, I’m just pondering.
“I know!” Anna exclaimed eagerly. “Firstly, you won’t initiate communication with him anymore.”
“Got it,” I replied. “I was actually thinking of giving myself that homework, especially since the last thing I wrote to him was a test: ‘If he responds, he’s the one he claims to be. If he doesn’t respond, then he’s full of it, a manipulative liar, in short.'”
“And also,” Anna continued, “every day, I do this: I have a reminder on my phone, and it asks me every day: ‘What would a person who loves themselves do right now?'”
I thought about it, and I liked the idea, but I decided to tweak it:
“You know, the idea is wonderful, but I constantly do things for myself that people who love themselves would do: I pamper myself, feed myself delicious and nutritious food, take care of myself, dress nicely… I’ve been doing all this for a long time, but it’s already become part of the ‘external attributes,’ and I don’t think it significantly affects my inner state. But maybe what would suit me better is not ‘doing’ but ‘thinking’ or ‘feeling.'”
So, I set my phone to ask me twice a day – what a person who loves themselves would ‘think’ and what they would ‘feel.’
Remarkably, just one day was enough to slightly shift the paradigm of my perception. This was especially important in recent days, as I was hit by some overwhelming darkness – the result of a new wave of attempts to communicate with men. I’ll write more about that later, but in short: I had fallen back into irritation and started losing faith in the possibility of beauty in my personal life – closeness, tenderness, and love… But the support of friends, as well as this inner work, helped me emerge from that pit. If not to soar yet, at least to stop crawling.
What I thought: “This is a difficult period, just try to get through it. Everything, in reality, isn’t as terrible as it seems right now. You are amazing and beautiful, and you deserve love, tenderness, joy, closeness, and I believe that the best is yet to come for you.” What I felt: warmth and support.
This harmoniously fits into one of the exercises my therapist gave me to work through childhood trauma. I’ve reached fairly basic levels of working through it, and it’s especially hard now, but also joyful: because there are reasons to believe that this is practically the bottom, if not already there, and I just need to suffer a little more and dig through this horror to clear everything up once and for all. And on this foundation of wholeness, I can build full-fledged relationships where there’s no room for emotional blackmail, fears, traumas, and manipulations aimed at sucking out “belongingness” in every possible way – tendencies that, regardless of the conscious desire for real closeness and giving love, kill the most beautiful impulses of the soul at the root.
By the way, the psyche resists, so tomorrow, I’m going to see the therapist in person (usually, our communication is over the phone, it’s convenient for both of us) so she can guide me through the process of internal consolidation of fragmented subpersonalities and establish a new pattern of their collaboration.
But everything has already shifted. And it shifted so unexpectedly, in a way I didn’t even anticipate.
Just yesterday, shedding internal tears, I told a friend that I couldn’t and didn’t want to do anything else, but today, waking up, I felt simple. Simplicity is a very precious feeling, – it’s like a clean house where there’s no clutter. Like a well-tended garden: all the grapevines are neatly pruned, the potatoes are hilled, the tomatoes are covered with a greenhouse. Like a classically dressed person – a little black dress and a small pearl necklace. Everything is simple, the eyes don’t dart around, but inside there’s some purity and hope. Yes, hope.
Today it’s overcast, but it didn’t upset me. For variety, sometimes a Los Angeles resident wants it to be “wet, cold, and without a bear.” In other words, overcast. And – surprisingly – it suddenly seemed to me that I was at home, in Moscow, and it was winter outside. And at home, it’s warm. And through the windows, I can see a white-white courtyard (light-gray Californian sky), and I feel cozy: I’m at home, “where I know everything and where everyone knows me,” you could say, in my homeland. Everything is familiar, and there’s such a strong yet gentle feeling of protection.
(Immigrants are familiar with the feeling of lacking this simplicity and feeling of protection of their native home, native city, where there is (or was) a mother, where everything is familiar, where you grew up or warmed up, where there are friends and sometimes even just unfamiliar people who understand you with just a half-word because you’re from the same culture. Abroad, this is sorely missed, especially if a person moved without family – relatives and has been living completely alone for a long time, without the opportunity to touch their native culture. This causes a feeling of “detachment and anxiety,” which can often escalate into severe depression: as it happened to me when I first moved to Los Angeles.)
Simplicity. Purity. And protection.
And this is the amazing – new – feeling when thinking about “him.” He’s no longer interesting. He’s turned into a banal, selfish little boy with a touch of narcissism. It’s terribly, surprisingly, unexpectedly, but incredibly – boring. He’s just like all the others – those who disappear at the first sign that some inner work is needed. Immaturity. It’s funny to remember his words about himself: “I think I have a very old soul”…
I sometimes think that I have a very old soul too, but saying it to someone who, I think, has an equally old soul, seems arrogant to me. Vasco, I’m bored. You filed to impress me.
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