Day 392: Using weather as an excuse

08032014

This post is a continuation to:
Day 391: Winter depression

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel disconnected from life during winter.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to ignore the manifestations of life around me during winter, as I have focused on the lack of what I have labeled as “life” instead of focusing on what is actually here.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that I need to work with the reality that is here at the moment in order to best support myself to truly live within and as life.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to ignore the manifestation of life that is myself when during winter my surroundings have not supported my idea of “life”.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to make a deal with myself that when the winter gets nice and cold and pretty (usually the temperature here drops enough for it to be a beautiful winter for a while) I will start taking walks outside and thus connecting with nature and giving myself exercise – not realizing that because the weather is unpredictable, this “deal” might never come to happen, making this bargaining with myself unreliable. [We ended up having a really sucky winter here, bad weather and no snow.]

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to justify giving in to discomfort of taking walks outside when the weather is cold, dark and wet by thinking that I'll go out when the weather gets better.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that making “if, then” deals with myself regarding my physical well-being is not reasonable.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not support myself to push through the discomfort of exercising and being in nature when the weather is “bad”.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to define “bad” weather according to some uncomfortable childhood experiences where I have gotten cold and wet with no sense of control over the situation to comfort me. [For example, now as an adult I can reason out with myself that if I get wet, I can always eventually come home and change into dry clothes.]

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel helpless when my surroundings are physically uncomfortable, not realizing that I have the tools to both alleviate the discomfort by practical means and to walk myself through my feeling of discomfort.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to disregard the manifestations of life in nature during winter by choosing to not go out much, thus causing my sense of being “disconnected from life” myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to disregard the manifestations of life in other people by choosing to not go out much and rather stay at home due to seeking comfort, thus causing my sense of being “disconnected from life” myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to use the weather as an excuse to not exercise.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to use the weather as an excuse to not socialize.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to use the weather as a justification to give in to my desire to remain within my comfort zone / my fear of facing discomfort.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that as I have created resentment towards certain weather conditions, facing those conditions within any activity is an act of stepping outside my comfort zone, which means that I need specific attention and care from myself when I face those conditions and expand beyond my current comfort zone.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to expect myself to go jogging in “bad weather” and get disappointed in myself when I repeatedly failed to do so, not realizing that as both the conditions and the activity are such that I am still to some extent uncomfortable with and resent, I would need clear focus and awareness to be able to commit this set of actions.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not fully support myself when and as I would have the opportunity to do something uncomfortable and expand myself, thus with my carelessness wasting the opportunity and building up self-disappointment.

• I commit myself to take into consideration my remaining resentment towards jogging and certain weather conditions when and as I go out to exercise by giving myself enough time, dressing up properly, removing any distractions and focusing on giving myself attention.
• I commit myself to exercise one moment at a time, one breath at a time.
• I commit myself to use self-forgiveness to overcome mental barriers towards exercise.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that the weather is not a valid reason to not go out unless it's raining fireballs or razorblades (lol) – unless the weather is actually directly harmful to human beings, which it rarely is here.

Day 391: Winter depression

05032014

Audio transcripts from today:

“Today I cried out of joy when I stepped out into the sun. Apparently it's been a very dark winter. It is very difficult to find life from within yourself when everything around you is dead. But then again, it shouldn't be about the polarity of life and death, now shouldn't it? Like going from one extreme to the other.”

“But everything is not dead. It's just... Darkness is not dead. Frost is not dead. The plants are not dead, they're just sleeping. The animals are not dead, they're just absent, they're just hiding. Winter in fact is not dead. Why do I label darkness as death? Or loneliness as death? Or coldness as death or discomfort as death? I've grown reliant on stimuli from outside of myself to make me feel alive. How do I learn to sustain myself?”

Some background:

I have recently surfaced from a couple-month long winter depression. It is a common phenomenon around the polar areas for people to become depressed during the winter, and this is usually explained by the lack of sunlight and the following lack of vitamin D, but also with the lack of exercise and other side effects of the environment turning unpleasant for humans. This, however, is the first time I have ever experienced this phenomenon myself.

It has been a very strange experience, and I cannot pinpoint exactly when it started. All I know is that some time around November I started gaining weight and that by January I started lagging behind on my schoolwork having lost all motivation. I reached a low point of sorts and haven't been able to pull myself out of it properly until I've literally had to in order to pass my courses. To pull myself “back to life” I have made reviews of my living habits – exercise, sleeping rhythm, nutrition, socializing, recreation – and these slight changes with the increase in daylight and temperature have brought me back to a state of vitality.

As a side note, I watched this really cool TED talk today about depression and found the key statement about the opposite of depression being vitality instead of happiness being quite accurate in my case. I remember feeling really alive before my downfall began, and I am finally starting to feel alive again – not happy per se, but energetic and motivated. God, I've been super cranky for these past couple of months now that I think of it.

Anyway, back to the transcripts. When I stepped out today and bathed in the sunlight for the first time in months, I cried out of joy because suddenly the world around me felt alive again – as if I was “connected” to life itself for the first time since winter began. However, this concept is inaccurate. Life itself hasn't been “switched off” during winter: I just haven't been able to see it. There is life in darkness, coldness, silence and hibernation, but it is just a different kind of life from the other end of the spectrum: of the noisy, bright, colourful and sweaty summers. So to think of winter as “death” and summer as “life” does not follow the reality.

What I am saying here is that I have somehow accepted and allowed myself to be affected by the environment I am in. Of course the circumstances the human being – an organic creature – is in affect its state, because different circumstances support different things: different possibilities are available and so forth. I do not suggest that the human being should somehow be separate of its environment, because that is simply not possible. However, one can believe oneself to be a victim of one's circumstances, thus giving oneself the permission or the excuse to do something, to for example “slack off”.

I have accepted and allowed myself to be taken by moods, going from one extreme to the other. I see that following these moods could possibly result in me being extremely happy during summers and extremely down during winters (which is the reason why so many people living here in the north escape the winter to warmer countries). I see that this is not a sustainable state, to resent one manifestation of life (winter) and to celebrate another (summer).

What I think happened in my case is that I used my prevailing circumstances (winter) to give in to my deep-rooted loneliness. My life is mostly quite nice and I can honestly say that I enjoy many aspects of my life, but the social dimension of my life has been unsatisfying for years now – actually, we might be talking about more than a decade of feeling completely alone, since I started getting depressed at around the age of 10 because of bullying and other malfunctions in my social network.

So what did I do when the winter came? I focused on my work, stopped exercising, started binge eating, forgot to rest and give myself space to be creative (with music, movement, theatre, writing, arts, etc). And then I wondered why nothing felt like anything, why I was so tired all the time, feeling restrained and secluded and brought down by my thoughts of self-diminishment. I was doing it all to myself.

I'm writing this now to support myself to remain stable and functioning no matter my surroundings. I might have to live through many winters, and I do not want that time to be lost into being stuck with myself. I might even face completely new circumstances, like staggering heat or humidity or drought, and even then I need to find the practical solutions for physically surviving AND the mental solutions for not throwing myself out of balance because I believe myself to have a plausible excuse to do so.

I'll continue from here with self-forgiveness and corrective statements.

Day 336: Reaching out to strangers

18-19102013

I was just walking down the street next to the university and a young man around my age walked past me. I saw him looking at me and so I looked back, and I saw that me looking at him encouraged him to look back at me after already turning his eyes away. It was a fun moment where I simply looked at another to express my curiosity, but I noticed that I kinda felt like smiling but couldn't do it until he had already passed me by. This has happened to me many times before, that I look at someone and feel like smiling but suppress it until the other cannot see it (or the smile escapes onto my face and I feel embarrassed), or I look at another without smiling and later on fear that maybe I appeared hostile because I did not smile.

I have been born and raised in a culture where strangers do not look at each other on the streets and do not smile, not to each other or to themselves. The lack of smiles is why a lot of foreigners find this place difficult to adapt into, because it appears hostile and cold even though under the serious faces people are really friendly. While talking to a mobile phone one is excused to express oneself because there is someone “familiar” one is talking to – someone from the “inner circle” that has “earned the right” to interact with this person – and after the phone call people revert back to silence and become serious and withdrawn. The phone call is not something you can share with the strangers next to you even though they're right there and heard and saw every bit of the phone call.

Having traveled in cultures where people do engage in contact with strangers much more easily, even if it's somehow superficial, I see that the culture I live in is very fearful, because even when one participates in apparently meaningless small talk one is at least giving oneself a chance to learn something from interaction. Here in Finland we don't even give ourselves that chance. Instead we keep to the small realities we create from the people we “trust” (have allowed ourselves not to be terrified with) and keep the rest of the world away and alienated.

When I look at it from this cultural perspective it is easier for me to see what exactly is wrong with the approach to strangers I have learned while growing up here. Why do I fear smiling to people? Why do I fear looking at people? Why do I fear opening conversations with people? It comes down to self-trust, self-honesty and self-expression – it all comes down to SELF, not who the others are.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear smiling at strangers because I have wanted to appear cool and distant to uphold an appearance of superiority so that the other one would fear me more than I fear him/her. *

* This may date really far back in genetics, even.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to try to intimidate a stranger with my appearance because I have feared that they might possibly be hostile and thus tried to keep them at a “safe distance”.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that the behavioral pattern of attempting to intimidate others to protect myself is a defense mechanism I have created in my childhood / teen years when I didn't have the capacity to deal with all kinds of people, and I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that this defense mechanism is no longer necessary as I am no longer a child / teenager.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear showing friendliness (good intent) through a smile towards strangers because as a child I learned that I my friendliness is dependent upon the other one's intentions as I was unable to defend myself from bad intent. *

* Just think of a small child: many of them do not smile unconditionally to strangers (at least not after a certain point of development) but instead become restrained and nervous around strange adults. This only wears out after the adult has shown the child that he/she is “safe” to be around and approach.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear being unconditionally “open” to all people (welcoming, friendly, warm) because as a child I have learned to protect myself by clamming up until my environment appears “safe” as I could not yet fully rely on myself regardless of my environment.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that my environment was “unsafe” in my childhood because I did not have the tools and the capacity to deal with everything that there is to the world, and that the fear of “unsafe” environments and people is therefore no longer valid as I now do have the tools and the capacity to deal with whatever I come across. (May sound “big”, but the basics are actually really simple.)

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that even though I still come across “new” situations where things feel uncomfortable, unfamiliar and strange, these situations are not in fact “unsafe” - such where I would have to fear for my well-being – but that I can support myself through these uncomfortable, unfamiliar and strange situations unharmed (although most likely I will be changed) with the cognitive, social and physical tools I have learned while growing up to become a self-supported adult being.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear looking at a stranger because I have perceived it as a threat, not realizing that it is in fact a window of opportunity and that my perception is outdated.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear smiling at people because I have perceived it to be a threat – that I am exposing myself to abuse by inviting another closer – not realizing that abuse will not simply “happen” to me but that I am capable of NOT accepting and allowing myself to be abused numerous times “along the way” (during the course of the interaction).

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to label the action “inviting people closer” as something negative because this has sometimes resulted to me being abused, thus blaming and guilting myself in advance to protect myself from getting abused again.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that the act of “inviting people closer” or choosing to trust people (which is initially self-trust - “I can trust myself to survive around this person” - “my abilities are enough to survive with this person”) is NOT in fact a negative act but that I have labeled it as such to protect myself from getting hurt.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear talking to strangers because I have feared getting judged because in this culture strangers talking comfortably to each other is uncommon.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear that the people in Finland will think that I am “strange”, “weird” or “crazy” for talking comfortably to strangers as my equals and that people will not want to interact with me because of how they perceive and believe me to be.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that if another chooses to seclude me from their reality because of their perception of me, it is not because I am somehow “not good enough” but because I trigger discomfort in the person on such a level that the person cannot / will not face.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to give up on interacting with the locals after the first difficult words/sentences because I have interpreted this difficulty/stiffness to mean that the other doesn't like me and that I should just shut up – not realizing that the people who have grown up here just “warm up” really slowly because they're (we're) so afraid of each other, and that it may take a while to actually get close to a new person. *

* I witnessed an interesting scene in the bus where a man was talking to a woman with a dog. The woman was replying with very short sentences, just one or two words, but after a couple of silent moments the man kept on going in a very friendly manner. Little by little the woman's sentences got longer (which is also when I heard her accent and realized finnish is not her first language) and she got more comfortable with the man talking to her, even though in the beginning she seemed very uncomfortable. I admire that man for his uncompromised perseverance! I will learn from his example.

Whenever I remember to do this, I commit myself to practice looking at, smiling at and talking to strangers on the streets by walking with my posture straight, eyes forward and face “open” (no scarves or hats “blocking” my face) and by keeping myself grounded in breath aware of my movements and aware of what I see around me. I commit myself to take note of all reactions that occur in me when I do this and to go through each revealed point in written or spoken self-forgiveness.

When and as I feel resistance/hesitation to look at, smile at or talk to a stranger, I stop, I breathe and I realize that the resistance is a remnant of a childhood defense mechanism that is no longer valid because I am no longer a child. I realize that I am now in fact fully capable of facing and supporting myself through everything that may come about within interaction with other human beings, because I know how to learn, adapt, express and communicate. I bring my focus to breath and ground myself back into my body and allow myself and my existence to rely on my physical completely. If the stranger is still there, I return to the interaction within and as self-trust. If not, I utilize my stabilized state otherwise.

Day 327: Attraction, part 5

 03102013

This post is a continuation to:

Day 323: Attraction, part 1

Day 324: Attraction, part 2

Day 325: Attraction, part 3

Day 326: Attraction, part 4

The connection personality (see yesterday's post for context)

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to seek for a connection in relationships because I have felt disconnected from Life.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to disconnect myself from Life – from all that there is – by believing and perceiving that I am somehow “special”, “unique” and “individual”, that I am “different” from other forms of Life because I have a consciousness of my “own”.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to seek for the experience of “being alive” from the energetic experience of “connecting” with another person as I have separated/alienated myself from the experience of being alive in every single breath.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to separate/alienate myself from myself as a being of Life by not realizing I am in fact alive in every single heartbeat, every single inhale and exhale, every single moment that passes by.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to create an expectation that “being alive” should feel somehow “big” and “overwhelming” and to thus feel disappointed when my life does not include that rush of energy. *

* I need to investigate where this expectation/definition has been created. Probably somewhere in my childhood, where positive life experiences have been experienced with a rush of energy, thus confusing this energy and “good living” to be connected.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to seek for a connection in relationships because I have felt disconnected from myself.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to disconnect myself from myself by resenting myself, thinking that life experienced through “who I am” is not “good enough” - it doesn't feel big, strong, overwhelming, ecstatic, powerful, fulfilling enough – not realizing that I have created “who I am” and that I am thus responsible for my life experience not being enjoyable, and that I cannot mend this by seeking for fulfillment from outside of me, as if I was abandoning a sinking ship.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that my life does not feel fulfilling because of how I live from within myself, and that I have created my experience of unfulfillment/disconnection by living as a being that is limited, suppressed, fearful and self-dishonest.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to seek for a “cure” for my unfulfillment/disconnection from other people, wanting to live through others as my “ship” has already been sinking, not realizing that I cannot escape this “ship” and jump onto another – it is simply physically impossible – and that if I want to live a fulfilling life I am going to have to fix THIS “ship” - myself – so that this “ship” could sail on its own.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to resent facing my own misgivings and finding a way to mend them because they have felt “too much” and “unmendable”, thus giving up on living as self-fulfillment/self-connection and only seeking fulfillment/connection from other people.
• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to give up on myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to desire for the moment where I “connect” with another because within that moment we become an entity – two beings energetically synchronized – which makes me feel more “fulfilled” as I for a moment live through/in a symbiosis with the other and thus can ignore myself and not live within and as myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive it is justified for me to neglect myself and to seek for the experience of “connection” from others as “fulfillment”, because this is what I have for all my life seen others do – this is what my world taught me through example – and because “everyone else is doing it” I believe and perceive myself to be excused to do it as well.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to crave for the moment where I “connect” with another because within that moment I feel accepted, seen and heard, meaningful, worthy, special and loved – not realizing that I do not experience any of this as myself but only through the other, meaning that if the other was not there I would not experience self-acceptance, self-attention, self-direction, self-worth and self-appreciation but would feel “empty” and “unfulfilled”.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that the “magnetism” I feel between me and another is a sign that I'm doing the “right thing” - that getting closer to the other is justified – when in fact that “pull” I feel is me moving within and as my mind according to my desire to get to the acceptance I might get from the other, like a beggar approaching a man with a wallet.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to try to replace self-acceptance with the acceptance I get from others, not realizing that this is not a sustainable way of living as the acceptance I get from others always fades so that I have to go “hunting” for more, whereas I could build self-acceptance into my very structure so that it would be with me no matter “where I go” – even if there were no other beings around me to make me feel accepted.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that a “good life” is a life lived – meaning that every moment of life is in fact lived within and as breath, as the being that I am in the flesh within the physical existence, and not escaped by jumping from one energetic experience to another.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that “fully living” means that every moment should “feel like something” - that every moment should be energetically charged.

I will continue with self-corrective statements and commitments on what I have written during the past few days.

Day 326: Attraction, part 4

 01102013

This post is a continuation to:

Day 323: Attraction, part 1

Day 324: Attraction, part 2

Day 325: Attraction, part 3

An interesting thing occurred. All of what I wrote yesterday was a cool realization in itself, but later I realized that I had used it as a justification to follow those “attraction patterns” or “pathways” I mentioned before. “It's OK to do stuff with people? Then go ahead, follow your desire!” You know, lol, kinda looping around myself, thinking I'd figured out something and then it turns out I had missed something essential. So, I will now return to writing about these patterns/pathways.

“Oh right, another point I've been thinking about in relation to this are attraction patterns: how mutual attraction usually “ends up” in sex through certain layers of interaction. I've realized that one reason I have refrained from acting upon attraction is the fact that I already saw the whole pathway leading up to sex looming in front of me and I got really fucking scared of it, and so I rather just staid away from people. What I've realized now is that I don't (necessarily) have to follow that pathway. I have a choice in each moment of breath – I have a choice in every single moment I interact with another, and so in a way every moment is a blank slate. This realization has been a great relief for me, because I have understood that I am in fact in charge of myself and my life, and that such a thing as attraction is no longer “in the wheel”.”

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to desire to follow a specific pattern of behavior and interaction with a person I feel attracted towards, because what I have seen at the “end” of the “pathway” I have defined as the “ultimate reward” - the climax – the peak of the energy I accumulate within me from the very moment the attraction is triggered in me. *

* Quite revealing how this is an analogy to sex.

--

In private spoken and written SF on specific events I came to realize that what I seek for when following this attraction pattern that would eventually lead up to sex is connection. I remembered listening to an interview of the Relationship Success Support -series about the “connection personality” - at the time not really seeing myself in what was discussed - and now everything suddenly making sense! According to what I've seen of myself so far, the energy I seek for in the fulfillment of attraction is acceptance, being heard and seen, feeling “special” and elevated, becoming an entity with the other if only for a single moment of contact.

I realized this when I looked at a moment where I looked another person in the eye after wanting to get closer to him for a while, and where in this moment I felt a slight “oomph” in my being, like a shockwave being sent through me, where I felt like I was seen, I felt like the look was “special”, I felt like that one look was speaking a thousand words, as if I knew exactly what was going on, as if we were “meant to be” there – when what in fact happened was probably some sort of a synchronization of energy (resulting from mutual attraction) AND my anticipation being fulfilled / my accumulated energy being released. So what happened was not a “real” “connection” in that sense: it was just me rolling around in my energy (and him rolling around in his).

When I look at this desire to have a “connection” with someone another point I was thinking of some weeks ago now starts to make sense. I thought to myself: “am I really myself with anyone at all?” With this question I realized that I am not really allowing myself to be exposed and to show all of myself with everyone and anyone, and instead I resort to personalities, within which I feel “easy” and “chill” around people. The search for connection thus makes sense: the connection I would naturally have with everyone if I hadn't locked up my expression into personalities driven by fear, I now seek for in “special” relationships that would be an outlet for all the things I “can't be” with everyone else. The interesting thing is: my “hunt” for this “connection” where I could expose myself also happens from within personalities. So while searching for the “right person” to expose myself to I'm not even being myself! How would they ever know who I am?

And this is why this insane looping has got to stop. No matter how I look at it – rationally or emotionally – it just doesn't make any sense. It's a self-contradicting, self-justifying cycle. So hear me now: The connection I seek for is the connection I have lost with myself and with all Life. I will never regain that connection from special, exclusive relationships that are based on energy, because energy will fade and die out. I will only ever find it from within myself, and consequently from every single facet of Life inclusively. I am in fact able to connect with every single being and element there is to this reality we live in. The connection I look for is LIFE – the connection I look for is HERE – the connection I look for is waiting for me here in every moment of breath.

To clarify, because I am prone to feel guilty: There is nothing wrong with interacting with people on different levels, as I have established during these past few days of writing. It is in fact recommendable. So go ahead and adventure, but be aware of what is going on within me and why. That's where I learn – that's where I grow – that's where opportunities are not wasted.

I'll continue with SF and commitments.

Day 237: Meetings and partings

19052013

Getting addicted to a sense of stability created by external factors apparently happens really easily and very fast. Without too much details, in a couple of days I got attached to a certain environment (people, location, activities) with such intensity that even though leaving it all behind to continue with my journey was at first relatively easy, I suddenly broke down and noticed myself to be utterly torn by it. I have now been writing to pull myself out of this experience.

I notice that here, “on the road”, especially when traveling alone, two things happen. Either I find myself “not connecting” with people because of my independent way of going around, or I completely latch onto others to create my experience for me when I do “connect”. The in-between where I'd connect but also be independent is here every now and then, but then I fall very easily by believing a thought for example. I think this is what has happened here.

A couple of days ago I “joined” a group of people whom I enjoyed very much. At first I did things out of my own activeness, having “joined in” from a stable position, but then stuff happened and I declined – things happened and I allowed myself to fall. I will now go through these events (partly in private SF) to see where I went wrong.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to want to spend an evening out with the expectation that it will be fun and that I will experience many energetic fun things.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to react with joy and energeticness to my expectations/wishes/hopes being fulfilled.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to want to spend a fun evening out with a bunch of people so that I could “feel alive” and escape my own company.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to use the company of others to escape myself and my fear of being alone.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to subconsciously “scan” my company in search of someone I could imprint on. [I actually noticed this habit this time, yet I didn't know how to deal with it and the program kept running.]

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to attach myself onto a person whom I “connected with” in a different way than with others, not realizing that this moment of “connection” was actually a moment where both really saw each other and faced each other with no fear, which is not something “special” or “more” as compared to the other people present but simply that which ought to be in between each and every being on Earth.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel entitled to the attention of the one I attached myself to because I perceived our moment of connection to be “special” and thus defined our relationship to be “special”.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to boost my “certainty/independence character” with the positive energy I got from my expectations being fulfilled.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to inhibit my speech and suppress my experience because maintaining my “certainty character” required so, thus not fully expressing myself to a person I am not likely to meet or connect with again.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to create scenarios where I do meet the person again and “make things right” and thus believe that by living out this scenario I “fix” that which caused my experience of regret – not realizing that these scenarios do not address the behavioral patterns that led to these events and that by fixing one string of consequences I will still not have fixed the actual cause.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not fully express to X how I actually experienced our meeting, our interaction and our parting; even though I mainly did, these emotional reactions indicate that there was something that I suppressed.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel sad about probably not meeting X again, not realizing that in a world of billions of people it is not necessary or practical to attach oneself to others – we are not special, yet everyone is special in their own way.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to elevate one person above others because I have perceived our relationship to be “special”, not realizing that when I elevate one I bring all others down and make them “less special”, within this not realizing that each and every being is of the same exact value.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to perceive the “connection” I had with X to have been “special” because we were approximately of the same age group and cultural background which made it easier for us to relate to each other and thus faster to “connect” - not realizing that even though with others of different backgrounds finding this “connection” might be more difficult or time-consuming it is still of the same value than the fast one.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear that X will be insulted, hurt or become spiteful by the way we parted, not realizing that he was there, too, to create that interaction and that I am not the only one responsible of it.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to attach myself to the people, location and activities within which I momentarily felt very safe, welcome and embraced, thus reacting with sadness, distress, regret and panic when I realized that my environment had changed and would never return to what it had been.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to make things more dramatic by i.e. thinking that something will "never happen again" - not realizing that even though a specific moment of life will never be repeated in its exact form, I cannot know what the future holds, who I will meet and what I will do - and that I am the co-creator of my future along with everyone else within this existence and am thus not helpless to just watch my life happening in front of me "never" or "always".

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to forget that I am the only constant building block of my life and that I have thus accepted and allowed myself to lay my sense of stability on others when I had the chance.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to get tired in my constant challenge to be self-reliant and thus allow myself to fall when there has been a safe environment to rely on instead. [*This point needs to be expanded on.]

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to waver in my decision to let go of the familiar environment I had become fond of when I saw X's reaction to it, sympathizing with him and feeling bad for causing him to feel this way, yet suppressing this guilt, regret and fondness underneath the “certainty/independence character” and pushing forward with my decision without addressing these emotions/feelings.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to want to appear strong and independent and thus suppress feelings and emotions that do not fit my definition of “strength” (which is pretty much all emotions and feelings).

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to blame myself for “fucking up” when I realized that I had suppressed myself and thus lived dishonestly and caused myself and another to feel really bad, not realizing that blame will not assist and support me to deal with the origins of this issue, nor will it help in sorting out its consequences.

Alright. I've got to now catch some sleep before I go climb a mountain. I am pretty sure I will keep on processing this point during my solitary hike, so I will most likely keep on writing about this tomorrow.