Monday, June 7, 2010

Have I Learned it Yet

Dear Universe,

Have I learned yet what you are trying to teach me. I thought that I learned a lot the first time around. You know, it really would have been enough. I really learned a lot. I am not quite sure what you are hoping I will get out of this time around. I mean, sure when I heal again it will certainly make my belief in healing that much stronger, but I was getting there you know. I was feeling pretty confident about healing. Do you think this is the only way to help me work through my shit with my parents? I am pretty sure we could have found slightly less traumatic ways to do that too. Is this your sense of humor. Maybe if I am in the right mood I might be able to understand it and even think it is a little funny, but not very funny, and for the most part I am not really in the mood in which I can see the humor in this. Its not funny you know.

You know, if you wanted me to experience being pregnant, there are other ways to do that. Like I could actually get pregnant to experience being pregnant. The lump from my liver is too high up, not very believable anyway. Also, when your pregnant you know it will eventually end. You know, May was 9 months and now things are overdue, not very safe for pregnancy. I didn't need to experience having curly hair that much and I could have used a curling iron or something if I really wanted to and also Sara is the only one I know that had that as a side effect of pregnancy. I was happy with my hair the way it was, I didn't need to experience having the thicker shinier hair that some pregnant people get. I know what it is like to get winded really easily and to not like smells and to feel like there is not enough room in my abdomen. So really universe you would have been much better off making me get pregnant to experience pregnancy. I guess I have more control over whether I get pregnant or not so it would have been harder for you to take control. Oh, I see now.

Anyway Universe. Thank you for your care and concern that I learn new and poignant lessons but .... oh no.... I almost asked for a break... but... every time in the last few years that I ask for a break you have a way of surprising me with more of the same or worse.. shit..... does that happen if I even just think it..... No, I am taking control here Universe. It is time to accept that I have learned enough lessons for now on this topic. I am sure there will be others for me to learn.... like maybe you could help me learn that not everything has to be hard to be useful. Teach me lessons about ease. Did I learn that one too fast. I sure was feeling lovely ease when I went to Northampton. But I think there is still a lot more for me to learn about joy and bliss and ease.....

Thanks,

Tamar

2 comments:

  1. Hey T,

    So, the last couple posts feel hard and real. Thanks for sharing what's up, especially the letter to the universe. I get it; I've only been doing my own struggle for 6 months, and I'm really sick of it already. I'm bumping into my own anger, frustration, etc. and spent half an hour the other night, after sitting on the sidewalk outside a gas station shaking and feeling like shit in the middle of the night, and then needing to get back in the goddamn car for another two hours in order to get to a bed railing at God. It's the first time I've let myself go there.

    Laird talked about my being sick in a go-around this weekend, and he was so sweet and sad and vulnerable, and admitted that it brings up deeper fears about me dying. So here I am contemplating it all more directly and, finally, more openly. On the train this morning, the two women behind me were talking about fears, and so I decided to write. Here's what came out:

    I am afraid of dying. Of finishing incomplete. I fear the sure thing.
    I am discontent, always. There is not enough, I've not been enough, done enough, said enough to feel content.
    I am content with steady progress, evolution, forward movement--but only if I think I'll be there for the end.

    I am afraid of death, especially slow death, where I can bear witness to my own incompletion, where regret can taint the letting go.

    I fear the dying moment--that no matter how prepared I am, how good the life, I will cling to it at that last second and leave parts of me to haunt the people I love.
    I fear my own mind, and the seeming inevitability of it interfering in a good death. I fear to have my last experience be the yammering objections of my own consciousness.

    I fear the slow breakdown of my own body, the rising of illness to consume my being, my attention, every last scrap of goodwill. I fear my own bitterness, that I'd become, as the final chapter of a good, giving life: hard, cold, fear-bound and angry. I fear watching myself lash out at the good, at love, and not being able to stop myself because my own joy has deserted me.

    I don't fear the unknown of death; I fear what I know of myself being magnified by hardship, pain, fatigue. I fear having others witness my falling apart and falling into the worst traps of pettiness and hatred that tempt me even now.

    I fear dying because I think I'd discover all the wasted chances, and that knowledge haunts me already. I'd die applying the club of judgement to my own head; I live already applying it and trying, futily, to root out imperfection before it is too late.

    It is too late. I'm already half gone in my fear, already killing my best years and brightness on the greedy cloud of suspicion that I'll never be enough.
    ++++++

    I'm not sure why I'm sending it to you. I don't want to add to you struggles or depress you... but I figure we're in community together and sharing what's up rarely seems like the wrong call.

    I love you... M

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  2. Tamar-

    Thinking of you on this rainy, chilly evening in Madison.

    Megan

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