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Judy Da Silva's avatar

Nickie.. thank you for your Table blog. We do know each other a little but that 'me' has changed and I know that, after your experiences, you won't ever be the same person as you were before. You know empathy seeks to comfort but, as you say, when you're in the middle of the rawness, you don't look for comfort from others. I have never had your challenges and losses...I have never had those sort of losses to contend with and see them as huge! However, right towards what I'm pretty sure is close to the end of this particular life (I'm 83 tomorrow) I experienced a complete change of what I knew as "myself|. I'd already nearly forty years ago, felt the loss of beloved foster children who'd returned to their mother and for me, that took years to really accept and go forward. But this "new self" I now talk about, came after a particularly challenging break in an extended family relationship which challenged all my previous trust in that person and his family. I spent weeks, feeling somehow I'd always been living a life based on illusion. As if I'd always known I wanted to trust everyone and had ignored any sign to the opposite. Well, despair stopped when one night I had a dream...such a strange and long one during which I was helped by a peviously unknown man to find where to go. (He was so totally kind in a way I'd never experienced before) and although I had purely wanted to find somewhere to sleep, he led to a clothing store where I saw and tried on an amazing new dress!! The new dress made me feel REAL for the first time! I woke up out of that dream shouting THIS IS ME!!! THIS IS ME!!! and jumped out of bed rejoicing! The new me was someone I'd never felt before and I feel and believe that that 'dream' person was divine help!

All I'm trying to say really, is that I believe this life (with the crucifiction of Christ Jesus as its 'moral', is one where only deep pain can drive 'me' into the deepest parts of 'myself'. Learning self-sacrifice seems to be what we have in this earthly life, complete and utter emptying of the self we find so hard to let go. And your such profound pain, seems to me, to be hiding the highest opposite..just waiting to manifest in you. When I met you years ago, you looked as though you had already found that beautiful Self within you, both you and your partner! But waiting in the sidelines, were the losses you still had those losses in front of you. From my side, My dear Nickie...what a truly light-filled, selfless person you are near to being.

I had needed these lifelong disillusionments to push me through the pain, into accepting a more real me, less gullible, less unthinkingly trusting! I'm stronger now that I'm no longer afraid of someone 'letting me down'. I realise as I rant on that this is all a long story to make me explain more clearly to myself, what 'sort of person' I'd been. It made me see that

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