House of Mirrors
There has been a change in my relationship with God recently. For years I was told that when I “gave away” the knowledge that God had been teaching me, I would move on to The Second Level of Learning.
In general, as I was growing up, I was most reluctant to share with anyone anything I learned from my visions.
But, somehow, stumbling along my way in life I found myself in The Second Level of Learning.
I was now on my own, so to speak.
Because the change involved the word “learning” I decided that I had graduated and was now in Graduate School.
There were two big changes in the way I felt.
The first was the realization that my world had just gotten significantly quieter. It felt like I had left a small closet that I lived in, a closet that was lined with a series of bass amplifiers that pulsed at any time of the day or night, no matter what situation I was in at the time. The bass amplifiers of God’s visions to me.
My stepping out of that closet, without even realizing that I had been in it, left me with a silence that felt infinite.
No more Booms. No more Calls to Action.
No more Commands.
For a while I would take time in my day to just sit down and experience the calmness that now surrounded me. I could feel the deep silence all throughout my body.
I felt like a different person.
Perhaps a baby feels this way after being born. After leaving his closet with the constant pulsing. The sound of blood flowing.
And then quiet.
The second change that I felt can only be described as having lost my coat. My skin. My hide.
I am now naked. The protection of the closet is gone.
I am on my own.
This sense of nakedness resulted in a tsunami of feelings of vulnerability.
Fear.
I found myself in the attic of my emotions, ripping through all the boxes that had been so carefully stored.
My memories of fear.
My fear at my birth when my mother insisted that the hospital had made a mistake. I was not her child.
My fear at five-years-old when my mother and grandmother brought me to the hospital because I had a serious case of pneumonia. And just left me there on my own. I had a panic attack one day when the nurse who had been giving me daily massages didn’t come. The administration realized that my family had never visited me and insisted on it. I was afraid when I saw them standing there, not knowing what to say or do.
My fear a few years later when my mother began coming into my room at night with a belt. She would beat me with it, saying, “I’m going to beat you to a pulp and then beat the pulp.”
Finally the solidification of my fear when my father’s message to me at seventeen was that he resented all the years he had paid child support for me. I had thought all my life that he would be the person in my life to understand and care for me. I was brilliant like he was. My mind could do amazing things, just as his could. But he was not interested in me as his daughter. Just as someone that he didn’t want to pay for any longer.
That night, after dinner with my father, I blacked out. I took over a day for me to wake up again. After that night I would black out here and there, now and again. One day I realized that I had just blacked out while driving a car. And that horrified me. My reaction to anxiety could kill not only me but other innocent people.
After this drive I came into the house and went into the bathroom. I sat on the toilet. I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to do.
My grandmother, after a while, wondered what was happening and came in to the bathroom. She sat on the edge of the bathtub.
With her were our two dogs. My dog, Thor, half standard poodle and half collie, and Billy, a mongrel terrier. They laid down between us.
When she asked me what was wrong, I answered her truthfully.
I don’t think anyone loves me.
“Of course we love you,” she exclaimed. She seemed so sincere. So compassionate.
“Thor loves you. Billy loves you.”
No person appeared on her list.
Just the dogs.
The shock that I was considered by my own grandmother to be one of the dogs of the family shocked me.
I was so shocked by the absurdity of her statement that I never blacked out again.
Instead I laughed.
And I have, by and large, been laughing ever since.
I think the finest way to heal is to change your position.
Instead of thinking about how people are looking at you, think more about how you are looking at them.
Sometimes, I think, we get into a mindset that is really based on our mirroring how we think others feel about us.
And we make the mistake of making our assumption something permanent.
This person hates me.
And we think this is a permanent state-of-being.
But it might not be.
Or, at least, it might not be the kind of hatred we think it is.
We take too seriously our assumptions about who we are in the world to others.
We don’t ever consider that other people could just be plain, old foolish.
We are the ones that we have to assess. To keep going.
To keep laughing at the absurdity of waking up one day and realizing that you are just one of the dogs in the family.