This is really good

This is really good, beautiful, positive, new pieces of the jigsaw giving a new view.

Mmm. Should I bother stating the old view? Perhaps, for a bit of context. I need to celebrate moving on from it.

OK. How have you felt about being a recluse?

Dreadful. A complete failure. I have stuck with it because I have not seen any better way. Meanwhile, my inner critic has told me that I am waiting to be rescued by some knight/ dame on a white charger, and that that is never going to happen, and that I had better hit rock bottom soon and start doing something about my problems myself, but then that is the challenge that I have never been up for.

I have felt completely shamed. The shame has sat, undigested, mostly below consciousness, a ball and chain.

I have had a Christmas present of “The Sacred Journey- Daily Journal for your soul”. My friend writes (in part) Give yourself an entire day before New Year’s Day, really thinking about the “goals” and “questions”  at the front of this journal. I LOVE mine, and I love my day of solitude, preparing for the coming year.

And of course my inner critic has been delighted with this. Goals=Income, except that is going nowhere because I am useless.

The inner critic even got hold of “I am worthy of Life” and twisted that. I have buried my talent. I am “soft, gentle, peaceful” and that is my problem.

The breakthrough came with saying, “I am soft, gentle, peaceful, and that is what is ‘worthy of life’.” There is no vulnerable bit, no “real me”, there is just me. The accretions of self-image or desire to be other fall away. The inner critic split those two statements and the answer is to unite them.

It leaves me with fear. What shall I do? Better than shame whispering there was nothing I can do.

This feels big, like new insight; and it feels like yet another wave: down into shame, up into healing. Down into old patterns and understandings, up into new. Fear is better, it is conscious, it does not eat my self-respect but sits alongside it, because it is not introjected from elsewhere but of me.

Still with the problem, of course- what shall I do? Things to cheer me up, I think- a bit of self-nurturing.

The Shropshire Lad had it about right:

Her strong enchantments failing,
Her towers of fear in wreck,
Her limbecks dried of poisons,
And the knife at her neck.

The Queen of air and darkness
Begins to shrill and cry,
“O young man, O my slayer,
Tomorrow you shall die”

O Queen of air and darkness,
I think ’tis true you say,
And I shall die tomorrow;
But you will die today.