Part of the twelve step program I’m practicing includes a “fearless and thorough” moral inventory of one’s life. If you’re past the age of 20 and have a pulse, this can be a daunting prospect, though the details of the inventory aren’t as important of the practice of it.
Its essence is the consideration of one’s own responsibility in every single relationship or significant event in one’s life. Reflection not as terrified clothes-rending remorse, but as a sober and serious accounting of one’s past actions and their impacts on the lives of those around you.
The next step is to talk these things through with another human being, anxiety over which is far worse than the actual experience. In any event, this list of things to be sorry about, become aware of, leaves me feeling in a funny limbo between light and dark.
Dreams of flying and of meeting up with ex-husbands and boyfriends happen nearly every night and I awaken at times wondering where I am, which part of my life I’ve surfaced into… Sometimes the dream person and I are laughing over our hard times (in retrospect only are they amusing), sometimes they’re yelling my faults out to me so that I wake up curled in a ball of misery.
And so it goes.
In the end I wonder who it is I’ve been dating and marrying all these years. A darker part of myself? Someone to punish and excoriate after loving lightly for awhile? If it’s true that wherever you go there you are, then I mate and date over and over again with the same person, the same man.
Someone who loves me in part, scorns me in part, but someone who can never know and never understand, because I won’t let him in. I simply don’t know how.
Keep going girl. Self analysis can be scary, and sad and blissful, all at the same time. But oh so worth it.
I don’t think any of us really ever know how to let anyone in, per se. All we can do is get up every agonizing day and try our very best, however that looks at a given moment.
I agree with Paige. I feel like I’m a failure at really letting people in — because I didn’t learn it? Not capable of it? Is that why I sit in my home office alone every day in front of the computer?
Calling my old therapist now.
Oh wow, that’s part of the 12 step? I appear to be doing it on my own as part of a slightly early mid-life crisis. You will want to justifiably slap me I am sure when I say that I wish, in a way, I had a structure and group for it. I use my blog. And people think I am overly intense and insane, I think.
This has to be the best description of it, “…anxiety over which is far worse than the actual experience. In any event, this list of things to be sorry about, become aware of, leaves me feeling in a funny limbo between light and dark.”
Bravo and kudos to you. It is a true effort when you are dreaming about it. Hang in there.
As for letting people in? I think the process for closing that down begins at about six months old. So I think Paige is right: we do our best.
I’ve been married to my man for 11 years and I still haven’t let him in all the way. Nor has he let me in all the way.
We just keep knocking at each other’s door, hoping the crack opens up a little further.
I hope these 12 steps are helping you understand yourself better. And that they bring you peace.
Man, that’s enough for me to totally lose any bravery of hitting the steps. I’m blown away by your bravery.