In my last post, I had mentioned that I was feeling great sadness at the hands of someone I love and wrote about how I was sending myself and them loving-kindness.

Since that post, I have learned firsthand quite a bit about cycles of negative behavior: how hard it is to break them, how hard it is to step outside and watch someone you love continue to go ‘round and ‘round, and also how it feels to finally witness the cycle you habitually participated in throughout most of your life. It feels absolutely awful.

Sometimes, opening your eyes is extremely painful.

After being hurt by this person, I realized that what I wanted most was to forgive. It was in that moment that I jammed my foot in the revolving door of my past behaviors and broke the cycle. It felt incredible. I realized that there were more options than to be angry and turn my hurt on the person who hurt me, ensuring they felt as badly as I did, ultimately evening the score and allowing for the eventual canceling out of both wrongdoings and a consequent truce. I decided instead that I would allow myself time to process my pain, create space for compassion, and come to a place of forgiveness before pushing myself to speak with this person. I didn’t want to risk falling back into the cycle I was trying to end.

I was proud of my decision and it felt good. Until with a sharp pain of manipulation on the part of the person who hurt me, I realized I hadn’t created that cycle alone. There was someone else behind the glass of that revolving door pushing hard to keep it turning against my efforts to hold it.

That’s when I learned that people don’t like their familiar cycles being toyed with.

I witnessed this person go through all the emotions of the cycle completely unprovoked and it was devastating. I experienced the attempts at manipulation, that gave way to guilt, that gave way to anger, that eventually turned to desperation, and finally exhaustion. I watched this person fight with an opponent who never showed up as I stood outside the ring in tears, fighting my own urge to jump in and scream “STOP! PLEASE!” I could barely stand the sight. But I knew the cycle had to play out. And even when horrible things were being said to me and I began to question what I had done to deserve it, I knew that I had done nothing. Nothing, except set this cycle in motion through years of participation. And I think that was the hardest thing of all.

Cracks need to happen to let the light in. Awareness hurts like hell. Waking up to the truth is hard; literally heart breaking, and I have cried more in the past two weeks than I have in a long time. I am still allowing myself time and space, although taking it worries me. I am afraid that something will happen to me or this person before things are resolved. But I also know that guilt and fear are the culprits at work behind that thought and I cannot allow fear to dictate my actions.

I’m still working it all out in my head. It is a lot to process. But I know I can only change my behavior and I can only be responsible for my own actions. My habits and behavior contributed to the creation of the cycle I was a part of. Perhaps I can slow it down for the other person as well if I continue to keep my weight against the door, no matter how much the push back hurts.

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One moment I was making a sandwich, the next I struggled to catch my breath. Heart pounding, I gripped the edge of the counter, knuckles white against the cream laminate, vision blurred by fat tears that streaked my fresh eye make-up. It was a random morning and I was getting ready for work. Preparing my lunch, anxiety struck. Thankfully, I’ve since learned how to mange my anxiety.

Anxiety wasn’t an unusual thing. Anxiety attacks have brought me to my knees, seemingly out of nowhere. All I could manage was to wrap my arms around myself, rock gently and cry until it passed, whispering to myself, “sshhh, it’s okay.”

Understanding Why I Was So Anxious

The thing is though, my anxiety attacks didn’t come out of nowhere. I know now that they were invited by my stress and imagination; created by my overactive mind that worried incessantly about the future.

That morning in my kitchen, a thought burst through the chaos in my brain, loud and clear.

All you have to do right now is make a sandwich. Just make the sandwich, sweetie.

I took a deep breath, looked down at my partially made sandwich and continued its assembly, letting my tears do the seasoning as I grew calmer. I made my way back to the present.

Managing My Anxiety

I haven’t had an anxiety attack since I made that sandwich. Not because my problems have gone away – far from it. But because I know that no life decisions need to be made at 7 am on a weekday; that the conversations I have in my head never turn out in real life the way I imagine them; because I cannot tell the future; because I am learning to trust that things happen when they are meant to; that they have a way of working out in the end, for better or for worse and no amount of mental agony on my part is going to change that.

Life happens one thing at a time.

My dear friend, Kathy shared with me that one morning she was helping her three year-old go potty when he got very upset and sobbed that he didn’t want to go to school. “Right now,” she said, “we’re just going potty. That’s all.” He immediately calmed down.

I still worry and feel anxious sometimes. But now I have the tools to not let it get out of hand to the point that I am not in control of my body. I catch myself getting worked up and I say to myself, “Just make the sandwich.”

One thing at a time. Whether you’re making a sandwich, or just going potty, that is all that requires your attention at that moment.

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“The root of suffering is attachment.” – The Buddha

My mom has been depressed and ill most of my life. The little girl that spent her childhood waiting and hoping and expecting her mom to be something more still lives inside of me, and she is still waiting and hoping.

Heatherash Amara explains in “Warrior Goddess Training” that whenever we have an expectation for how people, things, or events should be, that we are forming an attachment. “The stronger the expectation, the deeper the attachment, and the more we suffer when it is not met…” (xxiii). My attachment to who I want my mom to be has led to a lifetime of disappointment. I am only beginning to understand that I want her to be someone that she might just be incapable of being.

The fault is all mine. I have been unable to accept her for who she is, limitations and all.

Detachment, gentleness and compassion on my part is the silver bullet to put an end to my constant disappointment and resentments. But it’s so damn hard, because the little girl inside of me still just wants a mom, and the adult in me struggles so much to understand and be patient with her.

I have to learn to release this expectation of what I want my mom to be, this vision that I am so attached to, for both our sakes, and accept her for who she is. I have the tools and the knowledge, but the little girl inside of me is still longing for a mother…

For most of my life I have taken my suffering out on others, mainly the ones who love me most, like my mother for a very long time, and then my husband, as well. We hurt the people closest to us; they are the only ones who tend to take it. I didn’t really know this until this past year. Only recently have I become aware just how much I have made others suffer for my emotional turmoil.

Just because I became aware of this doesn’t mean I stopped doing it, regrettably. However, I did become more aware of the aftermath; it was exhausting. The hurt feelings, the damaging words, the guilt and shame, followed by regret. I was feeling more and more like a monster, and not at all like the gentle woman that I longed to be. But I couldn’t seem to help myself. That was until I read the following sentence by Byron Katie:

Your suffering is never caused by the person you’re blaming.

I let that sit with me for a moment, then cried tears of shame, regret and sadness for how I had made my husband and mother suffer for so many things that they were in no way responsible for. I realized I had been blaming or taking out my pain on them for 90% of my suffering, when in reality they were responsible for far less.

The statement stayed with me and I spent more time thinking about the true causes of my suffering, which is a difficult thing to do. Then one day I was really upset; I was feeling great sadness and fear and confusion and I couldn’t stop crying. My husband wrapped his arms around me and this would usually be the moment I would lash out at him. Even in that moment, I pinpointed it; I felt the heat rise within me and tasted the tinge of insults on my tongue. But instead of blaming and attacking him; instead of projecting my pain onto him, I let him hold me and I cried into his chest and let my body wrack with sobs.

When my sobs subsided and I felt all cried out and tired, I sat down on my bed. I had a private moment and I realized that for perhaps the very first time I had owned my suffering.

I wasn’t left sitting there feeling the need to apologize for hurtful words, or feeling guilty, or left with an angry husband in the other room. There was no hurricane of rage and therefore no aftermath. I owned my pain, and I actually felt better having owned it and cried it out. It was a tremendous empowering, enlightening moment.

But change is slow, and these things take practice. It is amazing when you can see that practice pay off little by little. Already, my world is a more peaceful place at times, since I am learning to keep the storm contained within and not blame others for my suffering.

Welcome to my journey of self-discovery and healing.

After years of keeping busy, living in a near constant state of fight or flight, operating on cortisol and adrenaline, things have slowed down. I finally graduated college in May, the book I spent a year co-editing was published in late September, and I do not foresee another work promotion anytime soon, amongst other stressful and time-consuming things.

After years of obligations and stresses, I took inventory of my life. A lot has suffered the past several years, and I see now it was because I was suffering. I thought I was overwhelmed and exhausted. That’s what everyone told me, anyway, along with “you take on too much.” There was so much going on, so I blamed my anger, frustration and fatigue on all of it.

Once the deadlines, suffocating workload and other variables were eliminated, I felt worse. Without the constant stream of distractions, I contemplated how I was feeling. I questioned why. This was a difficult thing to do. Unbeknownst to me, I started on a journey as soon as I looked inward. It was a startling and heartbreaking realization when I came to the conclusion that I had been profoundly unhappy for a very long time.

As all of my attention and energy was elsewhere these past few years, something was happening to me. A hard, cold, rough shell grew around me, comprised of a multitude of layers of pain and suffering. It protected me in the sense that I didn’t really feel anything. All my emotions lay deep inside of me. But I realize now that I used this shell not in defense, but in attack, hiding behind a strong exterior and launching all my explosive anger and pain outwardly.

Inside, I was completely vulnerable; an emotional mess of complicated feelings.

Outside, I was a hard-working professional and student; a commencement speaker with a 3.98 GPA.

Inside, I was growing weaker day by day under the weight of my sorrow.

Outside, I was taking pleasure in the joys of life and my achievements only on an extrinsic level.

Inside I suffered, as if there was a dead, rotted seed deep within me.

This realization resulted in the creation of a deep chasm within me. There was no dead, rotted seed within me. I was the dead, rotted seed within a nut of my own making. This fracture inside of me was so intense that it created the first minuscule crack in my exterior.

Once I cracked the nut of my suffering, the tiniest sliver of light permeated my soul and it shined on the realization that I didn’t like myself or my behavior, and that I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. I began to think hard about who that person was that I wanted to become. This journey became not a quest for self-fulfillment, but of self-discovery. Because we can’t be anything until we first understand who we are. And we cannot even begin to understand who we are until we crack the nut on our suffering. I have been sad and angry for a long time. I am only beginning to comprehend what the sources of these emotions are, and discover and learn the tools to manage them.

In the book “The Art of Happiness,” Howard Cutler quotes His Holiness The Dalai Lama who believes that our underlying or fundamental nature is gentleness. If human ability and intelligence develops in an unbalanced way without being properly counterbalanced with compassion, it can become destructive and can lead to disaster. Aggression and negativity is not innate; but influenced by a variety of biological, social, situational and environmental factors.

I am not rotten at my core. My conflicts are a result of those factors and my human intellect – misuse of an unbalanced intellect and imaginative faculty. Knowing this brings me a tremendous sense of relief and hope; hope that I may be able to find my way back to my underlying human nature, that I may someday be the person I want to be.

This is my journey. A journey of self-understanding as I continue to crack the nut on my suffering and work toward reclaiming my innate state of happiness; returning to my basic nature; which is gentle and compassionate.

I invite you to share this journey with me as I continue to learn and use my newly discovered tools to grow and work to end my suffering.