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söndag 5 juni 2016

Life is a JoyRide - on my own... (1/3)

This is the first of three blogposts that will be about being on my own, being alone - and teachings from that, during the past 12 months.

Wow! Life really takes me for a ride...



It´s been more then a year since I left the idea of having a home. And soon its a year since I left Sweden. Not really knowing what was going to happen. Being on my own. On a joyride...
Sometimes that ride has taken me down, deep down... 
To places where I really don´t enjoy to be, where I don´t want to be... To a place where it feels like being a child that has a huge need of someone else. The other. To feel seen, to feel loved and wanted. And deep down there somewhere, there is a fear lurking. Fear of being totally alone - for the rest of my life.  And of course, it happened...
Also, sometimes and somewhere in my body, understanding that the feeling and fear comes from my childhood. I can still feel it, even if the actual experience happened long time ago. A memory. A trigger, something touches it, and I can feel the echo of my childhood. I can feel it in the body - the fear. As children we really needs the other. Someone else - an adult, for example parents, teachers, older siblings... 
A feeling of having and being able to rely on The connection. A connection that creates belonging and possibility to relax and let go. 
To be at ease.
A child can not survive on his/her own, specially in new territories. And that is something I needed to conquer, several times in my early childhood. New territory, and coming from the outside, to a new land, a new tribe, a new culture, a new language, a new family, a new class, a new story, a new truth...  And with the feeling of not having the connection. That´s where the echo I can feel, comes from.
What I also can feel in those moments - when I feel all alone - is the absence of the adult and present part of me. The part of me that should be telling me now, that:
it´s just a memory. Things are different now. I´m not a child any longer and I don´t have to rely on others... 
The old feelings and the old pattern in me have been there for a long time, and are hard to put aside. But I have been working on it - and it´s getting better.
"Maybe we need let go and let us touch that bottom of the well from time to time? To face the fear of not having anyone else beside me. Because: Being alone is a state of mind, and has nothing to do with reality.  And from that bottom, I can start my journey again. My journey to find home - in me."
Allowing me to feel the feeling of being alone is probably one of the things I have been exploring mostly the last year. Maybe not in a consious way all the time. And I have been physically by myself very much the past 1-2 years. In countries like Greece, Japan and now Austria this feeling becomes even stronger. The lack of knowing the local language creates this bubble of being alone, when the group I´m in talks their own language. I guess that most of the time it was just a matter of "ah sorry, did not think about that". But it has been interesting to see what happens in me - when being in a crowd - and the feeling of being alone has been there.
The feeling is located somewhere in my chest and stomach. And it´s a feeling that is sucking energy, attention and there is something about control and structure. It makes my heart beat faster and it puts me on guard. I´m not sure against what.  
And when I´m with others I have the option of not owning it - and that´s what I been doing most of my life, using all kinds of strategies to keep it away.

So that feeling is something I have been dealing with most of my life, in a very unconscious way. I have always had the feeling of being the one who does not belong. And now I know where that feeling is coming from. That knowledge does not change much, but it´s been a major step in understanding. 
Maybe that was one of the reasons why I made the decision to leave everything that was known, that was familiar and everyone I knew. I stepped out in to the world to see what happens - without a plan - and on my own. Existence offered me a possibility to experience and to meet my loneliness...
"Existence offered me a possibility to experience and to meet my loneliness..."

First a WE became an I. Separation and divorce, and it was not only a marriage and a very close relationship, it was also on the professional level. We had been working and living together for many years - so the change was huge. The two of us also had become a brand name - and now we broke up. We could not see any other solution, but we reassured each other that we would still be best friends. That this relation did not end, it was just changing. We where getting beautiful feedback from friends, about how mature and loving we went through the change. I will come back to this blogpost - but things did not go that way...
And then came my decision one night very close to my birthday last year:  Not to have a home and to travel and see what happens...  
Not having anyone by my side.  Not having any safe heavens. Not having a goal.

Yes, it was my birthday. It was my re-birthday in one sense. I had found some kind of rest in the idea of not having a home, not having anything more then I can carry... I can still feel how a huge load on my shoulders vanished with that decision. But, I did not really know what I had decided, and what it really ment.
"I did not really know what I had decided, and what it really ment."
Maybe I was looking for adventure, new encounters, new experiences and new openings. Also looking for the freedom to go wherever my nose was pointing, without having to be anywhere. Without having to do. I never did that when I was young. I visited my father in USA several summers while my friends travelled around Europe, partying. And I remember that one of the reasons why I did it was also because it sounded cool coming back to school saying that I spent the summer in The US, when the others maybe had been two weeks in Spain or Greece. And I remember those summers, in The US, visiting my dad and his family. Those where summer I spent a lot of time on my own. Since I did not have the network a kid usually has from school. I was a visitor, from the outside - from Sweden. Or was it Switzerland? 
So that night, in our house in Malmö, last year I suddenly felt that:
I do not have to "live" in a special place. I will step out, in to life, and see what happens. I will let go...
I decided to practice living wherever I am - right now. It does not matter if I am on a hot Greek island, or Tokyo, the worlds biggest city, or in one of the less safe districts of Medellin Colombia or in the cultural Vienna. So in the middle of June, after living two months, in an other city, in a friends house - in the basement, in what I would call a teenage room. I took of - to Greece.
OK life! Show me! (this blogpost is 1st of three about being alone, being self...)

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