Reflections

One life has gone. Another is yet to come and I am standing in a space between the two.

My old life has been scattered to the winds, as a house struck by a hurricane.

I have whiled away many hours wondering how I'm going to rebuild. It's obvious that it would be foolish to follow the same design. Such a waste! I want my new life to be better, more solid and hurricane-proof. Naturally, then, I set myself the task of finding the cause of collapse.

There is only one way to identify the flaws in the design though, and its painful. I have to travel to the past and relive it! I don't need to make any effort to do this and I don't need a time machine. It just happens . One minute I'm tapping away on the computer, and the next I'm in 1996 or 2000. And every time I revisit it, I realise the waste. I understand that I was not living, for I had no emotion. I was not really deciding things for myself. I was not really there. I might as well have been abducted and taken to the planet Zog for study, while a Zogorian played me in my life here on Earth.  Not only that, but when I travel to the past, I often get stuck in transit. Glued to the past, my future becomes, in my mind, its complete repetition. This is worse than horrible! Its worse because I now have emotions. That suffering, the feeling of waste that I mentioned above is in Technicolour. And so, in my worst moments, I sometimes find myself wondering whether I need to be dulled again by drugs to survive it all. In a bid to avoid repeating a misfortunate past, I consider repeating the very same past deliberately!

I have thought about how I can avoid this and have decided that there are a few things that I can do. Firstly, learn the mental terrain. I need to recognise that being in this in-between space, I will find myself revisiting the past and grieving for its loss. It is the only way to make sure I do things right a second time around. Telling myself this is the equivalent of looking at a compass to check that I am heading in the right direction (towards my new life). If I don't do this, or stop, I can get lost in a no-mans land of past regret. Secondly I can try CBT: I can recognise when I am feeling loss and then try to switch my attention to something different. THe brain, as I have repeatedly been told, cannot think about two things at the same time. Thirdly, I need to recognise that I am still in recovery, back in a kind of pre-natal infancy and I need to give things time.