Three years and I think about it every day. It's been three years and there hasn't been a single day where some part of this didn't enter my mind. I'm ashamed to write that. I've gone over every text, email, and memory as if I was trying to solve a murder. Trying to understand what happened became its own obsession, although I don't know if I truly wanted the truth. My mind ruminated over this and every trauma I've ever had to the point of nearly killing me.
I recently read, "rumination is the mind trying to solve the unsolvable". The inability to turn it off is debilitating and exhausting. I've asked myself repeatedly, "Why can't you let it go?" I initially thought it was because to fully accept that it's gone, and really was never real, would be to give up the only love I ever had, even though he never loved me. The pain of admitting I am on the back end of my life and never had someone that fully loved, accepted, and cared for me, is devastating.
My thought system became entrenched in it. Was any of it real? Why would he treat me that way if he loved me? Why did I stay? Why did I go back? Why did this take me under? In yoga they talk about Samskara: a groove or rut in your mind that you are stuck in. They become vrittis which are the constant patterns and fluctuations of the mind. We do yoga to calm the vrittis but my mind is never calm. My yoga training taught me that you're in control of what you want to feel but also that we cannot get through until we're ready to get rid of it. There's the catch. And I have a well-grooved thought pattern of "you will always be sad and have bad things happen". Six months of ketamine treatment brought me back to the land of the living but I'm also having to survive my thinking.
It's extraordinarily difficult to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it, because from the outside the solution looks painfully obvious. From the inside the solution looks obvious too. That's the fucking horror of it. I've told myself thousands of times what to do. There isn't some missing piece of information that would suddenly make me realize this is hurting me. I know. I live in the shame of it right alongside the thoughts.
I thought of the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Elsa is reaching for the Grail, she's so close, Indiana holds out his hand to her but instead she keeps reaching for the Grail and falls into the abyss. Then Indiana comes into the same situation, and you see the fire in his eyes for how much he wants it. His father extends his hand, but the grail is so all consuming and it appears to him within reach if he just tried a little harder. He has literally watched someone die doing what he's doing and it's not enough to stop him from reaching for it. Because it's so close. This wasn't simply a bad relationship but rather cumulative trauma landing in a life that wasn't secure and stable.
In the yoga sutras it says that if we don't calm the vrittis, and release attachment, then your identity will take on the fluctuations of your mind. My mind is an exhausting and dark place that I have truly spent decades trying to change. It's not that I lack insight. I've known I have to let go. I've always known. I just don't know how.
