June 26 • Re-writing Mystory
Day 352 Today's reading in the book I'm using for my daily meditations offers significant new insights into where I've been. It suggests that a setback, or a relapse, tends to send us into a tailspin of revisionist history, at least in our minds. I've never understood my tendencies toward isolation as a bad thing (until recently), but I don't think I ever had a good handle on just what was going on there. This one line about running away to revisions may capture it better than anything I've heard or read or thought to date. Isolation is where I would go to hide my pain, hide with my pain, or try to make the pain go away. Any pain, not just the childhood injuries of the psychobabble world, but the daily rejections of employees, employers, officials, homeless guys, the man looking at me with judgment from across the street, or the woman that wouldn't look at me at all. And it seems so ludicrous to admit that there was a sexual component to all of it; the pain was either exacerbated by a perceived sexual insufficiency or was the cause of my slithering away to some sexual experience — real or fantasized — to numb the pain. This is awful. This makes sense. This isn't really new information, but either I'm able to hear it differently, or that phrase about revising my truths carries a different weight. Wow. –JR