Dear Pain:

“I am interested in the healing process you mentioned, what is it and how has it made you feel better?”-

My healing process started March 2011 and it is still ongoing. When it started, it was “the end of the road for me”, like it says in the title of your thread. In many ways it has been the end of the road for me year after year, decade after decade. I was almost always anxious, miserable, comparing my life enviously to others, making bad choices and living a dysfunctional life. My comfort was in daydreaming and occasional short breaks-from-misery that I needed desperately.

I believed as a child and onward that there is something very wrong with me and that I am inferior to other people, oh how painful it has been believing these things. How angry I was at others for being superior to me, as I thought they thought so, they knew… everyone knew I believed, that I was less than them. I wanted to be like them, I wanted to be one of them. But I was alone and lonely, an outcast, rejected, unwanted. I used to daydream that I was a famous dancer, dancing on stage in front of thousands of people and millions watching me dance on TV all over the world, I imagined the audience standing and clapping hands, cheering for me, fascinated by my dancing, by how talented I was and how beautiful, admiring me so.

In reality I didn’t dance and was oh so painfully alone, made fun of because I had those tics, part of what I later learned was called Tourette Syndrome. I was pointed at, made fun of, rejected.

How the process made me feel better: I don’t feel less than other people, what a relief this is! I can hardly explain to you how much better it feels to look at other people in the eye and not feel inferior to them! How good it feels to not … automatically apologize for being me or trying to pay people (treat strangers to meals, buy them gifts, even give money away) so that they will be with me, or like me.

And as I look people in the eye, my goodness, I see that they are not all happy like I used to believe, and more so, I see, I really see that they are not superior to me. The feeling, the belief of equality is something I didn’t experience before. I was either inferior in real life, or superior in my daydreaming.

There is much more, but this is enough for now. I hope to read more from you, your thoughts, your feelings, your questions for me, and I will reply further, if you would like.

anita