Dear Girija:

“That fear that I may lose everything”- it is not that you “may lose everything”- you will lose everything, your sight, your hearing, your touch, your taste and smell, your thoughts and all your emotions, all will be lost when dead, and some die sooner than others. I will die too. Every person who ever lived died and if he/she didn’t die yet, well… it is just a matter of time.

Better that you voluntarily lose your belief that your mother knows best (“what if she knows best”). Look at her life, the life about which she has complained to you and to your sister repeatedly for years-  is her life evidence of her knowing best at any point in her life?

She now wants to export The Problem aka her older daughter to the U.S., to marry a stranger. If this plan of hers involves a hefty payment she was to receive, then however evil her plan, it makes some logical sense. But if she is not to be paid for this export, what logic is there to her suggested plan?

A young child believes her mother knows best, all knowing, like a god. Better lose this belief.

If you are to save yourself, if you are to make a better life for yourself, then you will have to endure the intense pain of leaving your mother behind, and moving away from her. The reason you have to leave her behind is that as much as you want to help her, she will not accept your help. A person is willing to accept help only from a person they value. She doesn’t see you as a person who will pick her up from where she is, because she looks down at you, not up to you.

When she rushes to clean her home before strangers/ guests arrive is that she values them. She looks up to them. She values the opinions of strangers. She wants to marry her two daughters so that the strangers she values will be pleased.

On the other hand, you being pleased or not doesn’t matter to her.

“I have surpassed the point in my life where I believed that my emotions and fears hold any weight with my mom”- you said it yourself.

In the interactions between you and your mother, it will not happen that you will pick her up. Instead, she will drag you down with her, but as you live a life as miserable as hers, she will still not be there with you, instead she will tell you yet again about her sad life. You will still be alone.

If you see this reality, if you form a loyalty to living life according to reality, and dissolve your loyalty to the delusion of motherly love, then without that unjustified guilt, you will be able to leave your home and make your own choices according to logic and correct understanding.

Fear is the most powerful of all emotions and I did not find a way to live without it, outside a moment here and there, maybe a whole afternoon, I think I had two days free of fear in my life. I wish it was possible to live without fear.

But fear itself will not kill you. People experience great fear, for long periods of time, years of anxiety, and they remain alive. Endure the unpleasant feeling, take breaks, walks, listen to music then proceed. Endure all feelings, the sadness, the despair, the guilt, don’t resist these emotions, let them be and they will weaken soon by themselves. Then proceed, logically.

anita