Dear Murtaza:

“I hope that this image of me (A+) won’t get in the way when I say something wrong.. I was afraid (still afraid) of what I say/said that might disappoint you, this might filter what I really wanna say, but I don’t let it“- please continue to not let fear filter what you really want to say.

“What I need from you, to not have such high expectations for me, I always wanted to show the opposite, for people to have low expectations… ‘it’s expectations what ruin relationships, the image they hold‘”- I don’t think that you will find many people with lower expectations from people than me.. until recently. My trust in people has gone from zero to a cautious 10%, and then yesterday, I trusted you completely and you didn’t disappoint me. Thing is, I trust myself enough, at this time- to believe that my trust in you is valid and deserved (deserves got something to do with it, in this context!).

What I trusted yesterday before receiving your response to my 2 highly emotional posts is that in your response, you will care for me, you will care for how I feel, and that you will want me to feel okay and in control.

Here is how you responded to my sentence: “I tried to edit the post above, and remove the ‘I would have run to you'”: “Why? It’s cute, in my mind its a hypothetical scenario, it will never happen, it’s more like a wish, I wish the same too, but we can acknowledge that wish (just like you did above) no need for further actions“-

Compare my expectation of you based on my trust in you and what you delivered, and you can see that there is a perfect match.

After reading the above, in boldface, I experienced an emotional awakening of sorts: I felt alive in a return-to-childhood kind of way, happy like a child, eager to live.. more open to people, feeling more comfortable than ever in the taproom, and then at 2 am last night, I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep for the longest time because I was excited about life, about the next day. Although what awaited me in the next day was no different from any other day.

Back to your fear to say the wrong things and disappoint me: any time you feel that way, you can say nothing. Also, for the rest of July-August and part of September, the hottest part of the year, with inadequate air conditioning, I understand your difficulty in thinking and posting/emailing. (It is not at all hot where I live- until the next heat wave- so it is easier for me).

And now, in this long post, I will re-read your yesterday post and respond:

“I wonder if you ever thought about wanting to be helped when you saw me, that I could accept your anger towards your mother… maybe its just that you wanted to help me, after all you do that with every member“- at this time in my life, helping others and helping oneself is the same thing, it is like two sides of the same coin.

“If I’m Mary and Max told me that my messages makes him anxious, I would either talk about something that doesn’t make him anxious, or just stop“- in our future communication, if something I say makes you anxious, let me know and I will do my best to not talk about it anymore, for as long as you don’t want to talk about it.

“I understand the age gap, though you are the only person who meets both criteria, the intellectual and emotional sides“- I added this part here just because it makes me feel good.

“In my mind, we are compatible, in my feelings, we are compatible, in real life its not possible, but I just like to acknowledge it, we don’t have to do anything, just talk, until we ran out“- this is another part that makes you deserving of my trust. I am adding this: in real-life, a romantic/ sexual relationship is not possible, but an otherwise loving relationship is possible!

“If we are talking about a hypothetical scenario, and that we are both close.. I would give you as much alone time as you like“- a hypothetical thank-you to you!

“I would definitely like when you be angry (lol),  laugh when my little sister gets angry (its only happens when I care about the person)“- a beautiful sentiment!

I now want to return to “Run to you” song performed by the late Whitney Houston, which I listened to (after coming up with the “I would run to you” in my post to you) in a youtube with scenes from the movie The Bodyguard. I don’t care for the movie, but I like the scene in the video where she, young and beautiful, is running in the sky, among the clouds, in slow motion, Running To Kevin Costner.

The lyrics: “I know that when you look at me- There’s so much that you just don’t see- But if you would only take the time- I know in my heart, you’d find- A girl who’s scared… Can’t you see the hurt in me?- I feel so all alone- I wanna run to you-  I wanna run to you- Won’t you hold me in your arms- I want to run to you-  But if I come to you-  Tell me, will you stay or will you run away?- Each day, each day I play the role- someone always in control- But at night .. There’s nobody there, no one cares for me- What’s the sense of trying hard to find your dreams-Without someone to share it with-Tell me what does it mean?- I need you here, I need you here to wipe away my tears- To kiss away my fears..”-

– I talked before in these forums, particularly the Relationships Forum, about the connection between Romance and Childhood experience. It is common knowledge that childhood experiences with parents heavily influence adult experiences in regard to romantic relationships (ex., the Attachment Theory). The context of the song Run-to-You is romantic, and this is what I felt for you when I watched the video, and later as I sang the words to myself during my approx. 5.5 km daily walk. But something else occurred to me at one point on: I saw myself as the 5-year old girl that I was (the following italicized words are in the lyrics above): I was a girl who’s scared,  running to my mother, wanting her to hold me in her arms and keep me safe from harm, wanting her to wipe away my tears and kiss away my fears, but she didn’t. Instead, she was angry at me, she didn’t hold me, she pushed me away and blame me for having started to run to her. So I stopped. (But the running inside me did not stop, the running, the unsettled motion inside harmed my brain and body: OCD, motor and vocal tics, etc.,). After that one incident, there were many others, and throughout, my mother, when she looked at me, there was so much she didn’t see, she didn’t take the time, she didn’t see the hurt in me. I felt so alone. At night I couldn’t sleep, afraid, but there was nobody there to care for me.

Fast forward, I wanted to run to you, Murtaza, and the emotion in this desire to run to you was intoxicating, euphoric, similar to what I felt when I wanted to run to her. The intoxicating euphoria was a very scared girl’s desire and imagining that soon, very soon (if she runs fast)- she will be safe from harm.

“What I understood is that you never lived your youth, and that now those desires and feelings is  youth? That you are somehow trying to relive what you missed… Why do you call them youthful emotions? Why not just emotions?“- in that night, when I was five, she was very loud, crying, hysterical, breaking things, saying to my father: I am now going out to kill myself! She then left. I started to cry, terrified. My father took out a belt and hit me so that I will be quiet. I stopped crying. He then left and I was alone in the apartment. Next, I left, walking into the night alone, in the dark, under a bit of moonlight, looking for her body along the long, narrow path, looking to my right, looking to my left, then reaching the street… I saw her. The feeling of joy was intense, the desire to run to her and have her hold me in her arms was intense. So I started to run to her. She angrily stopped me. There was no holding me, no keeping me safe from harm.

After that, and more scenes like it, the running was all inside me in the form of motor and vocal tics and endless OCD compulsions and rituals- this internal running-nowhere, never arriving at a safe destination, made that pure joy and desire- an impossibility. When I say youthful emotions, I mean the emotions before those emotions were shackled/ caged/ dissociated by sickness.

Yesterday, the posting of those 2 posts was me running to you. In your reply- you cared for me, you held me in your arms and you kept me safe from harm.

Also yesterday, I emailed you for the first time and we communicated via email for the first time today. I messaged you there that I will submit a post here, and following the submission, you can reply to me here, or not- that I don’t care either way. I care to keep communicating with you via email because it will allow us to share personal information and discuss topics (such as the title of your thread) that I wouldn’t discuss on a public forum.

One more thing: there was a movie that was very special to me, The Never Ending Story- it is the movie that motivated me to travel alone to the U.S. through Europe, with no plan and no help. The movie starts with a boy reading from a book (the book is titled The-Never-Ending-Story). During the movie, the boy realizes that the book is more than a book, realizing that the book was reaching him irl. For me, at some point on, maybe from the beginning- you became more than a member on a public forum: you reached me irl.

anita

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