*** I like you, Peter, just the way you are! I think you are the bee’s knees 🐝✨No one like you!

* As far as the future goes, my mindset is to live one day at a time, and I embody this philosophy. I really don’t plan for the future. I don’t imagine a future. It’s just this day, this evening, this night.. Oh, surprise! Another morning, Yeah!

I carry trauma within my body every day, every hour of each day and night when I am not sleeping, in the form of tics- the flight-or-fight response trapped within my body, muscles running with nowhere to go. Muscles twitching, movement trapped. It feels like physical tension and there’s pain when I twitch a certain muscle too often. I can’t help it. I can’t stop it.

I tried to stop it. It is Impossible. it’s been going on since I was 5 or so, every single hour that I am awake. It feels really good to not twitch, the moments I don’t. It makes me think how fortunate the many who do not twitch really are, but they (you) don’t know it. If you knew the difference, you’d be ecstatic that you don’t have these tics going on and on and on.

Not to mention having made fun of for twitching as a child, a preteen, a teen, a grown up.

The current people in my life don’t make fun of me. All are genuinely nice about it. Thank you!!!

I had a long, meaningful talk with a woman I like very much this evening, in real-life. She’s about my age and has been anxious since she was a child. But no tics, none whatsoever. Yet her anxiety is ongoing. She rarely looks calm.

I talked a bit with a younger man and with an older man, 76 years old. Have known him for years. He is the one into whose yard I ran when I accidently sprayed my face with pepper spray months ago, using his water hose to water my burning eyes.

This is Community, and it is so very important to me. It means Everything.

The people in my life, in real-life, are good to me. I am fortunate.

Oh, I was going to talk about this topic: Suppressed Anger.

My mother suppressed her anger, putting on a facade of calm and peace and generosity until she couldn’t take it anymore. She would then EXPLODE. Her anger exploded and all hell broke loose. Similarly, there has been a person in my life, online, who had a suppressed anger problem as well, presenting a facade of calm and peace and generosity.. until she couldn’t take it anymore, and then, she exploded in her own way. I tried to accommodate her, to please her.. all in vain.

With some people there’ll always be an explosion, sooner than later. No Win with some people. The Only Solution is Distance (OSD, if you will).

The facade- my mother’s, others’- call it what it is: a mask, masking temporarily the Suppressed Rage Within.

anita

Dear Peter:

“What does a hurt feeling feel like? The space between emotion to feeling to a measurement, label, judgment… it’s the breath-thin space where mindfulness lives…”-

Without words like hurt, how can we possibly communicate here? All we have to connect us are words on a screen. But I do understand—words can limit, reshape, or even distort emotions.

What does hurt feel like to you, Peter?

I tried to experience the feeling of hurt just now. My mouth turned downward, my lower lip extended forward—like a child’s hurt face. And the feeling itself? It was like an emotional wound. It simply hurt.

“A criticism of Krishnamurti who was himself accused of being too clever with his words and paradoxically path to love was though negation, Emptiness, Kenosis, silence the undoing of words – what I think of as non measurement.”-

To move beyond intellectual constructs and allow reality to be felt rather than analyzed. I suppose, in this context, it’d mean that I will type something like this: “I feel tired right now, the left side of my body is hurting because of the way I am sitting. I just changed the way I am sitting and it hurts less. I am a bit hungry. My left shoulder just twitched. I can hear my pulsative tinnitus”,

Instead of something like “I feel tired right now. It must be because I didn’t sleep well last night, or not long-enough because I was at the computer doing my stream of consciousness after midnight. I wonder if I should stop drinking wine… I wonder if I should get another brain scan to check if some blood vessel in my brain is blocked after all, causing the pulsative tinnitus. Or maybe not, if I die- I die. I can’t believe I just said that.. am I depressed?”

“In the space between emotion and feeling were feelings hurt?”- I believe cognition is always intertwined with emotional pain—hurt, shame, guilt, fear, that it’s a matter of extent—how much cognition exists between raw emotion and the experience of feeling.

“No one that knows me would think me clever though as I have expressed before I have been accused me a lacking feeling, that my communication style and personality type is lacking, a way to avoid feeling… I don’t disagree, sadly its a core part of who I am. A trigger where I fill the space with a suspicion I’m not suited for relationship, something I fear my history confirms.”-

What if you rewrote the above using the words a 5- or 7-year-old might use? It could be a powerful exercise in connecting—both inward, with yourself, and outward, with others—in a deeper, more raw way, through straightforward self-expression.

I’m imagining myself as 7-year-old Peter right now, rephrasing it like this:

🧒 People say I don’t feel things. They say I don’t talk like other people, like I don’t show my feelings right. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know.

🧒 Sometimes I think I’m not good at being with people. Like something’s wrong with me, like I can’t get close to them the way I should. I look at my life, and it feels like proof. And that makes me sad.

“Funny when I saw this topic the first thing I wrote was a warning to myself, that any discussion into insignificance would only stir up existential angst and likely not end well.”-

But even with that warning, you still chose to engage. That tells me you care about these questions, about exploring meaning, even if it’s tough.

🧒 I thought about this stuff before, and it made my tummy feel weird, like something wasn’t right. I told myself not to think too hard about it, or it would feel bad again. But I still did. I don’t know why. Maybe I can’t help it. Maybe I need to know, even if it makes me scared.

There’s something tender in that version, something simpler—but still holding the same truth. What do you think, Peter?

anita

It’s never been clearer in my mind, this LOVE for my mother, A love so intense, minimized and abused and turned against me by the object of my love. It’s mind-boggling. For one’s love to be twisted and twisted?

I loved her so. She looked at me and saw nothing other than something to hate.

Something for me to understand.. how?

anita

Dear Peter:

“I recall the days the excitement, the fire, the bliss of being possessed by love. There’s something intoxicating about those early moments— the unfiltered passion, the consuming energy, the way love feels like it’s overtaken every inch of you, a kind of surrender, a beautiful chaos that colors everything in a different light (even if only the idea of love)…. until… the clock ticks… and we measure…” –

P O W E R F U L

“Each day, each moment I hear, from myself, from everyone, all 8 billion voices… the cry, see me, know me, love me… the suffering that connects all… what are we to do? Bigger then big, smaller then small, what are we to do?”-

It helps me to Cry, to Express the decades-long repressed and suppressed. Nothing for you to do, Peter, nothing at all. If you bother to reply and say: “I hear you!”, that’s more than enough, thank you.

This evening, I sent a friend a message, saying I heard someone mention him affectionately and saying I missed him, and another, I called, asking how he is feeling, being that he has this inflammation in his lungs, asking him not to talk much so to not irritate the inflammation, and recommended that he keeps taking Ibuprofen. And then, not very focused, I am posting this to you.

anita

Oh, oh, did I hurt your feelings, Peter? I had no such intent or awareness that I might have
Did I?

I meant that, in my estimation, you are clever, delightfully clever, but like with everyone, love ❤️ makes more of a difference in the experience of life than all the intelligence in the world. Of course, you know that 🙄 already.

Anita

Dear Peter:

“My mother’s physical death taught me that I didn’t come here to master devastating situations, circumstances, changes, losses, or even my own feelings. I came here to experience them. I came here for soul lessons and spirit teachings to carry on in this journey we are all on, this teaching way, this blessing way. In the end, I can, like my mother has done, return to the beauty that I was when I first arrived here.” – Richard Wagamese

To return to what was taken away from us: the opportunity to love and be loved in return.

“Without love, do what you will, be as clever as you like, you will solve nothing.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti

– Feels like this line was written especially with you in mind, Peter. You are indeed clever. Personally, being way less clever than you, I tried tirelessly to solve everything and failed in solving anything.

My life has been a vast desert of separation from giving-and receiving-love. I suppose there were many, many instances of awkward, blind attempts to give love and an ongoing failure to receive it. These days I am realizing, on the emotional level, that it is both giving and receiving love that gives life significance. One or the other is useless and leads nowhere.

“Eight-plus billion people on this planet, each existing within the width of a breath”—but how many truly love and are loved in return? How many possess the strength, confidence and ease required to give and receive love freely, without fear or resistance? And how many find themselves in the presence of others who are equally strong, confident and open, capable of sustaining this exchange?

anita