Dear Kibou:

You are welcome. You shared about your love for Japanese, anime and manga, these “fantasy worlds created and getting lost in them”.

You shared that because of your father’s work, you traveled with your family to many countries and moved a lot since you were 3 years old, if not earlier, moving within your birth country and outside your birth country: living 7 years in Cuba and 1 year in Japan. You have moved away from your family for Uni and currently living in the same place for the last six months, longer than you lived in one place since you were 3. Your parents live in Indonesia for the last two years, and you visited them there twice.

Your father “is not the one (to) give praise freely and talk about emotions”. He compared you unfavorably to others even when you were the best student and excelled in many things. Last year you “finally heard the words how incredibly proud he is” of you.

You wrote: “My mum said a couple of times that we have to prove ourselves due to our skin color”. You mentioned that after you were “depressed with suicidal thoughts”, your mother became unwell and you took over many responsibilities, which was the wrong timing for you, but you were “trying to be as strong as possible”, trying to “process one thing, as .. the next thing was thrown” at you.

“I dealt with many things on my own mostly, especially my emotions.. I repressed and denied many of them to get through everything. So when I did start sharing with others, all my emotions were bursting out”.

You resonate with the quote: “Only the broken will offer a piece of their soul to you, for they know what  it feels like being shattered into pieces”, and with the figurative image of “a man with many puzzle pieces missing inside of him”. After a healing session (perhaps the theta healing you mentioned elsewhere), you had the image of your inner child painting in the holes (the missing puzzle pieces). You wrote that many of the missing puzzle pieces/ holes “deal with the scars of abandonment”. As you figuratively fill in these holes with paint (which means using your coping skills), sometimes you find another hole you did not see before, or the paint is not thick enough, and it hurts, and sometimes you need to get more paint.

In a reply to another thread 10 minutes ago, you wrote to another member: “I do resonate with your feelings of loneliness. I am prone to loneliness”.

I understand you better now, Kibou. What jumps out from the page for me more than anything is that you experienced a lifetime of too much alone-ness and loneliness. I think that the ongoing, painful, immense loneliness created your figurative holes/ missing puzzle pieces.

anita