Imagine to Remember

My sadness, my regrets are for the life I have not lived. In true neurotic fashion I hid for many years from life, wandering blindly in an endless or grey or busying myself with everything but my souls, calling my one true responsibility. I have been the noble martyr saving others from their problems, soothing their wounds. I’ve been the good girl who also hides from life worshipping at the altar of a feigned purity. The hermit, lost in a world of my own making. I grieve for all the moments unseized, passions denied, dreams deferred. All the times I, like a coward, left the living to others, not because I was scared, really, but because it was easier, familiar even. I fantasized about how smart, how beautiful and successful I could be, marvelling at my own untapped potential. And then angry when confronted with the reality of my own mediocrity. I have spent many hours analyzing all the whys and the hows, I have searched high and low for the original wound, the defining moment, as if it would be a key to unlock the madness of my innerworld, on the other side of the door the answers that would set me right again. Jung famously said that “neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering”. And that is what I found on the other side of the door. Not just pain, but pain denied, hidden away and carefully suppressed. Feelings can be dangerous, suppression is often a matter of survival. But eventually when the storm passes, the pain too will want to come out and play, it demands to be seen and like an unruly child will not be ignored.