A MAN NEARBY

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

I feel good about people from prosperous families. Since childhood.

For a child who is loved, cared for, who has plenty of support and attention, it seems as if mom and dad are always standing behind him, putting his hand somewhere in the area of the shoulder blades. Even when or especially when they are not physically around, and a person has this radiation of confidence, security, dignity.

I always felt it, because I also always felt my difference. A bent back, a hidden heart, a closed stomach, because it's not safe.

Children in love are warm, lucky or something. Well-being in the family grows into a prosperous destiny. Even their troubles are warm, oxytocin. Because even in trouble they have close people around them. Not family, but friends. Not friends, but family.

As if by the bitter irony of fate, as if it would be unfair, but those, the latter, from a cold and emotionally hungry childhood, especially those in need of warmth and support from people, turn out to be emphasized - without a person nearby. Although they seem to need it more. At least to patch up those holes in the foundation that are.

What is there, "those second." That second one is me.

Loneliness turned out to be a terribly trickster contraption.

My second therapist talked to me about every session, and I heard her and was furious, and desperate and freezing about it even more. She said: "There is no other loneliness, except for the abandonment of man himself." I think those who believe in God could nod in this place and support something like: "God never turns away and does not abandon us, it is we who turn away from him."

If she promised me from the other bank that when you dare to wade your river, they will give you a boat, and arm ruffles, and a surfboard, I think I would quickly rush into this business;)

Loneliness is like a shape-shifter. You feel that no one is around, but no one is inside you. And therefore you are not able to see those who are near.

And only when you build up a core vertebra by vertebra. You perform your personal miracle of nature - you grow a sprawling baobab in the desert. When you become yourself that notorious parent for a sore inner child. You raise a parent first so that later you can raise a child - you do the almost impossible, because first the child grows up in order to become a parent, and not vice versa. You change the chicken and the egg in places, and then again in places, completely forgetting, so what is the source of life. Or completely knowing it - by gut.

That's when. It is only when you are no longer alike that a person appears next to you.

But first, in order for you to become uneven, you need to go through the thinnest eye of a needle in the world. Drag yourself through it with all your cardboard boxes, bundles of someone else's shit and spitting into your soul, tons of tears, crap memory, carriages of events, boxes of injuries that unpack along the way and prevent you from squeezing into your ear. And a little dog too. While lonely, dogs are very helpful.

Because only the presence of mom and dad behind your back in experience gives you the experience of meeting "mom and dad" in life. Only the presence of another person next to you in experience gives you the opportunity to have a person next to you in your life.

And if this experience did not exist, it needs to be increased.

You need to organize a person next to you so that he grows inside you, given that you are not able to pathologically not only organize a person, but to see, find, trust, rely on, take.

Nine years of therapy. Friends. Other friends. A game of checkers in circles of intimacy, with a regular review of whom to distance, along the way learning to set boundaries, along the way pissing off from the fear of mistrust that you have the right to do so. And whom to bring closer, drenched in sweat with excitement, that for a step towards you they will be rejected. Despair, get tired, get hurt, roll back. To be ashamed of what a sucker and traumatic you are. Get up, continue. Distinguish predators from mere mortals. Distinguish ordinary mortals from miraculous. And for this, recognizing everyone in himself: both a simple mortal and a predator, which is much more difficult and oh, and the most, most, most difficult: recognizing the miraculous in himself.

And then - experience grows and reliance on it. Knowing yourself. Willingness to answer for all this, to withstand, to accept. And most importantly - there is - a feeling - of one's own - dignity.

He was a therapist for many years. Different, it doesn't matter, although this is also part of the process. Then I learned to call myself an au pair. Then she added a coach. Every week, several people began to wait for me, meet me, testify, support, help, give. Helping with work is another step. And then - just people nearby. Themselves. The man is near.

You think it’s some kind of incomprehensible miracle - so that the people around you were human. But when you become a person next to yourself, when dignity grows in you, it is simply impossible otherwise that there were warm, or toxic people nearby. Your dignity, the one who is inside for you, filters them. And it is simply impossible that there was poison and poisonous cold nearby. AND! It is simply impossible to leave yourself alone. And you don't leave - and you go to people, you open up. And they see you.

You become visible. And the one who sees you appears.

What drama and beauty, isn't it? A person with crushed self-esteem so much needs praise, care, support. But his crushed self-esteem will not let him "make" this person next to him. It appears because you respect yourself.

Only then a piece of food dropped by chance on another's clothes turns not into a whipy shout that you are a pig, burning your insides and all living things in it with shame, but into a funny "If you blame it, just say" grunt."

Only then do you receive a message from your fitness instructor: "I believe in you. If you have any questions, do not be shy. I really want you to like yourself."

And from the mother, with whom you take the children to the kindergarten every year, an offer to take your baby sometimes in the evenings instead of you.

I was standing here the other day, deafened by the news and feelings about them, and people were walking around. And it seems that at first I bought cigarettes and cried right during the purchase, for some reason I was not at all embarrassed. Because it's okay that I cry. And it's normal that the seller smiles at me and gives me more than cigarettes.

And then she was smoking. And I looked at the people around. And loved everyone sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo It was bad for me, but I wanted to do well for others. I thought how much a heart beats in each of us, thirsting for love and peace, how much each carries fears in his stomach, anger in his hands and teeth, how much shame we carry on the tip of our tail, how much each of us carries every second of the past of his unbearable but wearable, future and now. How desperately we need each other, and there is nothing more important, nothing, nothing, than human warmth to each other. How can we remember this all the time …

How we underestimate this when we are so hard on ourselves, when we ask ourselves when we reproach and reproach. Do we take into account the factor of love?

How much support do we have? Are they criticizing us or joking and supporting? Are they ashamed or say "me too", "me too", did it happen to me too? Praise, notice the good, not as normal and air, but as beautiful, what is worthy of micro-celebration?

How much easier would it be for us to be given the weight of our being, motherhood, study, work, obligation, mistakes, depending on whether there is a person nearby?

Environment as strength or weakness.

A woman told the other day how beautifully she gave birth compared to the first time, how much relaxation came just because she - saw - her midwife firefly. And that's all, and you can be then. Show up. Open up.

I drive a car better if they don't shout nearby: "You fool, curb!" And then. When you are driving alone, and next to this very curb, you can reproduce a fool inside, and drive like a fool, and work like a fool, and live like a fool, shrinking into a ball until it disappears completely. And you can hear a warm voice inside - "well done", and take the next turn perfectly smoothly. And expand.

We need each other. We are dependent on each other. We are vulnerable to each other.

Now it seems to me that the factor of love - the factor of a person nearby - is the most important.

It is amazing that it became possible to admit this only after being freed from.

This is terribly scary. And infinitely beautiful.

Maryana Oleinik