Day 38: My own company

29102012

Today I've been spending some time off after over two months of running around and I faced a point of anxiety when within four walls for a long period of time (= many hours within one day). I call it the “seinähullu” personality. “Seinähullu” is a very describing finnish word that basically means “completely mad”, consisting of the words 'seinä' (= 'wall') and 'hullu' (= 'crazy'). This “wallcrazy” personality has been around for a long time and I now started to track it down and see what it's actually about.

I remember that as a teenager when I lived within and as depression and developed anxiety and panic disorders I started to experience this phenomenon. I spent most of my free time on the computer: reading stuff, looking at pictures, watching TV shows, chatting with people – being completely and utterly bored out of my mind. When my boredom became overwhelmingly heavy I usually left the house to shake off my anxiety. I had long walks in the middle of the night just wandering around the small town, escaping my tiny and messy room and all the mind-shit I painted on top of my reality in that specific location. I had a very interesting relationship to my room, as it was both a sanctuary and a tomb, but that I will open up in separate writing when I eventually start going through the depression era.

Later as I have lived on my own I have spent a lot of time simply within my apartment. I've lived through periods of unemployment where all I've had on my hands has been time and that small space of my own which was all I could afford. I had no money for activities; no hobbies (besides theatre which was free), no events, no traveling, no food, no alcohol, no parties, nothing I had learned to be an experience worth living for. That time taught me a lot about what's actually enjoyable in life as life, but as a result I also secluded myself from others more and more as I at the time hanged out with people who thought that meaningful social interaction always included some money-spending related activity. As I spent a lot of time by myself in my apartment I always eventually got anxious within the four walls, becoming “wallcrazy”, the anxiety of being secluded becoming so heavy I had no choice but to move myself and go out. What I did then was usually going into nature, taking walks, climbing a hill, walking in a forest, standing in the rain, lying in snow, hugging trees – immersing myself in nature just to feel I'm alive at all. Sometimes I called a friend to have a contact to something living through people, but mostly I didn't, because I didn't have many friends and I didn't think I had a big enough reason to call them up [a point of communication I'm opening up in writing at the moment]. Sometimes instead of going outside I made the indoors a more comfortable place to be in by for example lighting candles, putting on music or burning incense – giving myself an extra sensual experience in my environment to forget the environment that was causing me anxiety – refusing to just stop and be within my environment and creating an extra environment within it to protect me from it.

What I'm starting to realize here is that all I've ever done is escape myself within those moments of anxiety. I've gone after experiences of life existing around me – reaching out to nature or people – to experience myself as a living thing instead of realizing I don't need Life around me to be Life myself. I haven't realized I am All-One as I am alone, I am Life no matter what surrounds me. I have seen myself as less than life, not one and equal to it, as I have perceived myself to require it's presence in order to feel the life in me.

I now see boredom in fact has actually never really existed within my experience, as I have never really had a lack of things to do. Today as I've been home I've had a plenty of things to do and yet the anxiety persona awoke, so it has nothing to do with not having things to do. As a child I remember I often asked my mother: “Mom, tell me what to do, I'm bored.” Even back then it was never about not actually having anything to do or even about not knowing all the things one could do, as a child simply does not have all the knowledge, but about unwillingness to face oneself as one is alone and to explore one's own self-expression. I'm not saying I'm always anxious when I'm alone, no, but sometimes I am and I haven't yet figured out what the exact correlation between time spent alone and anxiety is: meaning I don't yet know what it is that makes me anxious during certain times of being alone, as it doesn't always happen.

Who am I with myself? How do I spend time with myself? How am I with myself as Life? What am I as self-expression as I am alone? How does my body actually feel? I now see and realize the anxiety is not valid as the fear of oneself is self-separation and thus not real, and I am glad I now get to explore myself with myself from this starting point.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize boredom has never actually existed within my experience as I have always in fact had things to do – to actually be bored would be to not have anything to do at all, which is a state of being I can hardly imagine would even exist.

• I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to define experiencing life as doing something as tasks and activities, not realizing life is about simply being and expressing myself within and as myself within each and every moment, be there activity or not.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe my experience of “boredom” to be valid and true instead of stopping to breathe and realizing the experience is a creation of my mind.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to experience anxiety as a result of separating myself from myself when and as I have refused to see myself as one and equal to Life.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to accumulate that experience of anxiety into such amounts that I have been living within and as an anxiety disorder.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize my experience of “boredom” is actually resistance to face myself as myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not be able to be bored in my own company.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear the experience of being bored as I have feared facing myself within boredom, creating resistance towards boredom and escaping it through arranging myself a lot of activity.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that what I have defined as the experience of boredom is actually the experience of not knowing what to do next – a state of hesitation, where I have experienced anxiety over the choices I have “had to” make as I have not trusted myself as self-expression to make the “right choice”.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not live as self-expression but to instead escape myself and all potential to ever be myself by believing myself to be “less than” Life and search for the experience of Life from outside of myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to see myself as “less than” Life, limiting my experience of myself to less than I actually am.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not be here to explore myself as I am as an expressive physical manifestation of Life that has the ability to move, make sounds, breathe, see, taste, hear, smell and touch.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to limit my self-expression to characters even when I am alone, as I have been afraid to simply be.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to escape what I have accepted and allowed myself to become as the circumstances I have accepted and allowed myself to create for myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to abdicate my responsibility over myself as the circumstances I have created for myself by believing the circumstances “are not in my control”, refusing to face myself as what I have accepted and allowed myself to become.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to separate myself from myself by feeling uncomfortable within the circumstances I've created for myself and wanting to escape them, not realizing I am then actually wanting to escape myself as that which I have created around me.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize I have always been able to locate the experience of anxiety as a certain kind of a feeling within a certain spot in my body, indicating that I can release the experience of anxiety if I release it from my body.

I commit myself to explore myself as an expressive physical being by returning into my body from the mind within and as breath and investigating what my body really is as sensations and movement.

I commit myself to face myself as myself as I now see, realize and understand there is no valid reason to escape myself, and that the only way to ever live within and as self-honesty is to face that which I actually am now.

I commit myself to realize all of my experiences of my surroundings are of my own creation and that I thus carry responsibility over my experience.

When and as I experience anxiety as I spend time alone, I commit myself to stop, take a breath and realize the anxiety is an energetic experience that I sense physically within my body because I have created it within and as the mind, and that it indicates I am trying to escape myself as self-expression. I commit myself to then face what it is I'm escaping and why and accordingly direct myself as movement.

I commit myself to stop being bored as I now see and realize such a thing does not exist.

As I now see and realize I am one and equal to all Life, I commit myself to realize I am in fact all the Life I can or will ever experience as all I “receive” from my surroundings as experiences I actually create myself; I cannot for example live as the actual life experience of another person even though I can be there to experience my own life experience in the company of the person.