Jelly, I struggle with how I look. I dont have the best complexion in the world and suffered from really bad acne in my late teens and twenties.
So I can understand a little how you feel. I am still plagued by scars but by now, I have learnt to live with them. And I realise that if I smile a wide smile, somehow people get distracted by my smile and don't look too closely at my complexion.
You can call me Dory/ Grl.
As a wise fish once sang,"Just keep swimming!"
It's no use to go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.
Fo and Julie are both struggling with anger and their H right now. I hear the hurt and loss and the betrayal. Imagine that anger turned inwards. Would you not do anything to rid yourself of that.
I don't know how to explain this.
This comment saddens me on so many levels. It makes me reflect on myself and my husband but also on what you are going through.
I would never want you to feel torwards yourself the way I sometimes/often feel torwards my husband. You feel betrayed by your body. You are angry because you feel as if you have no control of something that is so essential to your goals and future. How do you learn to just accept yourself for what you are and what you bring?
Understanding my husband and talking to him helps me to accept him. The anger really comes because he won't talk to me and explain. When he does I no longer feel anger, I feel love and compassion. Perhaps understanding yourself and listening to your own inner voice might help you?
I want to tell you straight out. While I have met people that have done well with lap band short term, I am afraid of the lap band procedure. I have seen some very sad complications. I am only being this direct with you because I have a current aquaintance undergoing such a complication. She is my age. Does the risk of these complications increase second time around? Are the success rates of such a procedure actually worth the risk for the complications? I am sure you have thoroughly researched this and are considering this from every possible angle so I apologize if I am being intrusive.
I wish you so much success as you take this step in moving forward and releasing all that has been burdening you, emotionally, psychologically and physically.
I will have my happy dance ready for when you reach your goal.
It's been a little while since I have posted, this is likely to be a stream of consciousness and journalling more than anything else. I am feeling a little emotionally lost tonight, a long and emotional day and I feel adrift in a sea of feelings without much light to see where the next safe harbor or pier or port maybe. I guess I am feeling equally dramatic. But I have come to know this about myself. Ah self acceptance.
This will pass I know that. When I arrived here wow just over a year ago, what a mess little Jellyb was. Depression, anxiety, self hatred, suicidal, jeez what a little ray of sunshine I wasn't. Really is it 12 months ago? I thought I could never be happy again. I would never learn to love myself. That maybe being dead was a better option than living with such heart and mind numbing pain for the rest of my life.
When did it change? When did the pain, turn to sadness, turn to anger, turn to grief, turn to rage, turn to grace, turn to connection, turn to love, turn to joy, turn to optimism, turn to self love. And it cycled turning back in and on itself over and over - 12 months eh? Ha! But never like the real pain like in the beginning.
So I guess this sea of emotion I'm floating in today, is just life is it not? Today I just feel like I'm in the water and not floating on top of it, and at the very least not drowning it. It must be good day! Hahaha turns out it's a good day.
The breadth your emotional evolution is wonderful. Your consciousness is drifting through the universe in this vessel called Jelly. There have been calm seas, turbulent seas, hot days and rainy nights. All these experiences offer your consciousness the insight that these emotions are non dualistic in nature Jelly. They are not opposites but all in relationship together for your consciousness to experience. Lama Yeshe explained it this way and it helped me finally see it.
Lama Yeshe: When you contemplate your own consciousness with intense awareness, leaving aside all thoughts of good and bad, you are automatically led to the experience of non-duality. How is this possible? Think of it like this: the clean clear blue sky is like consciousness, while the smoke and pollution pumped into the sky are like the unnatural, artificial concepts manufactured by ego-grasping ignorance. Now, even though we say the pollutants are contaminating the atmosphere, the sky itself never really becomes contaminated by the pollution. The sky and the pollution each retain their own characteristic nature. In other words, on a fundamental level the sky remains unaffected no matter how much toxic energy enters it. The proof of this is that when conditions change, the sky can become clear once again. In the same way, no matter how many problems maybe created by artificial ego concepts, they never affect the clean clear nature of our consciousness itself. From the relative point of view, our consciousness remains pure because its clear nature never becomes mixed with the nature of confusion.
Jelly, don't confuse your experiences with your consciousness. You are more then emotion and more then a physical vessel. You are a beautiful jewel of consciousness.
Lovely JksD thank you for your faith in me. I doubt myself some days and yesterday was one of those days. You know how it is. When you just don't seem to be enough.
Lovely Mu, you are too kind in your descriptions. I don't see it some days Mu, this evolution. V said something to me the other day about remarkable growth. I told her I still feel embryonic. She told me it was ok to feel that way. Bless and love her.
I am still troubled by the vessel and not alot closer to any resolution of what to do next with it's external presentation.
I have formed some greater thoughts about why I feel I need this surgery done before I have a partner in my life.
It is definitely about worthiness. It is still somewhat confused in my head but it is something along the lines of:
I understand and know that men love me regardless of how I look
I struggle to accept that love because I feel unworthy due to how I look.
I believe they deserve better than how I look.
I don't want my partner to be judged by my appearance, I don't want him to be considered less than for being with me. And feel this quite strongly.
There are of course all the other vulnerablities of being naked and intimate with someone but I feel the above is more connected to my desire for surgery.
There is no insight here, this is just what I have been able to simplify and name in therapy.
But I so value your words, encouragement and support.
It is funny I have to practice detachment with you so much. Let you move in your own time at your own speed. I laugh at myself with regard to this. If I had my way we would be meeting for coffee with Fo and the gang. I'm a pushy controlling codependent. I told you I'm embryonic!!
I'll be back