sometimes it feels like my life exists in cycles of building dams against the waters and then being inundated and flooded by them, temporarily taken and washed away, for the waters to be resorbed by the Earth, balance to return to the land, to build yet another dam to be taken again once the concretes fail.
reading this book Turtles All the Way Down — filling me with compassion and understanding that I wish was always there. the screaming winds of internal hurricanes that sometimes never cease inside the minds of the externally silent… sometimes those with their mouths sealed are quiet only because they cannot pick what to say, to begin to truly speak is to risk a near-infinite spiral of a monologue, because that is the state of their mind that will not abate.
the thought process is eerily similar. the natural disposition of Aza’s mind reminds me of significant people from my past.
her OCD seems centered around a form of grief involving what seems to me to be a complete and utter loss of control — i.e., the sudden death of her beloved father.
I have this hunch that her OCD is almost centered around an attempt at control. she continually describes her mind and her thoughts as being something she witnesses, completely and utterly out of her control, unable to choose her thoughts, instead at the mercy of their ever-shifting and brutal winds.
I think her childhood and her experience of her own mind is centered around a complete and utter loss of control. I don’t really believe this, but it’s almost like her mind is behaving in ways that cannot be controlled because of the sudden severity of the trauma — someone so near and dear ripped away from her suddenly without her having so much as a say in the matter. Her mind fearfully understands life as something that cannot be controlled, and it’s almost like her mental scape behaves in a way that reflects that. the inner reflecting her experience of the outer.
It gives me compassion for people who are suffering in this way, particularly if their childhood involved a loss of control, particularly in relation to a parent.
The book also gave me compassion for myself, in that I recognized the anxiously-circular nature of the thought patterns. They felt all too familiar.
I just want to have more compassion for all beings. I have a hunch that the evils of all beings are easily explained by their own suffering, by ignorance… it’s so easy to look underneath the surface and find the reason for why someone is behaving in any particular way. Too, too easy. I almost feel like intelligence lends into compassion, in this way, for to see the truth of things, and the hidden reality that a perceptive eye/mind/heart can pick up on, is to necessarily come to forgiveness and compassion for those who are hurting. Hurt people really do hurt people, and I’ll always remember that, and try my very hardest to love and forgive accordingly.
THE CLOSET MYSTIC 