Letters from Somewhere No.136
A Village in Rheinland-Pfalz (Germany)
I have spent my whole life trying to find out why I feel what I feel, why certain emotions overwhelm me so intensely that I can do nothing but surrender to them. And why I carry so much loneliness and emptiness inside me. To this day, I have discovered approaches and causes, but no solutions and no resolution to this state.
Perhaps I have even resigned myself to the fact that there are things within me I can never change. To a large extent, I will remain who I have always been. As if every thought were a stone that I pack into my emotional backpack. And as if happiness and contentment were plants with wonderfully fragrant blossoms and lush green leaves, shining brightest only in the sun.
And now that autumn is not merely at the door but has moved in in full force, they lose all their leaves and with them their radiance, stripped back to what they originally were. What was always there comes to light again. Bare branches, at the mercy of the weather, surrounded by a gray world, soaked in dark emptiness.
I blame the weather in part, but above all the events of the past few days. They have reawakened the pain. I am back at the point where I was at the beginning of the year, with the feelings of helplessness and of surrendering to things that are out of my hands and whose plaything I have become. And within it lies the fear of losing everything I have and everything I am.
Over all these years, people have told me again and again to just keep going, not to cling to the past, to look ahead. And yet I keep arriving at the same point. I go around in circles, but not forward. That may work for those people, but not for me. Only what might finally work for me, I do not know.
I have spent my whole life trying to find out why I feel what I feel, why certain emotions overwhelm me so intensely that I can do nothing but surrender to them. And why I carry so much loneliness and emptiness inside me. To this day, I have discovered approaches and causes, but no solutions and no resolution to this state.
Perhaps I have even resigned myself to the fact that there are things within me I can never change. To a large extent, I will remain who I have always been. As if every thought were a stone that I pack into my emotional backpack. And as if happiness and contentment were plants with wonderfully fragrant blossoms and lush green leaves, shining brightest only in the sun.
And now that autumn is not merely at the door but has moved in in full force, they lose all their leaves and with them their radiance, stripped back to what they originally were. What was always there comes to light again. Bare branches, at the mercy of the weather, surrounded by a gray world, soaked in dark emptiness.
I blame the weather in part, but above all the events of the past few days. They have reawakened the pain. I am back at the point where I was at the beginning of the year, with the feelings of helplessness and of surrendering to things that are out of my hands and whose plaything I have become. And within it lies the fear of losing everything I have and everything I am.
Over all these years, people have told me again and again to just keep going, not to cling to the past, to look ahead. And yet I keep arriving at the same point. I go around in circles, but not forward. That may work for those people, but not for me. Only what might finally work for me, I do not know.