Categories: uncategorized
Date: 07 May 2008 23:30:07
Today I did something that feels quite significant. When I worked with a previous counsellor I did quite a lot of work on paper in between sessions - lots of "inner child" type dialogue and drawings/paintings - hundreds of pages worth it must have been altogether! It's all been sitting in a plastic crate under my bed for ages. It's been really important as it records some of my first attempts to love different bits of myself and I've had a very warm and tender feeling about the whole process. Well- I've been trying to get round to resorting space so that things can be tidier and it occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I probably didn't need to keep most of this work anymore. So today I have been shredding nearly all of it ( I kept a few pictures I really liked). I was only going to start on the shredding , but then I thought that as the bin men were coming tomorrow it would be good if I could get rid of it all at once rather than have bags of shredded paper sitting around the flat.
As I've been doing the shredding I've noticed a few things that I don't want to over analyse but I'm just putting down for whatever they are worth. There's some rather weird, vaguely paradoxical, things going on that I don't want to look at too hard in case I scare myself or tie myself up in knots trying to understand them!
1) I felt glad to get rid of all that old writing. There seems almost a kind of joy at ditching it, but paradoxically, I don't feel that I'm ditching parts of me. The feelings and experiences I wrote about then are still part of me, but there's at least the beginnings of it being in a different way somehow. It's not that it isn't/wasn't important - but I don't feel the need to keep that particular snapshot of where I was then.
2) There seemed to be an awful lot of "angst" that I didn't particularly want to focus on. (I read bits of what I wrote, but mostly really didn't want to)
3) Even though I still feel some of the things now that I felt then, it's also different - it's weird - kind of different and the same and yet different at the same time.
4) My relationships seem more stable now than they did then
I think I feel more whole ( though not necessarily very whole) than I did then.