SPOILER ALERT: Robert Downey Jr novel The Alchemist is discussed, including the ending.
The search for love has taken up most of my life, a dark labyrinth filled with desperate dead ends, prisons of my own making, and more monsters within and without than I care to count. There was an ugly, painful, terrible emptiness inside me, a black hole of self-hatred and depression, and my twisted mind had believed for decades that only love could fill it. It turns out I was right, but not in the way I thought.
There’s nothing nice about disappointment, and I’ve been disappointed for decades. Not being alone was an obsession, and it was easy in such a state to make masks, put on the others and convince yourself that it was love every time someone was in love. At worst, it can convince you that relationships that are the exact opposite of love are the real ones, or that you would give more of yourself even when you are so empty. You will take whatever fills your hole, even if it doesn’t feed you. Sometimes, even if it poisons you.
Unconditional love seems to be everywhere, not just in all media, but also in the eyes of mothers in every grocery store and, most importantly, in people’s relationships with their pets. However, once the complexities of two fully developed human consciousnesses come into play, power structures consisting of competing priorities emerge in relationships even when love is in the air, leading to situations of compromise and sacrifice. The unconditional balance inevitably becomes one-sided and things get out of hand.
I’ve spent decades on this slippery slope, searching for a rare resource that doesn’t seem to exist, kissing princesses and frogs until my lips burst, and burning a few demons. Each connection becomes a channel, and it is easy to walk the path like a flash of consciousness moving almost at the speed of light, hopeful that your combined energies will be used to power a great machine, which is always a shock in circuitry is stopping and is just wasted effort.
The consequences of these mistakes can be catastrophic. This is partly the result of a worldview reversal, where hope is replaced by fear, unhappiness and loneliness and a return to black and white things. More than once, these defeats not only made me want to die, they also left me so exhausted that I could do anything. They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By this definition, I have spent most of my life in a state of madness.
It would be easy to blame Hollywood for making me think of her as a crazy dream girl, one of those seemingly heaven-sent people whose unique, eccentric worldview gives hope, happiness, and life to others. All my problems, but the sad truth is that along the way I met many people who lived up to my expectations. However, I was too blind to understand how self-realization should manifest itself, and my refusal to recognize my own mistakes was doomed to failure every time. In the event of an error, reset the cycle.
Since then, I have come to realize how important transcendental experiences are in disrupting the patterns that cause us suffering. For me, this came in the form of ketamine therapy, which created new neural pathways that allowed me to finally break the cycle of torture and find the ability to think outside the archaic framework of repetitive actions in order to let go of that, what always causes me grief, grief. despair. .
The biggest discovery, and perhaps no surprise to most people, is that self-love is an essential part of living a good life. Blame it on trauma or the neurotic worldview that can result from repeated helplessness and lack of control, but eventually I realized that this feeling of self-worth and appreciation was due to absence. I repeated these cycles until they disappeared. . He killed me
Patients are attracted to patients, and I was no different. When a loved one was confined to a psychiatric hospital for years, I gave them a copy of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a long-awaited treasure that seemed to be everywhere. Although I understood it theoretically and it always seemed to me like an appropriate metaphor for a certain type of suffering, the meaning of the metaphor was lost on me until I could see more clearly. Thanks to ketamine, I was able to find the nerdy girl of my dreams that I had been looking for my whole life. She was inside me.
It is impossible to learn the lesson of love without others, and that is why it is so painful to come to such a realization, because despite the desire to influence the hearts of others, it is often beyond our control. They are outside. Changes This insight, which I have ignored and rejected for most of my life because it was too painful to admit, can be hoped for once you realize the power of self-transformation.
Since self-acceptance is like a grain of sand in the palm of your hand, self-love can start small, something you can barely see even though you can feel it. Despite their microscopic nature, mindfulness, positive affirmations, devotion, forgiveness, gratitude, treating others the way you want them to treat you, and thousands of opportunities in any given day can destroy these tiny grains, just as an oyster forms a pearl. , unless it is large enough to fill the empty space inside. I fear that only then can we love others because they truly deserve to be loved.
I spent a lot of time looking for nothing, unfortunately I didn’t realize that the process had to start from within. Knowing this, I felt foolish for handing out copies of The Alchemist without understanding the message of the story. For someone obsessed with metaphors, I completely missed something important, but that changed a few years ago.
After the devastating lesson. I found what I thought was the love I always wanted and for the first time I walked that path without letting my fear consume me and ruin things. Instead of trying to use that love to exhaust her, I used my new resources to build something that was great even back then but then fell apart. What I realized in these dark times is that sincere intentions and hard work do not guarantee success in any endeavor and perhaps in all matters of the heart.
After this latest heartbreak, I reevaluated it again. Looking back on the years of just looking for love, I thought that would heal me. I began to think that I had nothing left to prove in the area of love. After decades of fighting rocks and feeling like I had nothing to show for it, I came to see the treasure beneath my feet.
My best friend is a psychiatric nurse and we spend a lot of time talking about mental health. I have read all of the textbooks in his doctoral program, some of which discuss self-love as an important part of self-actualization, but most of which focus on pharmaceutical interventions that have been lost with the dynamics of the “industry.” I have come to believe that more attention should be paid to teaching how to truly love one another, because once this system is in place, true peace becomes possible. This is largely because there is an inner landscape of wonder where it is more satisfying to simply follow trains of thought and insights than to pursue what has caused problems in the past. For me it meant becoming the crazy woman of my dreams.
Where does this take me now? The news these days reports an epidemic of isolation among the inhabitants of the digital age, suggesting that the technologies that could have held the world together have torn us apart, which is hard to argue with. However, I feel immune to this scourge because I am surrounded by love inside and out. Many of my wonderful friends are a shield against the emptiness that has tormented me for so long.
I never wanted to live a conventional life, I just wanted to be surrounded by people who make every day better, and I was surprised that that’s exactly what I have now. My mother and sister were still there, but at some point I realized that the relationships I had built with so many other amazing women filled my days with joy and wonder.
Of course there is pressure, but with this commitment to support a net is built around us and if one of the ropes bends the weight is distributed and none of us have to fall for long before being caught. These days I spend most of my time trying to find the right words to give hope to those who still struggle with what I’ve learned. A lot of this comes from trying to create and convey the unconditional love that has eluded me for so long. I can’t say for sure whether it works or not, but it’s been a long time since I gave anyone a copy of The Alchemist. I would consider this a sign of progress.
Chrysa Stergiou Asian Night Mary Kontouri Victoria Marty Queenie Davies Dr Shaw Joe Glacken
