Inspiration l Self Awareness

To Live With Half Sanity

Intentions Are Clarified

Full sanity…I can’t imagine living with it. My expressive and emotional nature. My roaming thoughts. My spontaneity. My insecurity showing up unannounced creates doubt and other unnecessary pauses.

Not trading them for anything. Looking forward to working with them courageously and continuously.

Half sanity is how I am dealing with life. I want to live authentically, with conscience and awareness, upholding the value of love and compassion.

Essential matters such as love require me to live with half sanity. To leave room for the unexplainable. To have compassion that illogical decisions and conversations are not unimportant. To withdraw from self-pity and feeling pity for someone. To have the freedom to care and love holistically. To see reality as is yet not accept it as it is.

I am sharing the most recent shifts within my consciousness. Recent being two years ago. It is about healing and its linkage with how I can love and care for others. It has brought a new freedom, which carries peace within me.

Please note for this article healing is specifically directed to forgiveness.

I can’t forgive easily. Especially not myself. I can’t deny it. I used to, which created suffering within.

I read many books and articles about healing and its link with forgiveness. At some point, I asked myself, “Okay, am I hopeless with healing? Or, should I try harder to forgive myself and others so that I can heal myself?” I decided to try harder! And harder! And harder!

The harder I tried, the farther away I was from forgiveness. Instead, I was closer to rage.

The rage created self-blame. I was looking for something, someone as the cause. And, without a doubt, I chose myself. I suffered inside. I questioned most of my decisions. I would nod so I don’t feel guilty about saying no.

I thought if I learned to be more accepting of others, whatever the requests and who they are, I would come closer to healing. Healing is about acceptance, isn’t it?

I didn’t like myself. I wasn’t fond of the emotional state I was in. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin. Worse, my soul fought me. It kept telling me that she didn’t like being with these thoughts, these emotions. I was miserable.

I decided to “hibernate.” I stopped reading books about healing. I didn’t tell others what I went through. I didn’t want to ask for help from others. I didn’t speak with my parents and siblings. I didn’t talk with many people. I limit my interactions merely for professional purposes.

I wanted to give myself time to think, reflect, recall, and understand why I felt the rage. I listened to music, read for fun, and wrote many letters to myself.

In one of those letters, I wrote about forgiveness. To forgive myself and others. I realized I wasn’t true to myself. I hadn’t been able to forgive even when I said to myself, “It’s okay. Let’s move on!” I said the right thing without actually meaning it. I forgave because I had to. I felt guilty if I didn’t, especially when it came to my parents and families.

Forgiveness became the center of my thought. I promised myself that I would be honest. Just wrote what I had to write. No judgments. No holding back.

I took a week off. No work. Nothing other than this. I said either I do this, or I stay miserable. It was one hundred and twenty-seven pages of writing. I was crying, cursing, angry, back to crying. One thing I didn’t do was to blame myself. I wrote, reread the words, erased sentences that implied blaming, and rewrote them. That’s the discipline I promised myself to get through this.

Two memories that I can’t forgive:

I can forgive physical punishments from Mom, but I can’t forgive her for calling me a slut ( a literal translation from the word she used in my language) because of the way I laugh and my friendliness with others. I laugh loud, and I am friendly; it’s part of my nature. She started this labeling when I was nine. Being nine, I didn’t know what it meant. I just knew it felt wrong. It went on until I was in my early twenties.

I can’t speak with her about it because she doesn’t remember. I brought it up twice, and I felt worse because she denied it. I thought I’d be okay by saying, “It’s okay. It’s Mom. Let’s move on!” I wasn’t. I admit that I can’t forgive her for the labeling. I am not okay with it. Maybe, I will never forgive her for this and not be okay with it for the rest of my life.

I can’t forgive Dad for using guilt to manipulate and create dependency, which he mistook as love. It impacted how my sister and I, as his daughters, view ourselves in a relationship with the opposite sex. As much as he was proud of our independence, he “strongly” encouraged us to be “feminine” and “obedient,” as those were part of our “duty” as women.

I can’t speak with Dad because he is not the person that will admit what he does. I thought I could say, “It’s okay; it’s Dad,” but I can’t. I can say, “It’s Dad,” but I can’t say “It’s okay.”

Healing isn’t in my ability to forgive. It is in my ability to accept, without judgments and guilts, what I can and cannot forgive.

It gives me the freedom to love my parents holistically, completely. It exudes utter happiness in me.

I am glad I took the chance to understand myself. It gave rise to a critical shift in my consciousness: the freedom to share love holistically when I can accept that forgiveness, at times, isn’t possible.

This shift has made me more courageous in caring for and loving myself and others. I can choose not to forgive. Myself or others. I am not obligated to say it’s okay or move on. I know that the possibility of misunderstandings may open up the opportunity for better understanding, even a closer relationship.

It makes me more humane. There is hope in loving and caring for myself and others holistically without an obligation to forgive. To put the test to my authenticity to the fullest.

Thank you, Yana Bostongirl, for the invite and for creating this opportunity with Carmellita. It means a lot to share this journey.

Harry Stefanakis’s “Unbreakable Promise”…I love its feeling of authenticity…