A Lake of People
When I was growing up and when I was an adult, I didn’t see myself as a separate entity. I would go through life like a person standing in a lake and all the other people I see are in the lake too. When someone has a feeling or a thought or a want or a demand, it was everyone’s. It was just a murky lake of thoughts, feelings, demands and wants; no one knew whose was whose. I literally couldn’t feel a sensation of having borders around me and borders around people and empty spaces in between. There was none of that. It was a wet lake mixture of everyone EVERYONE.
I now know that this is because of the way I was raised. I thought I had gotten away pretty well from my childhood, I had a pretty good life, with some struggles. But when I got to ACA, I saw that I was thoroughly infested with dysfunction. I was shocked actually. One of the issues was how I saw myself in relation to others. I was a nonbeing; they were a being. I focused on them, while they focused on themselves. I worked around them while they moved through life. I didn’t know any other way.
This of course meant that I had no boundaries; I didn’t know of such a thing. I had to do what I was doing to survive. But survive what? No one was threatening to give me a whippin’ anymore. I still felt a compulsion to continue to ‘stare’ at people to ‘see’ what they were thinking, so I could be one step ahead. This meant that others didn’t have a lot of freedom around me. I was mentally hovering over them every minute of the day. I can’t imagine what it was like for any of my previous relationships.
Once I started to try to stand on my own and let others do for themselves, I felt lonely and afraid. Unsure of what to do, I still did feel a relief that I wasn’t relying on others, studying them to figure out my ‘moves’. It took many stages of course, but I now see clearly the borders around me and the empty space between me and another person. I don’t like it when someone takes an action that limits my sense of self, my size, the me that is becoming a person. I don’t like it. I don’t always have words to say to them what is going on inside of me but I know enough that it doesn’t feel ‘normal’ anymore to mix my thoughts and emotions and views with another person’s thoughts, emotions and views simply because they happen to be standing close by.