Today was really hard coming in. I kept going to how to rearrange my room so it would be less messy to my birthday plans and then finally to ever-growing worry--my job situation, or lack thereof. This happens to me every year at January 7-8, I'm out of a job and have to scramble, scramble. I'm tired of it and deathly afraid right now. So all the fear just keeps getting stuck, and when I DO tap into it, just tears come up, then get stuck in my chest.

5. Can you pare away the story attached to your wound and acknowledge (feel) the raw

emotion it covers?

I know the story inside and out by now. If I pare away at my mother, her bitterness, her fear that she controlled us with, her pain, her anger at the world, I'm left with my own fear, anger, sadness and stunning hopelessness. John's abandonment. This isolation and loneliness. These are the pervading feelings of my youth and I've been running but ironically living controlled by them all my life. The raw anger at having to be a pawn of my mother's feelings. Having my life and mind be controlled by a mad woman's desperate whims. The sadness that it happened and has now affected me so deeply that I am paralyzed. The fear that nothing will change and I'll forever be stuck here, controlled by what she taught me and what I've seen in my life. Feeling these, acknowledging these, is new to me as I always feel guilty having emotions and giving them weight around my parents. Because then I collapse into victim mode and like I wrote yesterday, I want these emotions to give me courage and strength to move and grow. But I have to feel them first. And give them a space. I want to stop running from them because all that gives me is OCD. I want to feel my worth, that I HAVE worth, no matter what is happening outside.