Reading 122, from Riverflows.WordPress.Com

This is amazing writing …check it out here. Sorry I could not wait to take the permission…’hope I be pardoned…

Hmmm … so our jails are sometimes (maybe usually) our hideouts from the world. This is going in a different direction than I’d intended to go, but exploring works that way, I think. So where have I gone to hide and then found myself feeling imprisoned? Marriage to or hooking up with the wrong person(s) for the wrong reasons … loneliness, mistaking lust for love, trying to use it as an escape from myself, as a drug, a fix for a life that felt fundamentally flawed, bad, hopeless.Not exactly the best recipe for a fulfilling relationship, being angry at my partner because life still sucked, blaming them for not making me feel better (and choosing someone who did the same in my direction). Children throwing tantrums because they’re unhappy and want someone else to fix it, believing that if they can only find the right person, things will be all better without them having to deal with their own stinkin’ thinkin’ (as they say in AA), each trying to make their partner play the role of rescuer, nurturer, good mommy/daddy while they themselves get to play the role of spoiled, bratty, unhappy, demanding, lost child … this is not a jail you want to do time in. I guarantee it.

Ditto for other drugs of choice, other refuges that turn out to be jails … drinking, drugging, screwing around, looking for the perfect high or relationship or person or philosophy or religion or social group or leader to follow, or whatever might give a quick fix. The fear of growing up, of not being able to make the grade as an adult, of failing (at anything, at everything) … the beliefs about myself and the world underlying those fears … doing hard time in solitary, never realizing that I have the key and can leave at any time (scary thought, that).

The fear of freedom and its scary twin, responsibility; the fear of really loving and then having to deal with grief and loss; the fear of sadness, regret; so many fears. I think the most potent bars on our individual jails are made from fear; the fear itself, and the fear of facing that fear. Easier to stay imprisoned, easier to make excuses, easier to pooh-pooh the idea that we can ever be really free within our own skins…

Image: Thanks for the pic.