Puma,
Again, your words sincerely created a lucid, reassuring, and encouraging connection to my current state.
I feel that each paragraph you wrote will unlock in the future (or in the present) some gem of encouragement that I'll need. Thanks! I probably could spend quite a long time responding to each of your paragraphs because of their level of resonation and sincerity. However, I"ll try to be succinct as possible.
As you become an independant adult making your own way in the world, your parents will recede into the background; leave the stage, so to speak, curtain call.
You don't have to fear becoming just like them. Your struggle to gain understanding and perspective pretty much guarantees that.
I liked the image of "the curtain call" with parents receding into the background. Shakespeare said all the world's a stage. Hopefully from now on, my parents won't even appear in the cast:). Secondly, while I think making an active, conscious effort to disassemble the " tiny link in this vast cultural and physical chain" to ensure that I do not live up to resembling the mold of my parents will, indeed, (as you suggested) almost fully ensure that I won't be like my parents (fostering an intolerant familial ambience). However, some effort -- some investment of time -- into shattering and dissolving the cycle of suffering (as Thich Nhat Hanh would call it) to truly guarantee that I don't resemble my parents, would focus my actions because I'd have more confidence in being a compassionate, tolerant person. Despite my eagarness to cultivate those compassionate, tolerant qualities, that endeavor will always be ongoing and will arise further down the road, though. I currently truly want to focus on getting a job -- any job (as you put it).
Severing all financial ties cannot be stressed enough. In order to be free, you have got to be independant. This may be scary, but it can also be exhilarating! The resentment and self doubt will fade rapidly as you face real world challenges out on your own.
I totally agree with you here. In a way, getting financial independence should be "easier" than emotional independence, so, in that sense, in my current evolution towards independence, I'm moving well over the "hard part". great. However, your sincerity with financial independence having an integral part in overall independence solidifies the necessity of financial independence. All the work I've done to acquire emotional independence and solidifying my own beliefs -- all of that work -- cannot have its full positive impact on my life, until I get "the whole package", the financial independence along with it. Once I acquire that, once I start being able to financially support myself, I feel a lot of the emotional awareness and belief system work I've done will really spring forth and become activated as tremendous source of confidence because, after all, what better way to feel inspired than reflecting on your own emotional growth?;)
Secondly, your analysis of the emotions I most likely currently experience -- resentment and doubt -- has profound accuracy. Those two debilitating emotions enact upon me as my greatest limitations and restrictions. Resentment causes me to cling to problems with parents from my childhood and doubt obfuscates and causes my forward movement to falter. In other words, resentment pins me to the past and doubt sets up 'roadblocks" preventing me from progressing forward into the futre. I believe (and sincerely hope) that, as you suggested, both of those obstacles will fade as I face real-world challenges, and they must dissolve, or else I'll always frozen in an unpleasant past. Many authors (Carlos Castaneda for one) commented that it's good to connect with your past, but okay to throw out your personal history. I want to make sure I never get stuck in the past because of resentment and/or doubt. Fortunately, I already feel this discussion's propulsion into the future!;)
Okay, now specifically about the METHOD of severing financial ties with my parents.
While driving 2000 miles to california would be tremendously (of this, I'm about 90% certain) emotionally and spiritually fulfilling and nourishing, I do not, as of yet, have the confidence to say that such a voyage will be as financial meriting.
Here's why:
I currently live on an extremely tight budget. Every gas dollar, every grocery item, every purchase I spend must be accounted for (this is great for budgetting experience, but I want to ensure my financial "bookkeeping" doesn't become OCD!;). Taking the 2000-mile road trip to CA would just gnaw a tremendous hole in my finances. I truly do feel that I'd be in a much better emotional and spiritual place, much closer to the clarifying "reeds" in CA, and out of my current emotional rut (rut definitely accurately defines my current emotional predicament), and while emotional and spiritual fulfillment prove to be tremendously important, I don't see how my financial resources will differ in CA from chicago. I feel that building some kind of financial base here, first, would be wise.
Now for my saga of trying to find work in the past:
I have a 4-year college BA, so I want to try to use that. I've tried to start my own web design business, my own life coaching business, publish 4 e-books, as well as seriously pursue a career in acting. I used to apply (about a dozen applications or so a week) to numerous web design, tech, jobs through the internet, but having reached very little success with that, have stopped doing that. I've taken my professional target down a notch and have applied to grocery stores, and restaurants, and radio shacks, and cell phone stores -- you name it. No avail. The purpose here, in no way, aims to paint a "defeated" picture of my vocational pursuits. Rather, I am just illustrating the serious efforts and measures I've taken to get work. The only conclusion I could make of all these seriously whole-hearted attempts at landing a job was that I performed some form of subconscious self-sabotage. I'll detail this self-sabotage in the other message.
It is very common to abhor any resemblance to one's parents when one is separating from the nest and redefining his own identity, even if the parents in question were good ones. In some ways we will have traits of our parents. But they are not our only parents. What I mean is, your parents have traits of their parents, who had traits of their parents, an exponential fanning out into all of humanity. All of humanity is our parents. The two small individuals whom we call mother and father are but a tiny link in this vast cultural and physical chain.
Two things come of this:
1. We can learn from their mistakes
2. We can begin to forgive them their weaknesses. Your father's tears moved you even though at the time you chose not to act. Trying to give comfort whilst embroiled in a rage is impossible.
To gain perspective, look at your parents as though you were a historian. They didn't just spring out of the earth from nothing; there is a history there which might shed light on why they are the way the are. A frightened little girl grew up to be a control freak; why did she have to hide under that table in the first place?
See, you are already on the road to having greater insight, and eventually compassion, for these weak, damaged souls.
Your final sentence there really struck an emotional chord of meaningful resonation for two reasons:
1. I not only had to bury my true perceptions of my parents from them and the outside world, but I had to conceal my genuine perceptions of my parents from MYSELF. In other words, I felt, even thinking that my parents were weak, damaged souls (even though that surmises my precise description of them!) would get me in trouble with them.
2. I never had someone "from the outside" say exactly, with incredible precision, say directly what I feel towards my parents.
Both of those reasons provide tremendous confidence in my own perceptive ability and beliefs. For such a long time, I had to in a sense let the desires of my parents' image (namely their desire to be good and not problematic parents) over-write my authentic inrepretation of what I thought of them. So you provided an nourishing "external anchor" for something I've felt, (but never had any way to latch onto) for a long time: the weakened and damaged state of my parents. That was a HUGE elephant in the room whenever I conversed with them and I spent numerous, painful, and unsucessful (and now I realize how much of a waste of time this was) trying to "heal them". They naturally took incredible offense. They exist as such weak and damaged souls namely because their only interest is covering up their wounds and "looking fixed", rather than actual healing. As I mentioned before, I value greatly cultivating an ability to have tolerant an environment that actually heals instead of making thins "look" healed.
But moving on, thanks for recognizing that the sensation of compassion and rage can nearly never occurr simultaneously. I was trying to feel those mutually exclusive emotions, but you, again, have astuteness in the human emotional capacity -- I shouldn't demand so much of myself.
Your suggestion to examine (when I have time) at my childhood and my parents as historian or better yet, an archaeologist generated a very rewarding sense of calm. Because history, archaeology, etc. fulfill academic and intellectual means and the solidity and concreteness of something very intellectual applied to the confusing and seemingly intangible emotional situations sounds like a recipe for success. But specifically about my mother. I assume she hid under the table because 1)of nervousness at social gatherings or 2)fear from her older brothers, who, to say the least, played the role of rambunctious pranksters. Their impact on my mom seems innocuous but it could play a small part as to why she aimed to manufacture such an overbearing and dominating and controlling "bubble of control" around the housefhold. Boy does it feel exciting to get out of that!:)
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