We have started. Started writing and publishing blogs with about 12 others. Not talking about it and planning it and getting to know how it should be done, but actually doing it. So write it down from A to Z and put it live. Thirteen times, once an month I am to start empty-handed and end the lesson with a blog live on the internet. I've been planning this for so long and I just don't do it. So that's over now. Postponing has ended. “Start writing now,” Saskia says, “you have 25 minutes from now.” OK, then what about? I stare out the window and then something happens that I am familiar with: I look at the place where I went to pick grass for the rabbits a long time ago. With my father. One hundred years ago. And then suddenly I am there and my brother Jan is there again. Strong, tall, smart and handsome. In everything more and better than me. But not anymore later on: first lost track and then sick and then dead. Then there's my father again: shouting at us, come here, shut up, eat, hand over. Mama cries, and cries and cries. That pain in my stomach again. Be careful, be careful. They are big, hard hands of a coalman. “Look in the chat” says Saskia suddenly. Someone emerges late in the zoom. Oh, yes, I was writing a blog. Picking grass with my daddy. About what it was like then. My brother Jan ill, mentally ill to the end. The madhouse in Den Dolder still reverberates in my ears. I didn't understand anything about it, all the sadness and the impotence. Then. And I still want to pick grass with daddy and see a happy mommy. And I'm afraid to say the wrong thing. Twelve pairs of friendly eyes look at me through zoom. “Go on”, they say, “good idea. That's how we all todden, that's fun." The sun is shining again. I press the Publish button. Curious.
Curious for what exactly ????
As soon as I realize it, I recognize that this curiosity is nothing more than fear of severe disapproval on the one hand and hope for loving appreciation on the other.
The first a still strong fear of something I was afraid of as a child and the second a strong desire for something that was not there for me as a small child, or far too little.....
So not at all curious about what my writing means for you, the reader, being afraid to save my ass.
Fortunately, it is no longer the past, I am now a grown man, and that I can realize that this fear and need belong to the past and not to now. That my ass is not at all at stake now. Immediately it feels a lot better.
And I do what I have tot do an publish freely, without self-censorship.
In PRI language, this technique of self-awareness is called 'turning around', also breaking free from old pain and coming back to the here and now.
Want to know more about it or learn it yourself, read a book by Ingeborg Bosch, for example The rediscovery of the true self or listen to this short video.