Zk | 40

I took Sunday off to focus on church, but I have two things of note today:

The first is that I typed up and sent the previous entries that I have written to Jeremy. I will include his full response to me here:

Dee

Good to hear from you, man! I applaud the work that you’ve done so far here. I know that it can be really hard to buckle down and get to the actual work of parsing your feelings, but this is really great stuff. I like that you are using the journal entries to get out some of your current feelings that don’t just surround this crush, though I also like that you call yourself out on stalling. You have talked before about struggling with emotional literacy, and I have to say, I think you’re doing a stellar job of improving on your skills. Keep up the good work and try to employ more of that vocabulary where possible.

One thing I do want to mention however, and don’t take this as a knock about what you’ve got down already, is that I think a great next step would be for you to tackle what it is that you’re feeling now. You’ve told a really coherent tale of how you got here, and now it’s important that you focus on what you’re feeling at the moment. Pry at some of those threads and follow them to see where they go. Here are some questions to get you started:

• You mention your feelings on God not providing you the guidance that you wish you had. I here you, and I know that can be frustrating. Perhaps one thing you could look into is your own response to your feelings on Kay within the context of your spirituality. Do you your beliefs influence your thoughts on her? Do you feel that being a spiritual person has an effect on your relationship to her?
• When last we spoke, you mentioned that you weren’t sure that these feelings were “real”. What do “real feelings” mean to you? What quality keeps these feelings from being “real”?
• From the outside, you seem stuck. You don’t seem to want to push for something more between you and Kay, and you certainly don’t want to pull back from her. The next step in this project should be to find actionable paths forward. Why don’t you start by simply enumerating options. What could moving forward look like? What might stepping back look like?

Seriously buddy, this is really great stuff. Not usually what I see in journals, but you’ve always been a heck of a writer.

Remember to breathe!

Jeremy

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Jeremy brings up a lot of very good points and I will admit that I am both pleased that he has recognized the work that I have done already (and that he apparently enjoyed my writing) and also a little frustrated that I still have so far to go. However, I recognize that the latter sensation there is a fallacy and the result of me not being mindful and in the moment. The mind is ever drawn to conclusions and finales, when in reality, this is a process, not an end goal to be achieved. He is very careful in his writing there, in that he specifies that I should “see where they go” and “what could moving forward look like”. This is very process-oriented language, and something that I would do well to engage with, myself.

I can also tell that he is gently nudging me away from being hung up on the past. I know that that hug with Kay has stuck with me, and that I have done a very good job on latching onto moments when we have gotten particularly close or that she has shown me a level or quality of attention that has felt particularly fulfilling. It is important to have good memories, but it is also important to not stagnate.

The second item of note is that I had a dream about Kay last night.

Dreams are such nothing things. At best, they represent a means by which the unconscious mind adapts to stressors in order to build up defense mechanisms, and at worse they represent random firings of neurons in the sleeping brain — neurons that perhaps fired rather a lot during the day.

Dreams are such nothing things, and yet to them we pin so much meaning.

I dreamed that Kay and I were back at her senior recital, except that she was sitting next to me in the audience instead of up on stage, and we were watching her works being performed together. We were silent, rapt. The whole audience was rapt. The works were of breathtaking beauty¹ and when they were finished, the applause was so uproarious that she was not able to make it back up to the stage to take her bow. I tried to help her, but she got separated from me and was drawn off.

She did not seem displeased by this, however when I called after her, I, as in so many other dreams, dreams I’m sure we all have, had no voice. I was barely able to manage a whisper, and my muscles grew so weak and my limbs so heavy that I fell over and that’s when I woke up.

Powerlessness, separation, falling, these are all common features in dreams, and yet I am pretty firmly in the school of dream interpretation being largely bunk. Sleep is a protective action for the body, and dreaming is just the same for the mind. It is unguided, and serves to provide a break from taxing both our physical and our mental forms.

But we are so hard-wired to read deeper meanings into the mindless mutterings of countless neurons. “What does it mean that she was sitting next to me? Does it mean anything in particular that we were separated from each other? Why did I become so weak without her presence?” I am Nebuchadnezzar seeking my Daniel, not the other way around. There is no one to interpret my Mene, Tekel, and Peres but myself.

Some part of me craves answers to these questions and so many more, but there are no answers to be had because they are non-questions. They are questions one might ask the sky supposing only that that is where God resides.

The writing on the wall. Hah! Dreaming of someone that you have a crush on means absolutely nothing, and yet it certainly feels like it must mean something. It has left me spinning with so much to think about and a lot to feel whether I want to or not.

I did not dream again last night.