Chap. 19 - A Gradual Unthreading
We had a holiday meal in our community room, with a raffle and a few giveaways. The first gift was a single-serve blender—something I actually would have liked—but it wasn’t my number. The last gift was an air fryer, which I wouldn’t use and don’t have space for. That was my number.
When they called it, I froze.
Something in me tensed with fear, and I didn’t respond. I let it appear as though the person with that number had already left. I told myself it didn’t matter—I wouldn’t use it anyway—but my body felt tight and alert, as if something dangerous had just happened.
Afterward, I pulled aside the service coordinator, someone I have a warm relationship with, and told her what I’d done. I needed to explain that I had the number and had let it go, and also that I would have wanted the blender instead. She said I could have swapped gifts, something that hadn’t even occurred to me. But that wasn’t the point.
What mattered was that I couldn’t live with not disclosing what I had done. Keeping it to myself felt unbearable.
Later, back in my apartment, my mind began replaying the situation. I tried to reassure myself, telling myself it was okay. But the reassurance didn’t land. The same internal disturbance kept rising, again and again, no matter how kindly I spoke to myself.
That’s when I began to recognize it—not as a problem with the raffle, but as the familiar emergence of a much older pattern.
The belief that I had done something wrong.
As I began to turn toward this belief—I’m doing something wrong—and everything it holds, I felt a deep desire to get to the root of it. Not to manage it or work around it, but to understand it fully, so it could finally loosen its grip on my psyche and my system.
When this belief comes up, it carries a very specific internal world. What gets triggered isn’t a conscious thought so much as a painful, familiar pattern that rises before I have words for it.
Fear arises. A sense that I’m doing something wrong. That I will never be able to make it right. That I will be severely punished and abandoned forever.
It goes further than death.
What I feel is more exact than that: I will disappear. No one will look for me. I will know that I still exist, but I will have been discarded—thrown away, never to be forgiven or wanted again. I will live in whatever that realm is endlessly, eternally.
This is what seems to be running in my psyche.
There are many small moments throughout the day when this gets triggered, and I don’t always recognize it right away. Different situations, same internal consequence.
I am searching for the root of it
What follows is a conversation that helped me begin to see that belief clearly—not to argue with it, but to understand where it came from, what it protected, and why it still rises even now.
⬅️ Chap. 18
➡️ [Chap. 20] (in process)
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🕊A Living Memoir
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