I have been meaning to write for a long time. I thought about the small stories I observe around. And yet what I have to say is too private, too difficult but I feel I owe it to myself. And to you who have supported me in so many ways. So at the risks, of being offensive, I start by already appologizing. I ll try my best to be as gentle and as kind as I have never been.
I am better. I am not perfect I still not speak properly nor can eat much. Which both things have turned out to be good. Made me more observing, silent, and more cautious of what I put inside of my body. Yet, it is rather hard for those around who see me skinnier and skinnier when that is def not my goal.
There are many languages of descripitions for things we live. My neurologist has his, my musician friends theirs, and I have my own. So it is of mine that I will speak today.
I was asked by a Musician these days why did I get sick. Why I thought I got sick. I gave him the history of me being sick but was of course incapable to tell him why I thought I was sick. Yet those words have stayed with me these weeks. And through so much pain, and support I have had so far.. I came out with my own narrative. It is one that makes sense to me. And is the one I want to share with you.
Most of you know me. Most of you have encountered me in one or other place in the world and have known how much I care about people. How much I open myself to total strangers. And you also know.. that almost always I have to just keep going.
I grew up like this. I was born in an upper class family in Sao Paulo who supported me enormously and yet I always felt enormously lonely and abandoned. They had a vision for who I should be. And I was just someone else. Someone who needed to be taken care of. Someone so fragle and so affected by the world around that I needed probably more support that they could see.
I dont blame my parents for this…at all.. it has been , and still is a very difficult journey for all of us to understand each other. And it suffix to say that I grew up searching for the love, and the support I needed everywhere else. In friends, in strangers.. I always found it. And maybe because of this enormous loneliness I always felt…. I loved as many people as I could because I was afraid to be abandoned.
I of course, never really realised this… I thought I was strong, independent and could find my way wherever I was with the people I encountered bc I was capable to connect to anyone.
When, I was in hospital for the first day, this time… my cousins, my brother, and Gustavo the guy I was seing spent hours there with me. Feeling this independence that I do… I told them to go. I was used to being alone, and managing with what I had around. My cousin, Olivia, held my hand and told me “That is good, but you no longer need that”
I cant explain how much that has moved me, and how much that has shaped all this recovery that I am having now.
It was on that day that I started to understand how fragile I am. How much I need a home, love. To be needed, and cared for. How much it was important for me to care for all the people around me.
Lots and lots and lots of things happen in this process.
And I wont write all about it.
What I want to say here is what I find important that I understood these days …
Many of you are also travellers. Many of you are out there…. searching like I did. Some of you have very stablished internal homes… others like me are a bit lost.
Some of you are in a fix place and are lost.
And that is all fine. We all have to take different journeys.
I feel that the most important path to follow is the following:
Creating an internal home. Accepting our fragility, and being more gentle and caring with those around. Allowing for people to care about us… and being vulnerable to it.
I am not saying that out of any moralism, or religious teaching. I am saying that from my skin. My soul. My heart.
I really thought I was going to die.. and did not much care about it bc there was nothing truly here that made me want to stay. I cant point to an specific day that things changed… they just did.
Suddenly I understood ( in my language of description) what I had. And it comes from understanding that though I tried so hard to be a good person. I was good in the surface, but this loneliness I always thought was deep in me. It kept me from loving others, because I could not fully love myself. I could love fo brief moments..and then I fled… I asked from others this love that I lacked. Others who could obviously not be able to do give it to me.
I was a horrible wife to my husband, bc I was uncaring, I of course disguised with detachment of buddhism, or i don’t know what. The truth is that I just could not be there.I did not know how to be. And I left. He is a wonderful person, and had to learn his own lessons through this. Yet, I fled.
And once I left I started to searc in the path for meaning. Through volunteering, hearing stories, and love ….In one of these things there must me meaning. And yet all the encounters though they were profound… they were profound for as long as I could not be vulnerable to them… then I always left…
I fell in love with an Israeli, and I never wrote about this here, and I moved with him, and he was the male version of me. He knew me so well, and I felt for once remotely home, that terrified me and I ran away because I just could not do it.
And that is when my total lack of desire to live started. If I could not even find home in love. If I were totally incapable of it.. What else could I do? I searched in metaphysical paths, in stories and yet there was an incapacity to stay still inside of me that made me move so much… that made most people who know me always feel I had so much desire to live.
I confess it was not desire to live… It was a desire to find whether there was some point to life. To so much suffering.
Yet, this all changed now. I am still recovering. I am healing my soul. I am discovering myself. How much what made me move was fear. And not bravery. Though they are always together.
And how in the movement I always encountered precisely what I could .. is something that dazzles me.
And now, after this almost death, I believe firmly we must all take more care of each other. We have to take more care of the consequences of our actions. We can employ any religious, theoretical discourse to go living a life of following our instincts and desires. But to me, that led me to satisfy my ego, but never “my soul”
Ultimately, it made me disconnect from who I am. Be proud of who I was in the surface but not in the inside. Not loving what I am inside, I had to ask too much to all the people I got involved with. I had to have them to satisfy my own lack of love. And I could never trust any of them to do so. And I always fled.
I feel it is sad I lost so many amazing people along the way. Though now… I understand it was what we could live then. That is it.
Nowadays… what I wish to all that I know is not to get what you want, but to transform in the best way you can with what happens to you. Some of you learn faster than me. I am stubborn. I had to go through all of this to understand it in my skin.
It was tough, but now I am sincerely thankful.
I wish you all a beautiful life. A life where you are more present in what you do. That you are responsible to your actions. No one, expects to live a life without ever suffering.. but what i finally understood it is that what is important is for you to stay once that happened. Be responsible. Be gentle. Be patient. ( all the things I am still leaning how to do ).
And if you are a parent. Remember how difficult is this balance of love and support and freedom. Actually, in all of our interactions this is so difficult to understand. We are individuals in a social world.
I am more certain than ever that we must take much more care of each other, supporting people in their freedom, but always letting them know… they are needed.. missed.. wanted there.
When I was in Israel this time. I impulsively bought a ticket to go to India. My dear dear friend Michal wrote me saying
” I know you are impulsive but this time that hurt me. I was expecting to spend time with you. And now you just go. I am hurt and sad”
That movement of containment was as important as my cousin telling me i did not need to know to be on my own. That day I canceled my tickets and went to stay with Michal. Till the day I decided to come home, which she understood well.
So, yes, this is my most private email ever. And I write it bc I hope it helps someone. Because I have become such a public person.. through this life. that people write me… and I am happy and thankful for that.
I dont expect to now never to travel again.. I love the people and the places I have been to. They are part of me. I just expect to be able to be more in place when I do. I expect that I am more careful and in place. More gentle to those who are close. To be able to fully be.
If I am able to do so speaking and eating like I did before will be really not that important… Though I of course, hope I can one day say sing again 🙂
Lots of love,
Me
translatingthoughts.com 
wow! great lines! very personal and, yet, so universal! Rest assured you have helped somenone, Ju…
Bjão e muita paciência para todos nós. xx
Obrigada querida! Muita paciencia… pois eh 🙂 beijos