I’ve been running since forever. Running and running and running. Running away from things and running towards others. Running away from people and places only to run into others, of course.

I can’t stop, you see. It’s how I survived the abuse. Yet I know I have to stop, and in doing so that I will ‘remember’ the rest of what was done to me as a kid. It’s shit - knowing you have to go further into darkness before you can emerge into the light.

Yet emerging into the light, shaking off the last of the psychic scar-tissue wrought in the screams and supressed rage and sadness and hate of my childhood - these things I know I must do. I must do them for myself, but that is transitory. I must do them for others, which is a part of my path as a Buddhist. And, I must do them for I made a pact with the universe to do so. That was before I was a Buddhist but after I was an atheist. It’s the same as the Bhodhisattva vow.

Yet I can’t do it. I can’t stop. I have forgotten how to sit, how to meditate. I used to know how but I am scared to do it. I am scared to remember, to heal, to be healed. I am scared of the void that appears in my mind when I try to think in positive terms about the future. There is nothing there.

Except to find a partner and have kids and get enlightened. Which is a nice impossible dream that keeps me running …