And while the other day I was finally opening my gate, drenched to my underwear, my faithful MP3 reader "Russian Roulette", safely tucked into my tummy pack, was telling me: ... con un tempo d'inferno acqua grandine e vento pericolo d'uscire di strada a ogni giro l'inferno ma sbanda striscia e' schiacciato lo raccolgono quasi spacciato. Ma Nuvolari rinasce come rinasce il ramarro... (Lucio Dalla, Nuvolari) (... With a hell of a weather Pouring rain, hail and wind So easy to run off the road Hell waits at every lap He slips he crashes he's crushed They pick him up nearly dead But Nuvolari is reborn Like a lizard with many lives...) I thought about it again yesterday with my therapist, reflecting about my "imaginary friends" who, it seems, are helping me much more than I thought, instead of being a curse as I though years ago, when I tried to get rid of them. [Side note: by chance Nuvolari is not one of them, but I love this song and many songs about sports. Still, he'd qualify: he's dead. (He died of natural causes in 1953.) It's official, I don't trust live men. BUT my men have to be long-dead! So, young men all around the world, don't try to impress me any more by crashing your car or dying of prescription drugs overdose or anything, PLEASE!] I've realized that being alone is more of a problem for me than I thought. I'm fighting this battle against a part of my own brain, and being alone is very negative for this. Despite my therapist trying to hint otherwise - and I'll have to think about that too, but right now I don't "feel" it - this is a real war, without the possibility of a truce, and in war, if you're alone, you're in trouble. To quote Lord Lovat: If we had been individuals in battle we should have run away. But we were a team, held together by our training and our shared experience.Dick Winters and many others say much the same things. At my folks' I love waking up and hearing voices (once I hated it! I still hate waking up and hearing the TV, though.). If I have a cat nearby I concentrate better on my work (or fall asleep...) Here in Milan, I hate saying no to my friends' invitations because I'm too busy or I don't feel well: at least now friends don't scare me too much anymore, but time is limited anyway. Finding old friends on FB gives me a boost of energy. Even just knowing that friends are thinking of me is a big help. And then there are the imaginary friends. The music makes me think of Nuvolari and it gives me strength. I have lengthy talks with the whole 1st Special Services Brigade on a daily basis. (The trouble starts when I begin writing them down.) Unfortunately my current imaginary love interest is already married, not to mention being dead; but if I want an imaginary marriage I have Optimus, who is alive but isn't human, so that counts as being dead, not to mention that he doesn't exist. And then of course there's the ultimate imaginary friend, Jesus; if you have faith he's not imaginary at all, but even when my religious feelings ran colder, he was a pretty good role model and a handy philosopher to talk with. Despite the trifling difficulties of being dead, alien, non-existent etc, I'm finding they help me a lot. I just have to understand how, and how to convey that energy in a productive way into my work and my life. I think the final step will be to recognize that all of them, the way I see them (with the possible exception of Jesus), are ultimately me. And as I love and trust them, so should I love and trust myself. That's still a long way ahead; but for the moment, I'm content to think that I'm not alone in this battle that will be raging, I fear, for most of March. It almost makes me hope for a true resurrection by Easter. |