The Third Subchapter

This week I wrote one of the most difficult subchapters in the entire book. In the final chapter I am currently writing, there will be more like it — it is a chapter where everything I have described so far begins to come together.

I wrote about the therapy I started because I didn't believe I could love. Not because I had never thought about it — but because I have been alone all my life, and with that comes the conviction that it will stay that way. I was afraid my feelings remained buried somewhere in childhood, in moments no child should experience. The first chapter of the book is about exactly what happened back then.

This final chapter is different. It is not about what happened to me, but about what I did with it decades later — how in therapy I regularly returned to the same place, to the little boy I once was, and learned to be in the same room with him without running away.

Gingerbread Cookies I Wrote About

When I posted a photo today of the gingerbread cookies I baked last December, I wrote that I was thinking about my last therapy session while making them. Now I know why that session stayed in my head for so long — I was writing about it right then. When I was writing that scene down, I had tears in my eyes. Exactly the same ones I had back then over the baking sheet by the oven.

And right after that came something else — a smile I hadn't had on my face in a long time. Not because everything was resolved or perfect. But because for the first time I truly felt that it was okay, exactly as it is.

What Remains of It

I learned a lot while writing this subchapter — about how a person can return to the same place over and over again until the pain becomes just a memory, not a wound. Everything I learned is written today in the third subchapter of the final chapter of the book.

This passage is from the chapter The Demon Who Changed All Masks, subchapter Return to Little Jožko (working title, subject to change).