Testimonial

The realization of being nobody is keeping to surface. I begin to realize that being nobody has been there all my life as an experience of stillness yet at the same time as a difficulty to identify and to relate to anything (people and acts) from a personal place.

Up until now I thought something is wrong with me, I can’t relate, I just don’t know how to relate, so I tried to mimic what I saw in others and tried not to be caught in faking. This created quite some fear and avoidance around relations. I was ashamed of not being there and strained myself in appearing to be socially alive. I felt ashamed of being unable to focus on “my” life-purpose and putting my energy behind something meaningful, making it “my thing”. So I tried to hide my not-existing and lived long stretches of my life in a hazy, detached way unnoticed from outside.

I developed the belief that I had to make a choice: either to be somebody and thus creating a personal base to relate from at the price of living a fake-somebody, a mask, a role whatever name to call it or to be nobody and being true at the price of falling out of the world. I remember the despair and loneliness of not being able to communicate this to anybody, as people would point out to my physicality, my profession, my relations etc. and say: “What do you mean? We can obviously see who and what you are!” and left me riddled with what was wrong with my perception.

In Lujan’s work, writing and presence I began to find answers, resonance and understanding which carried me through the past four years. Now since the Barcelona workshop and the following experiences another realization begins to surface:

Being nobody does not exclude being in relation or in contact. I don’t need to choose. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. I can be nobody and still feel, act, resonate and be alive without owning all those experiences, rather swimming through life-experience.

That perspective feels very new ad I cautiously feel my way forward into this. I am deeply relieved that the intense fears caused by this dilemma are now easing and a vast stillness is expanding within me as I stop fighting being nobody.

During the workshop Lujan said: “I’m not here unless you are making me appear”. I begin to surrender to this kind of non-existence yet presence which seems a contradiction yet that’s the way it is.

My heart is filling with gratitude which I haven’t felt for a long time. It seems spring is coming. Something is healing and an illusionary gap bridged.

Thank You, life, in all your forms.

Dorothea,
Germany

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