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

You cannot copy content of this page

Privacy Preference Center