Ok, so I’m starting to write this at almost 5am in the morning and I’m not feeling my usual self. I’m so upset, I’m so angry at myself and I can’t even begin to get to sleep, and I’m experiencing a rare moment of ‘what the fuck am I supposed to do right now!?’ There’s a background to all this which I should explain first.

I’ll start with my first San Pedro experience which took place about 3 weeks ago. San Pedro is a cactus that grows in Peru and it’s another plant teacher that people and shamans use for healing and spiritual growth. From what I understand, it’s very effective for healing, or bringing awareness to, emotional issues which are usually related to the heart. And it certainly did it’s job on me!!

Now I wanted to write about this experience several weeks ago, just after it happened, but I decided it was too personal and I just didn’t feel comfortable writing about it in a public blog. I still feel pretty much the same way, but after tonight, I just feel ‘fuck it’. Maybe getting some of my feelings out into the open will start a healing process that I really need to begin, otherwise I’m just going to keep repeating the same old patterns that are becoming increasingly more unbearable. We can’t have that can we?

To explain the problem I need to talk about my life a bit more….

It’s fair to say I’ve had a very comfortable and happy life. There’s very little I can complain about, I’ve never really wanted for much and most things have generally gone the way I’ve wanted them to. I think I have a life and a (predominantly) positive mindset that many people would envy. So, I’ve always been pretty happy with my life except for perhaps one thing - I’ve never found that special someone. I’m currently 33 years old and I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’ve spent pretty much all my adult life being single. Although I have to add that’s been mostly my fault and mostly my choice. Things could easily have been very different.

If I have one main regret about my life it’s that when I was younger I always took the idea of relationships far too seriously. Ever since I was about 19 and I discovered spirituality (way younger than most people) I’ve been searching for my soulmate - whatever that actually means (I’ve decided I don’t know anymore). But whereas most young people don’t think about these kind of things too much and usually just date, go out, or have sex with whoever they please, I usually judged every girl I met as a potential ’soulmate’ or not. And if I didn’t think she was then I usually wasn’t interested in anything other than friendship. As a result of that particular mindset I turned down the possibility of many relationships that might have been casual or otherwise.

Now, I have had a few short, casual relationships and a few one-night stands over the years, but they’ve been fairly few and far between and although I don’t regret any of them, I don’t feel particularly great about them either. I know a few of those could have turned into relationships had I wanted them to, but they just never seemed right at the time.

However, over the years, there have also been several girls that in some way or another have really captured my heart and this is where things have always gone wrong for me (or I’ve completely screwed things up) and I’ve usually ended up getting really hurt. On the few occasions I’ve let my feelings known to someone (and usually, for some reason, believed they felt the same way about me) I’ve always ended up being rejected. And each and every one of those times has really hurt like hell!! However, usually within a week or so I’d start to feel ok and start to believe I was completely over it and I’d just get on with life as I always do. I’ve never realised how deeply I was affected by those rejections until I did San Pedro a few weeks ago.

This plant teacher showed me that I was still carrying all these emotional wounds from all these years of rejections that I had never properly healed from. And it showed me that if I don’t heal these wounds then they’re going to keep causing big problems in my life and prevent me from getting what I want. Well tonight I experienced another example of how they are still capable of causing big problems in my life.

Some of my friends know that I have a friend from the UK visiting me right now. If you don’t know who she is then it’s not important. But she is someone I’ve known for about 7 years and I once believed she liked me, and just over 3 years ago I decided to ask her out but she turned me down. Now, of all the rejections I’ve experienced this probably affected me the least because I never actually believed she was my soul mate or anything like that. I just really liked her and for the first time I was just intrigued to see what would happen. Unfortunately I never got to find out.

We did stay good friends though, even though I rarely saw her, particularly after I left Leeds almost 3 years ago. About a month ago I invited her to visit me in Peru, and a few days later she (very unexpectedly) bought a ticket to visit me for about 4 weeks.

Anyway, she arrived here just over a week ago, and although we’ve been having a good time together, a lot of my feelings for her came back which has been a little problematic, especially tonight…

[stuff edited out]

To cut a long story short, I was kind of hoping we might have a bit of fun and romance for a few weeks. However it became pretty clear to me quite early on that that wasn’t going to happen. Fair enough I thought, I had no expectations, and I certainly wasn’t upset about that, and ultimately I was just very happy and grateful to have some good company for several weeks.

But tonight something happened that I wasn’t prepared for, and I repeated some old patterns and lost the plot a bit (alcohol played a major role as usual). It was clear my friend was getting rather too friendly with some other guy we’d met earlier in the evening, and I suddenly felt these huge and horrible waves of jealousy and feelings of abandonment. It was basically another form of rejection. I made quite a fool of myself, and I won’t go into the details about that, but I know I’ve gone and made things very awkward between us and I’m feeling so angry and upset at myself, and stupid and depressed - and I never get depressed.

My behaviour has shown me that there are some important lessons I haven’t learnt yet, but I now realise from taking San Pedro a few weeks ago, that I keep repeating this pattern because I’m still carrying these old wounds with me that I’ve never really healed and whenever I feel rejected it’s like someone rubbing salt on open wounds. I’m not sure what to do right now. I’m feeling like I may have ruined my friends holiday and so that’s making me feel worse. I don’t usually feel like I want to climb into a deep hole, but that’s how I feel right now. Hopefully things will be ok in a day or two.

I’m mostly just upset because I feel like I’ve let myself down again. This isn’t the first time I’ve behaved like this, and each time I’ve felt bad and convinced myself I’d learnt my lesson and would never behave like that again. Yet here I am once again, repeating the same old patterns and feeling totally upset and shitty about it (again). I guess the main (and very important) difference is that for the first time I feel like I know exactly why I’m repeating these patterns. I guess that’s the first real step to healing. You can’t solve a problem unless you know exactly what’s causing it.

Hopefully I’ll get back to my usual positive self a few days from now