Today was a pretty good day despite only getting 6 hours of sleep. The skier arrived and it should be a great way to hit the road in VR. The only problem is that I’m a little underpowered because my arms don’t swing as much as I thought they would. The more you move your arms and head, the faster you go down the road you’re “riding.” Holding onto the controllers while holding onto the handles only gets me up to about 40 and I need to hit 120 to be up to full speed. Because there’s a wider stride between my feet than my hands, he’s going to create a holder to attach to the bottom of the skier. I don’t know if it can get me up to 120, but I should be close.

Love how this thing doesn’t have a fixed stride. I just wish we had a bigger house! We have to fold the thing up and shove it to the side if we want to do anything else in that room. When I’m meditating, I’m sitting on the couch so it doesn’t matter. But if I want to golf, box, dance, or play table tennis, it has to be out of the way.

Met with Helen and we didn’t quite talk about what I thought we would talk about. It almost felt more like a social meeting, LOL. She did ask how I was doing and if I was remembering to use the tools I have for when I feel anxious. I told her that although I haven’t felt bad for a month now, I do have my arsenal well stocked and I’m trying to get into the habit of remembering to go to the safe place we created for me at the beginning and ends of my day no matter how I feel.

She was hesitant to discuss certain things, knowing our views are different and all that. But I told her I was open to other people’s opinions and beliefs. As long as no one’s trying to control me, it’s actually pretty fascinating hearing the different ways people look at life as well as a possible afterlife. Being Christian, she believes in God and the whole heaven and hell thing. I told her that for the most part, it’s hard for me to believe what I can’t see. Believing the Eiffel Tower exists even though I haven’t seen it is one thing as opposed to believing in an invisible being. I guess the reason she believes is because of miracles that have happened where people have been healed when they shouldn’t have been and other things. I definitely agree there are some mysteries in the world we can’t explain and I told her about the Phoenix lights. Those soundless circular lights at midnight that didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere.

I know that some people believe that if you kill yourself, you go to hell. But why would any decent God send you to hell for ending your own suffering? You’re suffering so bad that you do what you can to end it and then you get punished for it? That makes no sense.

Then I told her I didn’t see how a good God could be so enabling as to sit back and allow a parent to abuse a child without intervening and she said, “Yeah, but do you want your choices taken away?”

I don’t know that we have as much choice as we’d like to think we have in life. Nobody chooses to die of sepsis at 40 years of age as Aly did.

I kind of see where she’s coming from in some ways, but I don’t think any of us can really know what’s what for sure. So we might as well be ourselves and just use our best judgment. If there is a God, maybe what we think it considers sinful is actually acceptable, and what we don’t consider sinful actually is.

Now this is something very hard to believe, but she says that the brain believes what we tell it. So next time I feel anxious, I should tell myself out loud, “I’m calm, I’m loved, etc.”

I wish this would work but I’ve never been good at brainwashing myself. I mean come on, if I tell myself I’m tall, am I really going to believe it? I’ll try almost anything once though, so it can’t hurt to give it a try the next time it gets me.

She told me to list the traumatic and tough times I’ve been through in the past and make two columns, one for negative and one for positive. I thought we were going to dive into this today, but I guess this way it helps make for a more organized way of tackling things.

But am I really to come up with something positive about my mother? That’s going to be a real challenge! Okay, so maybe a positive in her favor is that she was her own person.

I’ve been separating this place from PB as much as possible, so I can be more open here. My “safe” place in the diary world, LOL. I just don’t want to upset anyone needlessly. Well, I just realized that another person I’ve been communicating with recently on PB is a regular user who creates and dumps accounts faster than I change clothes. There seems to be a few people like that, but I know I should shut up and quit being so judgmental, LOL. Even though I don’t see what one account can do that another can’t. I guess it doesn’t make you a bad person either, does it?