Amy's Daily Journey

I want to share Rosalie's reply to my email (with her hers and her mom's permission)

"Hi Amelia,
I wasn't cringing my face because I love that you said I am your hero. At school today I told my friend about you and when I got home mum told me you have written about me in your email. I was so excited and read it many times.
I remember when you were sick in the hospital and I gave you Moby. Do you still have him? I miss him sometimes.
I also remember when you made the flag with me and we hung it at the trampoline. It is now framed in my room and whenever I look at it I remember you.
I miss you very much and I wish I could put my hand on your head again and ask God to make you better. Mum, Dad, my sister and me we pray for you every night.
Did you know I have a boyfriend now? His name is Joshua and he is very cute. He gave me a golden heart necklace for Valentine's day.
I remember when you told me that I will marry someone very special some day. I think I will marry Joshua.
My mum said I should tell you something about when you changed my life. I think I have hundreds of things where you changed my life. The best was when you gave us the Christmas present that we all can go to Paris and visit Disneyland. Mum and Dad were so scared when my oxygen didn't work and you called every hospital because we couldn't speak French.

I love you and I miss you soooo much.
Rosie"

Thank you, Amelia and Rosalie. I am crying and can't see the keyboard now. Not in a sad way. You touch my heart.Love to you both.

Very lovely. Thank you so much for sharing.

I want to share another email reply with you, I received today. The emails have started a really amazing journey where the responses reach everyone and people connect with each other. So the whole list read Jason's and Rosie's emails and people keep writing to each other and to me, it makes me cry really. And I can't help but share some of what is happening with you here. I hope you don't mind. And if you do, please just tell me to shut up!

So this is from Anna, who is 89 years old and I met her around 10 years ago, when she wanted to learn how to make iron sculptures. I held a class and the age gap between her and the second oldest student was 48 years
She was an excellent student and could keep up with the younger guys without a problem, even carrying the heavy molds to the furnace.

Now she makes incredibly intricate iron pieces that are simply stunning and she puts them all into her beautiful rose garden, which she still, every single day, tends to! (I will find some pictures of her art and post them here.)

"My dearest Amelia,
I read your emails with joy, thank you so much for including me on this precious journey.
I have so many things to say, my dear, but because everyone is sharing how you impacted their life I would like to do the same.
I met you in 2004 when I saw an ad in the newspaper about your iron pouring class. I had made a resolution that I wanted to learn something new. And I wanted to do something I have never done before. When I arrived at the college I was not only the oldest person but also the only female person there. You hugged me and said: 'You have no idea how wonderful it is that you are here, how could I keep all these guys away from me?' And I felt welcome immediately. And the boys treated me like a queen and that felt nice.
You helped me find my creativity again. But it was that one afternoon when I made my first piece, an iron angel with broken wings, that I saw your special heart. You asked me what made me so sad. And I told you about Kurt, my husband who had passed away a year earlier. That evening you cooked for me and I told you my life story. I will never forget that you reached for my hand when I cried but you didn't say a word. It was very special.
And I remember how proud you were when my sculpture came out unbroken. I have been at every iron pour in the area now and my garden blooms with art as well as roses. Thank you for teaching me.
I have adopted you as my special granddaughter and you will always have a special place in my heart. It is not fair that you get to be with God before me, but I promise I won't be long.

You have made me happy again, my dear.

Love and many blessings,
Anna"

I have thought the same thing since I first started to read Amy's posts three weeks ago. Amy'sJourney by Amy.

So special, thank you for including us on your journey.

"Day #7

So today is a really special day for me. A young woman I met on the online forum is flying in from Canada to see me for a couple of days. She has really captured my heart. She is very smart - gosh, she uses bigger words than I can understand sometimes. Something she wrote about logic made my head twist and it seriously made me question whether I am really as smart as I think I am She has a very special heart and I can't wait to spend some time with her in the next couple of days and get to know her better. Ha, she will even meet my Hero-therapist as she will arrive right in the middle of my session.
I feel very humble that she is making that journey all the way, just to spend two days to visit with me. And I hope she'll like me despite looking like a zombie without hair

I cried so much yesterday, reading all the emails that went around. But listen guys, this is not a time for eulogies yet, haha!! I am still here, you know?!
No, seriously I am overwhelmed by your kindness and I love to read all the stories. Some of them surprised me because, to be honest, most of the time I am not aware of doing something special or saying something special at all.
I just open my mouth and what comes out, comes out. And when I see someone in need, I don't really think too much, I just do what feels right.

I think I have a really strange heart. It usually has it's own will, and it almost always wins over my head. Sometimes that makes me very vulnerable and puts me at risk, but more times than not, it kinda works out for the best.

I always thought, and to this day I am still convinced, that it is compassion that heals us. Having compassion for ourselves and having compassion for others is a powerful, wonderful healer.
Many people have a distorted image of themselves. Lies of the past have convinced them that they are not good enough, not worthy of being loved or cared for. But that is almost never the truth. It hurts me when people think of themselves as despicable or awful.
The truth is, those who are really despicable and awful would never say that about themselves.

So I think my main passion has always been to show people as much love and compassion as possible because I knew how it felt not to be loved at all and cast aside. I think that's what made me who I am now.

Thank you everyone for showing me a little (or a lot) that I had some small part in your life. It makes me feel like my life was not in vain and shows me, I have always tried my best.

With a lot of love,
Amelia"

I hope you have a great visit

Of course she will like you. How could she not?

Well, I'll do my best to be a great host!

hehe no surprises there

Every day your update elicit so many questions I want to ask. I think most of all I want to know more, to understand better.

Compassion is a topic close to my heart because for a long time I didn't understand or believe in it. I believed in kindness and care, but not compassion (and this is despite being given a lot of love and care as a child). I couldn't believe that anyone would really want to or be willing to take the time to feel my suffering with me, not truly in any continuous meaningful way. In fact, writing this just now I wonder if this is what my therapist has been saying for years when she's said "I'm alongside you". Literally for years (and in many ways this continues) her saying this was meaningless for me, it was just words. Then she told me that there is some pain where all someone can do is be there until it settles. I understood that. To me that is compassion, to stay. I thought about that when you wrote that you went back to see the homeless man, he said "you came back, no one comes back".

I'm sorry for writing so much, I'm sure you have enough to read. I hope you have a lovely time with your friend. Enjoy!

Hi Abby,
feel free to write as much as you like and to ask whatever question you would like to ask.

Compassion is a really big topic for me too. I believe that compassion is when you can look at a situation or someone and you can feel a little bit of what that situation feels like (or what the person may feel like).
It's to not look away and offer yourself. That works with compassion towards ourselves as well as for others.

People sometimes say: "I have to look at my own life first before I can look at someone else's life." I think that is true and false at the same time. True in the way that it is okay for a while to accept that it is all about me, that I can find compassion for myself now and for what I have gone through in the past. Accepting that it is okay to be the receiver of care and love and compassion for a while and believing I am worth that.
And it is false too because looking at our own lives almost always forces us to look at others. And I strongly believe that in order to heal from whatever we need to be healed - small things or big things, we need to find compassion for others in our hearts. Because if we are capable of compassion, we are capable of looking beyond our troubles, which I believe gives us insight into ourselves.

It's not just about saying it, is about feeling it. Feeling compassion from others and towards others.

When I see someone in distress, it is almost impossible for me to look away. I don't know why, I have never been able to find an explanation. Perhaps I am just not tough enough. But when I look back, many situations when I didn't look away have turned into something great.

When I quit my job at the TV station and I wasn't sure what I would do next, I sat on the tram one day across an elderly lady who was crying. I asked her if I could help her and what made her so sad. She told me her husband had passed away and they would always ride the tram together through the city and now she is making the journey all by herself. We talked a little bit and she asked me what I did for a living. I told her that I had just quit my job but that I had earned my photography degree recently and that I might want to do something with that. She got very excited and opened her bag and pulled out a little digital camera her son had given her for Christmas. And before I knew what was happening she asked me questions about the settings on the camera, how to take better pictures etc.. I spent an hour with her riding the tram back and forth and explaining the camera to her.
I knew when we parted what I was going to do. A few weeks later I formed my own teaching company, teaching elderly people in photography, computer skills, photoshop. This company is still going strong and one of the major creative ventures for older people in the area. (I don't want to publicly say the name of the company, but feel free to pm me if you want to know more)

So compassion led to something new. If I had looked away, I would never have come up with the idea and would never have had that wonderful job that made me so very happy and changed the life of hundreds of elderly people who now have made new friends, for the first time in their life held huge public exhibitions and many have come out of utter isolation.
And I got to hear many incredible stories of long, interesting lives, which made me richer and a much better person.

It is hard to find the spark sometimes, that makes us reach out for compassion or give compassion. But I believe if we risk it, it can become huge inspiration and make our lives a thousand times better.

Thank you.

I think when I say that compassion is to stay, it reflects your meaning that it is to not look away. This definitely resonates with me.

I'm working on being compassionate to myself. It's a challenge because there is a part of me that quite obviously wants to destroy any positive feelings. Perhaps instead of battling this I could spend more time focusing outwards. Although I'll admit that even in this I become scared often; isn't that silly. I think it is a risk to be compassionate, mainly because it might not be accepted by the other person.

Yesterday when I was driving out of a car park and I saw a man on a bench. He looked sad; he stood up and I thought he was going to pick up the rubbish bin which, from putting two and two together, I assumed he'd punched over earlier in a rage. But he didn't, he kicked it further. He was still upset. I saw this in my rear view mirror. Part of me wanted to get out and ask him if he was okay but the other part thought about how I don't know the situation, I don't want to upset him further and as I'd passed it in the car before I fully could comprehend it all, I didn't. For me, the spark is there, it's just hard to be guided by it and not look away.

Thank you again.

I can definitely understand the difficulty of finding compassion for yourself.
I learned this really neat trick some years back. Instead of battling with the allusiveness of "compassion for myself" which is a difficult process really, I decided to something else:

I imagine looking at myself as if I were another person but with the knowledge of what this person has been through. So I step away and look at her, and imagine what I would say to her if it wasn't me. I looked at her, I felt sadness for all the pain she went through, I felt understanding for the things she did and it was almost impossible to blame her, to think anything bad about her because my heart just went out to her.

That's how I learnt compassion for myself. It made it absolutely impossible to stay in a self-loathing place because it felt like I am doing something really awful to a person who has been through enough, why would I judge her, hurt her, despise her on top of that?

I used to imagine myself as a little girl. I had this picture of me as a 5 year old and I felt so much compassion, knowing that this beautiful little girl was so severely physically hurt. I can't look away if it was a different little girl, so why should I look away from the little girl I was? Or from the teenager who was lonely and depressed? Or from the young twenty-something woman who was desperately trying to find love and did almost anything to get it, even it meant hurting a lot of nice guys?

That helped me a lot.

Thank you so much for this post Amy and Abby, it really resonates with me, especially today.

I wish you and your friend a wonderful time together.

Thank you so much for touching me deeply with your posts. I wish I could see your T tomorrow! She also sounds amazing.

Thinking of you and sending much love.

Thank you. Thank you. You will never know how much your words mean to me and they have been received at such an appropriate time. They resonate with me so much. It's as if you are writing to me! Thank you. I'm crying as I type this. I don't know what's happening to me - but your post about compassion has really touched me. Thank you so very much. Take good care of yourself and enjoy the next two days with your PC friend. Xx

I know how you feel. Sometimes we hear just what we really needed to...and that means so much. Take care of yourself Aloneandafraid.

"Day #8

So my visit with my friend is going well. We talk a lot, we are very close and we laugh a lot.
It is a real blessing and so wonderful to have her here to witness and share a little bit of our lives, our struggles and our joys.

So when I was thinking about what to write today, I felt a little torn. I received a few requests to talk a little bit more about my life as a child, spill a few more of my secrets, testify about my faith.. I will try to write as much as I can for as long as I can, so please bear with me.

So I will tell you a little bit more about my story today.
Not all of you know that I grew up in a very abusive household. My first memory is of me as a five year old who was so badly physically abused that I passed out from the pain and sight of blood a few times. I won't go into the details of what they did as it may be very disturbing.
My parents would make sure that I had the story "straight" when they had no choice but to take me to the hospital. I remember being awfully confused at what happened, I didn't know how my parents could do something like that and I thought I must have done something very bad that they did this to me.

But it was only the first incident of thousands that followed. Shortly after that incident, the sexual abuse started and it confused me even more. Suddenly my father wanted me to do all those horrible things and my mother became very angry with me for stealing her husband. My world had turned into this weird, crazy nightmare and my parents turned into monsters that I didn't recognize. I wrote in my diary: "Mommy and Daddy are gone, aliens took them away. I am scared of the monsters."

What followed where years of daily abuse. I was never safe except when I was so badly injured that I had to stay in the hospital. Nobody ever did anything. I was all alone.
My therapist always asks me: "How did you survive this, Amelia?"
And I can only say that I believe, God has given me an almost invincible spirit and for some reason I knew that my family wasn't normal. That there were better people out there. And I used to imagine my life after I could leave home. Every day I wrote in my diary and I imagined where I will live, how many children I will have, what my husband will look like, our house, our pets. I constantly searched to find good good things to hold onto.
I loved school and attached deeply to every adult that showed remote interest in me. I even had a best friend who I loved very much. And I always had an overwhelming desire to help people and make them feel better, even as a child.
When I was eight years old I would sometimes skip school (nobody would ever notice or ask questions) and instead I would walk into the hospital in our town and I visited people and talked to them. I loved sitting with elderly people who would stroke my hair and hold my hand and I loved that they seemed to be very happy to see me.
On Saturdays I would leave our house at 4am in the morning to walk to the pier where all the fisherman had just returned from catching their seafood and there was this one old man with a white beard and a sailor's hat and we would sit on his boat and he would feed me freshly caught steamed mini shrimp on rye bread. He told me stories about the world and I knew he made them up especially for me.
And then I would go back home, knowing I would be beaten badly for sneaking out but it never stopped me. The desire for these moments of goodness was much stronger than the fear of violence.

So somehow there was always something good even in the midst of utter darkness and pain. I am so thankful for all these "angels" I encountered who kept my curiosity, my soul and my spirit alive.

Throughout my life these "angels" kept appearing and I learned that there is so much love out there that there even might be some left over for me

With love,
Amelia"

((((Amelia))))

(((((((((((((((Hugs)))))))))))))

((((((((((((((((((((Little Amelia)))))))))))))))))))))) ((((((((((((((((((Adult Amelia))))))))))))

Thank you for sharing, Amelia. Sending you much love and huge hugs. Xx

Amelia thank you for sharing. It's a miracle that after such unimaginable suffering your able to give so much love & joy.

Thank you for the hugs This was difficult for me to share today, and it made me feel really raw and vulnerable, but thankfully I only received encouragement and love and for that I am very grateful. Including you in my story also means to share where I came from, because my life started out cruel and painful but it surely doesn't end this way.

Having Yearning here with me is such a huge gift. I thought I would be self-conscious about what my illness has done to my body and my appearance, my speech and breathing etc.. But it has been so easy and loving and close, it is truly a gift. In the afternoon I couldn't keep my eyes open and I just fell asleep with Yearning holding my hand and it was very peaceful. I am learning a lot from her.

I really do feel blessed by you on here, the people I was able to meet in person as well as those on here who walk with me.

Thank you all so much for your love and support!

Amelia