Billy, the Book (eBook)

Billy-Luise Sauerampfer (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
270 Seiten
Books on Demand (Verlag)
978-3-7693-7465-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Who am I? What for am I here? What is loe? Who am I Looping for? Me, but, who is this Follow me on my exiting way to experiece the live and finding some answers.

Hier ist sie, Billy, die schon so viele Namen bekam, dass sie sich auf diesen festlegte. Geboren 1967, hinter der Mauer. Im schönen Örtchen Finsterwalde versucht sie, ein nützliches Mitglied der Gesellschaft zu sein, bricht aber immer wieder aus, um sich selbst, Freiheit und den Sinn des Lebens zu finden.

Textauszug

SHADOW WORK

I was the second child, second best in my class. There was at least one girl who was better at swimming. Even my best friends were more beautiful, more mature, more desirable. A shadow child is only noticed at second glance. And so it was that the guy I’d fallen in love with only found me after a good friend of mine had kicked him out of her house. I was just a stopgap solution. He called it love — I wanted to believe him.

It was now the fourth time that I had shared my one-bedroom apartment with a boyfriend. Today, I can’t even imagine doing that again. I need space for myself, a place to retreat to. At the moment, I’m almost completely withdrawn because I feel like I’m a bit off my rocker.

What is certain is that I’m shocked at how submissive I was, and actually believed I wasn’t worth anything. Basically, he was the one who didn’t have his life under control. He was powerless and dependent on the favor of his landlady. He managed to project his powerlessness onto me through violent beatings, threats, and even death threats to family members and to me. On top of that, he had delusions of jealousy. Although he was the one who was always cheating, he suspected me.

I personally take offense that I didn’t save myself after the first blow. Instead, I forgave him again and again because of the damage that had been done to him in his childhood. You can understand everything if you put yourself in the other person’s shoes and investigate the causes. But to forgive? My goodness! I started forgiving very early on in life. If someone smacks you in the face, just turn the other cheek. That’s how I was ... anything but saintly, more like constantly hurt. He hated the world, people — and probably himself too. I’m still unshakeable in my belief in the good in each of us. IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING. First, the bottom line: I’ve learned to be bad, and he may have gotten a little nicer. Thank you. It was just training. Balancing.

On October 1, 1993, I fled Berlin with the help of my family. I first went to live with my aunt, my mother’s sister, who was a Capricorn like me. Besides giving me shelter and attention, she also gave me this saying: “Everything can always get better.” Thank you for that, my dear.

For seven months I tried to get away, built a new life for myself, found a great job in Gailingen. I looked after a group of 11 children who had previously all been in comas for months. It was shared housing, and I basically took over the mother’s job. I woke the children in the morning, helped them wash and dress, made breakfast and beds, and took the children to their respective therapies. Went to the shared apartment, cooked lunch, picked everyone up again, and gathered them around the table. Shall I tell you how I won them over? With a loud burp. My mother used to burp at the table sometimes for fun and then look at me reproachfully. “Annette!” It wasn’t me, but I still found this projection funny. In the meantime, my daughter has become the unabashed burper. The things you pass on in life.

One step forward, two steps back. How I squirm and would like to skip over the things that torment me. So I only ever write down fragments of the stories, just as much as I want to remember.

October 2, 1993: The only person I spoke to on my journey from Berlin to Tuttlingen was a young woman who had been evacuated from Berlin by her parents. And for the same cool reason, to free her from the clutches of her boyfriend, who would otherwise have destroyed her. Coincidence? More like a mirror within a mirror.

October 3, 1993: I want to remember so that I can forget. You destroyed everything that was dear to me, plants, pictures, instruments, diaries. You locked me up, tortured me with interrogations, your hatred. You beat me — more and more, more and more brutally, again and again, you were jealous of all the people who had ever played a role in my life. Idiot me. Why did I allow you to read my diaries? You studied my past, ravaged it and I hoped for understanding. Our love never had a chance to blossom, so suspiciously guarded and constantly doubted.

Everything I’ve worked for over the years is gone. My apartment, my independence, my job, my freedom and fearlessness, my belief in the power of love, my hope for us.

For fear of losing me (as a lover, breadwinner, landlord), you scared me so much that I left Berlin in a hurry. There’s no going back, all the bridges have been broken. Here I am now, in the middle of nowhere with my backpack and bike. A wreck, broken, at the end of my rope, dependent on my relatives’ help, and that after having stood on my own two feet for eight years. Start all over again. Don’t turn around! Sometimes my insane love confuses my mind, I have crying fits, I want to go back to you and die by your hand rather than live without you, I long for your good side, which captured me so much that I always forgave you for what you did to me.

I don’t want to forget it or where it has taken me. My pride is gone and so is my sense of what is allowed and what is not. No one should ever hit me. I don’t know of any reason that would justify such a thing. I detest violence and yet I accepted it from you again and again, I’m partly to blame for what happened.

In the end, I was no longer in control of myself. As soon as you came near me, I was ready to get involved with you again, with you and your dreams for us. We wanted to love each other, set off into the world on our bikes, have children one day, a house by the sea, grow old together, be good friends, bite the dust together. Dreams! We loved each other too, we love each other ... BUT ... I wanted to voluntarily go to the nuthouse or a shelter. That’s what my first steps away from you looked like. I gave up my life, I couldn’t protect myself from you and myself, from this crazy force that pulls me towards you. It’s still pulling and I’m struggling, and it hurts. I know we both want each other. The dilemma would repeat itself. Never in my life has anything or anyone scared me as much as you. (That’s not true. I’d just repressed a lot of things, split them off.) And yet I love you, I miss you, I long for you, I wish that you would fall on your feet, finally become free, no longer want to make yourself dependent, be able and willing to take care of yourself — out of your own strength; because only then, when you no longer need anyone, can you really love ... voluntarily. And I hope — whether that’s realistic or not — that I’ll meet you again then.

April 11, 2022: Up to then, I’d repressed all the other acts of violence my loved ones had given me.

My father once called me a POSITIVE POINT IN A NEGATIVE WORLD. The nicest compliment I’ve ever received. BUT yesterday I found this quote from C. G. Jung: “Every psychological extreme secretly contains its opposite or is otherwise closely related to it. There is no sacred custom that does not eventually turn into its opposite. The best is most threatened by diabolical distortion, because it has suppressed the worst most of all. No one stands outside the black collective shadow.”

Whether the following is also from Jung or from another clever mind, I don’t know, but I love this saying: “Evil is the good, tormented by its longing for itself.” The dark parts that I suppress within myself come at me from the outside. So, it isn’t the case that I had burdened myself with guilt in a past life and was struck for the sake of balancing things out. No, the good child had avoided being bad sometimes. Just don’t stand out and if you do, then by performing at your peak.

Before I fled Berlin, I left a 25-page letter together with Robin Norwood’s book, “When Men Learn to Love” outside my apartment door, anxious not to be caught by HIM. As soon as I was left alone in my aunt’s apartment, I called my old number just to hear his voice. I didn’t say a word, but my heart plummeted when he picked up.

October 14, 1993: One of your blows to my eyes made a hole in my retina. It was repaired with a laser to prevent it from getting bigger and the retina from detaching, which would have led to blindness.

And despite everything, I love you, crazy, isn’t it? Blind with ... Love. Why am I like this, that I have to leave people who really love me, push them away and fight for those I can’t reach? I fight for the impossible and cling to it until I give up on myself. Why do I love the most those who give me the least in return, who treat me the worst, who fleece me like an Easter lamb? Why do I only ever want to give and not take? Being able to take also means admitting that you are weak and need others.

It dawned on me at an early age that I could do everything on my own. I was alone, especially when it came to emotions. I had to deal with my grief by myself. In my weakness, I looked for weaker people (animals) to be strong for them.

October 17, 1993: Disappointment, the end of deception, disenchantment, awakening, bitter medicine swallowed in the name of freedom so as not to die from the spell.

“You have to go too far to see how far you can go.” Thank you, Heinrich Böll. And thanks also to Elias Canetti for this quote:

“There is a dangerous power in mistrust: it leads one to believe that one can think alone, judge alone, decide alone. It tempts you to believe that you are alone. It forces the others who belong...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.2.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 3-7693-7465-7 / 3769374657
• ISBN-13: 978-3-7693-7465-0 / 9783769374650