ABSTRACT
Rya’s spontaneous writing captures her sense of being immobilized by the polarities of approach and avoidance. Fear and longing are collapsed and fused, leaving her terrifi ed and frozen. Rya grew up in a world where feeling alive only occurred in the context of torment, loss, and acute despair. Suffering became enlivening and needed to be intensifi ed in order to counter her experience of emptiness and fragmentation. Relief was tantalizing, but tormenting; an inaccessible state, because she perceived herself to be toxic and believed that goodness was beyond her. Often she expressed her intense desire to fl ee or to die. More than anything, she wished she could disappear into a state of “unbeing.”
