A couple of years ago, I worked with a woman who disliked and mistrusted me. The feeling was mutual. I thought she was not well, her behavior was so angry and so irrational.

She seemed paranoid, and assumed so many awful things about me.

It was one of the first times in my life I had come face to face with what I believed was antisemitism, and it shocked me, and I stopped dealing with her.

Sometimes, you just have to walk away.

A few months, ago, I e-mailed her and asked her help in dealing with a refugee project I was working on. She said no, of course, and I was so relieved.

But why had I contacted her at all? What was I expecting? This suddenly was familiar to me.

I need to learn how to let go, not to revisit the scene of painful disappointments and rejections again and again, hoping to make them better.

It took me many years of analysis, therapy and spiritual counseling to understand and accept that I suffered from mental illness. It took me some additional years to understand that mental illness is  treatable, but not cureable.

In life, I now know, not everyone is going to like you or accept you.

Or be your friend. It’s just life, even though as a child, I learned how dangerous it could be.  I just never quite unlearned it.

Everywhere I go, I come along. I am forever discovering the many arms of mental illness, it is like a  giant octopus, arms and suckers everywhere.

You have to work at it, be conscious of it, keep up with it. The Dalai Lama says one of the fundamental questions in life is whether we have learned to let go.

Not yet.

I am still learning this lesson and it is a painful one. Letting go of painful things is very difficult for me.

Like many traumatized or abused children, certain kinds of dismissal or rejection are especially painful, they become embedded in my consciousness, like many traumas. They are dangerous.

I’ll give you one example of many:

I had a dear friend who was precious to me when I moved upstate, we saw one another often and talked every day, and for years. I helped him through some crises in every way I could, he was like a brother to me. I was a godfather to one of his children, to whom I was very close, and often baby-sat.

I loved him very much, and believed he also loved me. He was important to me.  In some ways, he changed my life, and  for the better.

One day I went to visit him – he was one of the reasons I bought a cabin upstate – and he had moved.  He was gone, so was his family. He had sold his house.

He never told me he was moving, and never told me where he was going It hurt, and quite deeply.  He never said goodbye. I never saw  his children again. I couldn’t understand, there was no argument, not misunderstanding.

I could not fathom, and still can’t, how he could treat me in that way.

I tried a number of times to reach him, but he never responded, not to phone calls or e-mails, and other than one brief and fleeting encounter at a party, I have not seen him or spoken to him since.

I just no longer  existed in his life, I had been discarded. I sure knew how that felt.

It was  a great hurt to me, and it is a hurt still, I still run through many tortured scenarios in my mind trying to understand it, I think of trying to contact him sometimes, to try to make it right, or to apologize for something I must have done.

Sometimes, I forget it, sometimes it feels as if it just happened yesterday rather than many years ago.

I even drove by his house once or twice in a nearby city  where he had moved (this was years ago) in the hopes of running into him. It felt creepy, like stalking. Quite clearly, he wanted nothing to do with me, what was I trying to do?

But I know what I was trying to do. I was trying to heal this deep old wound.

I told a mutual friend about this once, and she said, somewhat haughtily, “well, you must have done something wrong.”

Maybe so, but I will never know what it is, and I wonder why I have not let it go, it was long ago.

But now I know what I was trying to do, I was trying to come to terms with the awful fear and pain I felt when people had mistreated me, that was sometimes terrifying to me.

Like so many children, and so many abused women, you just keep trying to work it out and push back the shame. You try to have the conversation you were never able to have: why did you do this to me? What did I do to deserve this? How could you do this to me?

This is the part other people have so much trouble grasping.

You really have to live it to feel it. I know now this had little to do with my oblivious friend, I was the last thing in the world he was thinking of.

That was just my fantasy.

And who  knew who I was really speaking to? Not him.

There are other incidents like this:  people and bosses, friends and family members that have rejected me, dismissed me, hurt me.  Some are quite recent, they are not all long ago.

I think the most painful are the ones who just vanish and never speak to me or say goodbye or explain things to me.  I feel as if I am not even worth an e-mail.

When you suffer from mental illness, you always assume it is your fault, my life is full of occurrences that were almost certainly my fault – I am no blameless angel – but which I can’t recall and don’t understand.

It can always be my fault, there is always that possibility, even if it isn’t my fault, that’s how my head works.

In recent days, I’ve had the kind of epiphany that comes with mental illness, when I realize that this problem is not a random occurrence of life, but a part of the illness itself.

I just saw it clearly after I had the urge to contact one of the people in my life I disliked the most. Why, I thought? That’s when I got the answer. It was part of my illness. Now it makes sense.

Traumatized children – soon to be recovering adults –  often  return to the source of their hurt and abuse, they want to make it right, work it out, they can’t let go of it.

In the many painful stories I’ve read about children who were sexually abused by priests, or women who were sexually harassed by men, I can’t help but notice all of the accounts of people who keep coming back to their abusers, again and again.

They blame themselves, they want to make it right, they want their dignity back. I get it completely.

I realize now that I was never friends with this person I once knew, I only thought I was. Real friends don’t say goodbye in that way, and real friendships don’t end that way.

I ran into another friend who knew my friend and me back then, and I  told him this story, and he laughed, “oh,” he said, “I know him well, he does that all the time, he’s just an asshole, he’s a bit of a coward.  He sheds people when he doesn’t need them. It’s no big deal.”

Oh, I thought, puzzled.

But it was such a big  deal to me. I hadn’t done anything wrong, then, unless you count being dumb and  obsessive, which is how I sometimes feel.

I often tell my friends, some of whom are also mentally ill, that they should never call themselves names like “dumb,” and I know better, but part of being broken and damaged is that this how you feel, quite often how you are made to feel.

Something else to guard against. I never speak poorly of my life or my work, but mental illness takes its own path sometime, and there is too often some shame attached to it.

The good thing about being mentally is that you get to recover  every day, unlike many people who suffer from untreatable chronic diseases. I have learned to live with my mental illness and am happy and productive in my life.

The other good thing is that I have tools now to deal with it. I know when to get help and how to get help, and mostly, I know how to come to terms with a problem like this, and shed it, or at least reduce it to a murmur.

One of my tools is writing about it, bringing it out into the open. Most of the time, it just dies in the light.

Sometimes, it’s not that easy.

But there is always work for people like me to do, and I can either do the work or lament my life. The latter is not an option for me.

If I ever run into the Dalai Lama and he asks me if I have learned to let go, I expect to tell him, yes, thank you, I have.

I’ve gotten rid of worse than that.