in the past year and a half.

In a good way. I used to do so many things with this desperation to feel that I existed, that it all added up somehow. I emailed an old flame before my third to last column published and the subject line was "Googling myself to feel alive." My friend Maggie said it should be the title of my memoir.

Lately, I'm able to actually enjoy things. I think that my PTSD has calmed down a little bit from some of the more traumatic experiences I've gone through in the last few years.

I literally cringe when I read some of my old blog posts. I'm not embarrassed by the writing. But even right now, I'm crying as I write this. There's just so much sadness there. That's what My Worst Hookup Ever said to me. "I can't do this," he said. "There's so much sadness there." I was devastated.

I look at some of the pictures of myself, my complexion a wreck, my period so out of wack I could only get it back through going on the birth control pill and again, I just want to hold myself. I just want to be there for my terrified abandoned self. Obviously, I'm so very grateful for everything I've been through. I seriously could never do so much of what I do now if I hadn't been through every last minute of it.

I do believe that everyone who I've experienced life with over the last 32 years was doing the best they could at the time. I really do believe that, but it doesn't stop me from weeping. I think that it's a good kind of weeping. I'm pretty sure that it is. I believe that it is a purging, it is a ridding of the demons that plague me of a sense of peace.

Perhaps what bothers me the most is where I let my life go during the darkest parts of my twenties. I so loved my ex-husband. And I think that I do. I believe that I do. I hope that I do. I know that I do. I love and release him. That is my affirmation. But tonight, as I listened to Caroline Myss, a woman whose expertise is in healing and spiritual anatomy, she talked about what true forgiveness is.

She talked about how we say what forgiveness is, and how we may think we have it, but the truth of the matter is that we still want to see that person groveling.

I called my father tonight and he was as he always can be, gruff, inconsiderate, yelling, awkward, embarrassing and blind. I told him that I had some constructive criticism, to please be more considerate, to please not yell into the phone, please, please, please. I'm so terrified of him not being Idyllic Blind Dad. Of not being Likeable Blind Guy Dad. I'm afraid the world won't accept him if he's not in that sphere.

But the truth is, let's be honest, I'm scared of what people will think of me.

You know what is funny? I realize, I'm jumping from thought to tangent, but what is the most remarkable part about typing this is the fact that it comes free flowingly. There was a time when I would try to write and it would be jerk, stop, one sentence, jerk, stop, hatred, obsess, perfect, correct, criticize, wonder, want love, fix, correct, doubt, reassess, worry and repeat.

And now I flow.

I am OK. In some of the Oprah-esque fix-your-life stuff I'm into lately, a big conceit is that your life is a mirror of your interior life. This fascinates me to no end.

Because then, any part of the yelling, the terribleness, the awful fights, the love and then the hate that happened in my marriage that still haunts me actually makes sense.

Because I hated myself.

And now I do so less. A lot less. I'd even say I love myself.

This is progress.

I think perhaps the most difficult part of my life is forgiving myself for having let myself be in a relationship that got so bad. That I didn't let myself deserve better. And I want to forgive him and I want to forgive me.

And I want to forgive my father and I want to forgive my mother. I believe I do. I believe I'm getting better.

One of the healers that I saw at the Amma retreat spoke in this very spooky-ooky Chinese accent, Dr. Weng I believe, and she said so severely: "You have issues. With your mother."

And I lay back on the acupuncturist table and began to weep. Oh me, always with the weeping. Because I thought about what I might have internalized from my soft, gentle, loving mother who went through what she went through with my father -- the love, the kindness but then the putting up with, the absolute submission to another person's temper.

It's the temper that scares me. It was the temper that I married.

I believe that we all marry -- if we're not careful, some version of our fathers. And I know that I married one of the scariest screamingest versions of my dad possible. Also a brilliant, wonderful version. But nonetheless -- a toxic cocktail for any sense of joy and self and confidence and cockiness that had once defined me -- and which I've now since regained.

And please know -- let's be clear -- I take 100 percent responsibility for that. I do. I did that.

And I'm trying to be careful of the tendency toward "woundology," or so identifying with the pains, the victimhood of our past. I do not want to do that. But I'm also trying to be able to look at what was there. To get beyond it.

This is what I can finally do for the first time in three years.

I believe that the first year, in 2005, I was just running at 900 miles an hour with my new job at The Post and having no idea, no belief in what the future might hold. Wanting to feel my existence was justified. Eyes darting around. Trying to find goodness. Something to hold onto.

And now, all these memories are resurfacing. I can look at memories from my life. I no longer have to feel that it is all something to be shut off, to run away from, because literally as my friend Dr. Tom told me when I was so scared that my endocrine system wasn't working, when I would do anything to have my hormones functioning perfectly again: He said, "You are in survival mode. It is a non-essential system, and your body shut it down."

I was in flight or fight. I just kept fleeing and fighting.

But I'm not healed completely. There is this one wound. It is on my ankle. When things were pretty bad in early 2006 all of the sudden these veins started showing exploded-like near my feet, my sister pointed to them in San Diego, "Holy varicose," she said, and I was so ashamed, so ashamed, so ashamed, as if the literal expression of my discomfort with being tall had started to rebel by making my feet want to explode right off my body.

And so I raced to a cheapo doctor who shot me up, seeming half hung over, with a combination of lasers and injection and my feet exploded even more. A deep wound developed. The doctor said it will heal, whatever, it will heal, don't worry about it, seriously.

It has been over a year and a half and like a tattoo, like a badge, it still has not healed.

I would put makeup on it, I still do if I'm going out sometimes, and I say my little Louise Hay "You Can Heal Your Life" affirmations ("I walk forth in joy!" "Life is for me!" "I trust in the process of life!") and I pray that it heals.

I believe it will. I believe perhaps that it has been so stubborn so as to force me along the way to get to the place where I'm at right now. I might not have gone to the Amma retreat. I might not have read all the books I'm reading. I might not have come to a place where when I had a fight with the bf this weekend and he criticized me -- quite validly, I exhaled rather quickly and quoted "The Four Agreements."

Don't take things personally.

And for once in my life, I meant it.

I looked outside of myself and saw, oh yes! He has a point, and we are in this together.

There is no blame. We are in this together.

But now, I am ready to follow my own advice. To do as I suggested to a woman I met at a group meditation session a few weeks ago whose troubles never seemed to go away but only multiply, seeming to always prod her ever further on a spiritual quest, a journey to self-discovery.

"What if you could still have the journey," I proposed to her, trying to get her to calm down, to breathe, "without the pain?"

The journey. Without the pain.

What a concept.

And so tonight, I set about finishing this Caroline Myss program called "Spiritual Anatomy," a truly fascinating and provocative and maddening and hypnotic lecture series.

And I got to the point where she talks about how we THINK we've forgiven someone, something, some issue, but let's be honest -- we haven't. Most of us haven't anyway. And if we haven't forgiven, then we are literally giving up circuits of power and health in our body and forcing it to devote itself to recreating these painful memories over and over and over again.

And I had to look at myself. And see. And cringe. No, I have not fully forgiven.

So I started to write this letter to my ex.

I tried to be more honest than I've ever been in my life.

I tried my hardest. And I think I succeeded.

"Dear M., I forgive you. I've never really meant it until now because I think I always did want you to grovel or you to feel bad or you to tell me exactly why you hurt me. But you were doing the best that you could. We are all learning in this life together and you were learning. You were growing up and I was growing up and I don't think that's easy for anyone. It's hard when the hatred within you eats away at you. It eats away at your energy, your self-esteem, your sense of hope, your will to live. I really hated you, M. I hated you so fucking much because I've never loved somebody that much before. But I need to forgive myself too because I hate who I was. I hate how angry I feel at myself. I have so much rage at myself. I just think of myself being in that marriage and it makes me -- well, I had to block it out. I had to cut myself off. I couldn't even look at myself. I couldn't even bear to face reality -- my memories -- my brain is so different now. I look at life. I see -- I'm seeing right now a movie in my mind. It's me and you and we're lying out under the stars. And we're so desperately in love. But that's the key. The word desperate. What did you see in me? I don't know, M. I hope you saw good things. We're taking walks -- we're renting movies. We're on the bus to New York. We're in New England at your mom's. We're at your father's. We're at my parent's. We're in the house where it ended. The Chicago landlord's preppy name -- a predecessor to my bf's preppy name. How in the hell did I meet him? I can only guess it was through my imploring for 'love' and 'abundance' and all the rest. I'm so angry at you, M. I just always feel so much sadness when I think about what I became with you. I was pathetic. I'll agree to that now. But can we forgive ourselves for being who we were back then? Can I forgive myself for my parents? I have so much anger at them, too. When I called my father tonight, I just get so angry. He's bullied me with his anger his entire life. And my mom has taken it. It was the exact same pattern I followed with you, M. Loving someone who also hurts you tremendously. But my father, bless him, he is doing the best that he can. How can I forgive and release these people in my life who need releasing?

Dear God, please help me.

I have truly and genuinely forgiven my parents, myself, and my ex. I don't need that which hurts me. We are all learning together. I can be a loving, positive person and I can love them deeply. The piece of Scripture that just came to me is this: Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."

And then I stopped writing on my reporter's notepad.

And I got up, and I pulled out the Bible that my uncle gave me, and I Googled the passage, and I read Luke 23:34, and I wept some more, and for the first time in a long time, I felt a bit of peace.