February 16, 2003 | 6:55 AM

I have spent the last two days watching "Six Feet Under"-- sometimes the same episodes multiple times. I have not left the house or changed my clothes or washed my hair. Just soaked up that show-- that fucked up, beautiful, spooky show again and again. And laughed at it and cried over it. I've cried more in the past twenty-four hours than I have in the past month altogether.

The wonderful thing about "Six Feet Under", is how real the characters are. They have their virtues and their flaws, their wounds and their motivations. You can understand why each person behaves the way he or she does. So much like life, where no one is good or bad (well mostly anyway) and we all do our best fumbling in darkness to be true to ourselves and do "the right thing."

When you can step out of your own pain and look at your world, see that everyone is a human being and we all have our own stories, it makes things much more clear, and paradoxically far more confusing. The trick is to come to a place of empathy for others, a place of understanding, while also knowing that you have to be the person you are. You have to be your character in the great novel that is life, and sometimes you may be at cross-purposes with other people-- even people you love.

Sometimes that means cutting the chord and moving on.

When I posted the article on triangles, the central idea of which had to do with betrayal, my reason for doing so was to illustrate that no one in such situations is "the bad guy." There are no victims. We all play out certain roles and dramas in order to learn something about ourselves and each other. The word betrayal is misleading-- it implies a bad guy and a good guy. That article dispelled any such myth. We all do what we have to do. I am not a saint nor a villain, and no one else is either. And yet whatever pain we feel, whatever resentment and hurt, needs an outlet, needs to be expressed and dealt with.

So many feelings can exist simultaneously. It is our own ability to reconcile seeming opposites, to come to terms with paradoxes, that allows us to forgive one another and to grow. That has been my entire journey over the past month. I have swung at times from an overwhelmig sense of wholeness and forgiveness to despair and anger and hurt, and back again. This is only natural. The amount I have learned about myself and others in the past month has been monumental. Sometimes, in order to achieve that kind of growth, there must be some sacrifice.

My favorite part of the triangle article was when the author referred to betrayal as a natural and healing process, a way of puncturing the false belief systems we create in order to shelter ourselves from pain. That whether we have been the betrayer or the betrayed, we are all participating in something that allows us to become more real and actualized human beings, and that if we can take a step back from our own rage or self righteousness, there is a great deal to learn from the experience.

One of my favorite memories happened during John's senior year in college. He had gone off to take a shower, and I was sitiing on his bed listening to music. Absent mindedly, I began picking my nose, and as I was staring off into space, didn't realize that he had come back into the room.

He stood there at the door, wrapped in a towel, watching me indulge in a disgusting habit, for perhaps a minute before I noticed he was there.

He had the biggest smile on his face.

I had never felt so embarresed in my entire life. I started to cry and I remember putting the blanket over my head as tears ran down my face.

He ran over to the bed and lifted the blanket off of me. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed my cheeks and my eyelids and the back of my neck and said something like,

"Don't cry little babes. You're the most beautiful girl in the whole world."

That was years ago. Things change. Things happen. People hurt each other without meanning to. Sometimes there is a point where things cannot be repaired. Where the emotional damage we have shored up is too much to bare. We wound each other. As Brenda on "Six Feet Under" said, (and I'm paraphrasing)

We are all wounded. Things happen that leave a mark in space and time. Those things live in our body as wounds. And we walk around with them for the rest of our lives until they eventually kill us.

Sometimes, when you finally say "Enough.", when you realize that there is no possible way for something to be fixed, there is a certain perspective and peace that settles over you. An understanding. A forgiveness and an acceptance.

I've been up for awhile now and I am tired. I have more to say about wounding and the transcendence it can offer, and that'll be my next entry. I'm going to talk about the myth of Chiron, the Centaur-- a myth that deals with wounding, a myth I have always been fascinated with, but never understood up until the last day or so.

For now, I am going to watch "Six Feet Under" again. And I'm going to call Debbie, 'cause we are going to The Symphony later. I spent Valentines Day saying good-bye and grieving loss. I owe myself some old fashioned fun. and I'm going to have it, come hell or high water.