(Warning: Contents may be triggering and not appropriate for all readers)
Fear threatens to consume me again… just when I think I have a handle on things I feel that familiar threat rising up to consume me… I feel that self-doubt… that heart-pounding… that palm sweating… I feel intensely aware of my weaknesses and short-comings. I feel wholly inadequate. I feel so insecure and I avert my eyes in the mirror – too ashamed to meet my gaze. I hate this so much. I feel my heart break…
I was thinking the other day about one particular instance in my child-hood. I was forced by my father to kill my pet rabbits. In his mind I was not feeding them enough… or feeding them often enough… so he decided that since I was (supposedly) starving them that I should just have to kill them. He made me get them out of their hutch one at a time and hit them in the head with a piece of two-by-four and then skin them. There are not words to express how horrifying it was to do this… to hold something in your hands that you love and kill it. To be so ruled by fear that you obey without question. One of the rabbits came back to consciousness in my hands as it was being skinned and twitched and screamed… I can hear it to this day and I will never forget the terror in its eyes. My heart aches to recall it and I feel this terror and this shame rise up in me… I felt like a monster doing this… and that feeling lingers and sometimes I am afraid that I became a monster all those years ago. I don’t know how to forgive myself. I don’t know how to absolve this guilt or assuage this fear. I don’t want to go the rest of my life hating myself for this but I honestly don’t know how to ease this dark ache in my chest… this pit that opens up every time I remember.
captivatingbitter 