I am watching the day die slowly
As the cicadas and frogs
Begin to sing loudly
Drowning out the sounds
Of the city around me
And the light fades to
Gold, then gray…
Enriching the colors
Then draining them…
I feel the heat of the
Fading day against
My skin…somehow
Comforting and not
Oppressing despite the
Lack of a breeze.
I feel so alone, yet
Somehow not lonely,
My mind reaching
Into the silence, searching
For You….Hoping to find
Myself… at last.
I have found such unexpected joy lately. I am not ready to get into it yet…but it has been a very long time since I felt beautiful, since I felt joyous, since I felt like I had something to offer. I have had someone walk back into my life recently that reminded me who I was… and who I can and will be again.. Such an unexpected joy. I feel powerful and passionate and alive and beautiful and full of potential. I am awash in my hobbies and pleasures and passions and interests… I feel like I am coming back to life. This person has showered me in compliments, in passion, in adoration, in teasing and humor and has brought me back to myself… the me I was years ago… I left myself behind so long ago that I was lost in my pain and anger and confusion and I forgot who I was. I forgot who I was created to be. I am starting to remember. I am coming alive again… adrift and awash in Joy… finding a love I thought I had lost… finding the me I thought I had lost… Thank you my dear, wonderful, unexpected love… thank you for bringing me back to life.
She sat quietly in class
Never hearing a word-
Her mind screaming,
Racing, ravaging her thoughts…
She sat calmly, pen in hand;
Honor student….horror filled
And anguished.
Automatically, she made conversation…
She passed tests
She chatted with friends
And longed to die
To escape this pain…
She sat quietly in church
Longing for salvation
Imprisoned by religion
Preached at by her tormentors
Looking for horns
Disguised as halos.
She sat quietly at home
And smiled at the monsters
While cutting the pain
Of her soul out of her skin…
Watching the blood ooze and
Drip…with dry eyes
And emotionless face
Hiding the raging terror
In her heart.
She sat quietly in the therapist’s chair
Giving reassurances to the one
Who was supposed to help –
Praying they see
Behind her stillness
To the utter turmoil within
Not trusting anyone or anything…
Somehow comforting them
For her pain
And living with the hopelessness
That almost felt like a friend.
She stood quietly in the bathroom…
Staring at her calm face
Unwilling to meet her own gaze,
Unable to keep avoiding the horror…
The pain ravaging her from inside
And without warning-
Almost in slow motion
The avalanche began…
All the silence broke
The tears came in a torrent,
The rage, the pain…
The still, quiet girl is gone
Replaced with a woman
With a face full of anguish
Unable to sit quietly any longer –
Not willing to still her face
For the comfort of strangers
Haunted and crumbling
Shattered
Shuttering violently with each
Invasive
Intrusive
Memory.
Stumbling and falling
All along the path
To be whole.
Some days I feel like I don’t exist anymore… and in some ways I suppose I don’t. I am not the girl I was years ago… I am not the woman I was a few months ago. I am changing all the time. For the longest time I fought that tooth and nail…I thought that was a bad thing. I thought that changing meant I was losing a piece of myself ~or worse ~ all of myself. I thought I would not be me anymore. Turns out – I wasn’t. But that is ok. I began this blog to journal my healing journey. I have been runnin’ a lot lately. I have been hidin’. I have been sneakin’ around hidin’ behind syntax and proper grammar. I have been flowerin’ up my language and tryin’ to be proper. Truth is, I am so angry. I am so dang mad I could scream…and have! I have screamed, cried, prayed… I have felt lost and confused and abandoned. I have felt needy and weak. It feels like the deeper I dig the more junk I find and I feel like I will never be ‘done’. Like I will always find more junk to dig out and toss away. My current list – well, it’s loooong – but I am working on it.
I found someone in my family decided to throw away a 20 year marriage, he has just thrown it away and utterly failed his wife and son. He has been cruel and abusive and I am so disappointed in him. He hurls insults and he is so hateful. I doubt I would even recognize him anymore. Not that we are close. Those days are long over.
I am still working on my trauma therapy, having been beaten, raped, molested, abused…I just want to live, you know? To really live. I find myself tiptoeing around – literally. I find myself trying to make myself small and not to be a bother. I find myself waiting on the pain to rain down on me. It is killing me. It is killing my marriage. My husband married me, but got this docile, hiding, timid woman instead. I don’t even know who I am some days.
I am … well, not thriving… but hoping to thrive. I am tired of living on bread and water when there is steak and wine. I am ready to have my heart feast instead of hide. I want to swim in the ocean of emotion … swim, and possibly, drown. But I am ok with that. I don’t want control anymore. I want to be lost.
I have been fighting my tendency to hide from my emotions… I have been fighting to stay in my feelings and stop hiding from them. I have hidden from my heart for so long… I have felt like a chameleon. I have tried to give everyone around me what I thought they wanted… in doing this I have failed to just be myself. I have learned and am still learning that what the people who love me really want from me is for me to just be myself. How can anyone love me if I never give them a chance to know me? What do I do if I never figure out who I am? I am so afraid of this… I feel like I have spent my whole life running away from who I am…I have spent my whole life hiding… I have spent my whole life afraid. I feel like I lost this fight today…. Today I hid in TV… I hid in food.. I hid in entertainment… I buried my feelings and totally failed to sit in my skin. I was all alone and there was no one to please but myself…and I still hid and ran away from my pain, my fear… I sat in numbness… I desperately hope (and plan) to win more battles in the future… I know this one failure is not me losing the war. I can do this. I passionately love… I passionately fear… I am passionately angry and I want to fight injustice. I did not do anything to deserve the abuse and pain I endured – but I do have control and responsibility in how I react to that abuse and pain now. No more running away! I will FIGHT! I am beautiful, I am fierce, I am worthy, I am loved.
I feel so much… My heart quakes within me. I feel so overwhelmed and afraid…I feel so sad and angry… I feel so much love and longing… I feel like I am going to either explode or fall apart… I feel like I am never going to stop crying… but then I will suddenly feel like laughing… I feel like yelling, raging, tearing things…I feel like screaming… I feel so very lost.
I hate those nights when the fear creeps up on you… when you are settling in to sleep and suddenly you find your chest tightening and your thoughts racing… when you find your breath catching and you can’t get enough air into your lungs. 
I feel like I am in prison. Trapped between two lives. The life I have always lived, the life that kept me safe growing up … the life that keeps my head down and keeps me busy with things, that keeps every emotion under tight control…. and the life I long for. This life would be free… it would be an emotional roller-coaster and it frankly frightens me. I am afraid that if I embrace this life – if I just allow myself to feel what-ever I feel in the moment that I will sometimes be cruel, that I will sometimes be snappy and inconsiderate… I am afraid that I will make mistakes while I am learning how to live outside my own head and alienate people. Playing it safe is getting me nowhere…but it is the only thing I have ever known. The only time I wore my emotions on my skin was a time when I did not really care what anyone else thought – they could just take me or leave me just as I am. I was arrogant and terrified at the same time. I don’t know how to find that peace inside. I don’t know how to be what I am supposed to be.
I am a dead girl. I died a long time ago. I died when you raped me and what-ever it was deep inside me that made me “me” is gone. I don’t know how I am still walking around most days. I suppose I do it because I am on auto-pilot and the other me is at the controls, making sure I smile in the appropriate places and say the right things and hold my body posture and facial expressions in the right way so that no one will know they are talking to a zombie.
How do you bring a dead girl back to life? How do you convince her that she is safe when she doesn’t even know what “safe” means? How do you get her to trust you when you have despised her – hated her all these years. How, now, do I draw her out and show her compassion and delight. How do I warm her cold body and tell her that even though it was not ok what happened to her that it SHE will be ok… at least she will be one day.
How do I figure out how to forgive myself? I can forgive others. I have… my abusers – I forgive them all – I release them to God. I pray for them… but myself??!? I feel utterly lost here.
The dead girl… maybe I don’t bring her back to life… maybe I bury her and the robot and find out who I am without either of them helping me through life. Maybe there is another me in here … that super-secret special me who loves fresh picked flowers, slow dances, warm embraces, laughter… she loves the way long dresses feels brushing against her legs, she loves to twirl and blow dandelions to make wishes. She loves to be held and rocked and have her hair brushed… she loves surprises and presents and the smell of fresh-baked bread. She cries at the sad parts of books and movies (even if she has read/seen them a hundred times). She loves to paint and sing and take long bubble baths. She is very tenderhearted and her feelings are easily hurt. She is fierce and protective and makes lots of mistakes.
How do I do this? How do I move on from what I had to become to what I truly am? This feels impossible and I feel so lost and alone and afraid. I pray for help…God, please help me…
captivatingbitter 