The winter-shorn
trees scratch calligraphy
against the sky and
I strain my eyes
to see what
truth lies there.
Straining my ears,
I listen to the
whispering leaves
and wait
breathless
for the words
they speak.
My heart
yearns… longs
to know their
secrets… to feel
their comfort.
To be swept away.
A brittle leaf on the
October wind.
(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.
I’ve been absent from the electronic world for quite a while now… I’ve been working on a wonderful book called “The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse” by Laura Davis and Ellen Bass. It’s a wonderful therapeutic tool with several writing and meditation exercises. This book has taken me on a journey though my anger, my pain and my memories. Through it I am finding connections to my past in many unexpected places and through many maladaptive coping mechanisms. I am learning to identify survival techniques that helped me claw my way out of hell but are no longer serving me now. I am learning to honor those defense mechanisms and to release them. By no means have I “arrived” but for possibly the first time in my life I am consistently traveling on the road to healing. If you will permit me I would like to share more of that healing journey with you through sharing my journaling from this wonderful book as well as my writing exercises from it and an honest look at my anger and fear and the relinquishment of the same. May love and peace find you-may it find me as well.
captivatingbitter 