Damage control
10 October 2011 06:28 PM Categories: The struggle
This isn’t a rhetorical question. Over the last month, something inside me shifted. I moved to the right of damaged, can feel my iron core, my strength, expanding to reach its full potential. It’s an almost normal feeling. Like maybe I don’t actually have any holes to fill. I don’t need to tug on anyone’s sleeve for attention, don’t need to prove my worthiness. I am worthy.
Experienced in pain? Yes. Been through some difficult times? Yes. Kicked around by fate, bruised and left to cope alone? No longer. I don’t want to discount the effects of my childhood, but I no longer need to soothe that part of myself. This has been part of a long process of writing things that were necessarily fraught, revealing what I felt to be my ugliness, my secrets, to anyone who would read them.
Therapy has helped, too, and grounding myself in the present. I’ve realized that I don’t need to replay my childhood to make it right, that human beings are resilient and capable of change up until the very end. But one of the biggest revelations was that I created some of my darkened reality by clinging to long-ago events and by living off of fantasy in my daily life. I thought that in order to heal I had to have someone to heal me and that every rejection, real or otherwise, was a kick to the soul. I thought that the change was a mysterious substance that only the initiated could access or that I could only access by convincing the unavailable to redeem me with their love.
I don’t want to discount the love of other people, their support and friendship. My husband has stuck with me when others might not. Without his kindness, patience, and love, this process would have taken much longer. My friends, both real-world and virtual, have also been there when I needed them, empathetic and kind and necessary. (I am grateful that you are in my life.)
Normality. Everything is so everyday. My sleep is slowly improving. The dog walks are generally without tears unless they are about the heartaching beauty of life, its fleetingness. I have been a calm parent, a fount of reasonableness in the face of the boy’s occasional irrational fits, boundaries firmly in place. I am reading and studying and seeing the world around me. I am cooking food again and really tasting it. My focus is no longer on inner pain or on perceived slights, though, of course, I still have a lot of work to do.
It’s good. It’s strange. The only thing that concerns me is my withdrawal from social interaction. The only people I talk to are my family. After dropping off in Facebook participation, I’ve dropped out of Facebook (temporarily, most likely).* I have no desire to meet anyone for drinks or coffee or lunch. I barely email my friends. Maybe this is the chrysalis stage. I could need time to just be, to let the wheels continue to turn until I reach my destination.
There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home. And home is here, within me.
*FB friends -- you can email me at writingtosurvive(at)gmail.com. I dropped out without announcement and would like to "talk" to you (and I am thinking of you, Anne, in particular! xoxo).
Image of a cloudy blue Berkeley sky by me.
Edited on 10/12 to take care of an awkward mixed metaphor (how can wheels keep on turning until I get to the other shore?).
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