Risky business
08 August 2011 06:14 AM Categories: Writing prompts | The struggle | Childhood hangover | Facing fears
This is not the time to worry about how you look, about the sags and the stretch marks and the jagged lines. This is not the time to insist that the other does the same. Just stand there, vulnerable, naked, open to whatever happens next. Yeah, you try it, lady, you tell me with a roll of the eyes. You’re right, you’re right. I don’t know if I could do it either.
There are certain kinds of risk-taking that are appropriate, times when you make the leap off the cliff knowing that the drop off isn’t far or that there is a soft surface waiting to envelop you below. There are ways to game this, though the word game implies a calculated process. There are ways to remember that risking connection doesn’t mean risking your soul, baring yourself before the fully clothed. There are ways to practice it, too, ways to take little steps towards emotional freedom.
I’ve been reading lots of self-help books, oh so many, not so much on the cheesy side of things, but still, they are self-help books. The latest is about relationships when one of the partners has been through childhood trauma. Not PTSD trauma, necessarily, but, well, trauma. It’s taken me a long time to think of myself as someone who was traumatized by parts of my childhood, but now I, umm, own it. Not in a self-pitying way, but in a “yep, that was pretty bad” kind of way.
Not surprisingly, as someone who was abandoned at times, neglected and left to deal with overwhelming circumstances on my own as a child, as someone who was specifically told how bad I was and then saw how the people around me acted to prove it, well, getting naked (metaphorically) isn’t so easy. Oh, sure, it's become easier, especially in my writing. And I was reassured to read that traumatized people who can tell coherent stories about their childhoods tend not to pass the buck on to their own children, though I know I still have a ways to go there. It’s the closeness, the skin to skin stuff, that has me flummoxed, that has my heart pounding in the middle of the night, that wakes me up at 3:00 a.m. with soothing dreams of escape, of sweet sweet aloneness.
My childhood was a set up that made any deeply intimate situation feel like soul risk. It was also a set up that led to poor boundaries, to giving myself over to those who retreat, the constant pursuit of approval. I understand it more now, I do, and I think I am on a different path, but it’s still so fucking hard. To stay in the moment, to stay in my head, to read these reactions of panic as vestiges from long ago. What you think about me says less about me than it does about you, and your reactions come from your own place of darkness. It's not me, it's not me, and what is me I see with clarity now, with the distance of someone who lived those things long ago. Or I am slowly slowly getting there, on the path to freedom of a sort.
From the prompt "Time out."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Gaellery.
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