Show me your Darkness
Street art in Valparaiso, Chile.
The pain is all I feel, a piercing right through my heart, heartbrokenness
The balm of tenderness I need, of vulnerable space to heal, has also been denied.
Learning how to resolve this on my own perhaps is the lesson
or the lesson is sometimes things just never get resolved
The nightmares and images that steal away the craved forgetfulness of sleep
A single thought in my own mind exhibiting the power to shake and shiver my body in terror uncontrollably.
But they were family, how could they?
Is my paining/hurting/bleeding/dying/choking really invisible to the hearts that claim to love me?
But they were family, how can they? Is my need to live so permeable to their own tendencies and wounds?
Are the boundaries I communicate so weak compared to your discomfort of upholding them? The dis-ease you feel so much graver than the shattering of my heart?
Is holding space for me so much harder than blaming my wounds and tendencies?
I am weak, I am broken, I am bare and raw. I hate myself in this state and the rage I feel towards you does not have the power to lift me up, it just keeps dragging me further down to deeper self-loathing.
What is love? Why is love? How does one love and let in when the costs and risks are so high? How do I love and trust another again?
I don't matter. No matter how hard I try to remove that belief. All I see reflected in the eyes around me. I just don't matter. My own eyes don't see it.
Perhaps dying will relieve all of them of my burden. It will surely relieve me of this pain, of self-loathing.
That thought soothes like no other for a few seconds. The next thought — How?— brings the cacophony of terror and relief simultaneously within me.
Then a deep voice inside gives a bellowing loud ‘No’. ‘NO!’
You cannot. You will not. ‘Mother Gaia and Father Universe’ speak loudly but with love. “Intangible and invisible, yet, we see you”.
“We see your pain. Through gravity, I have held and hugged you since you were a babe. Though serendipity and strangers I have been giving you support, shelter and space.”
Mother and Father are you here? You want me to live?
In the next moment — a strange resolve births in my being — Instead of dying of my hands, I will die trying to live through this.
I will teach me to see myself with love, to love me the way I deserve. To love me the way I keep hoping my family and you will.
I AM the steward of my need to live. Upholding my boundaries IS MY sacred responsibility. I relinquish all of you of the power I gave away along with my love for you. I will now never let me down.
Time will not heal me. Nor will you. I will. And I surrender to that will, I surrender to that flickering light I see within me.
I allow this sacred light to brighten and illuminate so immensely that it may bleach my mind and being enough for me to see my unbounded power, to see that I matter. Someday, maybe never. But I will die trying.
Slowly, one step at a time. One breath at a time. I will heal. I WILL HEAL.
I am patient with myself. I am tender with myself. I am holding onto me. My life. Walking slowly, but surely towards the foggy and elusive path of living and living with self-love.
Thumbnail Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash