light to dark
dark to light
sight to blind
space
age
illness
quiet
chaos
control
stuck
not knowing
not understanding
not coping
relief
grief
sorrow
despair
closing the door
opening a window
the world
reckoning with change
reckoning with no change
possibilities—
Love in the time of all of this...
Moving through the pain of this life, you inevitably confront your past. Either you repeat strategies for survival even when they do not work—or take a risk and try something else.
Change is hard. You contract. You expand. This is repeated again and again in history, in families, and in ourselves.
Dissociation—losing track of time or yourself—is nature's most basic numbing response to pain.
Rage, compulsive attachment to abusive patterns and relationships, addictions—are embedded in the nervous system as strategies for survival.
"Laziness" or compulsive overwork have both become learned cultural responses to inherited trauma.
Shame forged from abuse or profound neglect is often the result of the damage to a sense of self by a perpetrator or abusive system. They temporarily mask the fear and self loathing, which are remnants of abuse.
But what if these habits of survival could be transformed? What if the mind, the brain, the soul itself could expand beyond the contours of trauma?
What if you consider another possibility?
You cross the chasm to the unknown, questioning everything you ever held to, everything you believe about yourself, wondering about your purpose and your course. You may have to sift through the pages of your pain with more kindness than you usually exhibit for yourself.
This is the journey of recovery—dark and light, grief and relief in the process.
Nobody changes in a vacuum. You may need to test the waters with new input, new resources, new community. You might have to reckon with where you are loyal to the patterns and programs that continue to keep you stuck.
That said, maybe you depended on someone else for advice or rules or dogmas. You might have learned not to trust your own heart—your own wisdom. Those old strategies might have crowded out the sense of loneliness and memories of isolation. You gritted your teeth and turned up the volume on the words or the music, mucking through the mud on your own.
But what if you were devoid of your gadgets, podcasts, soundtracks and distractions and all the endless activity?
What if you actually move to a deeper listening?
Silence. This the opposite of isolation.
You might resist the challenge and discomfort of remembering how hard it has been to be alone without your props, to actually feel the grief and the endless inner voices of shame and self loathing—that loop again and again.
But listen. There is a truth that is always inside of you, long before you were conditioned not to trust yourself or your own wisdom.
Each time you open the window of change, in community and in solitude, it will take courage to outgrow the snakeskin of the past and expose yourself to new skin.
You and I must be tender and fierce.
You persist.
Life is a series of these explorations. You cannot wait until you are no longer afraid to grieve what you lost, but to dig deeper into the ground.
You are afraid, tender and fierce—and you persist.
If you have taken this rubble for my past
raking though it for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved on
deeper into the heart of the matter.—Adrienne Rich, Delta