I am grateful that I have come to a decision this morning to pack up the past, the hurt, the fear of Mother and Brother into an imaginary chest and bury it at sea. I just need to stop processing, stop exploring, stop trying to figure it all out, stop trying to heal the wound, it is terminal. It hurts like an acid bath in my mind and adds pain to my body and strips my spirit of all joy. The past is done. It done me. Time to cut the ties that bind and bury the past. A Sea Burial as fits a woman who lives by the Moon and Tides of bipolarity. I will still of course be a daughter, but I don’t have to be a sister. And when Mum passes I do not have to be a daughter, and that will be a huge relief and probably grief, until then I can be in role of love and care and must, because life demands it.
2nd December 2016.
.... and today is the last session with a psychologist and this is what I have written for her because I can say in writing what can not be said in the spoken word.
CONSIGNMENT
No matter how many times I come at it.
Enquiring. Having fallen apart yet again.
What can be done?
And open to the flaying of terrors past.
I find myself undone.
I was done.
They did me in.
And yet here fifty years later.
I am still…
Loving
Compassionate.
Curious.
Talented.
Insightful.
Courageous.
Resilient.
Strong.
The many tears and fears of this little girl
Not all will be known, not all can be told.
So when the silencing that was tied about my mind
at 2, at 4, at 5, at 6, at 7, at 8, at, 9, at 10, at 11, at 12
makes me mute. I cannot find the words to undo what was done.
When an un-thoughtful, selfish gift to my Mother made by the others
that is the Elephant in the Room
can bring me undone, unravel me - I am still
Frightened
Vulnerable
Silenced
Quaking
Shaking
Scarred
Scared.
It is time to decide for myself what must be done to keep me safe and give me back my joy.
Do I keep Exploring?
or …
Do I say I have traversed these lands
for half a century and still do not know them.
That I will never understand them.
They are badlands, full of creatures made by other’s ambivalence or hurt.
They flap at my mind, shadows and demons of other people’s pasts.
No sense can be made of them by me.
Because they are not mine.
And should never have been.
I stand now, by choice
On the prow of my own ship.
Sails Unfurled. Attitude chosen.
A Sea Chest prepared for burial,
Full of all the sharp eyed,
nasty taloned raptors
who pick at my mind’s-eye and
create scenes anew so long past,
re-lived and re-burdened.
Over and Over.
Sisyphus comes to mind.
The boulder on my shoulder
is not my own.
I have felt doomed to push it up the hill,
to have it fall back to the beginning of me, infinitely.
To be the one that bears the load, alone.
I will to never push that boulder up that damned hill again!
Other people populated my life with their acting out.
It is time they were done and gone.
No sense can be made of another’s madness.
Other people’s madnesses.
Their martyrdom.
Their Saint Sebastians.
They populated me with their own Pandora’s box
And took away even hope.
They are Pillars of Salt.
I will not look back.
I consign their load to the deep.
May it stay there at rest.
For my own Self’s sake.
I am too old for this battle.
Comes a day a warrior puts away the sword.
This warrior knows the shield never worked.
So Chest - full of things that hurt and flail me,
I consign all of thee to the deep.
With octopus and shark, with starfish and lobsters for company.
To be the guardians of those things that should never have been.
I bury thee in the deep.
_____________________
Moongal
