No More Crazy Sorrow Through the Painted Glass

July 19th, 2015

“you saw it all at a glance and you burned…
that the sky would lift, that I’d find my place
that I see my face in the dark…
then the sun would glimpse
on a time well spent
on a time that ain’t no more
takes a broken heart in a vacant lot
to see the fruit that rots on the tray
that I turn my head, leave it all for dead
and it’s iin my mind always
honey lately, love on my mind
Someone tell me where did it go, darling I’m damned if I know
I saw it all at a glance and I burned…
drag a solid kiss on this cup I bless
watch a new light twist on the day…
that the sky would lift, that I’d find my place
like a new snow drift on the gray…”

I am getting stronger. After my life so far, for the first time, I am getting stronger. I am finding myself. I can feel my strength and I cried and said “thank you thank you” to God, to faith, to courage, to fighting, to myself. I am fighting and winning. I am having break throughs, I am remembering the hard, terrifying flashbacks and happenings and I am not afraid. I am subconsciously feeling things, I am choosing to not lay down and dissociate, I am opening, I am allowing myself time. Time to feel things, to see, to understand, to have compassion for myself. I may be a stranger to my friends or was, but I am finding myself, a self I have never known. I am not a stranger to my loved ones. It’s like watching them watch me grow, and I am overwhelmed by their love and endurance through all this. I am at my white tin kitchen table, shaky and thankful and loving and grieving and struck by how I am not afraid, how I feel courage and strength and pride, listening to David Gray’s “Lately” on repeat.
The nightmares are all water and dissociating, dying dolls and breaking necks, being naked and clinging to my stepfather, his excuse for my body against him because I don’t want to drown because I can’t swim. My step siblings with me being videotaped by my stepfather SCOTT, and their faces look like they are dead or dying inside, and I am in it too. My fear of water. Him watching me iin the shower and showing up in my room in his underwear when I was sixteen. And I can stomach it. I can look at it now. I keep “coming to” in the shower in the middle of the night. All these water dreams and I am waking up literally in the shower, or I wake up and I am dripping wet with towels on, not remembering the shower. What is this telling me? And yesterday I broke shit, threw shit, was so, so angry, I haven’t done that since I was sixteen, like I am allowing the feelings to happen. I am not laying down and dissociating, I am ready in steps to face myself and what I do to avoid and forget, and I am not lately. Over the past six months I am awakening. I shake but I am not afraid.
Mom found a little book from grams for me in her cedar chest. In her writing it says she loves me, and the first page said this:
“See each morning a world made anew, as if it were the morning of the very first day;…treasure and use it, as if it were the final hour of the very last day.
Time…is a sacred gift, and each day is a little life.” –John Lubbock

I am burning. I am alive. I have never felt this way. I am not under the illusion that I am healed. I am learning to cope. There is no cure for people like me. But there is healing and progress and promise for love and understanding and self search. I never thought this would come to me. I thought for years it would be over, it was over, I had no future and no hope. My therapist/psychologist—I am trusting her slowly, I am telling her THE TRUTH, which is so many things. So many things only she knows. And that’s ok. Because these stories, these feelings, these thoughts and realizations are mine and mine alone. I don’t need to look at others anymore to see how I should feel, how I appear, what is right and wrong. I didn’t just wake up, this has taken a lot of dark work, a lot. It takes so much. And now I can see that. And the work continues, and it may get harder, but I am stronger. I have loved ones. And I am learning to be ok with who I am, and I am on my way to loving her. Me.