Legacy

Here's a lovely legacy of the damage inflicted by years of abuse--times like this when I feel dreadfuly alone, isolated, cut off. Stuck on my own little ice floe and floating farther and farther away. It is an inner reality that belies what the eye sees on the external face of things. I look calm. I look cool. That is a learned behavior. Showing distress or need only brought me greater trouble when I was a child and when I was with the X. Being vulnerable was a bad thing, a victim place; it made me prey. And so, I look cool. I look calm. I look like I have no needs at all. But inside, I am a howling mad woman in a raging thunderstorm, tramping the wild heath as the wind drives the rain in horizontal gusts, and I am screaming in despair. (Yes. Imagine the energy it takes to keep that inside. And now you know why I am always so tired.)

There are certain kinds of abuse we never completely heal from. Kind of like when someone is in a disfiguring accident and lose an arm or a leg or an eye or part of their face. You go on, you function, but you are never the same. You are altered for the rest of your life. Sexual abuse does that. Repeated physical, emotional, mental abuse does that. Years of mind games and beatings. Years of heartbreak and emotional pain. Neglect. Disrespect at a phenomenal level. The injuries to trust. They change us, inside, into forms different from the ones we started out with. We learn to go on--or not--just as an amputee learns to function without a right hand or half a left leg.

I can say this with certainty: if I did not have the spirits, in all their many forms--Holy, animal, ancestral, earthy, angelic--if I did not have them to lead me and guide me and touch me and comfort me and remind me, I would be dead. If I were an atheist or an existentialist, I would be dead. I need to believe there is something greater than this earthly life, this worldly structure of human ego run amok, this place that only the eye can see. I need to believe there is something greater than this world obsessed with satisfying itself, this human world so intent on acquisition. Because that, for the most part, has been not so great. In fact, it has been a huge disappointment, a place of hollow emptiness, betrayal, and pain. Heartbreak. Cruelty. I need to believe there is more than this, that what I feel with my heart and see with my inner vision and hear with my inner sense of hearing is true. Because it is true, it has touched me and saved me countless times. It has spoken to me, and taught me truths. Without the spirits, I would be dead. They have touched me, and so, I live.

What is it that impells us over and over again to go on seeking love? Is the heart so blind? And now I must ask you this: now that I have revealed this part of myself to you, will you abandon me too?

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai