As you look back on things after being given the right fit, it starts to make sense. Sometimes the ideas and actions from your life start to come into focus. It is like when your vision is super blurry as you look at the letters on the wall and the doctor spins some lens and suddenly it is so crystal clear. The letters haven't changed, but the strength your eyes are given allows your brain to make sense of the lines in front of you. It was always B M W 2 P 6 8, but to you it was just a blur that couldn't be figured out.
I have been revisiting places along my journey. Places I went and couldn't understand why. People I encountered that I instantly felt drawn or connected to that the majority of other people did not. The decisions I made and believed were so well intended. In fact, I see now, they really were. I was labeled as a freak, a misfit and a lost cause and I now see that those were all labels people use when they cannot understand compassion, mercy and grace. When people feel uncomfortable around something, they avoid. I avoided the very things that were supposed to be helpful to me and I felt a magnet to the things society said were not. Thing is, I see now, I was not so wrong. I avoided fake and was drawn to real. Focus.
When you are adopted into a "loving and good" family, people make assumptions about you and those around you. When we see someone open their home and give of their resources, we assume it is all for the benefit of the person they extend their help to. We assume that anyone who would do that is truly a hero and some kind of superior feeling being that could never do any wrong. This is where we go wrong. Intentions are not always on the surface and only those in reciprocation of the act know the truth. So, it is not always about filling the person's needs but simply our very own.
Where am I going with this? Well, I guess you could say, I spent my life as a wound collector. I had wounds so deep that I could not even begin to understand them. My mind, I believe, protected me by burying them deep into a place I could not recognize them. It is a disconnection that happens emotionally that we truly cannot recognize because the glasses or the vision is not in focus. So, we look around and see this blurry stuff and since we never had the chance to see clearly, we assume that is how it is supposed to look. We don't tell anybody how difficult and scary it is to not really see because we first of all, we aren't really sure if we are imagining it and we also don't want to be viewed as a complainer. So, we steer and hope, and what happens is our other senses heighten. Our hearing and our touch. We start to live life feeling things others use their vision to depict. We tune into a part of the human process many people never get to experience.
So, the people and things that others may tend to avoid based on sight, we tend to feel deeper, we sense things deeper and look deeper into the heart. I can remember making friends with a group of guys from the "boys home". (that is what they called it) I can remember relating to them and somehow feeling a part of their struggle. But how? I had a home and two parents and family and all of the things we are supposed to have to succeed in life. Here is the focus part. Now I see I knew and sensed exactly where my spirit was with all of this. No matter what rhetoric I was fed, I know I too was an orphan and the day I was given to someone else did not erase that. Here were these kids with no parents living in an institution and labeled as lost causes by so many. I could understand why they were in trouble sometimes and why they were angry sometimes and why they didn't fit in. How? I understood their loss and their grief. Mine was just hidden under a false story of redemption. I remained silent, but yet my soul knew the truth.
This went on many years and as things crumbled around me in my fortress of lies, I learned to cling to people who understood my truth even though I did not understand my own. I think I thought if I could help them then I was helping me. It was a falsehood that wrote a script of deceit and confusion in my world.
I collected the wounds of others because they helped me justify my own. It helped me feel normal in a world I could not comprehend. I could not heal because I did not have the truth I needed to do so. I was fed so many lies that the recorder became all I knew.
Focusing and beginning to really see with the right support is critical along this journey. It is time to do more than collect wounds, but allow them to scab and heal. Scars are the result of a healed wound. I choose to collect scars now and take the steps necessary to really understand the difference.
Scars are proof that we went through the battle, but we found a way to survive. Let's see more scars in this world. We cannot predict or prevent wounds. They will happen to us all. What we must do, is help reassure there is a process of healing and the only way healing happens is accepting the wound that is there and giving it the care it needs. Ignoring a wound will not stop the bleeding and it only causes more because pain not dealt with breeds more pain. It spreads and it consumes.
Stop the bleeding and stop collecting. We need to heal together and be real together. Loss is real and trauma is real. If we can defeat denial we can learn to allow truth to heal.
No comments:
Post a Comment