I write because words are real. It doesn’t matter if they’re ever read. It is in the writing of them that the healing happens. They’re real. And they make me real.
My life’s work is practice, the practice required to overcome trauma, the trauma caused by the abuse, the neglect & the disconnection. The trauma of having parents that didn’t provide me with even the most fundamental human requirements for anything resembling normal or healthy emotional development. The trauma of having parents who stole my soul, stole my identity, and left me an empty shell of a person, afraid of everything, unable to function in the world, and full of such deeply embedded self hatred that I believed I deserved the abuse. The trauma that led me to addiction and illness and made me a target for abuse in so very many intimate relationships. The trauma that made me believe my only purpose, and the only way I could ever hope to be okay in the world, was to somehow figure out how to twist myself into the shape that would actually cause them to love me, to see me, to say, “oh, look, she’s an actual person, a child of god, we probably shouldn’t have treated her like that, so let’s treat her better now.”
I’m practicing living in this reality every minute of every day. It’s mostly a spiritual practice. It is the practice of day to day life, of cleaning and cooking and kindness. Wash, rinse, repeat. The practice of showing up and feeling the pain and anger and fear, moving through it and slowly becoming who I really am. The practice of really feeling the joy and gratitude without always being afraid of it. The practice of learning to let someone love me and trust that their love is true and real and genuine. That last bit has been the hardest and the thing that has helped me come closest to god, to connecting to this world, to good health, to becoming a whole and real person.
And, still, there is the question of my parents. My first higher powers. What can I say to them?
I’ve forgiven what you did to childhood me. But the thing is, I’ve been an adult, living in your adult world, for more than 30 years now. And the entire time, while my life’s work has been overcoming the trauma and learning to live in reality, yours has been to continually & consistently deny my reality, to deny your part in it, to tell me that I’m crazy, wrong, mistaken. Your commitment is to deliberately misunderstanding me, shaming me, telling me I am, and always have been, the problem. This is what is unforgivable. I accept that you’ve chosen to stay stuck in the dysfunction and lies. I just can’t pretend any more that it isn’t what’s happening. And I can’t be in it with you any more.
Maybe when you abused and neglected your child you didn’t know any better. You were doing the best you could. I am willing to accept that possibility and forgive you for causing the harm, the emotional deformities, the damaged brain and empty soul.
But today you continue to deny me — bold faced, certain and proud in your defiance. That choice is unforgivable.
I certainly know the why of it. You suffered your own traumas. Your own emotional deformities. Your own emptiness. And I have compassion for you. But I cannot help you. You have chosen to stay frozen in your own trauma. Only you can choose to find a way out. You always walk your own path.
All I ever asked was to not be treated like shit. I asked for the bare minimum and you refused. That is what is unforgivable.
So I have to let go. I have to choose me, my authenticity, my reality. Because walking the tightrope between my reality and your lies almost killed me. More than once it almost finished me.
Your choices are incompatible with my reality. And I can’t expend any more energy trying to figure out how to make you see me.
I was literally fighting for my life, fighting to come back from the depth of such horrendous depression that I had to go away to a treatment center so I didn’t kill myself, and your only response was that I was making your life miserable, that your life was wrecked because of me. Literally. You literally said those words to me, in that moment. I think that was the final straw. I mean, who the fuck says that to their child, their suffering and suicidal child? I just can’t find any way to pretend my way around that.
And every time you inject yourself back into my reality with half truths, made up emergencies, fake tears, manipulations and flying monkeys, I start over again. I return to my practice.
I see it all so clearly now. And I can’t unsee it. For the first time I can honestly say, I don’t want to. I don’t want to not know the truth. I want to know it and live freely in it. I want to swim in it. It is my way out, my path to joy. It is how my empty soul is being filled up. It is radical acceptance. And it is glorious.
So every day I practice. I practice living in reality when it is joyful, when it is painful, when it is overwhelmed with grief and sadness. And every day, no matter what else reality brings me, there is gratitude. Gratitude for this life, for the willingness and learning, for the love of my chosen family, for the beauty of nature and the way I’ve learned to connect to the world through the animals I am responsible for, for true love, for service, for my higher power, and for everything that has brought me to this moment.
…
I write because my practice requires me to tell the truth, to put it out into the world, to release it from its shackles. I write because even if no one wants to read it, I have a truth to tell. Keeping secrets made me sick. So I say the quiet parts out loud. It doesn’t matter if anyone ever reads the words. It’s in the writing of them that the healing happens. They’re real. And they make me real.
