There are places I cannot go, places I have learned to stay out of. I treat my thinking like a child who needs boundaries, I coax, I tell, I nurture , I direct, I guide, I love. I am aware of the place I could go. The place that is dark and alone, where nothingness prevails. Where there is no trust. The thief of joy in my mind is an old friend that was hurt so many times why would she be able to get up off the floor ? I have schooled her well over the years, showing her there is a line we can reach, where we can sit a while and make of it whatever we will. Sometimes we have been pushed to this line by the circumstances of trauma, other times we are fully aware of where we are going and we can walk the path together, choosing our destination. When we were pushed there it was because we became overwhelmed , we were not used to all of these feelings and memories. But in the end we got used to them, we had no choice, this is what healing is. In time we accepted we had been battered to bits by rape and physical abuse in our childhood. We accepted we were left with this damage and we could not return to the fully functioning person we were. We accepted our disability because of the abuse. It hurt. It hurt so much. It still hurts. When the finality of it settled and we had finished integrating all of the trauma, we saw we had come to a point where we could choose between life and death. This is the point our acceptance had led us to. It is a line, a line in the mind. From this line we saw we could leap. In front of a car or into the unknown, trusting this, falling into a new reality, with the poverty, pain and loss it carried. We juggled the two. Each place was worthy of being, one led to the end of pain, to light and love, a return home. But this way destroyed another life, the life of my daughter. The other way was a ride into the wind, a fall off the precipice, laughing , not knowing anything would be ok ever again. It is this place I have decided to be . We have wrestled between the two. We have woken over recent months in such physical pain, which would not resolve. It brings with it other physical symptoms I have been informed come from Vagus Nerve damage, a result of Dorsal Vagal Shut Down, or playing dead when I was raped as a child. This damage has revealed itself in the last year or so. It’s going nowhere I’m afraid and for my body to bring it out into the light involved me enduring over 4 years of nightmares. The light of day shone from my body onto all the damage that was left locked, dissociated in my system. There are a number of new symptoms I have had to learn to live with, to manage from this Vagus Nerve damage. Some days are better than others. So, it is this arisen damage caused by rape that has brought me to the line in my mind. There’s a lot of light here, in the place we decide , where we know that all that exists before we got here has fallen away . We are alone and yet we aren’t. We know we can fall. We can jump and go to that place we have been before. The place of not knowing. Into the oneness, the huge space of love out there in the mind that calls to us, that place that cradled us in our playing dead, when we were so small and broken. It is a universe of light out there, in this oneness. We may have been forced there by suffering originally, so we know it well, we can never forget it lies beyond the pain. It is the line we arrive at when the pain gets too much, the gift that awaits us when we can take no more. The mind knows how to guide us, we have had to bow to its power, saying to ourselves this is too much for me, so I will trust you will take me to the line, to guide me to a place you know is better for me. Trust is that movement into the unknown, a movement into the vast universe, where stars twinkle, the sun shines and birds fly. The mind has all the answers to the pain, I will still be disabled , but I will trust my mind to lead me with love. I have done the work, I have returned to myself after all the years of work I have put in and I have been given the truth of my life. That was my choice, so here I am.
I wanted to live. But I cannot live with the reality of the damage I carry, without trust. I say this for myself. What will be ? Only the trust knows, until it is revealed. No more trying to solve, to work out , to bend myself into what I was. I can sit on this line, knowing the trust will have my back. It has never failed me before. I say this for myself. I am on the line dangling my legs over the side. Alive, breathing, laughing, seeking, loving. With my two birds beside me, watching me, calling to me as we listen to music together. You see being raped as a child was too much for me, way too much for anyone , but I wanted to live then so I found a way to survive through it all. Now I have faced it all I see again, I feel again it is all TOO MUCH. So I have to jump from the line in this mind of a girl. I will jump into the unknown and embrace life once more. I have ended over and over again and I have risen from the ending each time. I say this for myself. I say this for myself, because I know it. The rape was about power and control. My solution to it is the never ending fall of trust. Over the line to the love which lies beyond reality.