I left myself behind, in places I did not belong. I was stranded. Lost and alone, not able to find my way out, because I didn’t even know I was there. I stayed missing for a long time. Too long. But all that time I was lost to myself I was desperately trying to reach myself. This internal struggle feels like it went on forever, the fight to be seen, to be heard. Each year that passed I yearned more and more to rescue myself from the hiding places I was forced into by the endless child abuse I was subjected to. This yearning manifested as addictions. Being lost to the deepest, truest part of oneself is a core wound that needs soothing with external elixirs. You pour it in to replace the void you feel, the missing that only your soul can fill. My life happened around me, while I remained distanced from it. Loneliness grew like a vine , strangling me with isolation, and so alcohol and drugs dampened down the feelings, those pure sensations of drowning inside, trying to reach the shore to get home. All the while trying to function on the outside, and I did function. I lived my life , apart from myself, so it wasn’t my life really. It was a wonderful, wild creation from those fractured parts I had become, back where all the unspeakable things happened.
At the point in my life I could really begin to save myself, when I got sober, I discovered all those many parts of me. I thought if I could integrate them, with a lot of therapy, then I could join up to become me. The lost me. But today I know and have only just discovered, that she was actually waiting after this integration. She or I were not the end result of this work. It is only when those small child parts which make up the system which saved me were all safe, that I could emerge. I was waiting at the end and it’s now I know this trauma happened to me, not to some others outside of me. Not to someone else. This was my life, this really did happen to me. I am floored, humbled, shocked and exhausted. I am beyond words, with emotions I have never felt before. It’s all very strange to arrive here. I was not expecting it, I was not expecting this at all. It’s a shattering revelation, a spiritual encounter with the truth that has been preceded by a death like depression, as final denial falls away and I stand with myself completely whole for the first time. New life emerges. What I lived was my life, but it felt like someone else’s life entirely. A life of forgotten parts I created to hide and hold the suffering. They had been the others who forgot for me, who helped me build the total distance which saved our life.
I can finally relax. The exhaustion is overwhelming. It’s an awakening of coming home and seeing I really was THAT lost. You wait you see. You wait with hope, with a passion so intense as the real force of you is held captive. The sheer frustration of this is unbearable, hence the addictions. It’s too heavy a load to bear without that kind of help. Every true emotion is sealed to your lost consciousness, every fact you had to forget. So, reclaiming myself has been pure pain. What has felt like endless pain because going back to find yourself really is quite deadly. You have to relive all of that, the emotions, the forgotten stories. You experience the feelings you could not feel back then, as each small part thaws out, you travel back in time, holding each with love and compassion until they are ALL heard completely. It’s like pushing on through the jungle, pulling the forest apart to reach the centre, that shaft of light in the middle. A clear spot, where you stand and breathe holding yourself to yourself. Still. Whole. Safe. I’ve never known this sense so completely.
Being broken and lost by a childhood filled with abuse and terror steals your soul. This work , all this work I’ve done was to get back to myself, the pain was to get back. You are there at the end of all this work and you don’t even see yourself coming. You think you are already there, but then you are revealed to yourself , as if by surprise and out loud you say, this happened to me. I feel as if my life is beginning again. No wonder as survivors we are angry. Anger is not a big enough word for the loss is it. Anger doesn’t cover it. We are stolen by abuse and we are trapped, so we fight to find a way out, a way back to who we really are, before we made the forgetting adaptations which saved us from the horror. I feel awe in the will we have as humans to survive atrocities. We survive by striving for our own truths, our integrity without which I became a shell who fought for others, but needed to fight for herself/myself. Love has carried me through it all, love for this wonderful life we are given and the love I was blessed with from nature and all of the people who have been sent to me, to help me along the way. I know now this was my life. I will sit with this and get used to it.