Days 0815 & 0816

When I was 18 and had been assaulted in an elevator by a complete stranger, I was desperately looking for things I could control in my life. I felt like everything I understood to be true was no longer so. Things like: if you treat others well, others will treat you well. Kind of the basics of sanity really.

Looking back I can see that the two things I grabbed and ‘controlled’ were my own emotions: I’m absolutely fine! (An utterly false ‘control’ of course – much more of an ignoring and suppression.)

And the second was how what had happened to me made other people feel, specifically the people I cared about.

I didn’t want them to be upset or sad or scared because of me.

Good people don’t make other people feel bad.

Or so my logic went at the time.

So I spent an inordinate amount of energy convincing people I was fine until I had numbed every nerve in my body.

I remember lying in the bathtub late one evening and thinking how my skin couldn’t feel anything, including the heat of the water. I resisted the urge many times to test that theory by hurting myself.

Now, so many years later, I can see clearly that numbness was not the absence of feeling, but the overwhelming of it. So much so bottled up.

And sometimes the safest way to feel those feelings is to share the privilege of them with others.

Days 0589, 0590, 0591 & 0592

Wouldn’t it be something if, after something unpleasant or a certain amount of time, we humans could slough off our skin like a snake? To crawl out of our facade, to turn back and look at it sitting there, dry, inanimate and empty: that could feel like a triumph at times.
But we can’t. And snakes are gross, of course.
Instead we lose our skin a cell at a time.
But something I didn’t realise: we lose it all every 27 days.
So we are new every month.
Last January I felt refreshed by the idea that Halfman had not touched my skin, hair or anything else for exactly a year. It felt good to be ‘new’ in that way.
But to think that all the organs in my body have become new again at a much faster rate than I ever imagined; that somehow works for me.
My skin, my hair, my fingernails. My lungs, my blood … My everything. It has all been new a dozen times over. The me he touched – the me he knew and mistreated – the lovely me he shit all over: she has kept going and regenerated.
Everything touched by him has fallen onto the floor and been swept away. Or swirled down the drain. Or blown into the countless spectacular views and waterfalls and friends my life has filled with.
And yet I’m not gone.
I am here even more.
I fill my space. Or I try. And some of the time, I make that space worthwhile.

Days 0132 & 0133

I feel querulous. What does one do when faced with a male who appears to want nothing more than to enjoy one’s company? And who genuinely appears to find the myriad thoughts bazinging around my head interesting?

When I move out of this gentle company I feel utterly confused by the pleasantness of the experience. It unbalances me.

My reaction is not to trust the gut feeling of calm and to start parsing it down, start finding the hidden motivation behind this or that statement. I am working hard not to do that.

It is more than a little disappointing to realise years of bracing for someone to explode with rage at something ‘thoughtless’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘unsophisticated’ I have unknowingly and unintentionally done have set me up to be afraid to relax and just be Me.

 

Day 0085

Well it would seem ginger beer and peanut butter M&Ms can cure a broken heart. Well that and stomping through good, sticky mud in the rain to the foot of a waterfall that was nearly loud enough to drown out my ‘barbaric YAWP’. I thought maybe I could toss some of the hurt out from my tonsils and into the drippy wonder of the world that sat in front of me. I felt a bit better and had a laugh when I happened upon a young and in love couple that were just behind me on the – I had thought deserted – trail.

I sat and ate a chickpea pie looking out over a steep valley of majestic gums. And that helped a bit too.

Life is odd. And beautiful. And oddly beautiful. But mostly, it’s just bloody hard work.