At random moments it hits me this wave The grief of knowing you are gone and of our difficult journey together. And all that is left are memories And awareness of so many hidden vulnerabilities You held deep down inside Under a skin growing thin with age
It seems to me now that I am turning yet another page in the book that is my life But as I look inside the covers all I can see are blank pages waiting to be written on And there is no pen Only this ink my blood Pumping through a body trying to find its way In a world with no direction Outside
Its getting so the only place I feel that I truely belong is here at home Inside my skin Out in the world are people connecting with other people and as hard as I try my connections are not flowing The only place I feel that this river flows is deep within my own soul And yet I feel the need to give voice to it. This feeling of being a stranger in a world where I see so much but never feel truly seen
Sometimes life seems to be as though it is a dream and I am the dreamer I know that inside my own head I make up the stories I tell but not all of them are imagined From this inner reference point I only know how it feels for me I am seeing that to make any kind of demand of others is perhaps useless But does that feeling come out of a hopeless resignation that was fuelled by the fact that as I grew there was never really anyone else to depend upon?
Last night I cried during the episode of This Is Us where Kevin confronts his family in rehab with how unseen he felt growing up in a home where his mother bonded with his brother and his Dad’s attention was focused on his little sister. His brother accused him of attention seeking saying his entire rehab attempt was an attention seeking ploy. Why is it that our need for attention is denigrated in the way it is by those who got plenty of it? Its a double hurt to be needing attention and then accused of attention seeking as though it was some kind of crime or slight upon others.
But it wasnt only this that made me cry. In the session they were all able to voice their view and in the end find reconciliation. At least the truth they felt was spoken and finally heard even if on some level defended against by everyone at first. But what broke my heart open most was the scence in which young Kevin found his brother’s glasses that his Mum accused him of stealing hiding under the bed in the middle of a storm, excited he runs to the bedroom to give them to his Mum and share the discovery only to find the sister and brother asleep in bed in the middle of Mum and Dad. Kevin pulls a pillow and blanket off the chair and goes to sleep on the floor. In the rehab scene the mother admits that Randall, his adoptive brother was ‘easier to love’ later she tells Kevin how he used to pull away from her and always seemed like he didnt need her as much and then to be falsely accused of something he didnt do well that would make a child want to pull away for sure.
This blog is a bit of a consciousness stream because the scene in the show last night seemed to turn all of the cells in my body to liquid, I cried with the realistion of how parents can love us but not manage to express it in the ways we so often need, they may not sense what we need or understand how to give it, they may not realise we needed them as much as we did and maybe they were not allowed to need either and so had to deny. But to deny that we needed something, well it hurts and leaves us living a lie, one we may have to deny the truth of through addictions. Also to not be noticed or to be blamed for things we did not do hurts and the frustration of that injustice when there is no where for a protest to go then gets buried down so deep inside and often reenacted on our body. We need an outlet but often it so hard because so many things that happen to us when young go unnoticed but never the less in some way they remain imprinted on our bodies and souls, difficult to find the way back to the truth of making us struggle in unknown ways hidden so often under a cover of silence and unable to even be voiced understood spoken or made sense of.
Emerging From The Dark Night 