this messy flawed experience of being human

I have a terror of mess. There I said it and owned it. It comes from my Mum and the way we had to have everything so tidy and controlled, a friend of ours told me a few years ago that when she would come to our house in the late 1960 and early 1970s things were run like a military operation. I remember from a young age being taught the best way to polish my shoes and I had to iron my school uniform on Sunday afternoons. Probably a lot of that discipline was good but we also had to be quiet and not make too much noise. I know my fatherless mother was whipped out of classes to clean the Nun’s chapel or forced to stand in the corner with a dunces cap on and its no wonder she wanted to skip classes all the time.

This kind of reigning ourselves in extended to the bit and bridle torture headset I had to wear when my straight if a trifle bucked teeth were braced from the age of 15. When I crashed and burned at 17 a few months after the braces came off I lost my front teeth anyway and after two reconstructions I now wear a denture and have head spins I have to manage every day for up to 5 hours a day. My teeth are aching in my head as I write this and my anxiety level which is repressed energy screaming is now vocalising at least on a cellular level…. I feel the twin forces of the desire to express and the force to stay repressed battling within me almost daily.

As I said I grew up feeling I had to have it ‘all under control’, I had to pretend because I learned early on the adults weren’t noticing anything and so it wasn’t good to have any needs. I learned I had to lock it all down inside (it is what I saw my father do as he smoked his 20 a day and had those two scotch whiskies every night at 6 pm). So it was natural I started to look to substances when my father refused to let me finish my teaching degree and rebond with the friends I had to leave to get away after my sister nearly died from an aneurysm. All this shit was done to me but if I ever got angry at all or lashed out (this is after I got sober and was no longer silently internalising the struggle) THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME ACCORDING TO SO CALLED FRIENDS OR RELATIVES. It makes me so angry that justified thwarting, frustration, pain, self expression or anger is judged as ‘insane’ or ‘mad’. How many supposedly ‘cray cray’ people or addicts are just angry about the unfair shit they were dished out and then blame themselves or continue to be blamed and shamed by an uncaring society? Why the fuck is it so hard to see the deeper truth beyond our sterilised, sanitised ‘kept it cool’ prohibitions????

Own the rage is what I say if you don’t want to be a rat in a cage forever, that said misdirected anger and assertive life energy must for our emotional, mental and spiritual health be rechannelled and expressed cleanly and appropriately or it may end up causing more damage and shattered connections. This I believe is why so many people who have been invalidated and unseen end up seeing no other alternative or way but to take their own lives, they don’t get to own what they feel and work it through with the right kind of internal or external support. We have to learn ways to direct the feelings we feel an constructive ways and that can be hard to do when we don’t fully recognise the jumbled up mess they may have become over years of emotional neglect of ourselves. We need to turn reactions into responses which is why its so important to get a trigger on our full range of emotions and triggers.

I hope in time to be free of my own deep shame which seems to be emerging more and more around me in these past few weeks as Mercury has stationed direct. I have had transiting Mars and Venus and the Sun all squaring my natal Neptune in square to Sun Mercury Venus and Jupiter nodal axis over the past few weeks. Neptune rules unclarity fog and confusion as well as emotional tangles. I see my own confusion at times over so much of our family history. I have seen it all, attempted suicide, addiction, terrible physical and emotional trauma and isolation, I have suffered it all too. I like to think that none of this trauma I have suffered nor my struggle with my human flawed messy state marks me as that different to anyone else out there. We all struggle in some ways, so it would be great if we could ease the hell up both on ourselves and others too at times and just allow others to be wounded, flawed or messy too and find ways to resolve and work things through. Many unmet needs trigger so many of our reactions.

I am not here condoning abuse or dysfunctional behaviour at all, rather trying to speak up for acknowledging the complex roots of what happens to us in family and a society in which we become entangled with all kinds of collective traumas too. I am pleading for an emotional insightful take on the guts of what it means to be human and struggle with all of our desires, shame, hopes, dreams and fears, rather than just misjudge them or hide or bury them all away in stay safe and cosy, too hard basket. For it seems to me that it is our preparedness to face question and wrangle with the many turmoils, suffering and struggles life presents us with that engenders both friction and growth. It is our willingness to try even though we know we won’t always ‘get it right’ or may fail or fall short of the mark and yet still be brave enough to keep extending ourselves to experiment and try new things, to give, receive and express love. This preparedness marks the degree to which we consciously awaken and consent to the life that emerges as we live the journey onwards navigating all the twists and turns along the road of that journey.