As I sat a moment ago reading my book How We Love and becoming fully engaged with the content and writing it occurred to me how important it is, where our attention is drawn. Earlier on the way to therapy I was listening to a TED talk by a woman whose husband died of alcoholism after about 4 attempts to gain abstinence, heart failure took him and after the death struggling with grief she shared how important it was for her to choose to live again and engage with joy.
Later in Kat’s room I thought of the many silent sorrows we carry in addiction, that thr dead husband of this woman carried to his grave. The talk also addressed our need to reach out in our pain, to be honest, free of shame and connect. That is what open AA meetings gave me but sadly often my pains were hidden under the story of my addiction and that moment of profound spiritual transformation following my first meeting in early December 1993 when the reality of the possibility of never drinking alcohol again one day at a time awakened. In fact it would take many many years more of sobriety, of not picking up a drink or a drug a day at a time for buried emotional truths to emerge.
It’s nearly 28 years since that Wednesday evening where I first heard other stories of recovery, and it took some weeks for me to connect with anyone, or share. And there has been so much go down since then, marriage, a move overseas, holding my older sisters hand on the night before we made the painful decision to take her off life support. Tears shared, anger erupting, separation, comings together, divorce, seizures in my grand niece, visits and reconnection with some og my older sister’s sons, depths of isolation and anguish at times in the quest to find my way home to my soul and the death of my Mum coming up for 4 years ago.
Today in therapy reading the poem Trying? my fists were clenched with pain and anger and then I was punching out at those who tore me down, shamed and invalidated me, and the words of the accompanying song I shared “you don’t see me as I am” were particularly poignant reminding me not everyone really CAN SEE US. But how important it is for our mental health to find those who do.
Many believe mental illness comes from never being truly seen or ‘got’, having to play a role assigned or taken on in a quest to survive especially in our families
Right now I seem to be shedding my ‘savoiur’ role or trying to. I actually danced after breakfast to a new song composed in lockdown by an artist that used samples of many interviews with people about its affects and wove them into a brilliant technology tapestry. It felt good to feel fully alive in my body (despite the accompanying neurological and chemical ‘storms that always comes with digesting.) Wonderful too to connect with that oh so desperately needed sense of aliveness and joy. As Jasper too jumped around me. I no longer only wish to be partially alive but that rests on me opening to ALL MY FEELINGS.
Sadly for me often old carried or arrested pain from the family and my past can eclipse that, killing off joy, self acceptance, self compassion and love, old angers can smart but the truth is that as I find the primal courage to stay connected in those depths and to allow the fires to burn in through as the cleansing floods wash my soul, in time I do emerge.
Soon it will be the Saturn return of my sobriety. I will manifest something important out of it all I am sure and even as I rage at those that hurt me, I no longer feel hate, just sadness and profound love. There but for the grace of God, go I. Kat agreed today I was so lucky to survive those final deep dark desperate lost years 1990 to 1993, all along angels,were there I have no doubt just praying in time I would find a way to wake up.
Emerging From The Dark Night 