Stories From the Past: Scars

Trigger warning: self-injury and suicide

There are hundreds of scars criss-crossing my body. Faded reminders of the pain from the not so distant past. I have hated these visible reminders of how bad it really was. But I still mourn as they fade and sink into the background of my skin. They are markers of my life. Twelve years of pain documented on my body.

I can still see the very first scars. The ones made with a broken bottle shard sitting under a tree near the highway. That first time, I wanted to die. Wanting to die, trying to die, those weren't new things for me. I'd already tried several other ways with obviously no success. This would be it, the ultimate escape. Back then, death was the only option I could see for getting free from the life I was trapped in.

Broken bottle shards do not make for good cutting tools. I cried because it wasn't sharp enough and then had to hide what I was doing when a classmate showed up uninvited. The burning stinging pain in my wrists got me through the rest of that week. It opened a whole new world of coping to me.

It spiralled out of control until I had to cut to make it through the day. It got harder and harder to hide, to excuse away. When I was arrested two years later they had to document any injuries on my body. I had almost 40 current self-inflicted wounds covering my arms. I wish I could say that I got the help I needed and that the self-injury stopped then. Instead I got creative. I found other ways that didn't leave a mark that could be seen by others. I continued to cut and it once again took over my life when I got a place of my own.

I'd love to say that I would have stopped on my own, but that wouldn't be the truth. I needed an external consequence that was serious enough to motivate me to stop. I still almost didn't make it. One day at a time added up to years. Four years, four months, and twenty-one days.

I wish I could say that I don't miss it. Some days that pull is still there. I don't know that it will ever go away. On the days that the pull is too strong, I trace the scars and remember. Remember the pain that drove me to cut for relief. Remember the self-hatred that demanded I punish myself for existing. Remember the lies that if I could bleed enough then maybe I wouldn't be evil. Remember that I have other tools now than this one and that I deserve gentle care from myself, rather than more scars.

Ugly Truths: Fear Runs Through My Veins

All the words are chasing each other through my brain. I'm discovering that I'm still good, too good, at hiding myself. I'm overly selective about what I will allow people to see in my life. Yes I get to choose what I share, where, when, how and there is wisdom in learning those things. Too often I justify not sharing in the name of wisdom and "Keeping myself safe". Because yes, safety and control as the Holy Grail in my world. Growing up without either, it's easy to turn them into my idol, my god, this dream I continue to chase, that leaves me exhausted and lonely. 

In the spirit of making a different choice here are some things I haven't been sharing in the way that I need to share:

1) My parents fly in late this Friday. They will be staying in town at a motel for 10 days. I haven't seen them in person for three years. I have not spent this much time with them since I moved out of their home, against their wishes 8 years ago. I am terrified to see them. I am more terrified to kick them out of my life for good. I am secretly hoping that he will be denied at the border or that he will decide to disown me for the third time (and this time I'm going to take him up on it!) 

2) I've been hitting every meeting in town for the last week and a half because I've never dealt with my parents when I was sober from all of my addictions/compulsive behaviours. I'm afraid that my sobriety won't hold up to having to deal with them. The last time they visited, I was still drinking. I have 18 months and 1 day today without alcohol in my life. All I want to do is drink. (or smoke or take pills). What I really want is to go back to self-injury. It's my primary addiction and the one that I'm still in love with even though it's been 4 years, 3 months, and 24 days since I last cut. 

3) I can't write at the moment. Not even for myself. It brings up all the lies and feelings about how writing is just one more flight of fancy that I'm too lazy to actually finish or do something with. 

4) My husband's abandonment of what was once our shared faith has caused me to shut down in my own exploration of what healthy spirituality is for me. I seem to be frozen in my own search for what this looks like for me. 

I hear the fear in my words, the fear that is driving my panic and it makes me sick. For those of you who are praying people, I would appreciate prayers on my behalf. 

Five Minute Friday: Nothing

Today I'm linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker's Five Minute Fridays. Join us? 

Nothing - well that's about what I feel like I've got today. I'm showing up with nothing. As a recovering co-dependent, there's freedom in that nothing. There is nothing that I have to do for someone else in order to ensure my emotional well being. There is nothing of yours that I have to pick up and carry.

It's still easy to find myself slipping backwards into those old habits and patterns. Reaching out to make sure that everyone else is happy, and ignoring my own needs in the process. Reaching out to care for my husband, to help him process through his feelings after yet another merry-go-round ride of blame, criticism and silence. I don't have to do that. I can walk away. I can do nothing. There's freedom there around this nothing word.

It's bigger than my husband. There isn't anything I have to do to make you like me, to make myself belong. I'm allowed to show up, with nothing but myself and that nothing + me, that's enough. I don't have to earn acceptance and belonging. It simply is - and there's nothing I can do about it. 

Patterns and Cycles

Bewildered
How did we end up back here?
Arms curled around the empty ache
As if to somehow hold myself together

Weren't we happy, connected, together?
Growing towards one another

Wrenched apart
Walls slammed into my face
Silence echoes
Mocking
Tearing at our bond

Pushed away
To stumble and fall
Blame rains down on my heart
From lips that once spoke affirmation

Defending the fragile nature of my becoming
From one sworn to cherish
Bruises would feel like welcome relief
From the battering of criticism against my soul

Intimacy has fled
Chased out
Time poured into everything but us

I exist
Shrouded in loneliness
Huddled against the shame
Trapped by unreasonable expectations

The dam breaks
Tears spill from swollen eyes
Recognition
Dawning awareness

Grief-stricken apologies
A return to different choices
The bond repaired, rewoven
Until the next time.

Sobbing on the Kitchen Floor

It's one of those seasons again.
The ones where I'm his yo-yo,
never certain which way his fingers will flick me.

Will I go hurling towards the floor yet again?
Will this be the hit that shatters my heart,
or will it only be a dent, a scratching of paint?
Or will he stop half way down, and jerk me in a circle,
weaving me in intricate patterns and knots?

He filters what is told to others,
making me the bad guy,
the unreasonable wife,
the too-fragile one,
the ball-buster.

My words become his justification
to continue to toy with my heart -
 my words,
yanked out of context,
 thrown back in my face,
slightly twisted,
 just a little bent.

He's learning to pull me close,
to hold me in his hand without having to hurl me back to the floor.
It's a learning though,
and my heart, MY heart bears
the consequences and scars of his progress.
I didn't think there was room on my heart for more scars.
Somehow he found the few unmarked places
and stabbed me clean through.

The Next Right Choice

One of the many clichés in recovery is to make the next right choice. It's served me well over the past three years. When I don't know what my next step is, or which issue to tackle next, when I haven't known what to do about the enormity of the dysfunction that I still live in because of my past - I don't have to have all of the answers, heck I don't have to have ANY of the answers. I need to make the next right choice.

It's not this pressure of perfectionism, oh I have to get it right. It's that I know I could choose to sit down and write, or I could go stare in the fridge and dream about what my next meal will be. My right choice is the one that leads me towards life, towards wholeness. It helps too, when I mess up, when I decide that I'm going to not just plan my next meal, I'm going to eat it right now too, even though I'm not hungry. It helps because I don't have to beat myself up, I can make my next right choice - to own my slip, to own that I chose medicating over feeling, and to release myself from my own judgement. I take my consequence and I make the next right choice.

Those choices add up, over and over until I'm now in this place where I no longer tie my worth to my weight. Where I like and even love who I am becoming - this introverted creative, full of scathingly brilliant ideas, who thrives on routine and is learning to live outside of the rules and the boxes. Where I can look in the mirror and see things that I like about myself, instead of only seeing what I hate. This place is one where I'm finally grateful to be alive, grateful that my best efforts to not live didn't succeed.

The past several months a recurring theme has been showing up - this theme of "I don't belong". It's not new. There were too many other things on my plate. It sucks, walking around feeling like a junior high girl left on the outside of every group. There's a lot of pain that says that it's true. There's pain that says that people would want me, value me if I was skinny. There's pain that says no one cares, you aren't unique, your words don't matter. There's pain that says I need to isolate, run away, withdraw, give up. I could do those things. I could believe all the things that my pain says. Much of what I'm feeling is based in the past. Because when I was a junior high girl, I didn't belong. I didn't fit in. I wasn't valued or cared about by my peer group. I was left out, repeatedly. Just because it was true back then doesn't mean that it's true in the present.

I've spent several days having to make my next right choice in this. Choosing to text a friend, choosing to tell my safe people how I feel, asking those closest to me to tell me one more time that I'm valued, that I matter to them, that I belong. It feels needy. It's also necessary. Some days I can hear my pain and validate what used to be true. Some days I can even list ways that it isn't true now. But some days, all I can do is add fuel to the fire and those are the days that my next right choice tells me to pick up the phone and ask for help.

This isn't going to just go away. My learning to like myself has taken years of hard work and choices. This is going to take time and choices too. It's not that I need to get rid of lies or stop believing them. My pain from then needs to be felt, to be written through, to be held and heard so it can then be released. In the process of doing that, my right choice then becomes reaching out when pain's voice drowns out my own.

Who knows, maybe three years from now I'll look back and see that I have learned to feel secure in my friendships, that I can trust that I am wanted, see that I'm valued, and feel included. Until that day, I'll keep making my next right choice.