Writing. in Phoenix

Writing is so good for me, so healthy, a much-needed release. I say things here that I don’t generally talk about in every day life, reveal so much more about myself than most people will ever know, or care to know. Husband number 2 could never really be bothered with reading and taking seriously anything I wrote. It was all just annoyance to him, a bothersome expression of feelings and thoughts that made him uncomfortable. Probably because he’s a complete narcissist. My thoughts have always felt invasive to me, and others have never hesitated to tell me how invasive they felt to them. I was considered too emotional or too analytical, I needed to just “get over it” and move on, I needed to learn how to let go, as if it’s so easy. I pity the men who are so empty-headed that they are so far out of touch with their own emotions and the emotions of others, and so closed off from the full human experience.

I’m trying to stay forward-focused, but that requires a tremendous amount of self-reflection and self-assessment. It seems as if I really have opened some floodgate within myself and memories are pouring over me like a waterfall, both things I want to remember, and things I sometimes wish I didn’t. The odd part is that I don’t feel like I’m drowning. For the first time in my life, I’m not drowning in thought and memories and pain. I’ve always experienced extremely vivid, awful memories, traumas, as if they were happening over and over again, in the current moment. They were like gunshots in my mind, or like… stabbings. Whatever I felt in those terrible moments in my life, I felt again whenever my mind would decide to dredge them up like sludge from the bottom of a deep pond. Exquisitely sharp details would emerge in a heartbeat and I would suddenly be cast into the past and have no control over it.

Now I seem to have some… not control, exactly. Now it’s as if I’m in a boat, floating calmly on a lake, watching the waterfall from a distance. It’s like I can detach myself from those memories, watch them from the outside instead of re-living them over and over again. The pain isn’t as sharp, as cutting, as it once was. Now I can witness those memories and feel only a bittersweet sadness for the girl in them because she’s not me. She’s someone else, someone separate, someone apart.

What I have also developed is the ability to recall, with perfect clarity and feeling, other memories, beautiful, sweet ones that warm my heart and make me smile. The girl in those memories never stood a chance. I feel sadness for her, too.

And now, I am me. I am a composite of three very different girls. My goal, through writing, is to bring those three girls together, meld them into one girl, one powerful woman who knows what love in all of its forms really means. A woman who knows her worth and sets her boundaries and rules those boundaries with an utter absence of self-doubt and fear. A woman who knows that she didn’t deserve all the wrong done to her, or the wrong she did to herself. A woman who has felt the full range of human emotion. A woman who can forgive all transgressions as merely symptoms of the human experience.

Last updated May 10, 2019