Pain

I lead you to my pain. We look at it together. I ask you to get rid of it. You have another idea. You listen to my fears, and wait for me to gather my courage. And then we step into it.

You stay with me when I think I can’t bear it anymore. I’m always wrong about that, and you know it. Sometimes we pause, and then wade on.

You say you can see the other side. Blinded by tears, I can only see the next step. But I trust you, so we wade on.

Success

I started therapy out of desperation.

I was being ambushed by sorrow that felled me like a cow in an abattoir.  Brought me stunned to my knees where ever I was: at home in the kitchen, at work, walking down the street.

All I wanted from therapy was: make it stop.

And: give me my old life back.

It hasn’t stopped, and my old life is gone, gone.

Sorrow is no longer a hammer blow between the eyes.  It’s a tidal wave, an ocean.  It drowns me, spits me up coughing and dazed on the shore of my weekly session.

Every week I crawl into that room utterly without words, beaten speechless by the storms that rage across my ocean, all  my words shouted into the wind and snatched away without reaching even my own ears.  And every week I fall into the tidepool of my therapist’s commitment, sink to the still bottom, and talk without cease, words from a stranger, pages from a story I’ve never heard.

The story talks about the fabulous creatures that live in the deep, some grotesque, some beautiful.  It talks about sunlit days in the shallow lagoons.  Building sandcastles on the shore.  Swimming naked alone, or with a beautiful friend.  The majesty and eternity of the big surf breaking against the cliffs.  The beauty and terror of the tempest.  And the cold and the dark that’s waiting right at the bottom.

I’m learning to live in my ocean.  I’m learning to float.  And then to swim, and then to fish.  One day I’ll build a boat, and visit some of the other islands.  One day soon.

So…

I wake up crying every morning, and my days are tinted with a watercolour wash of longing.   I write and I dream, I’m selfish with friends and generous with strangers.  I have a note in my pocket giving me permission to laugh.  I am stunned by the beauty of the skies as often as I am by sorrow.  I don’t want my old life back anymore.  Nothing has stopped, but many things have started.

Success.

To my therapist

I’m sitting alone on the headland at the point.  Just over there is the cliff I could use if I wanted to jump.  Not tonight.  Probably not ever.  My lover says that would be a good place to jump.  I think one day she will.  If not here then somewhere else.  I wonder if I’ll know.  That will be the fulfilment and completion of my failure, absolute confirmation of the futility of every thing I do and think and feel. And as such, I suppose it doesn’t matter if I know or not.