from the past

so this is how it goes...
sara walks in, not so much walking as storming, her wool shawl ripped and dripping in the blood of someone else...
i don’t know how to say it, she admits, finally, as someone puts a drink into her hand. she turns the glass around a few times before setting it back down on the bar regretfully. about five people have taken it upon themselves to lecture us... as if we didn’t already *know* these things already. something that i’m sure you already know-- those with the greatest skills at empathy have the greatest capacity for pain. and they sometimes are the ones who have the greatest capacity for shutting it off completely.. when we were young it was generally known that i was “sensitive”. when we got a little older we recognized it as one of our mother’s main problems. she was too sensitive to the people around her. if someone’s in a strong enough emotion we’ll pick it up and carry it around. no one bothered to teach me how to shield myself from the negative stuff until i was sixteen... after my second breakdown, after i had been cutting for six years for reasons unknown at the time, after the only way i could deal with the maelstrom around me was to become completely numb. so yeah, i guess in some ways i do hold onto my pain too much and refuse to let it go... because it’s *mine*. i own it. i know that it’s mine. i know that it’s not something that someone else is projecting onto me.

the shielding, or lack thereof, also meant that i could pick up on all the abusers’ stuff. that’s what i mean when i say i understood. because i couldn’t *not* understand when there’s that much strong emotion being projected onto you, near you, and your own mind’s gone on vacation... don’t lecture me, please. say what you have to... just don’t lecture me like a naughty child. last night--[she takes a deep breath, then lets it go]-- was something else. flash after flash after flash all night long, as i’m trying to figure out what i need to say, what i want to say, whether i’m even coming back.... not your fault, any of you, just my own stuff. someone warned me recently that soon i’d reach the point where i would either freeze because i’ve said too much, or i’d get through it and come out the other side. i think i sort of got a handle on it around 2am. if i stay, it means that i suddenly have a lot more people in my life, who do care, who will listen to my insane babblings, and who will give me the time of day; caring, basically. all of my life there have been at the most, two at a time, who never stick around more than a week or so. so i honestly don’t know how to deal with twenty, thirty, or more. i don’t know the rules. i go into crisis, and there are a list of numbers. i’ve never had a list of numbers. i have a list of emails. i’ve never had a list of emails. i don’t know the rules anymore. my mind’s been turned 90 degrees from everything i used to know, just at a time when my stress levels are back where they used to be twelve years ago.
and the hardest part is that when it’s just one or two people telling you that you’re not insane for coming through alive you can just sort of nod and smile, and almost believe it but not take it to heart. because they could be wrong, are probably wrong, because two people don’t know...can easily be wrong. when it’s twenty people telling you the same thing over and over again it’s harder to smile, nod, and not believe it. i am finding it harder to keep believing that it was my fault. i’m clinging back to things i *know* i can firmly place on my shoulders.
slept with my new toy under my pillow last night. best sleep i’ve had in ages. better than a stuffie. better than anything else that i can have.[she shrugs]. still ache sometimes to have arms around me, but i can deal with that. you can always deal with the things that you have no choice over.
so you think you can handle the pain? really? it’s started coming back to me in bits and pieces. holding onto the pain because it was mine. it was the only thing that i was sure was mine. it was the only thing that i knew i wasn’t picking up from people around me. and when you’re that insecure, you take what you can get, even when it makes no sense. but when you have one thing to focus on, it becomes your life. it becomes everything to you.
i clutch tightly to my pain, refusing to give it up, because then i have to look at what else might be hiding underneath. it’s the ones who care the most that hurt the most. and i don’t know if i can deal with knowing that. i realized a few months ago that i love my father. that i always have. that nothing he ever put me through could ever change that. i remember so much. i remember more all the time. nothing can change that either....
i remember the first time i had temporary release from it. i was first hospitalized, they didn’t know what they were dealing with, and i started going into withdrawal right there on the ward. pacing the floors like a maniac, tears streaming down my face, rubbing my arms because they hurt so badly. so they called the intern on call that night and shot me full of thorazine. i remember all the pain going away. i remember the panic i should have felt, would have felt, except i couldn’t feel anything and it was different from the other numbness. i remember drifting off to sleep, my brain wrapped in lambswool...
i remember being curled in a ball on the floor of the Cold Room, techs taking my shoes and watch from me, i remember not being able to stop shaking because it hurt so much and it was starting to go away, and being scared because if it stopped hurting there would be nothing left of me. Staring at the ceiling, counting the tiles, letting my breath slow down until i was in trance, my mind unconnected in any way to my body or my soul.
i remember the withdrawal pangs getting so bad i tore through the house, looking for something, anything to tear my flesh open to ease the pain in the only way i knew how, the only way i had gotten used to... used to so much it was a full-blown addiction. there was no one then, no one ever there on that day... and i remember when i finally fell to my knees on the living room floor with a plastic pen in my hand trying to break it in half so i’d have something to use. because i had just enough self-restraint not to go to the kitchen... i remember crying because i had failed. because i had been clean for months, the first time clean in years, and now i had to start all over again with the shaking and crying and the horrible itching under my skin.
i remember the morning i overdosed on my meds, the morning i finally had the strength and the will at once to do it, i remember not feeling anything in my body or my soul... to myself, i was already dead.
this is my pain
i remember my father coming up to me one day in church, demanding to know why i wouldn’t talk to him. i remember his broken eyes. i remember him saying that he loved me. and all i could see was those hands again, when he grabbed my arm to keep me from walking away from him. i remember the bruises his fingers left on my flesh. i felt absolutely nothing when i looked him straight in the eye and said that i wished i could believe he loved me.
and back then, three years, when it broke over my head and inside my soul, when i finally realized that he didn’t love me. that he never had. that i was just something he had been saddled with against his will and that he had been trying his best to destroy me, to get me to destroy myself, so that everyone would pity him and give him things and feel sorry for him and say what a horrible daughter i had been. i remember the pain that ripped me apart.
this is my pain.
i remember stumbling out of bed sometimes every night, to wake him up from where he had fallen asleep in front of the tv, and walk him to bed. i couldn’t have been any older than eight, but it was good practice for when mama couldn’t do anything but cry and scream at the slightest jolt to her shattered nerves. i was ten when i started putting her to bed, counting out the little white and yellow pills, and putting them right into her mouth before holding the water to her lips to swallow. helping to undress her for bed, turning back the covers, starting a pattern that wouldn’t end for nine years. half my life by then, by the time i mentioned it lightly in group therapy to have everyone turn and stare at me like i’d grown a second head.
this is my pain.
i hold it to me. it gives me purpose. it is my past. it is my dowry, my legacy. it shaped me. i will not abandon it, throw it out with the garbage in the morning. my pain is the one thing that i know that i’m not picking up from anyone else. it is the one thing that i know for certain all the time that is mine... i earned it with my own tears. i’ve bled for it. others turned to drugs to ease the pain. to vodka to dull it. i embraced it so it would keep me on my toes. so that it would be something i would always remember. so that it gave me a form when there was nothing else.
under chemical restraints it’s still there. eating a hole through my heart, until they put me so far under i barely blink. i do that to myself sometimes, oversedation, so the pain is even sweeter when it comes back.
i don’t know how to live without it. i don’t know if i can learn. i’m almost positive that i don’t want to learn. it’s mine. it’s the only thing that’s always only mine, when the shielding fails. it’s the light in the window to pull me back to myself. it’s why i carve into my skin for the blood to define it, give it physical form. i’m addicted to it, to my pain.
and you tell me i should give it up?
because it’s all i know right now. ...