I Feel

Time is moving in ways that make forgetting to take my meds an easy thing to do. I've been getting a little weepy lately and crying at pieces of music or works of art or scenes on screens. It's not exactly on purpose but I'd be a liar if I called it an accident. I don't know about you but there will never be a point where I will completely accept that I'm not losing something of my self that is valuable in the trade for my sanity. So, what if I decided today that I wasn't going to attach negative emotions like shame and guilt to the tears that are coming so easily? What if I, for once, allow myself to see the beauty in this mind that was forged in so much pain and yet has spent a lifetime crying for other people's pain as though it was his own.

I'll go back on the meds. It's only been a few days. The pill jar is within my reach right now. But I'm not in danger. My mind, unaided, is me. I refuse to treat myself with such hatred as to pretend these tears or these thoughts or this vulnerability is something to be feared and repressed. Those are not words in my vocabulary of self love. I feel things. Deeply. So what?

That's a gift.

There was a time not long ago when I spent an entire year off my medication. When we talk about shedding our armor and accepting authenticity into our lives in real and meaningful ways we must first understand what that armor is and where it came from. Medication, whether we like it or not, is armor. Very necessary armor, but a potential obstacle in our understanding.

During this year in the emotional wilderness I found my way to an alternative type of therapy. I'm not even sure what you'd call it. Energy and feeling work. The woman I worked with was wonderful. A person of light. Her energy and the safety she offered my was what I needed. She would spend the first minutes calming the room. Setting a tone of openness, of acceptance and of love. Transcendent love. Not romantic or patronizing. Unconditional. A place to be me. Once we had settled in she would touch my hands and ask me what I felt. i'd think, what am i feeling? I'm not sure I knew where to even look or what I could possibly say would accurately describe the emptiness I felt at the words "what are you feeling right now".

So I would start to sob. I am not talking about a tear or even a good cry. I'm talking about a visceral response to the question "what do you feel" that language simply didn't cover. There were no words. Literally. Emotions can be like that.

What do I feel?

Me.

I am allowed to feel. She had made it so.

But how can I learn something so basic that's been denied so long?

I don't think anyone who hasn't *both* experienced dissociation and come to understand can truly understand this type of dysfunction. It's easy to read "i wasn't even a real person" and think its some sort of figure of speech if you've never had your self taken from you or struggled with this type of dysfunction. It's literal. Our sense of self is given to us. Cultivated. It can be distorted and abused. A child can be grown to be an extension of their parents in really unhealthy and damaging ways if their primary caregivers are really unhealthy and damaged. A child is a reflection. His brain a product of external stimuli. Nurture leads to nature. Trust that.

The only thing I felt was pain. That's what I had been given. That's what was reflected back. So much pain. It shouldn't surprise anyone. It's always been there. They just told me it wasn't and I shouldn't feel the way I always felt. They couldn't face what the reality of my feelings said about them. I would have to face this alone. There was a part of me that understood the pain would have to be felt. It couldn't be taken away from me by someone else. It could only make the journey through my consciousness, into my flesh and out through my body in the way of calling it what it was and expressing it. Giving it a form of its own so it would no longer infect mine. That's the thing with pain. It wants to be felt. It demands we feel and acknowledge it or it eats us up very slowly from the inside. Each time I sobbed, I felt something different. I came closer to the bottom of my pain.

Weeks turned into months and my pain turned into her pain.

What do you feel?

Uncontrollable sobbing.

But why?

What's the source?

Where are you?

Where is your self?

It was like the cork I found at the bottom had been removed and I had to withstand the bottled up tsunami of feeling that had been denied me. Unspeakable and dark emotional tides that turned up even worse roots of things long repressed. The very things I had constructed the armor to avoid feeling and seeing and accepting. It was a completely foreign experience. Scary as fuck. I wanted to feel something. I didn't want to cry uncontrollably. I didn't want to disappoint her. But this is what I felt. This was feeling in its most pure form. This was my body purging itself of a poison it had been holding onto for people who wouldn't even acknowledge it existed.

The same scene played out over and over. She did all she could. She cried. There was nothing she could do for me. I was in such a raw and broken down place. The metaphor of the phoenix rising from the ashes leaves out the part where the ashes have to be reassembled. There is a period of healing where nothing makes sense. Where we have torn ourselves down to less than zero. The rebuilding has not yet begun and there we sit, completely lost, completely exposed and fighting for our lives. I see now that what she taught me was what I needed to learn. I had a right to whatever was inside me and I would have to excavate it myself or not at all. Heal or face a fate worse than death. A life lived in a mental cage of misery.

All I could do when granted the safety to show myself, completely free from the armor I had needed to survive for 35 years was sob like a child. I was a child in that room. Those tears were the tears of a child.

These tears are as well. When I take the armor off completely the wounds are most visible. It's not something I expect to go away. I choose to see the value in honoring those wounds and allowing them the comfort of sunlight. They are deadly in the dark. They almost killed me.

These moments where I am feeling things on a higher level and responding to the world with an almost dangerous level of empathy, when the noise is too loud, no longer scare me. I don't want to be like this all the time, but its me. This is me. I will not run from myself to make anyone else comfortable. When we deal with trauma the process of sunlight may turn others off. They'll tell you to get over it or be more positive. Our lives are our lives and we have every right to explore them and talk about them with pride, free from judgement. We can walk around naked if we want. Just protect what you need to protect.