Day 37 Lenten Meditation: Forgiveness

I’m not going to accept the common wisdom of this concept, which says that you should readily and automatically forgive those who have wronged you. That advice is simplistic and does hot honor the situation of those who have been wronged.

Forgiving means to stop being angry for some harm or fault. For everyday mistakes and small infractions, forgiveness is merited because the need is to move on with life.

However, for victims of aggression, anger is a powerful emotion that can give power to the powerless. It can motivate toward justice for the wronged. Automatic forgiveness relinquishes power to the wrongdoer. Anger, and thus lack of forgiveness, becomes healing.

For the victim of great injustice, of abuse, of violence, they need only forgive when they feel their lives are held back by their anger, when they no longer see themselves as victims but as survivors. They should wait until the point where they feel they have personal power without the anger. Until then, they need anger’s power.

I’m not sure anyone has the right to tell someone else when to forgive. Forgiveness is very personal, and our entreaties to “forgive and forget” often come out of our fear of anger and our desire to smooth over conflict.

Forgiveness is powerful, but only if the forgiver finds that forgiveness lightens, rather than diminishes, the soul.

Day 44 Reflection: Pain

Pain has a way of blinding us to everything else. It screams at us to stop everything and tend to us. As it should; pain exists to alert us to damage. The damage can be physical, such as torn muscle or damaged cartilage or advanced cancer, or it can be emotional such as the death of a loved one or the predations of an abuser.

Sometimes pain lasts beyond the original insult. Chronic physical pain such as arthritis lasts beyond the wear and tear that caused it. Chronic emotional pain in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder lasts far beyond the instigating factors. The time elapsed doesn’t lessen the pain in these instances.

We are taught to be stoic about our pain. We are told nobody wants to hear about our problems. We are told to tough it out, that no pain equals no gain. We ignore that very valuable alarm until we’ve lost sleep, damaged our bodies, break down, find ourselves with a gun in our hands pointed at ourselves.

Pain is an alarm. We must heed it for our own survival.

Day 37 Reflection: Recovery

Life passes peacefully, and then something bad happens. A town floods, a loved one dies, one’s dignity is violated. We feel lost, betrayed, angry that we have suffered this loss.

Then comes the slow process of recovery. Recovery doesn’t come quickly; we must go through the feelings that come with loss, the anger and the sadness and the fear. There’s no going through this quickly. We can’t recover from someone else’s timetable.

When we recover from a catastrophic event, we do not return to normal. That place is gone, destroyed by the event. We journey to a new normal, a normal where the event fades into memory and its changes to our lives are reconciled with the past.

True Confession (or I doth profess too much)

I’m going over some old ground here.

I insisted that I didn’t want to get published for the recognition, but just to fulfill a goal.

I have to confess that I lied.

I have fantasies about getting published, about becoming well enough known that someone from my hometown contacts me, and I can snub them.

It’s horribly unbecoming of me to be like that. I don’t even like to admit I have that fantasy, but I do. Let me explain, and maybe you will understand me.

I grew up different. Intelligent, socially awkward, overweight — I lived in my own little world. I suffered from pica and ate glue and pencil erasers, as well as handfuls of sugar and Bisquick. I bit my nails. I laughed when nobody else laughed, I sang out loud for no apparent reason, not caring if someone else heard. I cried when people attacked me. I whined. All together, I was that unattractive kid that nobody liked. I don’t know if I would blame them.

Being that child, I was prone to bullying from my fellow classmates and adults. By the time I reached high school, I had been beaten up by classmates repeatedly, sexually abused by a few people, raped by classmates, threatened with desertion by my mother.

I made myself a coccoon from the outside world — from my parents, extended family, and classmates. That coccoon was made of my fantasies, my behaviors, my wishes. In my coccoon, the monsters that everyone feared were my friends. The monsters would nurture me through the bullying, the attacks, the lack of safety I felt. As I grew older, I fell in love in my fantasies — and when I told my best friend the name of who I had a crush on, she yelled it out the window, and every popular kid in the class shamed me in the hallways.

My childhood marred me. I have trouble making friends because I don’t want to impose myself on them. I have trouble loving my snot-nosed, eraser-eating inner child. (I tend to wish I had been Marcie as a child. Marcie is me without the snot nose and eraser eating.)

I entertain sadistic fantasies about my classmates from Marseilles. I entertain the thought that someday the tables could be turned and I could, if not bully them, reject them soundly. I feel guilty about that because it’s not a “pure” reason to want to be published.

I exorcise myself by writing. This blog post is no exception.

Healing

This is a very personal poem about being healed:

My body has been torn from me.

My soul has splintered.

Sheer will moves my feet, my hands,

and keeps the molecules from spinning free.

The body remembers being whole.

The soul remembers being one with God.

May this touch give the memory of being,

so you can find the path back to yourself.

My body aches from carrying these cares,

My soul tires fast from holding self together.

I cannot ask again to be a child,

to be tucked in, to be without a care.

The body remembers the cradle of the womb.

The soul remembers union with the Infinite.

May this touch remind you of your Source

and bring you back to its seeds within yourself.

voiceless

To be a childhood abuse survivor is to exist without a voice.

Nobody hears when you tell them to stop. Nobody hears when you tell them why you’re crying.

The pain of being voiceless gets better, but the desire to be heard never goes away. It permeates one’s being like a curse that has settled into one’s DNA — “Until you get people to listen to you, you will never be whole.”

Sometimes you get people to listen to you, but it doesn’t break the spell. It never will, because it cannot erase the memory of adults saying, “Are you sure?” and shrugging off your story because you are a child and they are trusted more than you.

This is what mixes up with my feelings about getting published, and it has complicated my decisions about publishing. I want to be heard but I want to be true to my experience and ideals as well. The data from Kindle Scout doesn’t bode well for me. The last two days I’ve gotten less than 20 nominations a day; my writing doesn’t grab people. I have to accept this and go on.

My next step will be to self-publish this first work (despite the fact no one will likely not read it in the swamp of Kindle) and I’m probably going to quit querying. I then have to consider whether I will continue writing just for myself. Writing takes lots of time and I don’t have a muse to energize my soul right now, so my writing is up in the air.

So I hope you’ll stick with me and keep supporting me: