Hope

Before I had a sense of self, I bounced around untethered, no roots, no home or sense of place, no true belonging. I don’t really know where this lack of self came from, but I do remember that just before I found it, my therapist at the time asked me “have you ever truly decided to just be happy?”

I can’t remember my response at the time but I made a choice later that day to find out what emotion I WAS feeling in much the same way that several years before I had made the decision to begin fighting Slug, completely unaware of the arena I was stepping into. 

If not happiness, then what was residing in this vessel I called home? I lifted the lid to see, and just like in the myth of Pandora’s box, the force of the feelings escaping me through this acknowledgement of presence bowled me over and knocked me down. Howling sadness and knock-kneed fear galloped over me while vitriolic anger poured from the hidden caverns of my soul. They raged and swirled around me as I lay shocked and defeated beneath their storm, a hollow shell, uncertain what to do with such embodied emotion.

You see, even in my quest toward recovery I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted to win the war but I didn’t want it to be filled with gnashing teeth, claws and blood. I wanted the fight to be clean and neat, small and unobtrusive (can you see Slug?).

But my Self as a whole being had been ignored for decades at this point and she needed to be seen and witnessed in all of her gore. The hysterical witch, the vengeful crone, and the harpy bitch demand to be seen if I wished to spend time with the joyful maiden. 

I had been floating in a grey and abysmal sea of nothingness waiting for something bigger to swallow me. I hadn’t realised or been taught that feelings and emotions were safe to be felt, that they’re necessary and needed. I believe that I had been taught that I should always be calm; like a man-made pond, unchanging and still, void of surprises both good and bad. When an emotion came by to visit I would push it down, away from the surface where other people could see it, and smother it in the darkness.

The surface was still, but inside I was filled with an unacknowledged life, and in order for me to live, I had to release and realise all that I had experienced.

When I finally lifted the lid to see what I had covered, it was those fast, hot, and volatile feelings that flew out first, eager to be seen so they could move on and end the fight that had brought them to me in the first place. Then came shame and self pity, a seemingly endless, two-headed beast of a thing that felt like seeing an old best friend who you broke up with badly, filled with remorse that belonged to the past.

Then, just like in Pandora’s fable, a final feeling emerged who was perhaps the scariest of them all, hope. 

Sitting down there this whole time, hope (my very own) was alive and well. Living amongst the feelings that felt unsafe to me to feel, hope had remained untouched and undefeated, ready and willing to rise and resist, as only hope can. Hope has always believed in me… which means that I have always believed in me, my Self was there the whole time!

I am not just hope, nor am I only shame or fear. I am not only neat, clean and calm, nor am I only a mess-filled sludge pot of muck. I am all of it, all at once, rolled up together to form the exquisite being that is me. 

I’ve thrown the lid away with the intention to no longer push anything down and trap it within me. My new practise is to see it, feel it, validate its existence and move on.

I’m safe and filled with hope.

XXX ALi