Beth Got Married

Today I am writing to feel.  My heart has stopped working and is a lump of ice.  Because it is ice, it doesn’t feel, and I can go through my days with a smile (albeit a false smile) on my face.  In the meantime, I am becoming nothing but ice, cold and hard.  I push people away or hide from them.  I try not to feel.

I was called on it last week.  Giving a history to a clinician, she commented that I could “tell a great tale” but have no emotional involvement in it.    She is right.  I’ve spent t. past few days trying to bring up old memories and attach feeling to them.  It isn’t as easy as it sounds.  I’ve spent years building a wall between events and feelings.  When it started it was a survival technique.  My mother had no patience for “moodiness” and rather than comfort when I hurt, I would get chastised for expressing it.  No, chastised sounds too sanitized.  I would get screamed at.  A child huddling in the corner with a terrifying woman looming over her and screaming nonsense.  Now it is just a way of keeping everyone out, so I don’t chance another dark figure coming at me.

Putting it on paper helps me so much.  I look at those words in private and I repeat them over and over.  I see the picture I have written and it is too much at first.  Then the tears come.  I do not understand the tears.  My child-mind still believes that what had happened was normal, and the person screaming was telling her she had no right to feel, so stop.  The grownup-mind needs to take over and acknowledge that the abuse she endured was far from normal and the tears help those locked up emotions out.   Again, easier said than done.

I spent today watching an old movie about a woman who regrets her past and wishes for a changed life, Peggy Sue Got Married.  I can relate.  I wish I had stood up to my abuser when I was much younger and changed the course of my adult life.  I wish I had left my parents house and finished college.  College has stuck with me.  I’ve tried to finish a number of times.  I probably have enough credits in various majors to complete two bachelors’ at least!  First my parents and then the mental health problems they contributed to kept me from this.  Just as with the main character in my movie, I do come to the realization that if I change the past, I negate the present.  I can’t imagine my life without my husband and children.  They are light and life in my existence.  Still the past in all its imperfection is there.  I can mourn it.  I can get a box of tissues and remember how curious I was and how exhilarated I was to learn.  Then I can cry.  If I don’t, it stays locked up in the ice fortress of my heart and slowly kills whatever is healthy near it.

I feel like a bottle of champagne.  I’ve shaken the bottle with my feelings and the cork is slowly pushing itself out.  Will it be a celebration or just a big mess when it finally pops?  I don’t think I care.  The weight of this mess pressing on my heart is unendurable.  I bear it like a weightlifter who has taken on more weight than he can handle.  I constantly feel suffocated to the point where I won’t let others even hug me or hold me.  Trying to be safe without emotion, I eat constantly to build that wall.  Feeling that emotion, I feel purified, cleansed.

I want to use a flame thrower and melt my heart but know that easy answers will make things worse.  If I work diligently, the iciness of winter will gradually thaw with the warmth of my emotions, and my heart will be reborn in the spring.  I pray for the courageousness it will take to pry that wall down and let the feelings out.  Fear keeps me from so much.