before, i was dying

_{A chapter from my story towards healing}

I felt alive only when my blood would seep through with adrenaline: the numbing excitement, the buzzing of sensation through my body. It would be familiar yet always new, different – what will it bring this time? I constructed my life like an addict, ensuring that my next hit is easily attainable. It was from my job, my relationship, a current circumstance or if none of those would give me that rush, I would somehow obtain it – drive fast, argue, bang doors, date dangerously. Get a new tattoo? Lift the heaviest weight I have ever lifted? Drink to anaesthetise myself and pretend to love someone, even if only for one night. Pretend to be loved in return. Pretend it never happened. 

Peace was a threatening state. I’d be terrified of it. I would be frightened at the prospect of being bored, of monotony – peace felt boring. 

I would find the Quiet louder than a whole world screaming at me. With a lack of stimulation, with darkness and no noise, my Pain would speak her truth and I did not want to hear it. I knew that as soon as I started listening to Her, my whole life would have to change. Listening to my Pain would  mean I could no longer run away from Her. 

My refusal to listen only meant that She began expressing herself differently – not through words in my quietness anymore, but through sensations. Back pain, a fogginess in my mind like mist, pain in my belly and inability to numb myself with food because that did not work anymore. She began showing up differently, subtly, demanding that I Feel Her, knowing that I could no longer ignore Her call. She was the tiredness after a long night of sleep, the nightmares, the lack of excitement in the morning, the lack of joy at the thought of dragging myself through another day. She showed up as exhaustion, as emotional numbness. She showed up as a frozen body – she made sure that I can never feel the pleasure of soft pursed lips kissing my skin. She made sure that She has removed from me all that is deeply necessary for my thriving: pleasure, joy, meaning, connection. Will you hear me now? Will you listen to My truth?

I had no choice, and I finally sat down. Tell me now, I am listening. I see you. I hear you. Tell me now. 

The simple act of listening to my pain, of acknowledging my suffering, of seeing what broke me when I was young and fragile and couldn’t defend myself – the simple process of bearing witness to my pain opened up a new life for me. Identities, labels, distractions – they all dissolved. My whole life fell apart. I can no longer lie to myself. I bid farewell to the places I planted myself into as a response to trauma. 

For me, it meant seeing how dead I was in my aliveness. A body kept functioning by the next hit of adrenaline because that was the only thing that made me feel. The only thing that made me feel human, that I exist. 

What follows is the allowance of grief to flood in like a river that cleanses. Grief comes with the realisation that the part of me that I am leaving is the part that kept me surviving until today. My heart pulses with love for the girl that loved too much, and ate too much, and drank too much, and ran to exhaustion, and worked until burning, and swallowed the tears because strong girls were not allowed to cry, and swallowed her anger because good girls were not allowed to scream. I feel love and so much forgiveness for the girl that made the choices for my life, choices which were an attempt to save me from drowning, an attempt to give meaning to the emptiness inside. She did her best with what she knew at the time. I let her go.

There is grief, but there is also a new feeling: peace. I feel peace and on some days I go out and sit with the trees and yes we are bored, but we are joyful in that nothingness of Being. I go to the forest with my Pain and hear Her stories, Her realisations, Her longings every day, and yes my body is no longer buzzing with the electric rollercoaster of sensations that fooled me into thinking that’s aliveness. 

I welcome this new way of being. Human, feeling, no longer afraid. I offer my gratitude to this Winter that allowed me to dissolve and begin again.