“Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”
Audre Lorde
I have struggled with words and motivation lately. I got crushed by a wave I didn’t see coming, I expected a hand up and instead I got punched in the mouth. I recognize, it was my own hopes and expectations that let me down, but fuck it hurt, a lot. It also spun me back into the depths of what happened and what I said, dozens of worst case scenarios swirling around my brain and dragging me back into the depths of despair.
Walking the dog today, I stopped to look at this broken concrete parking stop. I’ve walked past it hundreds of times, sometimes 3-4 times a day when I’m in the city. But today, I looked at it different. Half of it, fully intact, fully functional, if a blind man touched that side, it would seem to be working as intended. But the other end, destroyed, broken into pieces, the rebar exposed like a skeleton and laid bare to rust and rot in the sun. No amount of work or glue will ever put it back together as designed, it will lack the strength and integrity to be functional, and by extension, the entire piece is no longer serving it’s purpose, it can never be what it was.
I feel this. As I sink into the depths and assess the broken pieces of me, I learn about the characters in my shadow who have brought me to this place, I see parts of each of them laying on the floor. None of them seem like they can whole again, none of them can be what they were. The characters can’t even go back to the relationship they had with one another. Some are stronger and will have a bigger role, some have been completely dismantled and lie bleeding on the floor. The me who was won’t ever exist again. Parts of me are here, intact and growing, parts of me are shattered beyond recognition, kicked aside and discarded. And parts of me are revealing themselves for the first time, and not all of them are good or helpful, but each piece needs to be evaluated, to see where or if it fits in wherever and whatever I end up.
I guess in the end, I had to shatter, I have to try and put what pieces I can salvage back together, and I have to let some of it rot in the sun.
Peace ~ JMH
