What No Lifeguard Wants to Admit

At the coffee shop where I always cry, I decide to go to the front “yard” to enjoy some cannabis. While there I see a flyer for a “grief walk”, which described a grief walk as a guided walk through the forest, hosted by listeningtogrief.org. I went to the website, read the process of this therapist on the landing page, and immediately began crying. As I consider what it would feel like to acknowledge all of my loss. To begin looking at each of the craters in my heart where parts of my life were ripped from me. Leaving tears in my spirit. Holes in my soul. Cutting off resources to keep these parts of me alive. It is as if, for the last 7 ½ years, I have been a lifeguard, one of the best, watching different versions of me, parts of my being, parts of the sum that make me who I am, drowning in the murky waters of caves where my pain was relegated. Knowing that if I kept going in the water to save these parts that simply aren’t capable of surviving in these environments, that it was going to kill me. So I did the thing no lifeguard ever wants to, and many of the best don’t, I stopped going in the water. I stopped going in the water for others, first. I stopped speaking the truth to power because power has become so inept, so apart from reality, so separated from intelligence and understanding, that I couldn’t take their onslaught of stupidity with every piece of truth I spoke (I’ll get into truth as a topic later, but don’t get hung up on that). I wanted to end my life because there are so many of them. Ukraine was a real breaking point though. And then Palestine. My god, Palestine. Palestine is what finally broke me. I stopped going in the water for Palestinians. It fucking sucked. I grieved for them as I told them I could no longer even speak up for them. If I was ever going to go back in the water, I couldn’t go right then. I needed to rest. I needed to heal. I was dying. And I would have killed myself going back out into the water. It has been said of me that I am like a puppy because I talk, and play, and laugh, and eat, and express, and emote, and move until I stop, and I fall asleep. Well I am the same way when it comes to rescuing people. I wouldn’t have stopped going in the water. Depression was the one who said, we can’t keep this up. But that wasn’t enough. I was still going into the water. But I was going into the water for me. For parts of me. For younger versions of me that have been doing their best. But they aren’t strong enough for this storm. They aren’t equipped for the treachery where pain lives. Because they’ve never been down there. But there is so much pain that it has started to come where these ill-equipped versions of me live. And take them down to the dark places. To show them that we have to change. We have to start listening to loss. We must listen to pain. We must acknowledge it. We must feel it. We must experience it. We must express it. We must let it out. Pain does not want to stay in you. It is eager to be free. Only the patriarchy within us is keeping it down there. Therefore, the first act we can take against the patriarchy is to learn to listen to our loss. To learn the sounds of pain in our bodies. To feel them. To understand how emotional and psychological pain manifest themselves in the body. You have tight hips because of trauma. You have a bad back because of trauma. You have sciatica because of trauma. You have migraines because of trauma. Once we begin to seek out our pain, who will take us to loss, who will show us the wounds we’ve ignored, then we can also begin healing our bodies. But we must begin healing the body as we heal our hearts and souls, for they are connected. You cannot heal one without healing the other. You cannot find emotional healing without searching for pain within your body. Tight muscles are the dark places where pain has been pushed. Your neck always hurts because you learn to ignore your emotional pain. You learned to ignore the times you felt excluded. You learned to repress feelings of being embarrassed or disappointed. You learned to stuff discouragement. You learned to suppress sadness, because it felt dangerous. It felt dangerous because you knew, or at least your body knew, your gut knew, that it led to these dark places; and you knew you didn’t have the strength to go to such darkness, even though that darkness was you, it was in you, it was within you, part of you, all of you and none of you at the same time.

Anyway, I start crying so much that snot literally drips from my nose and onto the ground. I go to the bathroom to get cleaned up, and while in there, I begin thinking about what would happen to me, what would happen to my pain, to my loss, to my wounds, if I spent time telling their stories. If I spent time remembering them. If I spent time intentionally searching out the loss I know I’ve experienced, acknowledging its presence. Honoring it. Telling my wounds that I see them. ANd I absolutely fucking lost it. I just sat down on the toilet and sobbed. Because I knew, intrinsically in that moment, that I need to begin doing that in order to heal all of those wounds. That I deserve to heal my wounds. And I’m the only one that can heal them. I am a doctor. I am my doctor. I’m my own healer. I am the angel of my own soul. I am my own spiritual guide. I am the only one. And If i am too scared to acknowledge my pain, then I can only continue spreading pain to those around me. I can only continue to remain in physical pain. I will only continue to suffer. To experience the misery that accompanies rotting flesh.