Think Speak Run

What do you write when you have so much to say, but feel there’s no way to express it? This is how I felt last night, and for parts of today. The dizziness returned this afternoon, and I’ve just spent a while reading the news when I was supposed to be making tomorrow’s sandwiches. I haven’t done the washing up, haven’t sorted the next load of laundry or sorted the dry things like I intended. Just again this sense of numbness. I am hurting on the inside, but about things that are nothing to do with everyday life right now. And yet inextricably linked, because I am me and my life includes my past. My history is not the same thing as my destiny, thank God, but nonetheless, it has a bearing on it. I want to be able to ignore all the crap from the past and make it go away. But it won’t. And whenever I try to ignore it, it comes up in a different way – in dreams, a lot, at the moment. I don’t get to escape from it just cos I haven’t got the space to deal with it in the day. It turns up at night. I have very mixed strange dreams that don’t make sense, and yet where I can see where all the strands of the dream come from. People are mixed up from the past and now; my dead grandmothers are often still alive in my dreams, and I wake to a fresh grief as I realise they are gone. My children appear in my dreams, sometimes the age they are now, sometimes older. I am in my dreams, often reliving scenes from years and years ago, but in the wrong context. Events take place in the wrong house, or my children appear about twenty years ago, when they were not yet here. I think they already were real, with God, spirits awaiting His timing to be birthed into the world through me. David very rarely appears in my dreams, and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. He is very supportive in real life, so I don’t understand why he is not there in my dreams. Maybe I am meant to fight my battles alone in my dreams, gaining my own voice? I do not know. Last night, I had to make a complaint in a high street superstore. I complained, and was given an apology, a voucher, an extra chocolate pudding for my kids. And actually, David was in that dream. In my dream I was aware of the momentousness -is that a word?- of me complaining: I actually stood up and went and made my grievance known. I am not known for doing this, but I am getting better at it. I am also getting better at saying, not just to David, what I really want, rather than just accepting whatever people think I want so as not to cause upset.

So I guess this is a bit rambly, but I feel better for turning up to the page and staring it down; better for daring to say that this stuff bothers me during the day too, when I’m looking after my kids. That is a big fear; telling anyone that I struggle. Letting anyone see past the exterior to the real pain, the real me. I find it hard cos I think I’m supposed to be strong for my kids all the time, and that I don’t want to upset them by them seeing Mummy cry. So I hold it all in – maybe why I struggle so much with my weight – stuff it down, and cry later through the words on the page, or the conversations with David. He is my rock. God is my Rock with the big R. Yeah. I struggle. I am trying to deal with past sexual abuse. The abuse is past, but the pain and effects are very present. I hurt, now. I cry, now. I allow myself to say it has happened, and it has happened to me, now. For years I have felt great pity for people who have survived rape, abuse, attack, violence, danger, horror. Now, I feel empathy, because I finally realise I too am one of ‘them’; one of the survivors. One who has endured huge pain and suffering. Humiliation. Shame. Disapproval. Degradation. Hatred. I am now crying. This hurts y’all. I think I am finally coming out of denial. And I think that denial may be only the first step in the recognised five steps of healing. Oh boy have I got a long way to go. I came through denial of what happened to me and Ella through the last few years, but now I am trying to come out of denial about the abuse I suffered in my childhood (and later, but I am trying to start at the beginning and not overwhelm myself with too many abuses and hurts at the same time). I guess what makes me so sad and struggle the most is that I am trying to heal from largely two different issues and abuses at the same time, but where I am at different stages with the two pains. One is the pain of the loss of Ella, my firstborn, who is asleep upstairs right now, but where I lost the pregnancy and seven and a half weeks with her at the start of her life. I can’t get that time back, and it eats the inside of me. It hurts so deep I didn’t know my soul went that deep. I’m crying again. I miss my baby. …and the second hurt is actually the first, of being sexually abused by my brother when we were growing up. That all led on to the hurt of losing Ella. I’m going to try and break it all down over the coming weeks and months of writing – I have no idea how long it may take me to say it all, nor whether the saying will ever be done – as Siegfried Sassoon said in Everyone Sang : “…the singing will never be done.”

So I have two major hurts, and everything else spirals off from that. I find other people’s words and other people’s stories really help me when I feel I can’t speak. As a survivor, I am learning to speak. It does not come easily, readily, quickly, naturally, but with great effort of will, and major pain on the inside – I feel as if I am sabotaging myself – like a deserter in the ranks because I have broken rank and dared whisper til I can shout, “NO. You hurt me. What you did was wrong. I could not speak then, but I am speaking now. My voice is gaining strength. I am gaining strength. I am my voice, and I have my story to tell.”

I love to sing. My voice and my throat have been attacked consistently over the years. The day after my brother and I (at boarding school) were told we were moving away from the house where he abused me, which was home, I got Glandular Fever. Diagnosed with it around 10 weeks later. Since then, recurrent bouts of tonsillitis every year, and scheduled tonsillectomies that had to be cancelled because of other illness. And then barely a bout since we cut contact with my parents and brother two years ago. Funny that. But I think people who are not victims or survivors cannot begin to understand how you cannot speak for yourself. So here’s to singing; here’s to speaking; here’s to sharing, and breaking the silence. Let’s all speak together – we have one message, and can speak it with one voice. And after that? My hope is that our grateful singing – our selves singing out of their new freedom – will NEVER be done.

Incidentally, today is 25th April 2013. It is Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday. I love her voice. Wish I had met her. So this one’s for you, Ella.