✨ What Is Left ✨
I've been doing a lot of writing lately. I had two recent events in my life trigger some old relational PTSD for me. Only one I was walking into eyes open, and braced. Prepared and accepting. The other was a complete curveball with impeccably bad timing.
The combination of the two at once has been brutal. Wounds that were ancient history have opened, pulsing fresh pain in bursts that burn. Volcanic and destabilizing.
Writing has been the only thing that seems to keep me progressing in the right direction. This kind of barrage in the past would have caused 10 times the damage that this has. And yet this doesn't exactly ease the devastation I would rather not admit, after all my hard work.
Anyway, some lines that I wrote today have been haunting me:
- I'm the one that stays. I hold them. Until death. Who holds me?
- I feel like I can only trust the dead (to be there, to take care of me, to love and support me).
Dead cannot be burdened. Dead cannot make any more mistakes with your heart.
The dead are infinite. They are done holding anything else in life. Therefore they are the only ones I can imagine would offer to hold me back. Without the limitations and the exhaustion of the flesh to prevent it.
It's no wonder I would seek the comfort of the dead when I look back at my life. I have inherited this familial situation of being with very sick people, sick physically and mentally.
From a young age, I put everyone else before me. I've been caregiving for my mother since I was a little girl. I've been easy as a daughter for both mother and father until they died. I've been protective and caregiving over Anthony since he was born even though I was scared of him because at first, he was emotionally much like Mom. Although now, he's much smarter and way more self-aware than she ever was, even with five times the physical problems too.
But I am the ultimate holder. Not because I want to. Not exactly because I should. But because I must. There is no one else left.
And I'm really tired of holding. My arms don't have the strength. When I really need it, there are no arms waiting to catch me or comfort me. I have experienced arms to catch me in temporary ways, for which I am grateful. However I cannot help but contrast this to the first bullet: I stay. I stay to hold people until they don't need it anymore, and that has often included until they die. I have been doing this for a long time.
No one takes care of the holder. Because why would they? It doesn't matter that she has just as many needs and wants and hopes and dreams and emotions and pains as any other human might. There's just no one else left; she IS what is left.
Often the holder has had no energy to consistently foster the bonds that satisfy those who might have been more than another passing soul. Instead there's just a trail of could-have-been corpses littering the landscape.
So I turned to the dead. The dead are who I have. And while I think there is a beauty to that, it's extremely sad. I never got to recover. I was just the only one left alive but "capable."
Even when I went into behavioral IOP I was still torn because Anthony happened to get extremely ill with life-threatening sepsis from infected wounds. He needed emergency surgery and was in the hospital for many weeks, while I fought to get a bed back at his facility and to get the case manager to pay attention.
Oh, and my dad developed his second cancer, the one that would eventually take him.
My romantic relationship at that time had been saving me over and over throughout, but that shriveled away too. I was never sure why the arms went away, but just that I couldn't even go rescue it because I was too busy catching my brother and my father as they fell off the cliff at the same time. I just blamed myself in the aftermath because I was the only one left to blame, I guess.
How? How was I supposed to focus on my own healing at the same time as that? How was I supposed to survive all of that?
I still did it. I did whatever I could.
And it wasn't enough.
Not because I'm this huge black hole of neediness. It was because this was another major loss point when I was already on empty. I just never get to recover. In fact, this was the time I was supposed to recover from the years preceding all of that.
This is why I believe in curses sometimes.
I still make recovery a primary effort in the trivial ways that I have access to. It's better than nothing and I'm not going to say I'm too proud to work with what I got.
At the same time, I deserve better than nothing. Not in the entitled meaning of deserving. Just more in the meaning of worth. Unfortunately, reality does not necessarily follow worth.
And so we're here.
At least I know my worth this time. At least I see things more clearly. At least I can extend self compassion, even while a very agonized part of me screams that it should and eventually will need to be from an external source. Not just the self on self all of the time.