I’m not sure

I’m not sure you understand yet. I’m not sure you understand that this isn’t about you, or what I think of you, or how I really feel about you. This is about survival. It’s about running on empty so long that I no longer remember where I was running. It’s about making do with nothing until there is nothing left I can do. It’s about pain that hasn’t been salved, and injury that hasn’t been treated. It’s about extended deprivation and repeated assaults, enacted again and again, using the same clumsy manoeuvres. It’s about being victimised by assumptions about my apparent success, while my real failure is delivered in daily doses of economic strangulation. It’s about the kind of despair that engulfs, not after weeks of hopeless futility, but months and years of it. It’s about the lies that people have told me before they went on to enact the very opposite of what they said they would. It’s about the cumulative physical damage to me of being unable to access medical and dental care. It’s about losing my inheritance and all the personal mementos that I vowed I would fight for, before I’ve even had the chance to fight. It’s about the falsehoods writ large that have kept me personally isolated from the people I most care about. 

No, it’s not about you at all, unless you are one of those people I care about. But it is about you if you find dismay or distress or anger of your own in what I’ve written. It’s about you if your pain meets mine in the twists and turns of this horrible extended torment that has taken so many excruciating words for its voice. And it is very definitely about you if any or all of this thrusts a jagged blade through the tattered remains of what care or regard ever existed between us. I’m not sure you understand the depth of desperation that could require such an enormous risk. But neither can I comprehend how any of this could be a shock to you. How is it that the truth of my life has been so invisible when I am so painfully in the view of so many people all the time? How can you, any of you, have allowed this to go on so long, even after all of my best and most eloquent words had collapsed into a torrent of incoherent distress? 

No, I’m not sure you understand. But I hope you will try. 

thirty

This thirty rings hollow, like the crashing of these waves onto an empty beach. This thirty is mine yes but stripped away from me also, taken along with all the other absences and all the other losses. This thirty is wrapped, muffled in your convenient assumptions, and your careless permission for unforgiveable things to be rendered unto me, again. Again and again this thirty is turned upon itself, unrecognisable in the disgorgement of what should-have-been, false in what was, and yet it was this way and it is. This thirty is mine yes but taken from me also. Did my words cut you? Did they cut you like this misshapen thirty has cut me? Did they stripe upon your skin like this thirty did mine, this thirty and before that others too? This thirty has howled in this listening place, and with many others, and its cries were met with silence, and that too rings hollow on the moaning wind. There is no joy here, only failure. Is the failure mine, or is it merely borne by me? I am torn down by this, again, and no new number of promises will make this better. This thirty was mine but now it is become wrong, like so many other wrongs, and I have forgotten so much and in my forgetting it has been turned to lies. And with those lies only sorrow and all the harrowing hours are wrapped around it and all of my hopeless helpless anguish and I cannot and I cannot do this and I cannot bear this and I cannot I just cannot live this thirty and all the others I cannot. 

insufficient

your tidy lawn / is

a poor receptacle

for these waves of despair

you

You

yes, you

have made a

travesty 

of my life. 

30 years

and this 

this

is what I 

get? 

I am 

done.

I am done with

pretending

that the insufficient

is enough

that the unacceptable

is happenstance

that these misfortunes

are but a near miss

I

deserve

better

Fuck you.

Fuck all of you.

You who are getting away with it

and you who have failed me

and you who didn’t even fucking turn up

You 

have made a 

travesty 

of my life

In low fields by the sea

Like barley bending

In low fields by the sea,

Singing in hard wind

Ceaselessly;

Like barley bending

And rising again,

So would I, unbroken,

Rise from pain;

So would I softly,

Day long, night long,

Change my sorrow

Into song.  

~ Sara Teasdale

fortnight

I would like you to understand this: my anger does not represent some kind of mental unravelling due to the large assaults I have endured these past months, but it is a justifiable reaction to the small ones. The small daily, weekly, fortnightly assaults of repeated denials and exclusions and the daily effects of that on even the most basic aspects of my life. 

It was “payday” just a few days ago. I have not yet bought medication, nor shopped for the main part of the fortnightly groceries. We now have little more than $40 remaining in the bank. That won’t cover my medication, which is about to run out, and it’s not enough to pay for food for the next two weeks. This is not a result of my inaction or mismanagement, but rather the cumulative effect of all of the circumstances that have been artfully designed and systematically implemented for several years, while denying me access to all the normal mechanisms of seeking income and addressing financial issues with the main thing needed: money. 

So, go ahead and read the rest of this blog. Linger over those posts that have descended into crazy sweary rage-fuelled ranting. Consider what you know about me, if you know me, who I am and what I have done, for you and for other people, and then consider the depth of my anger at being so deeply under-resourced and unsupported for such an intolerably long time. Now consider your own role in allowing this to occur. At what point did you lead me to believe I would be OK, when nothing about this situation is OK? And then ask yourself whether you could or should have acted differently towards me, then or now. 

You might decide you have nothing to answer for. Maybe you are content to allow someone in your midst to be so badly treated, provided your own interests are looked after. But imagine it’s you who has only $40, and your fridge is about to be empty, and your medication is going to run out so you will start feeling pretty awful, and you’ve got nothing of value to sell, and there is every indication that none of this should be happening. Wouldn’t you be angry? Now ask yourself how or where or to whom you would express that anger, especially when your situation keeps getting worse? Because that is what is happening here. No amount of resilience or excellent mental health or personal transcendence will change it. Even if I manage to scrape through this fortnight, I am facing the same essential lack of necessary resourcing next fortnight, and the fortnight after that, on and on with no foreseeable improvement.

So, please do go ahead and read the rest of this blog. Be as hurt and offended and insulted and whatever else you like when you see what it is I have written here. But remind yourself that your grievance is perched atop Maslow’s hierarchy, while I’m down here at the bottom of it trying to figure out how I’m going to get medication for my basic wellness and how we are going to eat for the next fortnight. And then think about how many fortnights it's been and how many fortnights of this are still coming and everything else that has been and will be displaced from my life. Yes, I am still angry. And I will direct that anger wherever I fucking well like. 

endured too long

  

Though bleak these woods, and damp the ground
With fallen leaves so thickly strewn,
And cold the wind that wanders round
With wild and melancholy moan;

There is a friendly roof, I know,
Might shield me from the wintry blast;
There is a fire, whose ruddy glow
Will cheer me for my wanderings past.

And so, though still, where'er I go,
Cold stranger-glances meet my eye;
Though, when my spirit sinks in woe,
Unheeded swells the unbidden sigh;

Though solitude, endured too long,
Bids youthful joys too soon decay,
Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue,
And overclouds the noon of day;

When kindly thoughts, that would have way,
Flow back discouraged to my breast; -
I know there is, though far away,
A home where heart and soul may rest. 

Warm hands are there, that, clasped in mine,
The warmer heart will not belie;
While mirth, and truth, and friendship shine
The smiling lip and earnest eye.

The ice that gathers round my heart
May there be thawed; and sweetly, then,
The joys of youth, that now depart,
Will come to cheer my soul again.

Though far I roam, that thought shall be
My hope, my comfort, everywhere;
While such a home remains to me,
My heart shall never know despair!

The consolation ~ Anne Brontë

in Poems for a world gone to sh*t