explain

 

I want to explain something to you

I want to explain this is how it is
that the teasing of hope becomes
the feeding of despair

I want to explain how it is
that small kindnesses become
the tools for larger cruelties

I want to explain how it is
that I gather the last of my resolve
and I aim again for 
the better day 
the better day you told me about
the better day you explained to me
the better day you promised
that hasn't come

I want to explain how it is
that this exchange has a price
the transaction from hope
to payment of despair 
extracts a toll paid
in the currency of belief
and the ravening expense 
is 

trust

I want to explain how it is
that the payment becomes
inexorable and the price
too high and how it is
that I have explained this to you
again and again 
until these words
were all I had left

Perhaps the one thing

Perhaps the one thing I would like you to know is how mentally busy all of this makes me. How overburdened my thoughtspace is, with the compounding excess of things I should not need to consider, crowding in over the top of all the ordinary things I need to think about. It is so taxing to have such essential facets of my life relentlessly unresolved. And not just my thoughts, either, but my feelings too. My feelings are woefully entangled in these great unsolved mysteries. And the heart wants what it wants, all the feeble desires of a thwarted life, all the tantalising promises of improved circumstances, and the brutal counterpoint of the real difficulties I encounter day by day. (This is not what I thought it would be, any of it). And there’s a workload to all of this, a cost of thought and strategising and difficult decisions that never seems to lessen, no matter what footholds I manage to clamber onto, even briefly. And with it, self doubt. The grind of not-knowing, of having no certainty, of constantly guessing at the meaning of so many things, of reaching for confirmation and finding only speculation, always. And it would be one thing if it only concerned my own little bin-fire of incompletions and failures. But it goes further than that. It touches the lives of other people, and then rebounds back onto me with redoubled vigor. And I ache with the absence of people I value, people who may, for all I know, have decided I am too much. Too much confusion, too much crazy, too much effort. And even the having of this mental load adds to that, as if my right to clarity and communication and transparency of intention is somehow muddied by the process of daring to claim it, even in my own mind. “Stress” doesn’t adequately describe this overload. Neither does “burnt out” capture the depth of my weariness. I am tired. I am tired of the conscious load of always reaching for anything worth having, only to have it denied. I am tired of absence, and failure, and mixed fucking messages, and wanting. I am tired of acting like the unbearable burden of this on me is OK. That I am OK. I am tired of the constancy of having to question even the easiest of apparent facts just so I can find the shape of my own sanity in such a distorted mirror. I am tired of having my crazy wrung out of me like it’s its own commodity. And I am tired of the effort of believing you ever cared, most especially when that belief is still, even now, something I cling to. And I am exhausted by the mental load of knowing how utterly pathetic I am to have that need, as if there was anything different I could do about it. And even that is a burden: trying to understand what, if anything, I can do to change it. Because this overload, this constant hum of mental turmoil, is not my natural state. It is something I have acquired as a result of being confronted with the baffling inconsistencies of fractured cause-and-effect that now govern my life. It is a response within me to something outside my locus of control. (Or is it? Have I missed something obvious?). And it shouldn’t be such a grinding source of disempowerment. But if you knew, if you only knew, the fullness of the burden on my life, the delays and denials and disruptions and disappointments and disconnections, you might marvel at how unfathomable it is. And you might understand, in a way I cannot, how much of an effort this is to me to even comprehend it. 

Shock

What really shocks me, and it still does, is how you absolutely failed to assist me. It’s been more than a year since I fell over on your unstable, dangerous path, and I still feel the effects of those injuries every day. Ankle, ankle, knee, hip, tooth. I have pain, inflexibility of movement, and my balance is still, STILL compromised. It’s fair to say that I am likely permanently affected by the damage done to my body as a result of falling on your path, and the hard reality of that is that it has made me horribly vulnerable to future falls, because of the way my balance and proprioception has been damaged. I’m now staring down several decades of my older life when serious, life-threatening falls are a real risk to my wellbeing and survival. And during that year, I have been actively excluded from assistance. I had a doctor’s appointment booked at one point early on, specifically to have my injuries reassessed. I could not attend that appointment on that occasion, because I literally did not have enough money to pay. And being a compensable appointment, I should not (legally) have claimed any Medicare benefit for it. This is what you have done. I am still, even now, shocked by this. I am shocked that I am embedded in entire living, breathing organism of people, a “community” of persons whose existence and wellbeing are dependent on how well they look out for each other, who know so very much of every detail of my life, and yet no assistance was rendered. I have had to fight every day, on a personal level, to push through my pain and, yes, my trauma and despair, to move my body sufficiently to claw back my ability to walk in a normal-seeming manner down the street. (Normal-seeming because I’m only ever a short uncoordinated, unbalanced stumble away from another fall. I can’t even dance properly, I can’t step or spin or travel across the floor because it’s a constant risk of toppling over). And yet nobody, in all that time, has leaned in to offer advice or support on how to go about claiming monetary assistance, compensation or god forbid, actual specialised rehabilitation? I am still shocked by this. I am shocked by the absence of care, of the most basic gestures of empathy and support. The psychic damage of this to me, sustained every day when I wake up and confront the reality of what has happened, is enormous. How could you allow this to happen to someone in your midst? What game plan can this possibly serve? Injuring me, in the first place, either with your carelessness or your careless-seeming engineering, and then utterly failing to step in with an appropriate after-response? It’s not OK. I am permanently altered. My life, my fundamental physical being has been changed, damaged permanently. And yet you are content to allow this to be done to me, without ensuring I have the wherewithal to recover? I do not intend to go to an early death. But without a full recovery, that is what is at stake. And since basic survival also requires monetary resources, when those are withheld, so too is my welfare and wellbeing. 

How much harder to you intend to press down with your steel-capped boots? It’s fair to say they have already left an indentation on my face. 

I mind

I mind very much when I have no discretionary lifestyle choices because my finances have been constrained.

I mind very much when it’s payday and we already have less than $400 to get us through the fortnight.

I mind very much when my husband finds himself within a very small subset of persons who are required to travel away for days at a time but brings home exactly $0 in allowances for his troubles.

I mind very much when I am required to be subjected to a set of circumstances again that were unacceptable the first time I was subjected to them. 

I mind very much when you lie to me, and when you make out you have planned for contingencies that you clearly have no qualms about neglecting. 

I mind very much that I won’t have sufficient funds to get through the next week, and that there will be attendant social and health ramifications for me that result in cumulative long-term damage to me. 

I mind very much that you are willing to pour resources into maintaining a pretense of looking out for me, but you are unwilling to pour any resources into actually looking out for me.

I mind very much that I’m required to suck all of this up with dignity and discretion, when what you really deserve is a torrent of verbal approbation. 

I shall

The Crystal Gazer

I shall gather myself into myself again,

    I shall take my scattered selves and make them one,

Fusing them into a polished crystal ball

    Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.

I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent,

    Watching the future come and the present go,

And the little shifting pictures of people rushing

    In restless self-importance to and fro. 

~ Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933)

Not waiting

Tired of being weighted down by hope, she threw three days’ worth of biscuits, cold backstrap, and sardines in her knapsack and walked out to the old falling-down log cabin, the “reading cabin,” as she thought of it. Out here, in the real remote, she was free to wander, collect at will, read the words, read the wild. Not waiting for the sounds of someone was a relief. And a strength.

From Where the crawdads sing ~ Delia Owens 

What do I care?

What do I care, in the dreams and the langour of spring,

That my songs do not show me at all? 

For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,

I am an answer, they are only a call.

But what do I care, for love will be over so soon,

Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by,

For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent,

It is my heart that makes my songs, not I. 

~ Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933) 

I found this poem in winter, near the beach of my childhood, and dreamed of spring. And with it, the promise of fairer weather and better days. But now that spring has arrived, I find myself weathering a different kind of storm. I'm staring into a vast, churning void, heaving with absence and silence and unsaid things. It is a torment and an anguish to hold so much unresolved for so long, and in the midst of it I feel profoundly unseen, unheard, even unknown. It is as if I have become tangled in someone else's version of a story, and it is unwieldy, intractable, unyielding to all my efforts to shape it into something kinder, more generous, more benevolent. And there's a wailing sound coming from my mouth, a keening that's been made by the pain sustained in the story, so there's this awful noise coming out of me and there are people who think this is what I am, that this role that's been forced upon me is who I am. No. It is not. But the story has been so overwhelming and so relentless on so many levels and for so many reasons, and in all of that loss and hope and longing and grief and striving and brutality, there must be a voice. Let my heart have its say. All of that suffering cannot be visited upon a single person without choking out some form of expression in response. The wind cannot sing through the clefts and curves of the sand dunes without scouring them into new shapes, but neither can the beach be dragged away from its moorings without the ocean roaring its terrible songs. But those howls are the voice of pain, and I am not my pain. I am undone in pain, but I am not destroyed by it. My mind is proud and strong enough to be silent. Even at my lowest ebb, I have had the presence of mind to guard and defend some place of sanctuary within myself, so that I have the wherewithal to do what needs to be done. To declare painful truth in the face of the vicious onslaught. To chant the wracking lamentations of that other story without being consumed by them. But it is gruelling work, it is exhausting, and I am worn down. So now that the spring I dreamed of has arrived, bringing kinder weather but uncertain relief, I take comfort in these words, written nearly a hundred years ago, which remind me of my strength, my ability and my worth: I am a flint and a fire, / I am an answer, they are only a call.