Careful thought

Careful thought, today and in the coming days, about the content on this blog. 

There is a dilemma in it for me. Whether to preserve the accurate record of what was, and will always remain fixed in my mind, as a horrendous collection of experiences laid over the top of each other in one continuously awful period that lasted several years. Or whether to erase the fullness of my own cathartic expression of so many aspects of that, in order to preserve the blog's original intent and tone, as it was originally known by the few of my readers who know me or know my online writing. 

But there needs to be some acknowledgement that part of the experience rested in the suppression of my fullest expression, by myself but also, maybe, by others who wished to avoid the inevitable confrontation with the awfulness of my reality, either because they had some part in it, or because they looked away when perhaps they could have been more attentive to the circumstances that were consuming me. Even in my hour of greatest need, believing myself to be heard, here and elsewhere, I was not, and there's a resonant damage in that with the silence of my abused childhood. That trauma, reawakened, deserved a voice, no less so than the trauma of my more recent experience. But it was not a kind voice, and there was all manner of blame and powerlessness and fury expressed here that was rightly so at the time, but which may not persist beyond the final bounds of the experience. 

So now, with a little time and distance from the worst of that onslaught, and soothed by a more benevolent-seeming turn in my circumstances, I must now decide how much of this written record to preserve, here or elsewhere. How much of that honours the truest nature of my experience, and how much of it might unnecessarily distress readers who come late to this written account, and who might be shocked to read for themselves that way I unravelled, at least for a time. There is no easy reading of genuine despair, and it was the very depths of such despair that I laid bare here. I am mindful of the hurt that reading such despair may cause people who care about me, and that is why I took the blog down when I did, over a year ago. But a year on, a year in which there have been some small, beneficial changes in my life, it no longer seems fair to deprive myself of the joy and consolation of this space. And more than that, I feel the need to reclaim the better parts of my life, the parts that were stripped away during the worst of those incomprehensible times. 

A balance, then, is what is needed here. Not to expunge the more torrid narratives, but maybe to preserve them in a bracketed way, so that I can refer to them without exposing my readership to the fullness of the worst of it. But you should not, if you're reading this, expect to find a nicely sanitised version of the events of the last few years. I may choose to soften some of my writing, but I will equally permit the boldest facts to remain so they can speak for themselves. You have a choice, whether you read it or you don't. I have applied careful thought to my decision to curate my blog in this way so that I can open it to readership again. You too can apply careful thought to understanding what is written here, and why I have written it. 

herein

herein the moment

the small sanctuary of

understanding that this

my excruciation liveth

not once but again

and herein the moment

I find for myself 

forgiveness, bravely

that others may not

herein the moment

and herein the moment

the larger battle of

all this my weakness

that forms the rounding play

in all these places

and herein the moment

I find for myself 

kindness, fiercely

that dwells here or not

herein the moment 

Half asleep

 

    She tells her love while half asleep,

        In the dark hours,

            With half-words whispered low:

    As Earth stirs in her winter sleep

        And puts out grass and flowers

            Despite the snow,

            Despite the falling snow.

                   

                     ~ Robert Graves

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.