Every year or so, I wipe the slate clean and start writing again.
I've come to realize that it's mostly a coping mechanism. Burying those old emotions has become easier than allowing myself to feel them again. There are a lot of walls founded in the text of my past, punctuation and mortar slathered on stone in an effort to shut out whatever hurt I felt.
There is no underlying trauma, no tragedy riddled with grief or guilt. There are no trigger words, no childhood abuse. Just a kid with a mental illness, keenly aware of his demons but so too scared and ill-equipped to confront them.
The sentiment about time and how it heals all wounds, while hopeful, is wrong. Some wounds are superficial at first; time packs it, cleans it, covers it in gauze. But life has a way of opening those back up, going just a little bit deeper the next time. There's no true closure because it's a cycle.
I think what the feel-good messaging tends to gloss over is that time can't heal something that's inherently broken. It can't heal something that's born wounded.
Something other than time has to intervene to heal a birth defect, simply waiting for relief is not the answer. No, I had to make a conscious decision. I had to place my palm on the mirror, studying each microscopic groove in my fingers as they met with their counterpart in the glass, an imperfect and symmetrical union.
I had to choose to let go of that image. I had to choose to cast off that shell, to claw my way out of the dark carcass that I had driven around for so many years.
That's why I choose to let go of those fragments cast off through the years. I shake them off, and I write because nothing, not even time, can heal a cycle.
You have to break it.
No comments:
Post a Comment