Looking Out

Therapy.  I’ve done a lot of it.  I’ve shared in the confines of those stuffy offices detailed accounts of all manners of trauma and I’ve worked through so many versions of myself with words words words.  

I’ve talked for hours and hours and been given tools tools tools to manage it.  To manage this damage Set it aside, get the tasks of the day completed.  

I’ve sat awkward and crying in those offices with sad pillows and scratchy kleenex.  Trying to justify with examples all the ways it makes sense that I can’t cope sometimes, that sometimes the darkness drowns out the light.  

I’ve waited outside the door while the other person burns through their final 4 minutes wondering if what’s been said will fix them until next week when they return for more talk talk talking.  

I’ve spent the $200 an hour, hoping it’s been a worthwhile investment, talk talk talking about me.  But that thing that lives in me, that dark brooding wound, that abyss of emotion that I’ve tried to stuff closed with booze, food, sex, clothes, cars, kids, trips, drugs, scrolling.  That open gash can’t been talked out of itself. It can’t be managed and put into a neat and tidy CBT box.  

My trauma can’t be sorted and filed and put on the shelf or shredded forever because while I am not my trauma and my trauma isn’t my truth, my trauma has forged me, it’s effect undeniable.  

I’ve done all the looking in on it, staring at the face of it trying to make sense of it and there is no sense to be made.  The only way I will heal it is by loving what is and by looking out, ahead, away. Way out.  

Out out out to the sunrise.  Far out to the distant stars.  At the moon setting in the morning or rising at night as I finally release into warm water the strain of the day.  Out to the lake cresting on the horizon. Looking far out into the wonders of being alive, now, in this time and this place.  

Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be ignoring the dark hole that swallowed my little girl self.  I’ll be healing it by seeing the big big big picture, silent and watching. Learning that this human experience is a lesson for my soul and that all of it, broken and whole can be pure love.

That the damage done by other humans, by myself, by being alive cannot be resolved for me by looking in and talk talk talking anymore.  That work has carried me as far as it can. I know the tools, I’m now a skilled trade. I know the stories, they live in my bones and I’m the one who wrote them.  I’m now the one who will exorcise them of their power.  

I know that my numbing it won’t heal it, that the only way to escape falling in is to keep looking out out out and never losing the wonder of being alive.  The shock and miracle of waking up today. A day in the world. A day to try again. Another day to be gloriously alive.