Week 23 of 52 Changing in the Dark-Revisiting the Dashed Hopes of Christmas

REFLECTIONS

There can be no transforming of darkness into light without emotion

-Carl Jung

As I move towards the longest night of the year, I am compelled to walk into the inky starless sky, where I fear goblins under bridges and sea creatures under black waves. Feelings deep in my core perturb me…panic ensues and I try to run, but not wildly with the wolves, but cowardly with the jackals. What is this place I meet every year, in December? An internal war begins. Plans for the celebration of Christmas… singing carols, drinking Gluhwein, meeting family and friends… compete with an overwhelming urge to dig myself into a hole, lying in pain, in the dark. So I write a poem…

The Dark I Fear

 You are the wave I cannot stop.

You wash over me

You drag me under

You engulf my very soul.

 You are the wound I cannot staunch.

You bleed my pain

You ooze my libido

You thief of joy and hope.

 Your presence surrounds me like a gas.

I have no choice  but to inhale.

 Beaten

I

Succumb.

 forlorn

forsaken

diminished

bereft

 I weep the tears of the broken.

-Between2Marys December 2012

The Dark I Fear

The Dark I Fear

The Dark I Fear

The Dark I Fear

This fall, in an effort to create the life I desire, I put out a feeler to see if other writers in my area wanted to form a group. I wanted to meet with fellow ‘scribblers’ who shared my passion for creating, using the written word. Happily, I had a group of 8 almost instantly. My expectation was that we would be an encouraging and supportive environment.

After our first meeting in November, I happily added this group of writers to my list of those I alert via email, when I have launched a new post. I began this mailout in July 2012, a few weeks into The Other Woman Blog, for 2 reasons…first and most importantly, I wanted to share the real me with my friends, in an effort to end the life I had lived, under the umbrella of the persona. This was a huge risk, as I was ‘coming out’, vulnerable and naked, without the veneer of bravado and pretence. The second reason was less personal, but equally important to me. I wanted an audience, so I began to create a readership. This number has tripled in size since July when I began…WOW! (although if I only had 2 readers then, I’d have 6 now)…Conclusive statements from statisticians can so easily mislead…( NOTE as soon as I veer into the left brain, waxing on about  ‘statisticians’ …get suspicious, I’m avoiding…I’m more comfortable here than in the pain of existence) I’m embarrassed to admit how a trivial trigger spiralled me into the world of the dispirited, the disheartened, the disenchanted.

Here is the trigger…one comment I received back from my mailout to my writers’ group contained 8 simple words and a period. “I would rather not receive your blog updates.”

These 8 words and a period hurt my feelings deeply. I was drawn back to my sighting of the Canada Goose, shot through her foot by an arrow, that I had encountered on a walk in Week 21 of 52. When I had come upon her in the grasses, I had identified with her desperation but at the time I could not understand why. In my anthropomorphisation of her, I imagined her soaring alone with ease and confidence, doing what she was born to do. I then imagined her shock at being assaulted by the arrow of a heartless hunter. With her foot thus impaled, her demise became almost inevitable… By chance she was struck and by chance she might be saved.

I wanted to ignore the comment’s impact, by laughing it off or retaliating. I tried to prevent my tumble into the dark by listing everything I was grateful for, and when that didn’t work, I tried distracting myself with a French Mystery Series while eating calming carbs… but eventually I succumbed to the negative power of this force. In this black hole, I give up on my life…I stop writing and creating art, I stop having fun, and certainly stop all encounters with D! I pretend to be living. I smile, I talk, I act quite involved…but the real person has disappeared. I stop expressing from my heart and soul. The soaring bird has been quelled.

Injured Canada Goose

Why would this simple request from a fellow writer send me into a dispirited and hopeless place. It would only have this power if it was reminiscent of a deeply hurtful time in my childhood.

Childhood Memories

In December I feel vulnerable, as this season opens the ‘yet to be healed’ wounds of my youth, where my expectations for family joy and harmony were crushed by the dark reality of family unpredictability and chaos. Although The Other Woman Blog has allowed me to return to the soulful and hopeful person I once was, by letting me express aspects of myself that have remained buried beneath a pile of human dung, flung from adults behaving poorly, at this moment I am susceptible to judgement.

ASPIRATIONS FOR WEEK 23 OF 52

CHANGING IN THE DARK

I am in the dark right now, feeling the pain of the shunned soul. So now I will freely shed the tears of the child, knowing I will be comforted by my stronger self and all the other souls on earth who have felt like misfits in an incomprehensible world.  Wounding words of judgement, hurled by the weak, are flimsy barriers to our wildly creative selves. So for Week 23 of 52, I will let my painful emotions surface, having faith that through this release the darkness will lift, permitting the lights of Christmas to shine.

Emotion-Bringing Light to the Dark