Wrote this yesterday. Didn’t share it – chickened out. I’m sharing it now.
Rejoice, rejoice,
Stephen Stills, 1970
We have no choice
But to carry on.
Will I be doing my bit to support the economy by going shopping today? Probably not. I’ll stay at home and carry on doing what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months, thank you very much.
This morning I am lost for words, a strange experience for me. Poised on a knife edge between opening myself up and expressing my honest feelings and thinking of something else, less contentious to write about – at the same time as watching on YouTube – really watching for once, not just playing music as a background – Fleetwood Mack performing ‘The Chain’ live, witnessing the rage flashing and crackling around and between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, feeling it entering and reflecting my pre-existing mood of pent-up furious chaotic self-destructive energy.
Why? Why this morning, why today?
‘Where [am I] going now my love?
Where will [I] be tomorrow?
Will [it] bring me happiness?
Will [it] bring me sorrow?Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams
Stephen Stills
What you do with what you see…
Woke up with my usual mixture of shame, self-hatred and despair, but instead of taking the path of trying to calm it down and hush it up, I decided to go the other way and face it all head on, and this is where it gets me. For once I can feel all that anger in my body, not just think it in my head.
This was happening in my therapy sessions towards the end of last year, when we were still meeting in person. Every week I would come into the room with whatever was in my mind, but before the end of the session I would be screaming and grinding my teeth and smacking my fists against the arms of the chair to stop myself from smacking them into the side of my head.
It would be easy to put this down to the repressed frustration and anger of a child whose voice was never heard; whose questions were met with impatience if not downright anger; whose feelings were never acknowledged without disapproval; who learnt that those feelings of sadness and loneliness and inability to mix with other children or interact with adults were her own fault, a wilful failure to play the ‘happy little girl’; who lived in a world of confusion, constantly trying to anticipate what was wanted of her, never knowing when she might unwittingly overstep some implicit boundary and suffer the consequences.
Maybe that is a true story, maybe not. I honestly don’t know. In last week’s therapy session, I said that I’m sure there must have been happy times in my childhood, but I can’t remember them, which to me feels very shameful, my failing that I should be so unfair on my parents, but the therapist’s reaction was that it was very sad.
After sixty years, after multiple attempts to resolve these questions, can I ever find a way out?