In my therapy session yesterday I read out the post I wrote on Wednesday, about love and relationships and at the end, in answer to the question of why I’m alone, she said:
‘Because you’re not prepared to compromise on who you are.’
Of course! It came like a lightning bolt: I’d rather have my solitude than suppress the difficult part of my nature. I’m not a ‘loveable’ person – I’m really not. Turn the mirror around. Why do even I find it so hard to love myself? Why have I spent a lifetime berating myself for failing to live up to the image of a ‘good’, pretty, well-behaved girl? Why have I always been so careless of the feelings of men who wanted me (my first husband adored me, and I despised him for it) and wept over the ones who didn’t?
Writing out her comment now, I can see how it could be taken for a criticism (though I know that’s not how she meant it). ‘Compromise’, after all, is usually considered to be a Good Thing – and so it is, in most circumstances, but it can also be seen as a betrayal of a deeper integrity – ‘You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em’.
I’ve been folding for so much of my life, ‘settling for what I could get’. Striving for the rewards due to a ‘good-girldom’ that was never going to be within my grasp, however hard I tried, and hating myself for that failure.
And now I’m alone with the Wild Thing – which has just reminded me of a poem I wrote a while back.
Wild Thing
Bind my wounds.
I will rip the bandage
Roll in the dirt
Claw at the scabs
to uncover my flesh
Gleaming
Festering
Bleeding.Full moon casts shadows
through my window.
I am a wild beast.
If you try to help me
you will suffer for kindness.
Feel my claws, teeth, scales,
Anger
Pain.Will you leave me
or will you hold me
Feel me writhe
in your grasp?Will you judge me?
I will show you what I am.
Ignore me
I will scream till you hear
Till I feel your contempt.
Till I see your sneers.
Then I will know.
I will test you
beyond endurance.Are you brave enough
© Linda Rushby July 2014
to hold me still?
Are you strong enough
to love me?
No one really wants the wild thing. They might think they do, but they don’t want to live with the claws and the beak. They want to cage it with rules and take away its true nature, but when they’ve done that, they find that what is left is not worth having. There is no gold left, only dross.
Linda Rushby from the blog ‘Melinda Solo’, April 2013
I can’t change the Wild Thing into something she’s not, but there may be other ways of taming her. She needs to be recognised for herself, with compassion, not judgement.
And who will do that for her, if not me?