There is nothing to be said of this sadness
You have to be a giant walking paradox
Or at least recognize that you are
Recognize that you’re recognizing that you are
Because you are Spit of star-dust
What a phenomenon To feel like a prisoner
In a body that is always moving
The books on mindfulness
tell me to embrace my suffering
but I don’t know how much deeper I can climb
into this black hole. Should I let the black hole
climb into me? I am trying to imagine what this looks like
and see an enormous bottle of Xanax
waterfalling down into me, poured by the
invisible hand that lives in my upper right peripheral.
Hand of doctor, hand of god, hand of savior, hand of dad.
All these man things.
Today a nurse examined my breasts
and I felt so flat beneath her hands. It’s something
I want to always remember,
though I’d like to forget the stir-ups, the enormous Q-tip
poking at my cervix Is this how it feels
for a flower to be sucked dry
is what I want to say
but I am not a flower. I am a person
stripped of her personhood
and stuffed inside a woman’s body. I am a person
with two X chromosomes
and people think this means something tangible about me.
Okay I guess I will never grow a beard on my own. How does this affect
my value as a person? Am I a woman now?
Some men can’t grow beards.
I light a cigarette
and think about all the ways to be intimate with you, all the ways
we have been intimate but not allowed
to call something other than friendship. I hear them
saying it doesn’t count unless we moan, always
they want to hear us cry.
I don’t care. I am okay with friendship. I am okay
with eating ice cream next to you
while sunlight moves through your hair,
or is it your hair
that’s moving through the light?
I can never tell, which is how
we both like it. Like this you are one
with things. Like this
you have known me.
I just want to hold your hand
in the backseat of a car
and email you photos of us holding hands
in the backseat of a car. I feel the river
coming up through me. This is me
swimming towards you,
call it breathing, call it yes.
new poem at wexarexopen.com
I am unreasonable/ because death is
CW: relationship abuse
Tonight I was looking through the Facebook “On This Day” memories app & saw that I wrote this exactly a year ago, and I am so thankful. I really needed these words tonight:
“Yesterday I shared #WhyIStayed but not as an attempt to explain WHY the abuse happened, and I said this in the comments below my post but want to put it here, too, because it’s important to remember that you don’t have to explain anything to anyone. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for why somebody else hurt you. The abuse didn’t happen because I stayed. It didn’t happen because I loved him anyway or because I saw the good in him. It happened because he did it. I chose to share some of my reasons for staying not because I owe anyone an explanation, not to shift the responsibility from his shoulders to mine, but to highlight the complexities of these relationships, because I’d heard stories of abuse and my story didn’t fit, my story didn’t seem severe enough, my story didn’t fit the narrative, my story included loads of mental illness, because he and I have almost the exact same list of diagnoses, and so I felt I understood him in ways other people couldn’t, and so I didn’t believe I was really being abused, because I didn’t believe he meant to do it, because I didn’t know all the shapes & forms abuse can take until I read stories similar to mine, I didn’t know it doesn’t matter whether he intended to hurt me or not, it doesn’t matter if I can understand him in ways other people can’t, & also I shared because I wanted to highlight the normalcy that so often coexists with abuse, that in many ways we were just like any other engaged couple, or at least we tried very hard to be, wedding colors picked out, a wedding date set, how this normalcy is very good at masking the abuse, how deeply ingrained the dynamics of abuse can be, so much that it is almost invisible, to him, to me, except for that gnawing pain I couldn’t ignore, except for the flashbacks, how that normalcy couldn’t cancel out the abuse, no matter how badly I wanted it to, it didn’t matter that he was the most fun person to go to Target with, it didn’t matter that he would give me anything I wanted, all the money, all the clothes, all the books, he would do almost anything I asked him to do, but it didn’t matter because the only thing I really wanted was for him to stop hurting me, and it was the one thing he couldn’t do. He couldn’t stop. And I don’t know why. That’s for him to figure out. That is his responsibility. I have given him more love & compassion & resources than I can even begin to fathom but never because I believe his actions are ultimately my responsibility. They are his. And I shared to remind myself: you are not crazy. It is not your fault.
There’s been so much talk about abuse and I wish I could turn my computer off and look away. Sometimes I need to do that to save my own sanity. Sometimes I am not able to talk. There have been times I talked when I was not ready to talk. I think I need to let all of that be okay. But also when I am able to talk, like today, there are so many things I want to say. Mostly today I am saying: I want to be here for you. It is not your fault.”
I’ve realized the men who’ve hurt me don’t actually hate me. They hate themselves. They hate themselves so much they never let me hold them.
My first psych evaluation over three years ago was invalid & unreadable & they just sent me home w/ breathing techniques. Now I realize my evaluation was invalid & unreadable because that’s how I feel deepest on the inside.
(lol what kind of psychologist doesn’t know that *everything* is readable?)