Healing

Since I've had some time off over the holidays, I've been reading over some of my old blog posts. Some of them are practically memorized from having reread them several times (did I say what I wanted to say? Does what I said still make sense even now? Are there embarrassing un-growths I was complaining about and unable to resolve?) and some of them I've just reverted back to draft form so that no one can EVER see that garbage. But some still prompted that inexplicable urge to get something else out. I'm never quite sure what when that happens. It's a sign that there's something else I need to work out, but I tend to pull back because I still know that old garbage is still lingering in cyber space; and what more can I say that isn't just going to be more whining?

I'd like to venture and say that I've done a lot of healing this year. Over the last four years, for sure, but definitely something more pointed in this last year. It's just the way things happened to pan out, and I'm grateful for it. It's come with some heavy realizations, but realizations nonetheless that have helped bring a whole lot of context to my life and, consequently been so eye-opening for me that I've been able to put what is more or less the rest of my life into some freaking logic puzzle solution.

Surely, the pinnacle of a healing point is never at a single drop of the hat, nor a solitary moment all by itself, but being able to pinpoint the source of my wounds in a few words has surely given me occasion to also realize that those wounds were all that I was struggling to make sense of back in my twenties without an iota of vocabulary, assistance, or recourse to utter the least of it TO make sense of it. Never mind that I was just coming out of the generation where talking about our feelings was new and still relatively unheard of. My generation was better about it than our parents' baby-boomer generation (my parents were the baby end of the baby boomer era), and we are far less dubious about it than all the self-righteous millenials out there (not all of them are!), but talking about it and figuring it the hell out was, for me, at least, something I needed to do because trying to be normal wasn't working.

But something even more remarkable has happened that even this old here cranky, sour-ass curmudgeon can't chokehold onto and that's this little thing called forgiveness. As the experience of realizing that I endured several abusive relationships continues to dawn on me in several facets, it's released the knot that not only was the knot I have been holding onto for the better part of twenty years, but has released the knot almost entirely. To such a grievously enormous extent that the most serious of perpetrators of those abusive relationships have my softening compassion. Because, in a painfully simple way, they've all been lost themselves, males close to me in my life. Males who didn't have their own clue before thoughtlessly contributing to my wounds or butthurts.

And this is remarkable in itself, yes, but it's remarkable because for all that I have pained over, bled over, poured tears into, and picked my heart up off the floor for, that. . . is "all" it is. That's "all" a childhood and lifetime of skewed ideas "is". Just broken men passing on the broken buck. (From my father passing on his woefully mangled ideologies to my brothers and me and me going out into the world expecting to be loved by anyone because I fit the ideology of my father and getting into relationships for every broken reason.) If this had been any other kind of transgression, any other kind of violation, it's hard to say that I would be so readily forgiving.

This is NOT, I repeat, NOT to downgrade, minimize, or Polyanna-ize the painful experiences I had trying to get here or to, least of all, understand the overpowering panic, heartbreak, numbing, and sheer anxiety I had at any given point during my marriage. But it is to say that 1) I could have always had it worse, 2) I have context now, and 3) it frees me to love more.