What He Said

Up late chatting with an old friend online....talking about long ago things and how important everything seemed, before the real world set in after college.  I brought the anguish of the gods down on my head, a wild and broken girl, so early on. I did not know that in my fifties, all that glittering darkness would begin to show itself as fuel for the work I still have to do as a writer, that anguish can become an obsidian blade to incise all the way to essential truths.

My therapist told me this today: to stop choosing relationships that cause me to lose my way, over and over, until the person is done with whatever they wanted from me and then moves on without caring how much harm they have done and my own identity is shattered.  I had a great therapist once (he has since retired) who, when I was newly divorced, told me that there are too many people out there who have a sort of malignancy beneath their best intentions, relationship-wise, and this will emerge if they are not consciously working on getting well. He warned me and for a long time, I did not hear.

I also decided today that those who thought less of me in these last few months, who discarded me because I had to battle for physical and mental health, cannot be in my life for the armistice.  Perhaps if they are willing to look at WHY...really look. I take people to task on these things because it is my life at stake, the actual fact of my existence. And how would they like it if the person they loved and trusted most in the world just up and abandoned them to their fate? These are the kind of people who would throw you under the bus to save themselves. If people really have the ability to see another person's true worth, they would never do this sort of thing.

I will become myself again. I will refuse this time when I lost my way, when I had to do things so far beneath me.  There is a time to wear rags and be the beggar maiden, and a time to remember who I really am. That time begins now, every day, as a conscious decision.