Stress Colic 1973-1990

I have turned on myself, lately. These last several days, despair is brooding over me, forbidding me constructive action, and I space in silence, fretting in solitary. I feel foolish and ashamed, and have little love or patience toward those who I suppose mean the most to me. I think about leaving. Why have you forsaken me? Where have you flown to?

These past nights my dreams...night dreams are alarming: separation and travel over great distances, such as I am familiar with since childhood, when house and yard and woods and friends are exchanged for the unfamiliar. And for the child, whose happiness begins rooting in the stability of the home, this is a great trial, even when it turns out well. Home is jumbled, its map’s continuity becomes tattered and confusing. The parents: unfathomable. And if the parents are so, then how unstable is the heart of the child!

And each time the stability shatters, and the child is shaken out of its niche, everything must be started anew. A horrifying emptiness yawns open, and fear flies in, because the path back is obliterated. Friends cannot be kept. I have no home. Someone else will fill my place in your heart. Someone else will fill your place in mine. It’s all expendible.

To grow up firm in one place, in a family priding like lions, with a range of constant friends over a frame of years, does this give independence and lack of fear? Does it ensure a trustworthy reading of the map? Or can we none of us go back?

My life has been moving forever, folding up and moving, leaving things behind. Sometimes I settle and rest, and have the necessities, but all with the understanding of how temporal it all is. Eventually, it will all be revoked, and I will leave again, as empty as I came. So I learned how to be deficient; to set myself apart. It became my way; a sort of protective torture. I have became a stranger. My torture is a fear of myself, because I am lost. I have no sense of direction. I can neither go back to the things that were meaningful, nor go ahead, toward what might be hope.

Yet, as I learn, I find that all I thought would have made the difference for me can only be realized within, sometime. My strength will be measured in my ability to re-form, to chart the map from the center of the heart. It is life struggling upstream against the wounded past. And in spite of my brooding, I do want to live. In spite of the bad dreams of eternal separations, I still struggle to cut a trail and leave marks. How can I stop? I must find the way home.