She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow…” -Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
Twelve years later, and I’m still staring off into the distance. Still contemplative. Still searching. Still moved deeply by the territory around me. But no longer sitting my sadness on an elbow.
I’m not so concerned with how hard aging has hit me, as the profile pic challenge that’s circulating asks us to show. I’m proud of my transition from maiden to mother and the way my body has carried me faithfully through these years. Although when I ask my husband what he sees in the first picture, the first thing he says–in a detached way as an art historian might–is “youthful breasts”. Yeah yeah yeah, thanks, buddy. I know I now have undeniably maternal breasts, tugged on by baby mouths ticking clockwise and counterclockwise and winding backwards and forwards to every degree. My breasts are more like the long hand now, swinging fast and free.
But the differences that I see, the shifts that strike me sound more like: “How hard has freedom hit you?” “How hard has reckoning hit you?” “How hard has self-knowledge hit you?” “How hard has becoming and unbecoming hit you?” Cosmically hard in my case. Gloriously hard. Blessedly hard. The explosive creation of beautiful new worlds.
Don’t look for the wrinkles on my face or the gray in my hair or the extra pounds. That’s like noticing the wind has moved the leaves when really what we’re facing is the glory of a new season when the world has had the courage to start all over, trusting that beauty will birth again, cycle after cycle.
In the first picture I was on a trip with my boyfriend of the time, two years into my first real romantic relationship. By then I knew that it was wrong. Just all wrong. But I didn’t know how much more wrong it would get. The relationship was four sizes too small and got smaller all the time, but each day I tried to squeeze into it all over again. I was holding my breath constantly, hungry for air. This was just the beginning of the worst. It was a Chinese finger trap of an emotionally abusive relationship: the more I pulled away and tried to leave, the tighter he pulled me in and the more he tried to overpower me.
What I want to tell the girl in the first picture:
You deserve better, dear one. Not just because you’re you but because everyone deserves better than this. Don’t believe for one instant that no one will love you more than he does. Love doesn’t get expressed in control, shame, and violent rage. Fear does. He doesn’t do it because he loves you so much, honey. He does it because he is sick. And you cannot heal him. You are not failing him by not healing him. You cannot do it; it is not within your powers. And it is not your job. It doesn’t make you selfish to protect yourself and move on.
Because I know 2006 me will not listen to anyone who tries to tell her this message (they tried), I’ll add these words for her long journey ahead:
Life will get so much more beautiful, and you will make a life without secrets and ultimatums. You won’t have to hide any part of yourself–any emotion or desire or dream. Your whole life will be lived in the open. But first it will get a lot worse.
He will try to make you doubt everything you know about yourself. He will try to make you doubt the motives and integrity of everyone who loves you. He will discredit your understanding of reality. He will exhaust you into submission and wear you down into yielding. He will confuse you into letting the truth go. Girl, believe yourself. You know who you are. You are not crazy. He is only trying to make you think you are so that you believe no one else will ever love you and that you need him to survive.
He will hurt you more than you ever imagined he would. He will betray the light of your humanity. In the end, you will hardly recognize yourself and wonder how it got to this.
Beloved, you will survive.
Getting away will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But once you break free, an army of people who love you will come out of every invisible hole in your life, like when an ant hill gets attacked. You will for the first time understand that you are the queen. Your army will walk with you and protect you, and they will never leave you. It will be years before he leaves you alone and before you stop being afraid. It will be years before you stop thinking he might be watching you at any given moment, turning away in the darkness out of your peripheral vision. It will be years before you stop projecting his hurt onto people around you. You will be okay. I repeat: you will be okay. Then your okay will open into a burst of blooms.
Life will return to color. Immediately after leaving, you will come up gasping for air. You will find it. It is already all around you now, pulling you toward new and continued life. A song here. Laughter shared there. They are showing you glimpses of vibrance, dropping bread crumbs you can follow out of the underworld. You will take a free breath for the first time in a long time. God will continue to give you tastes of life abundant that will make you brave enough to keep moving away from destruction, away from fear, away from the wreckage. Yes–God. I know that sounds weird now when “God” sounds like a trite Christian bookmark, but along the way, a wild and fierce God will make herself known to you, and she will feel like home, like the widest embrace you’ve ever known, the safest arms that have ever caught you.
You will lean into your queendom. You will realize that you have no time to accept any more shit or mess around with mind games. You will take people’s actions as their word and not go back for a second serving of anything less than delicious and nourishing. You’re finished with that. You didn’t go to hell naked and claw your way out crowned in fire and cast in gold to fool with needy, emotionally stunted, power desperate boys who can’t handle every inch of your majesty and accept the shadow connected to you, too.
You will worry that he got the best of your love, and you will wonder how you will ever have the energy and trust to do it all again. He did not ruin you, sister. He did not ruin love for you, and he did not get the best of your love. Actually he got the worst of your love because it was a love born from fear, and you will never have to love like that again. He showed you what love shouldn’t be. The red flags he used to restrain you will get coiled in your veins, and they will flash with your heartbeat to teach you about yourself and the people around you.
A big love is waiting for you. Sweet one, this love will be like no love that’s ever touched you before. It will open into more and more love. Endless love. There is a person coming who will be a true partner, who will not try to hoard your light and hide it in the palm of his hand for only him to enjoy. This person will inspire you to believe you are the brightest light the sun has ever seen, and your light will break worlds open.
With incredible insight, determination, and courage, you will work to understand what kept you in the shadows of the abuse, and you will face yourself with honesty and compassion. The eggshells you walked on will fertilize the land you are tilling inside yourself. While the abuse never should have happened, nothing that you endured will be wasted.
Forgiveness will come for yourself and for him, and then it will go, and then it will come. It will settle into your bones as your wings grow into freedom.
Brave one, life will get so sweet. You will know yourself more and more deeply. You will accept every you that you have ever been. Right now you can’t fathom the peace of accepting your wholeness. It’s a new color of the rainbow that can’t be detected by your perception of light waves. It won’t get easy, but it will all get worth it. Because you’ll stop reaching for the things that aren’t.
Warrior, I love us. I love you in 2006, and I love you today. You have always done the best you knew how to do and have tried to look at yourself honestly. You have never fully given up on yourself, other people, or this world. You never will. You will birth so much beauty. The simple wonder of your fundamental worth will shine from you.
I believe in you. I believe you. Keep stoking the fire in your heart that whispers your name and reminds you who are when the path goes dark and the trail disappears. Radiant. Brave. Intuitive. Worthy. Follow your own light out. One solid step at a time. One shaky, scared-as-hell step at a time, too. Both kinds of steps are brave and will carry you forward. You will be okay.
Leave a Reply