I’m listening to the Argo soundtrack as I type. It’s one of my favorite albums, because the Eastern and Western blend is so exciting and comforting at the same time. The title track is the backbeat of some of my entries, and actually, so is a piece called “The Mission.” The music allows me to expand my mind so that I can think bigger, similar to a doctor in the operating theater. Some of the best rabbit holes of this web site have come from a piece called “A Spy in Tehran,” which is a conversation musically between danger and the rest of the world. It’s a dance beat, friendly in its fire. The power comes in with rhythmically undulating chords of darkness. With every measure, my mind goes deeper into myself and just wanders to see what’s there. What’s left. What is still standing in darkness that I cannot yet remove and want desperately to do so. I have given myself up to surrender when I thought I had to have control to keep everything together. Life got better when I realized that nothing could be controlled and I was a pawn in a chess game writ large. I had to willingly serve in order to receive power granted to me voluntarily, rather than think that someone was going to knock on my door one day and say, “poof! You’re educated enough to hear people without judgment.” I know I hated it being done to me. Those people who thought they knew more than me. They were right, they did. But I was not in a place of surrender. A place of control said that I knew best even when I was heading the wrong direction. Other people have gotten to the right one before me, and I couldn’t reach them, an alien on my own planet, to say how much I needed help and couldn’t ask for it.
When I got the help I needed, I fought it tooth and nail. My therapist rejected me, so that meant there was no one on earth that could listen to me process. Someone thought my words mattered enough to tell me, and my past darkness said to repel her because her light was too bright and I couldn’t stand in it. It was just too healthy. It’s just conjecture on my part, but I feel that we are on the same page and running in opposite directions because we haven’t learned that there’s no barbed wire fence between us because it’s there, as in “object permanence” and the verb “to be.”
Barbed wire fences make themselves.
Coming at each other in a negative way was just building the castle and the moat behind it. Emotional surrender was destroying them in my mind even if she doesn’t destroy hers. It was a redirect that cost us time in peace, and it’s something that I will regret always. I did not take care of her heart, and that statement stands alone.
In the past, I would have run from that fact by saying that my words could never have enough impact to do that and mean it. You say horrible things because it takes that much to get through. It’s using darkness to get light, and even if you use darkness to get to the light, it matters whether you can show your work or whether you hang your head in shame. It’s the difference between being an honest human being or not.
If it seems like I am hammering a point home, here, it’s because I am. When you use darkness to achieve a goal, it matters that you can’t look in the mirror very long. I tested that boundary, and it wrecked me for the greater good. I surrendered. I wasted time with darkness and when I saw the light, I had to respond. It’s not fair to leave her wondering whether I’m sorry and wish for forgiveness or not. She does not have to forgive me to appreciate that I said them.
It’s a new thing I’m trying…….. being more patient, turning off my immediate impulse control, and knowing that the answer will come more deeply, down from my raw intuition, if I spend the time to get it while thinking about the fact that my own words are large and they have the ability to hurt people as well as heal them.
Because I can turn off my emotions, I choose to use light or dark every day. The decision is inside me now, whereas before I could not see the tapes from childhood that told me darkness was the best I could ever hope for. I had to see that surely I was worth more than that.
I changed when I realized I was.
Stories That Are All True 