Who Am I? Feelings

I continued slogging on through all the feelings, hurts, and anxieties. I started to express these ugly, turbulent feelings that were stored inside.  Fighting each other. Clamouring to get out into the open.  To be heard.  For validity.  These feelings refused to be denied.  Like a turbulent sea threatening to capsize a small boat, these feelings buffeted me at all times threatening to pull me down in their wake.  I couldn't get away from them.  When I slept, they woke me up.  They manifested themselves in nightmares, sweats.  When I was awake, they tormented me almost every waking moment.  They wanted to be heard.  They clamoured to be heard. They refused to be denied.  So I brought them up out of the darkness inside me.  Naming them.  Giving them an identity.  Recognizing their existence, their right to exist.

I felt:
alone
isolated
abandoned
violated
threatened
voiceless
powerless
faceless
adrift in a storm-tossed sea
valueless
angry
depressed
suicidal
anxious
afraid of people

Naming these turbulent emotions, previously in hiding deep inside my psyche, injuring and buffeting my emotions brought them out into the open. Where they could be heard.  They could have validity.  They could be examined.  Being brought out from darkness into light, they slowly, very slowly began to lose their awful power over me.

I had been brutally and viciously attacked.  I was bruised, battered and bloodied emotionally.  Physically I looked the same.  Emotionally everything had changed.  Physically, I would have been in the hospital under the care of doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals.  Emotionally, I was left to wander alone gathering support in a fragmented way.  Physically, people would have seen the wounds, the damage and known how to respond.  Emotionally, the wounds, the damage was hidden from their eyes.  They had no way to see into the depths of my soul.  The depths of the damage.  I floundered.  They floundered.  And yet, somehow, miraculously, different people came out of the woodwork and offered an outstretched hand.  They didn't understand.  They couldn't.  Yet, they still reached out that hand for me to grasp, to hang onto for dear life and said:  "I care."  "You matter."  "I want to see you live."  Unlike the Pharisee and the Priest in the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan, these people didn't cross over to the other side and pretend that the bloody, battered heap of humanity lying by the side of the road didn't exist, didn't matter, was odious and unclean.  Gazing intently on the bloodied body of a struggling human being, like the Good Samaritan they stopped, reached out a hand, and offered assistance.  May God bless them.

Continued tomorrow.