Sometimes bits of childish chatter will float up. I will find myself saying NO, or “you can’t do that”, or STOP. My mother, particularly, did not know when to stop. There was no real connection there. And, again, I was not sexually abused, I don’t think. It is simply the case that psychologically normal people instinctively feel the presence of boundaries, feel a sense of going too far, but that some of us were not raised by psychologically normal people.
Be all that as it may, the metaphor of the movie “The Others” came to me, especially the part where the children are whispering among themselves if they should tell their father “what she did”. It is never clear, until the end of the movie, what she did, but you feel this presence it was something terrible and irreversible.
And I feel that trauma is sometimes like being the sole inhabitant of an empty house you haunt like a ghost. You are there physically of course, and learn over time to do a passable impression of being there emotionally and socially, but it is never quite true.
And there are whispers of the truth, but only whispers. The full thing is too much to bear directly.
But there is a fire I am waiting to start, or kindle. There is something, I feel, that I need to contact and allow to expand in its own way, at its own rate, in its own direction. It needs freedom from direction, since it is escaping confinement.
I share all this because we all live in this strange world together. I feel winds blowing through all of us, first one way, and then another. Sometimes it smells of roses, sometimes garbage. Sometimes the birds are singing, sometimes starving and freezing and falling from the air. All of this is mixed together, in winds sweeping sometimes up, and sometimes down.
We, all of us, are left to make sense of it all. We do need one another, and I aim to hold my own place in that vast line.