I have a stone around my neck, heavy and dull.
It sits in my gut, twisting around.
I am bad. I am lazy. I am selfish. I am mean.
It cackles as it swings.
I have a stone around my neck, old and fresh.
It sits in my head, knocking around.
I am bad. I am lazy. I am stupid. I am mean.
It thrums as it swings.
I have a stone around my neck, honed and primed.
It sits on my heart, smashing it down.
I am bad. I am lazy. I am cold. I am mean.
It slices as it swings.
I have a stone round my neck, dusty and dark.
It sits on my soul, weighing it down.
I am bad. I am lazy. I am unworthy. I am mean.
It suffocates as it swings.
I have a stone around my neck, weighing me down.
I know not how to put it down.
I forget that my mom died.
She died 18 months ago, but time is not the reason. I forgot she died by the third month. And then a wave of sadness would hit and I’d wonder why. Then it would hit me, mom died.
The reason it is, was, easy for me to forget is because I didn’t have the stereotypical relationship with my mom. I talked to her four times a year, give or take, on birthdays (if she remembered, we hadn’t had an “issue”, or she hadn’t asked for money), major holidays and occasionally a time in between that. Her mental illness left little room beyond that.
I don’t regret the number of times we talked. After twenty years of being her emotional punching bag, of enduring the disappointment that she only called to ask for money, I stopped trying to fix her. Or connect with her.
And instead I focused on surviving her.
Well, I’ve survived her. Sort of. The scars she left linger, as do the good things she taught me, like how to cook and bake, how to knit. On bad days, I try to see her for the person she was underneath her pain and demons. And on other days, I either forget or feel the emotional memories and try to work through them.
I often get sideswiped by grief. Two weeks before my birthday, the first one since she died, I felt the weight of her missing presence. But it soon passed, like my memory that she died. If I want to poke that pain, I have a voicemail I saved of a random day she called when I could not or would not pick up.
I survived my birthday. There’s that word again. It seems I spent most of my life surviving. Not living, not finding joy, but surviving. That’s not a healthy way to live. I’ve been working on that recently, looking for the joy, the satisfaction, doing tasks that felt good or right to me in the moment. It’s mostly working.
But I still have all this lingering pain. The limiting beliefs and the fears built up since childhood that control my day-to-day. I need to address them. I need to clear them. And I am, but it’s a tangled mess and the beliefs are ingrained.
I’ve read a lot of books about this, how to emotionally regulate, how to clear the blocks. They work when I apply them, but sometimes not even then. Sometimes I need to feel the feelings and then shove them back in the corner where I last left them to survive for another day.
Like this piece. I’m already over the emotions that brought them on, or rather, I can feel them tugging at the back of my throat, but I have shit to do and I don’t have time to focus on them right now.
I have a feeling I’d better make the time or they may just wash over me and tug me under. When surviving won’t be enough. That day is not today, but soon.
Maybe.