Just as there will be those who can only hold you in your hurt and not in your happiness, there will conversely be those who retreat into the shadows during your healing to avoid the radiation from the release of your lifetime’s worth of repressed anger and grief, and who return to you when you’re safely at the end of your journey in peace, remarking how much better you seem (in a way that betrays that they really mean that you’re more palatable to them when you’re not in your feelings).
Well-meaning associates who likely haven’t done the deep work themselves will remark on how much neater or more cheerful or more precise you are, and you’ll hear the hint of relief in their voices – relief that you’re no longer the mess you once were when you were just learning to find your voice and it was still emitting in screeches, gasps, and sputters – because they didn’t like being triggered by what they saw in you. They didn’t want to inquire to themselves about whether perhaps they’d been unconsciously complicit in the institutions that birthed and held up your pain, because if they did, they’d have to either admit a willing complicity in that harm or change their beliefs and behavior on the spot, neither of which are particularly savory options from the outset. They much prefer you now that they can run into you and trust that you’ll be civil. Now that you’ve regained control over your tone.
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No. You don’t get to do that.
Never disrespect the mess that I was when I was in pain.
That mess created this healing.
The girl I was then was the architect of the woman I am today. You can’t love me today without loving the genius artist who created me. She worked this up from NOTHING, from the scratch that she was. She stitched herself up by hand, she created this wholeness from brokenness. She made something out of nothing. She turned lead into gold – even while holding all that pain in her body. Even when everything was being taken from her. Even while embodying the emotional fallout of her trauma.
If she’s not good enough for you, then you’re not good enough for me. Because you’ve failed to realize who was in the driver’s seat all along.
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