“Contentment layers over me in waves.
A heart that doesn’t ache,
a realization that somehow I will reach
up and out of the melancholy,
no longer angry. I forgive, forget,
fashion a new life from what they have given.”
I read these words from Susan’s poem, Port to Starboard, and I wonder if I will ever feel this way.
An old wound reopened today. Just when I thought I finally had let them go, those feelings of not belonging, of not being seen and loved for my true self, rise up again. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. And I sense that I have let resentment build and now it bubbles over in streams of tears and distorted thinking. I’ve been down this road before, and I know I will come out the other side. But I wonder if, in trying to fit in and make everyone else feel comfortable, I have been complicit in my own sadness. What I really feel is anger, but I do not trust myself to unleash the tide I’ve been holding back.
These are the pictures, in the garden of good and evil, where humanity is expected, accepted, and sometimes even applauded.
