I kept it all in a box, and no amount of therapy, counselling or writing about it over decades helped alleviate the pain. Abuse infantilises you: you are forever trapped in its fearful grasp.
Category: That’s Life
The hardest part in all this is the realisation how truly alone I am. I’m used to fending for myself in everyday life as I’ve never known anything else, but when things go wrong, I am consumed by the fear of what the end of my life will look like.
It’s the language interaction I miss. Language is my partner in crime, the thing that is always there for me when all else fails, my one great love. Without that tool of communication, I shrink into the shadows. My voice dies.
Yes, I get it. Families need support – but so do the rest of us, and singles (especially older singles) come bottom of the list when the Government seeks to improve people’s lives.
Do you have those days, or even weeks, when even the simplest task seems a mountain too high to climb? The bin that’s overflowing because unlocking the door and putting it out for collection is a marathon you just can’t face? BananaWhen your diary is sitting on your bookshelf six feet away, but it’s easier to say ‘Alexa, what day is it?’?
I am wont to quote (often) Rainer Maria Rilke and his line from his poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing – ‘No feeling is final.’
It isn’t.
Until it is.
Or, at the very least, feels as if it is.
While the adage ‘Time is a great healer’ is true, I prefer to think of time as a great changer. I don’t think pain is ever healed; it just shifts its focus.
‘There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.’ Rainer Maria Rilke
I confess to crying when I see the Lindt bunnies in shops, warm in their gold foil and red ribbon scarves. Mum bought be one every year when she stopped buying me eggs, as I was never a huge chocolate fan once childhood passed. These days, I can make a Kit Kat last a month.
What sex is on my birth certificate, the man patiently explained. Look, mate, I have a goddamned whacking great hole between my legs that small creatures the size of water melons can emerge if ever I’d managed to hang on to a bloke long enough to shag me senseless.