Raven on Nostr: I often struggle to translate my thoughts and feelings into words-out-loud. My mind ...
I often struggle to translate my thoughts and feelings into words-out-loud. My mind goes blank under the benign stares of other human beings.
Perhaps this is because I was slapped for saying the wrong thing when I was little. I couldn’t figure out what I’d said wrong, so began my anxiety of speaking out loud to other human beings.
Perhaps it is because my perfectionist nature sees my difficulty communicating as a shameful failure.
I’ve only expressed my deepest grief about the passing of my child when I am alone. The closest I’ve come with another person present is with Troy.
Sometimes, holding my pain in, I feel like, if my abdomen were sliced open and my entrails threatened to exit my body, or even if I saw the same happen to someone else, it would be considered in the natural course of things to scream about it.
But when the gaping wound is in my soul and the evidence of my agonizing pain is invisible, I mustn’t scream out loud. Unless I want to be seen as crazy, lost-it, not-all-there, unhinged.
Sometimes the screams build up inside me. Build and build and have nowhere to go. I must hold them in and wait and wait and wait. Wait until what was a scream can come out softly in a written thought or a painted canvas, or a few quiet tears.
Sometimes I scream in the car while driving down the highway, where no-one else can see or hear.
Sometimes I suffer debilitating migraines that disrupt sight, hearing, touch perception, and reasoning.
Sometimes my gallbladder convinces me my insides are rending apart.
Today, singing along with Pentatonix -- Hallelujah. The vibrations made in my chest on the “hallelujahs” feel like happiness.
A second time through and I remember him singing along, too. Memory sweet and bitter. He is earnest, intense, sometimes off-key, flat, enthusiastic.
For a brief moment I can almost see him standing next to me, filmy and barely there, like a ghost in a movie. I can hear him. Then the impression is gone. I clutch my chest and dig my fingers into my skin, the physical pain anchoring me to the spot, so as not to float away on the roaring emptiness of his absence.
Tears flood and I curl up on the couch, bury my face in a wad of velvety blanket to muffle my voice and let the pain turn to sound for a little while. Don’t want to keep quiet, but mustn’t alarm the neighbors. I wail and sob until I feel a little relief.
I complain as though this reserve were solely a failing of my culture, but also, I am shy. Very shy. If you asked me to cry out loud in “public” (even around just friends), said “go ahead and scream and wail” I don’t think I could do it. The walls are too high and too firm, keeping me faux-safe from unexpected slaps and other rejections.
#suicide #mentalhealth #parenting #grief #writing
Perhaps this is because I was slapped for saying the wrong thing when I was little. I couldn’t figure out what I’d said wrong, so began my anxiety of speaking out loud to other human beings.
Perhaps it is because my perfectionist nature sees my difficulty communicating as a shameful failure.
I’ve only expressed my deepest grief about the passing of my child when I am alone. The closest I’ve come with another person present is with Troy.
Sometimes, holding my pain in, I feel like, if my abdomen were sliced open and my entrails threatened to exit my body, or even if I saw the same happen to someone else, it would be considered in the natural course of things to scream about it.
But when the gaping wound is in my soul and the evidence of my agonizing pain is invisible, I mustn’t scream out loud. Unless I want to be seen as crazy, lost-it, not-all-there, unhinged.
Sometimes the screams build up inside me. Build and build and have nowhere to go. I must hold them in and wait and wait and wait. Wait until what was a scream can come out softly in a written thought or a painted canvas, or a few quiet tears.
Sometimes I scream in the car while driving down the highway, where no-one else can see or hear.
Sometimes I suffer debilitating migraines that disrupt sight, hearing, touch perception, and reasoning.
Sometimes my gallbladder convinces me my insides are rending apart.
Today, singing along with Pentatonix -- Hallelujah. The vibrations made in my chest on the “hallelujahs” feel like happiness.
A second time through and I remember him singing along, too. Memory sweet and bitter. He is earnest, intense, sometimes off-key, flat, enthusiastic.
For a brief moment I can almost see him standing next to me, filmy and barely there, like a ghost in a movie. I can hear him. Then the impression is gone. I clutch my chest and dig my fingers into my skin, the physical pain anchoring me to the spot, so as not to float away on the roaring emptiness of his absence.
Tears flood and I curl up on the couch, bury my face in a wad of velvety blanket to muffle my voice and let the pain turn to sound for a little while. Don’t want to keep quiet, but mustn’t alarm the neighbors. I wail and sob until I feel a little relief.
I complain as though this reserve were solely a failing of my culture, but also, I am shy. Very shy. If you asked me to cry out loud in “public” (even around just friends), said “go ahead and scream and wail” I don’t think I could do it. The walls are too high and too firm, keeping me faux-safe from unexpected slaps and other rejections.
#suicide #mentalhealth #parenting #grief #writing