Light

Yesterday, I did the thing I've been telling myself I would do for the past four months.

What I didn't expect was how I would feel when I left. Pure. Expunged. Clean and holy as childrens' fingers clutching at their mother.

There was the fear that had hollowed me out, burrowed so deep I wonder sometimes if it will ever leave, if the demons who've taken resident will unhook their talons and quietly slink away. The great fear that perhaps I had messed up by taking the actions I recently have. The even greater fear that I was right to take those actions and what that meant about my life.

Yesterday, I finally saw a therapist.

I cannot say that I've found the road that will lead me absolutely to a place of healing and redemption, but coming out of the building into the cold fall morning, it was the first honest breath of air I have taken since July. Despite the hard, hard things that are ahead, there was a rightness to the words I'd shared that morning, an honesty that was like stretching after a long, long sleep.

And that honesty is the thing that has been chasing me my entire life. How incredibly difficult to finally admit, after twenty some odd years, that the thing that should be the one constant in your life is damaged, flawed beyond repair, a source of sadness and hurt that goes deeper than I've ever allowed myself to look. Because if there is poison there, how could it not have slowly seeped into me?

When the therapist said the word, I winced even though there is a part of me, a part I keep pushed deep, deep down, that knew she was right. "So I'd say she was abusive, too" she said, and I slowed, opened my mouth to backpedal, to quickly correct her assumption, but as she continued to speak, I found that there was nothing to correct, nothing more to say in defense, and so I was quiet, dazzled in the face of what was finally honest, what was finally truth despite my best attempts to hide it from myself.

In the coming weeks, there is hard work that must be done. But I'm not afraid, not confused, or bewildered, or sad, or hopeless any more. That power that she had is slowly diminishing. I can't say that I won't fall into that confusion or fear or sadness ever again, but for the first time in a long time, the blinders have been loosened, and I can see.