Give me your broken, your battered, your dark. Give me your tortured past and your stories of hurt. Offer them up to me and I will keep them safe, here in the darkest depths of my soul.
Your pain shows me that I am not alone (never alone).
You are not alone either.
I want to flip the world over and discover the underbelly. The soft, dark, rotting underbelly. No one is as perfect as they think they are. We’re all a little shattered, here, inside our minds.
You can glue something back together, but it will never be the same again.
***
If you keep pushing everything down; the pain, the emotion, the hurt and anger; sometime in the future, your brain will decide that you’re safe (right when you’re not expecting it) and shatter into a million tiny pieces. People will look at you and wonder, why is she broken now? What changed?
Nothing changed, and everything, all at once.
As they scratch their heads and wonder, pondering uselessly on your sanity, you’ll be left sitting in the middle of the room, the shattered remains of your mind falling on the floor, as you try and find the glue to glue it all back together.
The good glue, the one that holds everything together, even as the salt water of tears threatens to dissolve everything again and the white heat of anger melts you.
Not everyone finds the good glue.
Some of us have nothing more than sticky tape and string, hopes and prayers, tangled remnants of song lyrics, to hold our brains together. I cannot say that this is an effective way to parcel up your sanity for use again. Maybe you should put it in a box and save it for later instead.
That’s what I did.
***
If you keep your sanity in a tidy little box and place it carefully inside your closet, closing the door after it, when people ask you:
‘Have you lost your mind?’
You can reply:
‘No. No I haven’t. I know exactly where it is – it just doesn’t work very well anymore.’
Tears.
Tears because you speak my truth. You know my heart.
Compartments. For some people, that’s the only way to mange the memories that are too painful to live with, sectioning those aspects of their lives, perhaps their pasts. Compartments also keep the daily trials and traumas where they need to be, rather than contaminating other parts of our lives. Compartments. Call them avoidance; others call it self preservation.
My mind/brain broke today, even though I thought I had been going OK. Keeping busy with stuff has stopped me thinking about how much I hurt. Still.
I want the good glue.
What a beautiful, sad, poignant post. I love the way you write Veronica. You are a wonderful wordsmith, with a rare ability to connect… respect x
Thank you so much for the follow on my blog. This is a beautiful post. I have had my share of struggles and I really love the phrase “‘No. No I haven’t. I know exactly where it is – it just doesn’t work very well anymore.’
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