My Healing Isn’t Pretty
My healing isn’t pretty
It’s not clean,
With nice edges
Colored to the lines.
It’s raw, cracked skin
Blistering and breaking open
To the dry eastern wind.
It’s the unashamed, disgraceful death —
Shitting and pissing my pants,
Wailing with heaves of snot and tears
As drool dripping down my face.
A pained growl that will claw
At the waters my thinking mind
Is used to swimming in.
It’s a frothing rage
And a dignity-shattering grief.
The inner gaslighting dies.
The ego’s performance ends
And the curtains close.
I purge and scream
And say —
”I need help!
I’m not strong.
I don’t have my shit together,
I don’t know what I’m doing,
And I can’t do this alone.
I need you,
I need community —
I need a Village.”
I’m a baby screaming for mom.
Crying out for help
In the dark of the night
Releasing the last of all the ways
This internalized individualism
Has poisoned my heart
As I beg for
Another broken child
To reparent this broken child.
This healing isn’t sunshine and rainbows
It’s thunder and lightening
An earth shaking quake
Weeping rain, howling wind,
A trembling beneath me
Whittling me down to my bones
Its not sexy
Or a sales-worthy marketing story
Asking you to hire me as your coach.
It’s not theory and talk —
It’s a complete rewriting
Of how I relationally walk.
It’s revolting and repulsive,
Disgraceful and shunned —
Beyond any sense or sensibility,
And strains the domesticated mind.
It breaks the egoed, separate self.
And will make one judge and project out
Their inner shames of worthiness,
As I find mine in being worthless
And still worthy.
It’s uncultured and uncivilized —
Primitive and wild.
Savage and untamed.
It fractures my reality
And makes me question my sanity.
What is sanity?
What is normal?
Why is there a normal?
It’s the fugitive night
That terrifies and ignites —
That makes you wonder
If dawn really is a thing.
Calling it messy
Is an understatement.
I’m on my hands and knees
fumbling in the dark.
Naked and bare,
Searching for the path
One dirty hand clawing into the mud
At a time.
Dirt builds up underneath my fingernails.
I feel the grime and soil.
I embrace it.
It’s in me.
It is me.
It’s my body and bones —
Impressed upon my DNA.
I yell at my ancestors,
“WHY??
How could you do this?
How could you forget?
How could you go this far astray!”
I’m a flower
That’s been transplanted
And called a weed
So many times
That I’ve forgotten
What it means
To blossom and bloom.
I flail and impale.
I scream and yell.
I challenge the light,
And find salvation
In the dark.
There are no accolades here.
No pat on the back saying
Look at you humaning again —
Feeling feelings
Your father and his father
Couldn’t imagine.
Suppressed intergenerationally
Down so deep,
Beneath mounds of disillusions
And graves of forgotten truths
That I don’t know what’s real anymore.
This isn’t some glorified story
Of destined prophecy.
It’s anarchy in the liminal in-between
The tender fracture
Within the decomposing self.
The misunderstood, unmet
Needs of yesterday,
Become alchemized into
Something new today.
A remembrance that
Shakes my foundations
To the core.
It’s not comfortable.
It’s fucking uncomfortable —
Uncompromising
And unrelenting.
To truly surrender to it
Means surrendering to being
So fully seen that
One can only cower at the light.
And in that shit,
Still stand up and declare —
I’m worthy. I’m enough.
I’m human.
And I choose to accept your love and
The truth of our interconnection,
Even when I don’t feel I deserve it.
It’s a declaration
Of uncertainty and disillusion —
Proclaiming loudly,
With my spine straight
That I’m broken and whole,
That I’m the colonizer and the colonized,
I’m the rapist and the raped,
And I’m still worthy and needed.
I denounce
And revere.
I shame
And celebrate.
I integrate all the parts of the dark and light
Back into awareness and acceptance.
I keep putting one foot
In front of the other
Without knowing what’s next.
I yield into the dark unknown —
Heart open,
Hands out wide,
Somehow walking tall
With the wild tears of grief
Streaming down my cheeks.
And with a raw scratched throat,
I say —
“I am here.
I’m alive.
I have hurt you.
I am hurting too.
Can you see me here in the dark?
I need you.
Will you take my hand,
And forgive and liberate
Our hearts, bodies, and souls together?”
