Dear me, today I'm letting go.

Today I started going through all my diaries and journals, in my attempt to let go of the past. Most of them are from when I was working with a psychotherapist on my Child Sexual Abuse experiences from childhood. They are pretty intense. Interspersed here and there are funny little anecdotes and nonsense rhymes. Some of these I've saved and they'll no doubt reappear here as a Once Upon, a Haiku Noodle, or a Dear Me (see my blog labels if you're wondering what this means).

It feels glorious to pull out the pages and rip them up. I read through first, of course. The whole experience is liberating and inspiring and reassuring. Some of it makes me very sad. But mostly I can see how I've grown, and how I've fulfilled at least a few of the dreams I had back then (which sounds like it was decades ago, but I'm talking about 2001 right now!), and how I've been able to answer some of the questions I had. It's also amusing to see that there are some questions I'm still asking, and I'm thinking today that if these questions are so very stale, I might as well let them go.

I was angry in a lot of the entries .. wow. So very angry, and hurt. But today I can see how every bit of what I went through in therapy was So Very Worth It.

On one page I found the funniest quotation, scrawled at the end of a very enraged and frustrated bout of journalling:

"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
- Ken Martin, A Silent Strength

"Fly away, my soul ...

Dear me, dear me ... I meant to do this chronologically but occasionally get it wrong. Here's something I wrote to the same guy a few months earlier. I think it was when he went off to Coorg to try and get off the smack and straighten his life out.

Fly away, my soul
I can't hold you back any longer.
Go and look for the sun.

But if you get tired of searching
come back to the warmth of my arms.
Just let me know when you're coming back
so I can shed my armour.
(Written on October 17, 1985)

What I like about it is the way I expressed feeling exposed and vulnerable without him, having to armour myself in order to survive without him. (And we think this is "love"?!)

A few months later I wrote another version of this poem, by which time I was, like him, badly hooked on smack, and I think I (or perhaps we) had begun to realise that our love affair was a threesome - him, me, smack - and that our being together only pulled us down further.

Fly away, my soul
We can't be one any longer.
It's time we looked for the sun.
And when we've found what we're looking for
come back to the warmth of my arms.
Just let me know when you're coming back,
so I can shed my armour.
(written on 22.3.86)