Becoming your own master

Finding eternity in your skin

Before I even knew who I was, I was me. I am made of star dust, of dirt, etched with paradox, full of guilt for existing. Sometimes I wished not to exist, when existing felt suffocating. 

The echo of “at least it happened to me because I’m strong enough to withstand it” fails to account for strength being mutually exclusive form protective repetitive perpetration. The cost my body has been paying all this time hasn’t been worth exonerating others of the burden of responsibility. It seems that my life up to this point has been choiceless martyrdom. Withstanding trauma doesn’t protect someone else from being victimized - I do not absorb the pain that others will endure in their own traumas by being strong enough (whatever that is) through my own. 

I cannot be crucified on a cross of my pain to protect others because I am not harming them. 

This is how my psyche had gotten caught up with control- if I can be strong through the pain then maybe They won’t hurt anyone else. Maybe if I don’t give them the satisfaction of hurting me, they’ll lose their appetite for exploitation and violation. But it won’t. And my body ends up with the bill. 

Eventually, the pain became sewed into my skin, grafted into my musculature. To let go of the pain, I would be pulled apart. My pain kept me alive and also on the brink of death. I was dead to the world and in my death, I overworked. I was a zombie moving without thought from one task to another. I would get out of bed and work until I collapsed. Productivity hot wired a sense of worthiness so instead of drowning in uncertainty, I dropped an anchor in workaholism. Existence was a Sisyphyian punishment and the harder I worked myself, the more I proved I could withstand anything. But I can’t and I shouldn’t. 

I am flesh and bone, evolved from cellular division and to compost I will become. Fire, of course, burns flesh, wind erodes bone. There are climates we should not withstand because we are unable to. But humans have never understood nor accepted our limits. We strive instead to overcome them. It becomes an insatiable treadmill to surpass ourselves, to move beyond the limits of our body. To work more. To eat less. To take up less space. To have more. We are walking contradictions of desire. We reject the limits of our own body because how could we be controlled by the whims of a fleshy wetsuit prone to back pain? The needs of my body feel unmeetable - for once I meet my needs once, I must continue to. 

Rather than risk the failure of not being able to maintain my needs, I rejected them altogether. It serves the narrative of not being worthy to have my needs met well. Every need I meet, every desire I bring forth, is fodder for the fates to rob me of it. So it becomes safer to move through live Empty, a shell, than to risk being Full of my sense of self, to risk losing my identity once I have it. Ironically, self-loathing originates as self-protection morphed into hatred over time. 

I have missed so many beautiful moments of life because I was bracing for their end. The end would have come, whether I was braced or not and I instead just missed the beauty completely. It’s taken repetitions of these lessons, because I’m stubborn and strong in will, to understand that the good times end - just as the difficult times do. I remember feeling that I could never tolerate existence, that being in my body could never be anything but insufferable. Now those feelings seem to exist to an entirely different person, the sensations are so unrecognizable but it is undeniably my origin.

Understanding I did not know who I was outside of the pain was the permission I needed to discover. The discovery was and is harrowing, terrifying, incredible, satisfying, beautiful, and everything in between. I am still discovering.

It has come to accepting the contrast of life’s experiences that has given my obstinate self, certainty, amidst the uncertainty. In allowing - as if I have anything to do with it - the natural ebbs and flows of life to ebb and flow, there is so much more to life. Because love requires heartbreak, it is an inescapable reality - insofar as much as I love, I am sure to have my heart broken to the same degree. And to accept a life of love, I must also simultaneously say yes to grief - the counterpart of love.

“I can give her no greater power than she possesses already; don’t you see how great that is? Don’y you see how men and animals are obliged to serve her and how she gets on so well in the world with her naked feet?”

Who would you be if trauma never happened to you? Who is the self waiting to be discovered on the other side of pain?