The following is an excerpt from my fledgling attempt at a novel. Luckily, it's from a time that now seems a million miles from where I am today. It's about the painful fallout of a lame relationship, the regaining of sanity, and the support of friends who help you remember that all shit will pass! So, I include this mostly because I think a lot of us have been here in some way or another. Wading through the bad in order to get to the good, Is a staple of the "20-something" experience and so I felt it was fit for sharing....
He
had chiseled away at me and somewhere along the way, I had decided to let him.
There was nothing left inside me. No energy to fight or call names. I was
speechless and breathless, stripped completely bare and utterly alone. I curled
up, shivering with fear, but sweating with anxiety. An anger I had never felt
towards anything or anyone, rose inside me and created an unsettling ache that encompassed
so many varying emotions. I could not pinpoint how to react to it. So instead,
I just sat with it. I sat, and let my body quiver as it absorbed the full
agony, want, desire, and pure hatred that was swirling around my mind and
pulsing through every muscle of my torn, weakened body. The only energy I could
muster, came and went in spurts of sudden fury. I would scream- a high pitched
wail that gave way to a low groaning mumble as the rising crescendo of emotion
exited my body like an exorcism, then calmed back into a numb lull of
emptiness.
Moments
of clarity came and went. They shifted in between and all around the whirlpool
of other emotions, all of them contending for the minimal focus available in my
war weary mind. But I was incapable of mentally or emotionally landing on one
spot for too long. I had fallen deeply into a broken state of undirected and
untamable emotion. It was an ebb and flow of extreme opposites, in which I knew
I would be rocking back and forth for quite some time. The thought
alone made me sea- sick...
A few years after this part of my life, a good friend of mine found herself in her own breakup. She eventually told me that she was able to get through it by letting herself hit her bottom. She revealed that it was only when she had finally gotten to the point of sitting in a state of acceptance, within the immense hurt she felt rising up inside her, that she was able to grasp at an inner strength buried amongst it all. Ultimately, delving head first into the deep pool of love, loss, regret, and sorrow, made her feel free in a way she hadn't expected.
Listening to her years after my own experience, I couldn't have put it better myself. Even in the midst of everything I had been going through, a faint glowing flame of self worth flickered persistently- refusing to extinguish against my best efforts to completely destroy it. Instead, this hidden reserve of durability sat waiting patiently in the unexplored caverns of my self. It readied itself for a time to spark back into a roaring inferno. As the eloquent advice of my friend stated, this comes when you hit the full expanse of hurt and have nothing left to grasp except your own hardiness. It is the will to survive ingrained in every human being- you grab your backbone, and climb right back up it inch by inch.
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