All My Rage

Four years ago, I stood at the beginning of so, so many endings in my life – a near-complete unraveling of everything I knew. Though I was six years out from the cancer-ending transplant that saved my life, the resulting chronic disease coupled with overwhelming, relentless, stinging waves of survivors’ guilt still battered my mind and body every…single…day.  I was trying to rebuild a life.  I was trying, unsuccessfully, to make sense of things.  I was not well.

I’m so glad I didn’t know then what was coming, that in the span of four months, I would leave one job and start another, move to a new home in a new city, send another son off to college, lose almost all of my closest friends, lose most of our family support network, lose my stability, lose my routines, lose my faith and my faith community, lose my identity, lose my direction, nearly lose my marriage and heart connection to my kids, and devastatingly, lose the daughter I promised to adopt in the realization that we did not have the physical, mental, or emotional fortitude to care for her in the ways she needed.

I felt eviscerated.

My heart was dis-integrating.

I

was

drowning.

And many days, as I lay on the damp, dirty floor in that cavern of loss, I wanted nothing more than for that drowning to be complete…

I can still see the person that I was then – standing alone at the precipice of all of that burning loss, tears streaming, no way back, and no way out but through, and if I could step through the veil between the two of us for just a moment, if I could tell her anything at all, I’d grab a tight hold of her hand and whisper that for the foreseeable future, just waking up, just getting out of bed, just continuing to breathe, and just surviving each moment would be wholly enough. I would lift her chin, look into her eyes, and to assure her that though she is about to journey into places that are unavoidably, characteristically lonely, she will not be alone because I will never abandon her; that as she learns to get quiet and let the world fall away, even in the suffering, she will find an infinite and enduring home within her. 

Though I wouldn’t repeat the last four years of my life for anything, I’m grateful for where it has brought me. This life so deeply embedded in loss has drawn me face to face with a darkness within me so thick I couldn’t breathe at times.  I have felt deep rage and vicious anger - at people, at myself, at god - to a degree I had never felt before, and after years of shoving those parts of me down, trying very hard and very unsuccessfully to let things go in the name of being a good person, I had to acknowledge that that was no longer working for me, and that it actually never had. I am simply not wired that way, and I would posit that many people are not. While the Christianity that defined my first forty years on this planet produced much good in my life – a support system, the love of a community, an invitation to think about spirituality (albeit in one very specific way) – it also taught me to abandon myself so completely that I lost all ability to care for, to be gentle with, and to love all of me. When I was finally able to get help to begin to approach myself with a little grace, when I finally began to call all of the exiled parts of me back home, I also began to understand just how devastating that self-abandonment really was both to my own internal landscape and to every relationship I’ve ever had. For the first time in my life, I let the anger and the rage I felt inside exist and breathe without judgement and found that those parts of me were never bad or shameful or unworthy to begin with; they were always signposts pointing to bigger problems: repeated violations of my boundaries, deep hurt that needed my time and kind attention, throbbing wounds of shame and rejection both from myself and from relationships in my life.  They were strong, guardian parts of me that were calling me to slow down, to pause, and to take gentle care of myself and my inner family. They were trying their best to save me.

None of this knowing has been easy.  In learning to find new ways to love and care for the angry, wounded, sad, and rageful parts of me that I’d denied for my whole life, I’ve made a lot of mistakes.  I’ve said hurtful things. I’ve cut off relationships without much tenderness or understanding for others. I’ve numbed instead of slowing down to honor my own needs. Some of those moves were the right things done in the wrong way, and I’m still learning what it looks like to make repair and have boundaries, to give love without losing myself. It’s all very imperfect, but I’m learning every day to tolerate that imperfection a little bit better, and to give to myself what I have craved  from others from as far back as I remember, permission to get it wrong and to be accepted, welcomed, loved anyway. And counter to everything I learned from my faith, I’m finding that the more I give this to myself first, the more I am naturally able to give it to others.  Put your own mask on first and all that.

This drive to get to know myself completely for the first time ever has pushed me to bring all my shame, all of my mistakes, all my worst moments, all my self-loathing, all my incredibly painful rejection, and all my strongest fears into the light and back to the table.  It has demanded nothing less than brutally honest self-examination and radical self-grace, acknowledging that every part of me that I’ve labeled as bad, ugly, or unworthy has worked hard over the years to keep me physically and emotionally safe even when those parts created a lot of strife in my life. Today I embrace them and thank them for that work as much as I can. Though I am failing and succeeding and stumbling and rising every day, I am learning to reconnect to myself,  listen to myself, trust myself, and to never, ever abandon myself again. Though every other relationship in my life may fail, I am with me, and I belong to myself, inexorably.

I want to know that viscerally, interstitially, completely.

A secondary gift of the last four years of my life is that they have served as a trailhead for me to walk toward a deeper understanding of trauma and biology, about energy and human bodies, about physical and emotional pain and our absolutely magical nervous systems.  I am thrilled by what I am learning, and to write, for me, is to integrate knowledge and understanding into my being;  writing is the act of becoming. I’ve played with blogging on and off over the years, but now for the first time in my life, I’m writing and posting for myself first, so I can continue to process my experiences, to learn from them, and to keep returning to myself, and if you and others come along, then that just adds to the delight and wonder of my life all the more for however long it shall be.

I’m so excited (and a little trepidatious) to build, to grow, and to integrate in this space again.

With deep gratitude, full love, and all my beautiful rage,

Zee