It isn’t every day we feel like celebrating,

This morning I cried harder than I have

Allowed myself to in some time.

Tears from my inner 12 year old,

The anorexic suffering in silence,

Because her words and feelings

Didn’t have a safe place to be held.

Not in her family of practicality,

Her parents unable to hold

Their own emotions,

Let alone the weight of their daughter’s shattering heart,

I cried this morning,

Wept of the pain she endured,

The life she stopped living,

The death she wished would find her instead.

She held on,

To her body,

To the only thing that made sense

To take her pain out on.

This pattern of pain is one

I am unlearning,

It has taken many years,

And I am still learning how

Love can feel safe

Without prior pain,

Or need to earn it.

We all come from families

Bent on exploding their pain

Onto others,

Or perhaps like mine,

Whose women swallowed the anger,

Shouldered the pain unhealed,

Carried the trauma into dis-ease.

I found underneath my grief stricken heart,

Anger,

Rage,

At the unfairness,

Cutting to the heart of it all,

My rage with the Divine,

God,

Divine Mother,

How could she have left me in pain like that?

How could she have allowed me to suffer like that?

I didn’t expect anger to surface.

I expected sadness and grief,

Maybe some unacknowledged anger

At my mother for passing her

Dis-ease onto me,

The child in me WAS angry,

Raging,

Boiling from within,

That this pain was now mine to bare.

My weakness made me susceptible

To this demon of shame,

Self hatred,

Self abandonment,

Cut off from love itself.

That has been my journey.

Amidst the various shades of form,

Starvation,

Over indulgence,

Body punishment with control and rigidity of force in movement.

I am two years recovered from two shades.

Anorexia and bulimia.

A death trap.

I am many shades still to go to being totally FREE.

But I am more free these days than I have ever been.

Buying foods just because I wanted to,

Resting when my mind is screaming at me,

Learning to calm my own energy,

Without the need to self evacuate every time.

Crying,

Giving myself actual SPACE,

Actual permission,

Less shaming,

Less judging,

But MORE space to inhabit my body,

And my feelings.

It is scary as fuck

Treating myself with kindness.

Tenderness,

Instead of punishment,

Opening my heart when all

I want to do it close it down,

Run away and just stop

It all.

But, I am here,

I am alive,

My inner child is safe.

In my own arms now.

And only I, can give her the

Care she needed way back when.

The blaring apology to my own heart,

“I am sorry.”

“I am so so sorry.”

I can’t stop crying.

She is begging to be witnessed,

And finally I am here

For her.

Healing is so icky feeling,

Real healing that is.

It’s tears,

Swollen faces,

Snotty noses,

Weird wailing sounds.

I don’t know what awaits on the other side

Of fully, irrevocably letting go,

But I am walking through it,

Hand in my own hand,

Hand on my own heart,

Saying all the things the 12-year-old,

The 8-year-old,

The 4-year-old,

The 17-year-old,

The 20 something-year-old,

The 28-year-old needed and needs to hear.

“I love you. And I am learning how to care for you like you were never cared for before.”

Hand in my own hand,

I hold them,

I carry them with me,

And cease to stop running away

From my inner being,

And allow love to feel safe again.

Safe to open to again,

In myself,

And give it to myself.

That abandoning myself,

Was the initiation into

Healing,

And that I can still feel

Whatever I feel

Around that,

And remember the Divine within my

Own heart has never left,

And is reminding me in its embrace

Even in painful remembrance,

I am found,

And I am loved.