MUSINGS FROM MIDLIFE
My Stories
Breaking down or Through
Shame. I shudder at the word. A powerful force. When I’m in it, it feels like I am sinking in a deep morass of disgust in myself. I feel skinned alive with my chest ripped open. My heart exposed to all.
Recently, I walked through time feeling like the world could see right through me, without me saying a word. I found myself getting through the days, only finding solace in retreating to my home, and eventually into an exhausted sleep. Even then the nights were wakeful and disturbed as I faced the dark shadows looming in me.
I felt humiliated and repulsed by my inability to muster up any compassionate thoughts towards myself.
The Journey
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice — though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you did not stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognised as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.