There was the tragedy of the circumstance in those moments, of whatever you had to endure, but that is only the obvious crest of ice that sticks of out of the frozen murky abyss. It’s the stuff you can’t see, that maybe you will spend your whole lifetime never living your way into awareness of, that is the real tragedy of the time you didn’t get saved.
When you didn’t get saved you lost your faith in everything as you had previously understood it, like one sour note that ruins the whole song because you keep listening for it, bracing for the impact of hearing it again. Just below the surface, the strings began to fray that once connected you to the fabric of humanity and maybe you lost faith in god, and maybe for the rest of your life you use a lower case g when you write that word. But you also lost faith in something more nebulous- your own competence, the ability to carry yourself to safety. The world splits, and you learn the sun can be shining right on your face but it can still be the darkest day. You realize there is darkness in the world that makes the blackest night look like noon. And so you become disconnected from the nature that seems to exist for everyone else, as you slowly begin to live in a new chaotic world under a separate sky.
During that time you became invisible to others and eventually yourself – a way of living that can last a lifetime by not addressing the needs of your self or helping others to love you the way you need. When you didn’t get saved, you learned the lesson that you’re not worth the effort in the eyes of Mercy and so you go through life like that, not expecting effort and not putting effort in beyond surface levels. You stop your emotional investment in life. You come to the conclusion life is some kind of sentence and if you’re lucky, you manage to find a quiet humility in serving it out within those bars set forth for you.
And all of that pain will become heavier over time and more uncomfortable inside of you until it changes your face and warps your body in your own eyes and you turn on your own self, for all kinds of very logical reasons, harping on flaws you’d swear are real obstacles instead of seeing your body more like a rental car- simply a vehicle for you to borrow to take the best care of that you can, with which to have adventures on this planet with.
From that time on, you became fractured. You separate yourself, your life, and your story into pieces, maybe learning to accept some pieces but burying others at all costs and living with the discomfort of these pieces as if you were full of glass shards, always feeling their sharp jagged edges, where they rub up against each other- never understanding that everything about you adds up to a loveable picture. Never knowing that all of your parts actually add up to the solution to a brilliant and perfect equation, not possible without the subtraction and division.
Love feels invasive, or at least like a repulsive sort of weakness. You spend your life with blurry boundaries that cause continual compromise of your spirit and leaks of your strength where there used to be solid barriers. You become diluted and weak. A victim.
You go into all things expecting to suffer. This is the smallest sentence in this bit of writing, but the most important. Realizing this is an awakening.
You don’t know that sometimes just by speaking… your whole world can start to change. Sometimes just hearing words come out of your mouth is enough. No one has to avenge anything in some brilliant act on your behalf. Just the act of hearing your own voice speaking about what you have been living with- the act of not holding something in, releasing that tension, defying the prison guard Shame, is enough. Sometimes just the look in the eyes of someone who has no answer but hasn’t run away, and in that moment, knowing you have affected compassion in someone, is enough to start healing. You don’t realize that one of the greatest triumphs is becoming visible again, the way you were before all of this happened. Instead you hold it in… it’s not important anyway, you can swallow it, make it to the next moment, survive it tearing around inside of you like a circular saw shredding your soul just a little longer. If you tell people they may judge or reject you, and it’s far better to be accepted for who you are not and to fool yourself into believing people who don’t really know you at all can still love you. Maybe the exhaustion from that dual reality is how you have spent most of your life. Maybe you’ll never know the full extent of the leak of your life energy being sucked up by bearing your burdens alone because it’s just always been that way and you have no reference point for what freedom of the soul feels like.
And so you continually find yourself in situations where you are in need of saving, with no Hero ever coming to your rescue. The circumstances change, but it is the same broken record of pain you aligned your dance to once upon a time. Mistakenly believing we are powerless, invisible, it never occurs to us that we might look for the things we need inside of ourselves. Never in fairy tales do we learn the lesson that sometimes you have to reach deep down inside of yourself and find things you didn’t know you had and be your own fucking hero. Set your own self free.
And you obsess over “why” as if the furor of your obsession can manifest an answer that will set everything right. “Why?“ is a trap which keeps us chained to whatever happened, believing we can’t be free of suffering until we find the answer. “Why” keeps it replaying again and again, like we are reevaluating a crime scene looking for new clues.
“Why?” is a journey, not a question. A question for which ironically, there is no set answer. You make the answer yourself, which is the ultimate power in life. It is on this path you discover new highs that you would not be capable of experiencing had you not suffered. You begin to define your own fate the moment you commit to living a life that answers the question of “why?”. If you had gotten saved, you would have no chance to go on a journey along the highest peaks of life, having ascended from a deep sunless valley.
You can begin to see all of this unfold before you by embracing it- all of it. Cleanse it of the thick tarnish of emotions. No shame, no guilt, no horror, no judgment, no regret, no what ifs. No human assignment of value at all so that you can really begin to see- and ask yourself one simple question. What do I have now that I didn’t before? Aligning with that simple question changes the whole drift of your life. Life’s circumstances can seem cruel, but in reality they are a sharpening device, leaving you with an edge that you will realize glints in a full bloomed miracle in the sunlight in a way like no one else’s. This is the edge you that you need in order to fulfill your purpose. You begin to see possibility and magic where before there was only pain and curses. It draws you in, and you start to feel a pull down a very dark path. It looks dark because you can’t see where it leads. You can’t fill in any details because they don’t come from anything you have known up until this point. But you notice it doesn’t feel dark… It feels warm, it feels like home. If you go down this path, with courage and defiance I can promise you one thing.
You will only look back and be grateful that something once happened… that left you with nothing left to lose.