There's a kind of enduring
hard moments and tasks
that’s not the same at all
as the kind of enduring—
helpless and alone—
we did when we were small.
I learned to suppress
my feelings and needs
and pretend everything was fine.
You learned that there
was no one anywhere
who cared about your cries.
Now we’re grown
and in the grind,
but we have points of choice—
to recognize our options
and respond
to our own voice. 💗
In the notebook
I wrote this poem to help myself sort out the difference between enduring hard moments now—say, when one of my kids is melting down while the others also need things, and I need to eat and use the bathroom—versus in my past, when my needs utterly did not matter and were even perhaps sinful, according to the hellfire and brimstone preaching I heard every day. I’m also thinking of close friends who are likewise on journeys of healing from traumatic developmental years.
I’m including a sentence from my preceding journal entry, in which I was starting to explore this stuff. It reads: “So while I may, in the difficult moment, practice some amount of shutting down my reactivity and suppressing my needs until I can attend to them, I am doing so with strategic awareness and BGBO [best-guess best option] coping, not self-abandonment.”
Thank you for witnessing this moment of my healing journey. Does it resonate with you at all?