Vulnerability

I allowed myself to be vulnerable yesterday. It was our weekly, writing group challenge. The task was to write something pertaining to the word fulfilled, in under 200 words. Some people were very clever in their interpretation of the brief, while I had chosen a personal angle, writing how my life was not yet fulfilled following my son’s death in 2017. But afterwards, that set me thinking.

You know, it has been eight years since his passing. Surely I have moved on. One can’t let grief define one’s life, otherwise, what is the purpose of living? One has to find a new normal, a new space for joy. I thought I was doing that, moving along reasonably nicely, laughing more, finding genuine happiness in the activities around me, yet writing this fulfilled piece made me realise that all I have done is secure a wall around the grief. I haven’t actually transmuted it – rather, continued to build a higher, more secure wall, so as not to feel the pain that is there.

With my healing work with others, I find it is always about feeling the pain to release it. The exercises I do with my clients involve uncovering the feelings beneath whatever is currently going on. At the end of a session, people feel they have been through the wringer but also that they have set free the innermost trauma we have been working on.

My writing has been the same. It is almost like one could draw a line across my chest. I write from the space above that line, hardly touching on the deeper stuff that is buried within. Poetry for me used to be deep but the ones in my three books are light.

But somehow, I do feel a shift coming, that I will start to write from my heart again, something I haven’t done since I was a teenager, when I used to write screeds and screeds of poetry, real heart stuff.

Let’s see what unfolds.