THEN CAME A GLIMMER

It’s been dark for almost a year now. A shadow following me, always right there, never leaving me. I tried to hide from it, tried to run from it but I couldn’t. The shadow was quite large as it held so much! It held all of my past traumas, it held my deepest fears as well as my failures, my shame and guilt and some wounds that had yet to reach my consciousness. Every once in a while, there was a hint of the light just to the right or just to the left but then it faded away. First the shadow loomed for days, and I was hopeful that it would fade but then days turned into weeks and weeks into months and suddenly a year had passed. When the weeks began to turn into months, I began to feel hopeless and defeated. It seemed that all the work I had done in my healing journey and on my seven-year sobriety path, disappeared and I started to lose myself again. I continued my therapy throughout the long year and stayed on my path with sobriety, but this shadow took a toll on my physical health, and I was now plagued with not only emotional pain but physical pain as well. The shadow became darker and quite scarier. The worst part of this season in my life was the feeling of disconnection and loneliness.

As the shadow became larger, darker, wrapping me up in its entirety, I began to question the purpose of my existence in this world. Why was I even here? Clearly, I was a failure because I felt so hopeless and couldn’t find my way out on my own. Why was I here as I believed that I was always going to feel broken, alone and misunderstood. Wouldn’t everyone else around me be better off if I wasn’t around for them to worry about or deal with? No matter how hard I tried, I could not feel joy, as a matter a fact I was finding it difficult to feel anything. As the end of the dark year was drawing near, I began to feel numb, there wasn’t even pain anymore. That void of feelings has to be one of the scariest things to experience. It becomes increasingly more difficult to fake your way through each day. At first you feel the pain, but you get up, put one foot in front of the other and fake smile your way through the day. When that starts to become impossible, it seems that the only answer is to give up. That is where I landed recently, in a space where I believed it was time to give up.

The shadow rested upon my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “it’s time to go.” “Is it really?” I asked. “Maybe it will get better” I cried. “Just a few more days please” I stated. The next day arrived, and the shadow made sure to stay close, not even willing to wander away for a moment. Defeat set in. Is the shadow correct? Is it time to give up? One more day! Day turned into night and night into day, yet shadow stayed as close as it could refusing any light to be seen. “Okay shadow, I give up.” I want the end to be quick, to be as painless as possible, what do I do? I research it. Each time I type into my browser I see the phone number for the 988-crisis line appearing on my screen. I pause once or twice but can’t find it in myself to believe it would make a difference, so I scroll past and do my research. Okay, I see the way out, now when? I have an upcoming therapy session with the therapist that I have worked with for ten years and I feel in my heart that I need to go, to see her just one more time or maybe deep inside I am hoping that she will somehow give me a reason not to quit.

The day comes, and shadow is still there taunting me, but I take what little strength I have left, and I pull myself together for what I think may be the last time. I take time and care in picking out an outfit, doing my hair and putting on my make up. I begin my forty-minute drive with a sick stomach, rapid heartbeat and so much fear and confusion. “Do I tell her how I feel?” I ask myself. “Will she understand or be mad?” I wonder. Arriving I feel more scared than I anticipated, and I sit for a moment. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. You need to do this. One foot in front of the other. Walk to the elevator, get on, walk down the hall, knock on the door. Deep breath. She opens and I am greeted with a hug which on a daily basis is foreign to me. That hug pushes shadow just a little bit behind me, allowing me to see her. I sit, face to face with shadow waiting behind me and all of my deep emotions weighing on my heart so heavily that it physically hurts. “Don’t think, just speak,” is what I tell myself. I began and suddenly an hour and a half has passed, and I look up to see it! The glimmer of light! Where has the shadow that has slowly enveloped me gone?

I’m driving home and the glimmer sits in front of me as the shadow trails behind, trying to catch up to me. “Don’t let it” is what I repeat to myself over and over. For the next two days, shadow is a good distance away and glimmer stays in front of me. Day three and shadow steps closer. “NO!” It grabs me tightly and wraps around me so hard that I can’t get out of bed for days. “I have to fight this; I can’t let this shadow win and take from me all the hard work I have put in over the last seven years or all the hopes and dreams I had for myself when I set out on my healing journey. I awaken one morning, days later and am elated to see glimmer! “Where did you come from?” I ask. “I was waiting for you to get some rest and gain a little strength.” glimmer answers. “I have something to show you” glimmer tells me. “Oh, what is it?” I ask.

Glimmer proceeds to share with me something I probably knew deep down unconsciously but couldn’t bring myself to bring into my consciousness. “Do you know where your deepest pain originates?” glimmer asks. “The childhood abuses?” I ask. “Not exactly my dear.” “My heart is open, please tell me”, I ask. After some time, I began to understand that of my deepest pain goes back to the first time I verbally reached out for help, around the age of 14, explaining the abuse that was happening and was met with the statement, “you are an attention seeking liar.” From that moment on I would never be able to trust, I would blame myself for everything, I would seek love and validation in all the wrong places, and I believe that in that moment I would also start to see myself as worthless and unlovable. I would then go on to spend the better part of my life desperately searching for validation, love and understanding but behaving in a way that would make that literally impossible. Not being heard and believed in that moment would propel me onto a path of much more violent and unimaginable abuse that would consequently lead me into addiction and a life of pain and misery.

Getting sober and getting honest seven years ago made huge positive changes in my life that I did not believe were possible, but something was still missing. My behaviors have unintentionally not been pure as I have still unknowingly been searching for validation, understanding and worth. Glimmer, I believe, is trying to get me to understand that I may go the rest of my life being the only one who believes me, and I have to find acceptance with that. I have to love me and heal myself by accepting that I may never get the validation externally and additionally, it is not anyone else’s responsibility to make me feel worth. I have to begin to make peace with and accept that I had absolutely zero control over my childhood and the things that happened then were building blocks for what was to come and those were not blocks that I had a part in placing. The parts I may have played in adulthood are yes, my responsibility to be accountable for but are not my fault because I was literally doing the best with the tools I had and, on most days, just trying to survive. If I can, as my therapist says, come from a place of understanding, it is then that the real healing will begin. Having that understanding and compassion is what I struggle with the most. I carry so much shame and guilt that I often find myself believing that somehow if I just did______ then I could have prevented all of the trauma that I endured. I intellectually understand that that makes no sense, but I struggle to have my heart accept that concept.

I find myself to be extremely frustrated that it took a year of this shadow slowly wrapping itself tighter and tighter around me before I was able to see glimmer and realize that my worth comes from simply existing. I have allowed my past to define me my entire life, even through my sobriety and it is time that I put a stop to that! I have not only SURVIVED childhood physical and sexual abuse, rapes, addiction and countless other traumas but I have gone on to raise six of the most wonderful human beings you will ever meet, became a financially independent single mother, a respected professional, a sober woman and most importantly to me, an honest and self-aware individual who is willing to do hard things to become the best version of myself. Thank you Glimmer! And thank you to my amazing therapist whom I am sure is unaware of the fact that she was holding glimmer for me and gave it to me when I needed it the most!