It took years of work

But a feeling finally slipped out

And we caught it in a butterfly net

And kept a precarious hold on it

And wrestled it into a cage

Where it flitted about frantically

Like a wild bird who’s never known captivity

Desperately seeking to escape the bars

That would force the kind of reckoning

It just doesn’t allow for itself.

There is panic that comes from having to

Recognize truth

You make your whole world out of ignoring.

And not all truths feel good.

And it hurts. Oh, how it hurts so much

More sharply than the dull pain I bear

From a lifetime of ignoring it instead.

This truth has barbs in its feathers and

Horror in its eyes as it looks all around

The empty room

For fear

Somebody still heard it.

But that’s the irony and the heart of the matter,

Isn’t it?

We trapped a feeling and broke it wide open

Because the truth will set you free,

If you can catch it napping.

~

Sometimes free verse poetry is more therapeutic a channel for me than prose writing. Still, I feel the above warrants some context.

I am notorious for over-intellectualizing in therapy. It’s an avoidance tactic I have honed to a very sharp point over the years. If I can explain something away, if I can understand something better, I can make do with the illusion that this is healing and give myself a gold star for the week in therapy. Fortunately, I have an excellent therapist who calls me out on that bullshit when I let the intellectualizing get in the way of actually processing my emotions and pain. For someone who grew up needing to suppress my mental and emotional needs in order to serve the mental and emotional needs of everyone else, it’s hard to let myself have a feeling and allow it to truly run its course.

Indeed, we were discussing this sort of thing just today, about how for neurodivergent people, especially women, who have spent their lives masking and suppressing themselves to suit the demands of our environment, are now collectively becoming so burned out and unable to maintain the facade any longer. We talk a lot about how lefthandedness alone is a sign of neurodivergence.

I brought up that my mother is also left handed, and pondered how — knowing as much as I do about her life story — she was likely also muted and suppressed emotionally to an extent. And I then said something that, after it left my mouth, felt almost like a reverberation that went across the room and then circled back to me and echoed in my ears, as if I had slapped myself. I could almost feel my pupils dilate in that moment. Indeed, I spiraled into a self-triggered panic attack. (My therapist would stop me here to emphasize that I pulled myself out of said panic attack, that I grounded myself, let myself process the feelings that came up and didn’t flee from them or try to avoid them, and worked through it. She says there is real power in that.)

What was this groundbreaking revelation? Nothing so groundbreaking or revelatory, except that it boils down to the language that slipped out through all my intellectual defenses (and I’m telling you, it’s like Fort Knox up in there).

I said that while it can be helpful to understand more of the full story, it doesn’t justify anything or change the fact that my mother was an abuser.

Abuser.

I’ve never used that word before. Never. Not even for the other people in my life who’ve perpetrated more than enough trouble to earn that title.

I said it, and I was halfway through another sentence before my brain whipped back around and said wait, what did I just say?

My therapist asked me how it felt to say that. I told her it felt downright disrespectful.

It was about at this point that I forgot to keep breathing and started feeling all tingly, like I was trying to crawl outside of my own skin. I was alone in my living room, no one else home besides the dog, and still felt myself looking at all corners of the room worrying that I’d been overheard calling my mother…that.

I’d never really made that leap before today. Not inside my head. But my body has obviously been holding onto that for a long time. My brain likes to sidestep the direct leveling of accountability there, instead seeing her behavior as enabling abuse, facilitating it even. I’ve never put that label of abuser on her, never dared to think about just how direct a role she played in the harm I endured, the aftermath of which I contend with on a daily basis. Does the shoe fit her? I’d be disrespecting the hell out of myself and the feelings that revealed themselves today if I were to say no.

I’m working on processing this new understanding, this reformatted schema. None of the facts have changed, but my perspective of them has shifted. It feels like trying to corral wild horses, or, as I expressed above, keep a wild bird in a cage, but that’s the goal, so that I can’t explain it away or let myself think my way out of it. I told my therapist that I would have thought stumbling upon a truth like this wouldn’t be such a troubling experience, in the sense that we want truth to win out, don’t we? But she reminded me that not all truths feel good. Some of them can feel downright awful.

They say knowledge is power. I don’t quite agree, or at least I say that it doesn’t go far enough. Knowledge may be power, but strength of character lies in what you do with it. For once, I didn’t run away from some objectively dreadful knowledge; do I feel strong? Hm. Perhaps. I’m too worn out to feel certain about that right now. Parts of me are still waiting for the bird in the cage to calm down and stop panicking.

I’m reminded randomly of that scene from A Few Good Men where Tom Cruise shouts that he wants the truth, and Jack Nicholson shouts back, “You can’t handle the truth!”

Well, Jack, I guess it’s about time I start trying to handle it.