Being Heard

After days of thinking and consultation with Nalini, I believe my turmoil truly is about being heard.

I have so seldom been heard.

The baby version of me was not heard in the NICU. I cried myself hoarse. No one listened. I was conditioned to become anxious and panicky if I am not heard.

Those rare moments when certain people do see me and hear me, and hear me without my asking them to, or without cajoling them, or without sending a road map: they send the emotional side of me into orgasmic paroxysms. It is like a drug. Like an amazing shot of some amphetamine mixed with an opiate. I don't know what to do with myself when I am on that high. I feel a need to crawl out of my skin.

I can *listen* to myself, but really, I cannot *hear* myself. I need others to do it.

I can be taken care of on a basic level. I can have my daily needs met. What I want, however, is someone to see me, to *hear* me the way I need them to. This happens occasionally. Very occasionally. And because it is so occasional, it sets me up on a cycle of extreme emotional highs and lows (somewhat tempered now by medication, but I note them, nonetheless). I feel like I must expect nothing, ask for nothing. Acknowledgment comes out of thin air and vanishes, because people are unpredictable.

The people who can help me most are the ones who are least predictable. There have been times when they should have been predictable, but they weren't. My mother. Aaron. Others.

These are people who were supposed to love me, completely, forever. People who connected with me on visceral level. The baby level, the emotional level, the pre-verbal plane.

I was thinking about how a particular person should have been with me to hold the baby me as I met my father, sometime back before he died. We should have gone to Tahoe together. Should. Have. In another life.

I mourn that, too.

It would seem that it's my job, my lesson; I don't know, my path, perhaps, to figure out how to manage an existence without being seen or heard, or to manage with all the pain.

I forgive my mother for what she has done. I love her, but I don't want to be with her or around her. On a visceral level, truly, she disgusts me. She has her own hurts, but all she does is reach out to damage others to try to ignore her own wounds. I have no more patience for that.

Life is suffering. There aren't happy endings. I need to acknowledge my gifts of intelligence and fortitude and soldier on. I will always live in a world of shadows, thanks to the decision my mother made, but I can make that world as light as I am able by loving myself, too, and forgiving myself for momentary lapses of reason.

I wish that I didn't have these temporary glimpses of the sun and feel its warmth, although those glimpses and that warmth remind me that I am human and alive. Losing connections hurts (hence my PTSD to begin with). But what doesn't?

Ghosts

Chills.
Thrills.
Roller coaster rides.
Characters in stories told long ago.
Imaginary people.
How fun, you think! You clap your hands!

Is that who we are?

Aliens?
Unicorns?
Changelings?
Mythical creatures, to be shaped at your will?
Thrown aside, when you are bored?
Without feelings, carved, changed for your tale?

Rag dolls?
Soulless toys?

Cyphers?

Papers thrown in drawers?
Simply names in e-mail?
Signatures on letters you can ignore?
Wraiths of babies you held once, long ago, counting toes and fingers?
Children named once upon a time? Or not?
Reminders of dead siblings?

We are not real to you, though. We cannot hurt, we cannot bleed: or so you think.

Except that we are, in fact, human.
Fully so.

Adoptees.