If I want to get to know you...

What inspired me?

I got news of a student who committed suicide by hanging himself.  He was living at one of the Teen Challenge facilities which uses christian-based spirituality as the "cure" for drug/alcohol addictions.  Hearing about it really affected me - especially the me who so desperately just needs to be seen and heard and not fixed or asked to step into some supposedly ONLY way to God in order to be saved and received into God's heaven someday.  The director of the program where this happened sees the answer to what happened to this young man to be: To wage war in the spirit realms against the devil who took this one's life. I know the bigger picture is that everybody is allowed to further their denial state while believing they are creating a program to rehabilitate and save people.  It was what I was doing  when I came out of bible school.

As I read about his description of what happened and his skewed way of seeing it, I felt the pain of someone who had to be following the rules of living in that environment.  They have recently left their numbing agents of drugs or alcohol and are living in this in between place of getting in touch with their life pain.  They are not to talk about their past, but now take on a new drug called christianity...memorizing scriptures, being taught how they must forgive and ultimately taking hold of this savior called Jesus who is depicted as the son of God whose death sacrifice took away all their sin, so they have a clean slate and now need to go share this Good News with others as their personal "thank you" to this Jesus. Anyone who doesn't just follow along becomes labelled as "rebellious" and "having some real problems." I don't have a clue as to what this kid's story was coming in to this atmosphere, but I wonder what he was trying to say with his suicide.  He stayed behind and hung himself while  his fellow students were having their graduation ceremony.

"If I want to get to know you" was written from the part of myself that knows I have only just begun to feel through my own wounds enough to barely see and hear what anyone in my life is trying to say.  This student inspired me as I began to wander into this event and wonder how he was dealing with those blind guides he was surrounded with. Their holding to their religion creates no seeing or hearing of what is real and true in the ones coming in for their help...and for some, they believe it is their last stop/last chance.  If this isn't the answer and they can't comply and get with the program, then they are really messed up and a lost cause.

I processed a lot inside just from hearing about this...there were a lot of tangents, many angles of feeling and seeing into it for me.  When I got to the point of this poem being written at my keyboard, I heard it being said to my husband.  It was an interesting twist to it all, yet when it all shakes out, his upbringing was much like this student's was.  He lived in the camp of a family who saw themselves better than others because they didn't drink, dance or play cards and no doubt he emotionally committed suicide many times over as he had to relegate his true expression of who he was down inside of himself...blotting his desires and needs out. As a child I know he felt as I did in that kind of maze, feeling like there must be something I just don't get that everybody else does.  

It has been something churning in me, this place of realizing I have very poor eye-sight because of all that is yet unacknowledged and unprocessed within me...and yes, as it ends up, I literally have very poor eye-sight!  Feeling this, instead of just knowing it in my head is one of those things that makes me feel good to be able to begin to see the reality of how deep all of this goes and how very long of a journey out of this is. Taking the beam out of my own eye is not a one time gig like "getting saved" and now going out and saving the world like what I was taught in religion.  It's a way of daily life, living humbly with the emotion that I feel surfacing and with no point to be anything for anyone else, but to learn to live as one who is being loved as I simply feel through it ALL.  The great reward is being someone who does less harm to others by not pressing them into a mold I need them to be in because I know the pain of having my limbs cut off in order to "fit in." Staying the course day in and day out, keeping my own nose to my own grindstone makes me less dangerous to myself and to anyone who lives in my proximity. The more I run from my own pain and the expression of it, the more I will need to cut off the real personalities of those around me to suit what I can emotionally bear.

I am thankful for this brother's message to me that I received personally from his suicide...that what may feel unacceptable and un-bearable because it doesn't fit in to the family's, society's and religion's ways of denying itself does not require me to kill it. I can not wait to ever be seen or heard by another in order to validate what I feel and allow it full expression.  It is always just a plus for another to say, "Yes, I understand, what you say resonates, makes sense" but never what is necessary for me to go forward into freely feeling however I feel.  There is no present day substitute in person form whose job it is to relieve or resolve the grief of the parent who was never there for me as a child.  We may stand by one another helping to trigger each other into repressed feeling states and say " Keep going"...in this we are only just being ourselves, no one "special."

I hear you, James...the burden that likes to crawl like a monkey on the back telling me there is more to be or do than to just keep on taking care of what surfaces, asking for the truth of it and unwinding out of the repression.  This forum whether it is found as a dead zone of being useful for others or not in their own feeling journeys will be something each of us will try on and find out for ourselves.  Most times when I write, whether here or for myself or to another, I feel threads of other emotional places in me cropping up. And lately what keeps coming home to me is how each of us, our own soul journeys know their own personal winding roads of unfolding.  As much as I would like to be some significant leader or teacher thinking it is mine to guide and comfort others as they do their own soul work, I am not at all to take on that (very ingrained familiar) role...it is the primary one I have lived to stay away from my own emotions, desiring to be the world's garbage can that they can use to throw up in and then feel temporarily better about themselves.  There are no words to describe how we do affect one another without even trying to and I believe that this happens more and more powerfully when each one takes full responsibility for their own soul work...realizing my own work is more than enough for me to tend to.

I sent this poem to my husband's email when I finished it...normally I do not share any of what I write with him as in the past he has said how I write makes little sense to him.  Because I was feeling our relationship and how it has been affected by my own log in my eye, I desired to communicate my commitment to my own soul work and it's relation to my desire to be able to really "see" him and "know" him. We have been experiencing more freedom of saying what we are feeling to one another without either one of us stopping the other and I sensed that there was enough understanding growing between us for the words of this poem to find a place to land in him.  It did land in him...and he took the time to share with me that it did.  Without this student who chose to hang himself coming into my own world, I doubt that the words would have ever been written.  I know that the places in me that I have visited and felt as a result of hearing about this man has taken me deeper into my own commitment to "Keep Going."  A man who probably thought nothing he'd do would amount to anything...well, he sure as hell has moved me.