tensions.

My pastor claims to not be a poet. He published a volume of poetry entitled I Am Not A Poet, which makes me chuckle, and I wonder if he chuckled when he chose that title. Because he is a poet, whether or not he ever intended to be.

I am not a dancer.

But I dance all the time.

Oh, the tension of it all.

*hand dramatically flung across forehead*

_________________ 

In six days, it will have been 2.5 years since big, bad life events began. And I still cannot understand how women survivors manage to use their voices calmly, how they manage to plant their feet and live alongside rapids; how they consider first the life they draw upward into themselves, and not the fact that the rapids erode the ground beneath them: that tragedy is, at any time, imminent. A few years ago (before all this), I wrote that, in the company of strong women, I often felt like a little girl, sitting on the floor wide-eyed, one finger in my mouth as I watched the women go about the business of the world. I feel closer to tantrum than reason lately; bewildered, on the floor, as I watch the women dance in the tensions of whatever brings them to where they are.

I want to learn the Tension again.

I want to understand how to gather the parts of this experience that make pure, objective, critical thought impossible for me right now, and put them in the places where they won't need to burst out, graceless, enraged, snarling and foaming for blood. I grieve hard at the loss of my balance, my grace. I hate the way it cripples.

I want to know how to reconcile my firm belief that women are not primarily their sexuality yeah yeah yeah! with the shame of admitting how this experience has razed me and what I think is a pretty objective observation that I'm probably never going to be the same again.

I want to understand how to not be broken by this. Because I am. And the current goal of my life is to not stay here. Whatever mistakes I may make in processing all this, I cannot hold this close; I can't make it part of myself, to the extent that the value I assign the pain begins to outweigh the promise beyond it.

I get it, for the first time. It has to be okay to let things go. It has to be okay to outgrow the way things have always been. Outgrowing doesn't mean you're abandoning the self-care you invested in the person who experienced things; it doesn't mean you're leaving the four-year-old on the side of the road. It means that the tension of things is at work: it means that the person you've always known is the same, but not: the four-year-old is now twelve, or fifteen, or twenty-five, or fifty-five; it means she lives and needs differently. She's not Sleeping Beauty, holed up in a tower, static for a hundred years; she's Rapunzel, literally attempting to climb things for more.

So you give her more. You re-learn the Tension. And it's hard.

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I've never thought about pain abstractly until people started giving me self-help books. There are some great ones; they're usually the ones I start reading, then say whoa. and set aside for awhile. I glance at them every now and then, and I know there's plenty in there for when I have teeth.

The other books, though? There are some weird, even offensive, ideas out there regarding pain and recovery. I don't know much, but I'm glad I know weird when I see/hear/read/smell it.

I'm not determined to carry pain around with me, and I'm not investing in poking at bruises to remember the ouch, but this idea of pain as something to be overcome, eradicated, left behind as an obstacle to greater things.... I don't know. I can't see the value in pursuing a disconnect from the pain we've experienced; I can't even see it as possible, that I would ever not feel pain regarding painful events.

The idea of not trying to overcome pain kind of flies in the face of most things I've heard or learned about pain. More tension. Glorifying pain, denying pain; making pain an idol, rejecting pain as sinful.

I'm not glorifying pain. Mine is currently debilitating, and I am not content with this. But I think that, if we're careful with it, and with ourselves, our pain is an integral part of the roadmap that propels us forward on a path: what does this mean? why, and in light of what ideas I had before? how has it changed the person I was? what does it mean to God? what will it mean, going forward? And while a tragic experience can be mistakenly processed as merely a framework in which pain can be expressed and made to redefine a life, the pain itself differs from the value we assign it and the ways in which it manifests in a self-image, an image of God, or a worldview. Feeling pain is not the Ultimate of a recovery. But neither is discarding pain as something peripheral, or attempting to eradicate it as a distraction.

I'm thinking that God is most profoundly present in pain: in the transmission of it, the unwilling reception, the burden, the go-forth of it. I don't understand it, but it is. It is witness to the in-between, the tension of all that is God. Sometimes, there's no greater comfort in the world than to hear the words I know how you feel from someone seared by their own branding of the pain you carry. Somehow, in ways for which I don't yet have words, when one draws a deep breath and pushes out those words, wishing that one did not have the capacity to know - I know how you feel - the in-between tension of all that is God is most present in those moments: knowing, not knowing, speaking, being still, recovered by grace, and yet that grace is most present in the sacred Moment of pain in their eyes; and you know you're not alone or without grace as you labor with your own moment.

Somehow, God lives in those most sacred Moments, which still rumble and smoke from the depths; to eradicate them? deny them?

Impossible.