Cowardice

I'm noticing that I'm having trouble finishing some of my reading. I've got too many books started and left unfinished. I moved some furniture in the bedroom and put up more bookshelves, this time right by my bed. Another 16 board feet of space, and its almost filled. I put all the books I am reading and going to read on that shelf and I'll be damned if there aren't a dozen unfinished books. I can understand the book on string-theory, and the notebooks of Leonardo de Vinci, and that collection of Einstein's writing. Collapse, I just started. But the others? I looked at the other books I've not finished, and noticed something. They all have to do with my 'internal work', which is slow going as well, but some of them I haven't touched in months. It was easier to avoid noticing something was up when I had the books spread out in my various reading spots, but now that I've brought them all together and have noticed a pattern, my mind is pushing at me. Where did I stop, and why? The Survivor's Guide to Sex has been a very interesting read. I got hung up on the chapter on embracing triggers, and rather than force myself to finish reading it, I went on to the next chapters. I read all the way to the first few pages of chapter 16, the topic being intimacy and self-forgiveness. And then I stopped. Cold. Some thing with J. Benjamin's The Bonds of Love, Goldstein and Kornfield's Seeking the Heart of Wisdom with its guidelines on insight meditation. I Never Told Anyone, Allies in Healing, and the Right to Innocence, each of them, gathering dust because something in me still resists the emotional approach to 'healing'.

Most of them advocate facing the truth, which I've got down. Then there is releasing my anger, and a part of me goes "what anger?" Heh. Yeah, right. Its beyond anger, beyond rage. I'm trying to release it but I'm holding on to it... out of what? Fear? Comfort? Maybe I like those banked coals of rage, always there when I need to tap them. In one of the books I got stuck on the part about confronting those responsible with facts and feelings. Not! Its too devestating for those who neglected their responsibilities as 'family' to be faced with my disappointment, my coldness, my contempt, my rage. Why didn't we hear from you after you moved back East, Auntie asked. Why? Because when I was legally adult and knew that I was finally beyond my father's reach, I wanted nothing more than to sit them down and tell them what !@#$@#% people they were to look the other way, to tell themselves it wasn't their problem, to ignore the fact that Tamar wet her bed until she left home at 16, to ignore that Tess would sit up in her bed in the middle of the night, screaming my name, or that dear dad put her in the hospital not two months after I left home, to ignore my bruises and headaches and insomnia. They used to ask me why I didn't date. I lied and told Granny it was because no one asked me out. She said that was what I got for being too smart. What was I supposed to tell her? That I didn't have a boyfriend, I had a lover? That I'd seduced a friend of the family when I was 16 because I could not stand that stupid, inept fumbling in the dark? That there was no pleasure to be had with teenaged boys, and since I'd learned all about pleasure when I was 11 at the hands of another friend of the family, I'd decided I might as well get what I'd paid for? No, it was better to leave and be rarely heard from. I'm too good with words, too effective at expressing myself. With one conversation I could have told them exactly what contemptible cowards they were in my eyes, and left them hemorrhaging. They do not need me to tell them how broken my family was nor how broken theirs is. I have enough guilt, and so do they. I'm not going to add to anyone's burden. Which is why, when Granddad asked me when I visited at Christmas why I was in therapy, I looked him straight in the eyes and told him he did not want to know. And I knew this, with absolute certainty, because he already knows. He just chooses not to admit it to himself.

And lastly, there is that section in Right to Innocence on "forgiving yourself". Forgive myself for what? I ask. And I always answer: For surviving. For leaving Tess behind. For failing to save Ryan. For not forgiving Mom before she died. For hating and pitying Dad. For wishing Demming had never been born, for wanting to tear, rend, and mutilate her. For not going to the authorities. Its a long list. And I'm not willing to work it, any of it, I guess, based on the places I have stopped in my reading, in my efforts. Maybe I'm tired. Maybe I need a rest, to prepare for the next charge forward. Or maybe I'm a coward, afraid of my own Jungian shadow. Yes, I do believe that is it. I am a coward, and at this pace, I'll get my shit together just in time to be old and in the way at some nursing home in 2050. Joy.