Survival

Yesterday was a breaking open day. A day where I felt utterly lost and not at all sure what to do, what to say, how to be. So I just stayed. And I prayed. I still don’t know. What I can see is that I am pushed and pulled around by my mans moods and ways and storms. I allow myself to be sucked into whatever he is doing or not doing. I know in my heart and my mind that no-one is to blame but there are parts of me that still go there.

Walking down the cold and windy shoreline, the sound of the vast Baltic Sea in my ears, I realized that for the first time since I left Australia for Germany, almost 16 years ago, I was doing something exclusively because I wanted to.

Nobody asked me, or expected me to bend, to comply so completely. To do and think and feel and decide one way or the other. I was never forced. I was never given any ultimatums. I did what I thought I had to do to be loved. I didn’t even decide for that. My subconscious mind chose survival and survival meant complying. Survival meant becoming the version of myself deemed most likely to be loved, to be protected, to be held onto.

I am not the only one who has, and still is suffering the consequences of all this. May man fell in love with someone else. Not me. No wonder he is so afraid. So often, I see the little boy in his eyes. So afraid - What is happening to my love? What is going to happen next? And I feel angry because I want to see a man, not a boy. I don’t want my emerging to produce fear. I want to induce surges of love and wonder, hope and grace.