Soul Mosaic

What did all of these rounds of work leave me with? A hole. Certainly, I had my center, my adult core, still intact. I was still standing.

But that pit that had been filled with everything I sealed off all my life — when all that pus was emptied out, it left a gaping, aching abscess. It would need to be scraped out, tended to, explored to make sure all the poison was gone, and coated with healing ointment. Essentially…I would have a lot of work to do.

The only words – questions

Up until now, there had been few words to express what I was feeling. And even now, they only came slowly…in the language of questions. MANY questions.

There was the list of the usual culprits:

• How did I finally get out of that house?
• Why did I stay so long?
• Why did I finally leave?
• What saved me?
• Do you think Mom or anyone else in her family knew…and left you in it?
• Do you think he changed when he got older?
• Does it matter?
• Will I ever forgive him?
• Is forgiveness necessary?
• Why did he think it was okay to molest a toddler…or beat her mother?
• Why was he unwilling to get help even after all the chances I gave him?
• Why did HE, the ADULT, CHOOSE to do this to me for 28 years and never question himself?
• When did he start hitting her?

And there was my ever-popular, shame-filled, self-hating mantra of my life, complete with all the self-loathing it held:

• How could I have been so stupid as to believe him when he said it was okay and it was love…and to stay that long?

More recently, there were questions I hadn’t posed before:

• Who WAS that kid? And that Teen? And what was it about them that allowed them to survive and thrive anyway?
• And why did I ever think that young adult was stupid and a coward, when she defied all odds and got me out?

Deeper philosophical ones also popped up:

• Because of what happened, what will I do with it, to give it meaning?
• Why could I forgive Mom but not him?
• If I’d been in Mom’s shoes with the same conditions she’d had, would I have done anything differently? Would I have been able to?
• When we try our best but it isn’t enough, did we fail?

There were also those old, very primal and sorrow-filled ones:

• Don’t I “deserve”?
• What about me?

And the question at the core of my wound”

• What am I if you don’t love me… and I don’t either?

But there were also questions like the one I’d asked myself so many times in life:

• How did I end up here?

And the most recent:

• How did I not know all of this was there and not see this coming?

After all my work, why this…why now?

Daria Burke, in writing about surviving her own abusive childhood in her memoir, Of My Own Making, asked her therapist how all her pain suddenly surfaced after 10 years of working through it all in therapy.

That resonated with me. I’d worked with therapists off and on for decades to learn and grow, and heal. And I had. But then, still, this emotional cataclysm was waiting for me. Where had it been, and why did it finally come out?

Burke’s therapist gave a clue:

“Sometimes, even when we’re talking, even when we’re analyzing, there are parts of us that stay hidden, waiting for the right moment. Maybe after all these years, you’ve reached this place in your life, creating a safe distance from that past, and your psyche deemed you ready. …Perhaps this moment of mourning, arriving as it has, marks not an ending, but a beginning.”

So Daria Burke’s therapist had the same answer for her as TS Eliot, my husband, my inner self, and my own therapist had for me. Like Daria Burke, who came out of her past highly functional and successful, my therapist pointed out the same about me:

“You’ve done a fantastic job taking what happened to you and turning it into some positive action. Somehow, you did not end up in an abusive relationship, no addictions, not self-destructive, and you are HIGHLY functional. You have managed to dissociate from all those painful emotions and lead a very good life.  But you have kept those emotions locked down tightly and off to the side.  Now you are finally accessing what you actually felt during those times.  It was too much for you then. But now, you are slowly taking that dark ball of tightly bound-up energy, and the strands of the various emotions tangled there are coming loose. Now we can access them better to work with them.”

Even as I knew we had a lot of work to do, her words felt good to take in.

But, of course, they brought up even more questions:

• If all of that was in me, unfelt, what have I missed from that past?
• What REALLY happened to me back then, and what did it REALLY do to me?
• What could I trust as “truth”…if there is even such a thing?
• If the adult in me could travel back and see what he was doing to me, what would my adult self feel?

What’s the point?

Looking at the list of unanswered questions, my pile of journals, and the stacks of paintings, photos, and objects, I suddenly felt overwhelmed. Everything started to jumble together and blur in my brain.

What was the point of all this again? Was there a point?

Whenever I feel overwhelmed by a project, I stop and make a list of everything I accomplished to that point. First, it makes me feel good to see how much I’ve done. I am a list-maker and love nothing better than to cross off items on a to-do list.

Second, it gives me a clue of where I might go next, or what’s missing, especially when confusion is flooding in.

But most importantly, it calms the spiral and reminds me that if I don’t freak out, but stick to the plan and go “step-by-step,” I can do it.

So, my list at this point included:

• I determined that to understand, which is something I deserve, I must write this book.
• The time is now. I won’t live forever.
• I have a beginning — I picked a nipple and started *somewhere* – with endings.
• I am an artist and painted everything I had no words for, or needed to get out of my head.
• I have a process – my science experiment training – so just ditch previous ideas, examine what I have, record my observations, then assess them all.

Assess. That was the point I was losing track of.

The thing I learned while teaching kids about science at the museum was that I needed to help them care. I had to show them: “Why should I care — what’s the point?”

And that’s when it crystallized for me, the overarching, most important question of them all in this effort:

• What does all of this mean, and what can I do with it to be useful?

For sure, the question was never about “Why me?” But in my panic, I’d lost track of the fact it was about: “What do I do with it?”

In my panic, I briefly forgot that I did not live through all of this — abuse, surviving close calls, coming back from the edge to thrive — to do nothing with that experience. I have to tell it first, yes. But then, I have to give meaning…answer for all of us: “What’s the point?”

So having calmed down and recentered myself, it was time to pick the next step…

This entry was posted on August 24, 2025 at 9:00 am and is filed under Memoir - sexual abuse trauma recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.