Notes from the shower
I am one of those people who, when I get in the shower, relax and let everything slip from my mind. Which is precisely what my subconscious is waiting for!
The minute the mind goes blank and focuses on the snuggly warmth of hot water cascading over my skin, the subconscious starts talking. Some mornings just a word or two, and other mornings…a mile a minute. Everything from items for the grocery list, to what I need to write, connections for things I have been trying to figure out, or flashes of insight out of nowhere about a long forgotten question.
Aware that I can’t trust my memory to remember any of these things in my head until after my shower, I needed a way to capture them. Then I remembered that the nature researchers at the museum I taught at use waterproof field notebooks and pens to capture observations. So, I bought myself a package of “write in the rain” memo pads and a waterproof pen. And voila! I no longer have to worry about remembering.
Now, when a flash of insight pops in my head, I grab the notepad and pen which I keep on the shelf in the shower stall, jot it down, and fling it out of the shower and onto the floor. Afterward, I just collect them all and take action! And should the “thought flood” continue after I am out of the shower, I have another stack of recycled papers that I use to scribble more notes.
Today’s message – change the viewpoint
So the same thing happened this morning, related to my blog post yesterday, about why I write, draw, and paint my memories of abuse. In that post, I talked about looking back at the past in an intense “post-mortem” examination, like an autopsy…dig deep and see what it REALLY looks like, not just what I remembered it looking like.
In the middle of today’s shower, these ideas flowed out about why I needed to get those images out onto paper, in paint, and words. The note about “anger and grief,” I will come back to another time. But the others were key thoughts for today:
I had to change the viewpoint. I needed to, instead, see my young self the way others would have seen me if they were standing there at that moment. The insight said, “Put yourself outside of you,” as if you were an observer seeing an adult doing to another child, the things done to you. In that moment, how would you react to that scene?
When I remember something done to me in the past, I may know it was done in my childhood or my teens, or my young adulthood. But my current-day, “adult” brain isn’t seeing me for the true age I was at the time…isn’t seeing what I was capable of knowing, understanding, or doing.
Instead, I’ve been inserting the “adult me” into that memory. So I am thinking of the me in those moments, as I currently am, and judging the me in that abuse scene, as if I were my current age.
Looking at the memory from within, I am seeing me with the eyes of judgment, shame, and intense self-blame. Statements like, “How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I fight back in that moment? Why didn’t I know better???!!!!” I judge the me of “then,” with the knowledge base of “present-day” me.
It has taken me a lifetime to understand how awful I am treating me, and how grossly unfair those judgments and questions are.
The shocking discovery
Four years ago, I realized I needed to write this book. But I couldn’t find words. They, and tons of mixed emotions, were choking me and rendering me unable to say a word. So, I started drawing and painting. And I made a shocking discovery.
When I painted myself as that young child, pinned to the wall after supper, held there by my father’s fist….When I painted that small, scared child sitting by the stove and saying “I don’t want Daddy to come home,” …or, when I painted the Saturday afternoon image of my father pushing my young child’s head into his lap, I was shocked…horrified…then enraged.
The female elder in me now, the old adult, the woman who has been a mother for over 30 years, didn’t see an adult me in those paintings. I saw a helpless child. A child trying desperately to endure and sustain through absolutely abysmal situations. Situations she NEVER should have been put in.
Instead of judging me and hating me for not fighting back, I saw the total impossibility of that. How in God’s name could my little person have been able to stop him when my mother could barely pull him off of me? How could that young child have even understood what he was doing to me on that couch, much less that she was not to blame?
When I paint the scene I have carried in my head, I no longer hate myself. I am, instead, filled with horror FOR me, and compassion. Anger at him. And intense respect and admiration that my young self was able to keep going DESPITE being confronted with those things.
For years, I especially hated my teen and young adult self. But in doing these paintings, I then did the math for how many thousands of times over the years, from infancy to 28, that I was assaulted — physically, mentally, verbally, and sexually, I am now more upset that I judged me so terribly. That child, and teen, and young adult were doing the absolute best they could in that moment.
How could I have expected that young adult to have had the maturity she should’ve had for her age, after years of thousands of assaults? Those assaults and stress affected my cognitive and neurological development. My nervous system development. And assaults that robbed me of having any semblance of a decent childhood development process?
Now, looking at those pictures and writing those scenes, I am, instead, flat-out blown away that I fought back or held onto myself as much and as well as I did. And I NEVER could have made those realizations without doing those drawings and paintings, and writing out in black-and-white words on paper – just what was done.
My husband told me one day that he always heard and believed what I told him about my abuse. But he said that the paintings were so powerful that they made things so intensely real for him in a way that just saying it couldn’t. Powerful, yes.
Changing the picture
So, yes, I am revisiting the memories for a “second look” to see what I missed. But I am also revisiting them WITH DIFFERENT EYES. I have shifted my “viewpoint camera” from within me, to “OUTSIDE of me” and that has made all the difference.
Viewed in that way, THIS is how the picture changes:
I now feel so much compassion and love for my younger self. I feel remorse over judging her so harshly, and, instead, have such total respect for her….
Now, back to the next pieces on my “Wider Circle” – grandparents, school, and God.
Soul Mosaic 