I believe in miracles.
Not the rock your world, holy saints and rising apparitions kind of miracles. But rather, the light shifting, change your life, in this moment kind of miracle that takes you by the hand and guides you home. The kind of miracle that awakens you to the truth that this moment is all you’ve got. The kind of miracle that says, grab me and run with me or lose the miracle of your life forever.
I know about miracles like that. I got one on a sunny May morning five years ago when I had given myself up for dead. Well, not dead-dead, but rather, the walking breathing dead kind of living that leeches all energy from your body and leaves you without hope of ever finding a way back to the land of the living.
My miracle appeared in the form of a blue and white police car driving up and arresting the sociopath who had been lying and cheating and manipulating and abusing me for the length of our four year nine month relationship.
When first we’d met I thought his name was Prince Charming. I loved the view of the short cut to happiness he promised me and jumped onto the runaway train of his promises of happily ever after. I never expected to find myself lost in hell, in cahoots with the Prince of Darkness and praying for a miracle I didn’t believe I deserved, to set me free.
But then, that’s the funny thing about miracles. They don’t come looking for believers. They just appear, like stars in a darkened sky coming out at night. It’s not that they weren’t there all along, it’s just lost in the pit of despair, we lose sight of the miracles around us. Too frightened to open our eyes in the blinding light of day, we shut out the world and crawl into the cave of desperation, shutting ourselves off from belief and hope and possibility and even miracles.
It was a miracle the police found us. He was hiding out, trying to escape the country, and I was hiding behind the smile I’d pasted on my face, pretending to be the person he told me to be, or else. The miracle saved me from finding out what the ”˜or else’ might be.
Looking back, it was a miracle I was still alive. I had seventy-two cents in my pocket, a few clothes and my beautiful Golden Retriever, Ellie, who had travelled that rocky road beside me, faithfully keeping step to my faltering footsteps as I travelled further and further from life as I knew it.
I don’t know who said this, but I find it very powerful, “Change is the essence of life. Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.”
On that day in May, five years ago, I knew I didn’t get a miracle to live in pain and sorrow. I knew I got the miracle to live in joy. But, in the process of losing myself on the road to hell, I had become someone I didn’t recognize, someone I didn’t love. I knew I had to change. I feared I didn’t know how.
Change is always possible. Ending something that isn’t working for me requires me to change what I’m doing. When I awoke from that relationship, there was very little that was working in my life. So much was broken, so much was in disarray.
To change my life, I had to surrender my disease and embrace my ability to heal. To heal, I had to change the anger into forgiveness. The sorrow into laughter. The hatred into love. I had to let go of who I had become on that journey and fall into love with who I could become in healing by letting go of my fear of falling and learning how to fly free from the pain of the past.
And so, on that morning in May when my world changed and I began to see there was light beyond the darkness, I grabbed my miracle and set out to recover my joy. Step by step. Moment by moment. And, in the process I uncovered the greatest miracle of my life. Me.
I believe in miracles. I am one.
The question is: What do you believe in? Do you believe you’re some big cosmic experiment gone awry in one hopelessly lost human being, or a miracle of life, unique and magnificent, a shining example of the best of human being, full of possibilities, endlessly in love with the wonder and the miracle of being you?
Whoops, didn’t work.
It’s left carrot, then the letter “b” then right carrot. To close the italics it’s left carrot the symbol “/” then the letter “b” and then a right carrot.
I tried putting it in with spaces but all it did was BOLD.
Hahaha.
Orphan, I gave up on the bold and the italics and just “bold” it by using caps. LOL New learning and remembering rightnow is still difficult. (where DID I put those car keys? LOL)
I agree with Orphan that ANGER, and allowing us to feel that anger, IS important to the healing and resolving the GRIEF we experience of all the stuff involved with the relationship. The anger at them, the anger at ourselves for allowing it. But getting STUCK in anger mode isn’t healthy either. Getting STUCK in ANY of the “stages” will not allow us to progress.
We DO go “back and forth” from anger to sad, to anger at ourselves, at them, at the world, at God, sad, cry, pity for us, etc. and back and forth, but still WE PROGRESS—one day at a time is victory. I’ve been through all the stages 100 X each. and it seems that just when you thiink yo are “out of the woods” you go back in…and that is NORMAL TOO. It takes time (a different amount of clock time) for each of us. Accepting that what is “time” for you isn’t enough time for me, or vice versa is important too.
Really feel I’m “out of the woods” at this point. Even think that last week of hell when my friend got married and I had weepy distraught PMS over the idea I’d never marry again was part of GETTING OUT (notice the caps??!?) of the woods.
The death-throes of a dream, maybe.
I still will marry again. Just that it will be different than I thought before. And that will be ok with me, too.
PS — doesn’t mean I won’t get “stuck” again, like rperk mentions. Likely will. It is a process, and there will be good days and bad days. But I look around here, breathe in the spring air and see the sunshine and figure that if the guy I loved really existed and loved me back he would be here with me, now.
Yea, Orphan, I think I am over the biggest humps and out of the thickest of the “forest” but I know that I still have some things to work on. I actually can’t believe that I haven’t had any kind of a melt down since January when I was out of town and cut down on my meds to try to make them last til I got back home for a refill. WON’T DO THAT AGAIN! LOL
It actually seems ODD to me that I haven’t shed a tear over anything except a sad movie in SO LONG! Almost like something is missing that I haven’t been upset, angry, sad, just generally cranky, pissed, etc. My emotions are not “flat” but are quite active really, I’m laughing, joking, interested in things again, etc. VERY MUCH enjoying the spring (my favorite time of year after the dull winter months). I’ve taken more interest in my animals and doing things with them (training etc) and if the darned rains will ever stop for a while (we are getting floods in this area) I’ll do even more Another BIG rain system (5 days of it) has just moved in with severe thunderstorms so guess I will be here on LF waiting it out. LOL
My only question is this: how do you stop loving that person?
I’m not sure about the answer to that question, Orphan.
I don’t feel “love” for the man that is my son, though I still remember with pleasure and love the little boy he WAS before he became the MONSTER. But it’s like that child is DEAD.
I still remembeer my grandparents with fondness etc. but I’m not sure that it is the same kind of “love” I felt for them when they were alive. I still fondly remember my husband, but it isn’t exactly the same “feeling” I had for him when he was alive. Some how I have “disconnected” from the feelings I had for these people that I LOVED very much when they were alive, and remember with great tenderness and fondness…the same way I do that little “boy” that is NO LONGER ALIVE inside the body of the MAN he became.
My son C is a man, and the little boy he WAS is sitll alive inside that man’s body and bald head! He’s changed, since babyhood, obviously, but he is the SAME PERSON, if that makes any sense.
I thought I was VERY MUCH in love with the XBF-P, and I wept over that, grieved, or that, and now I don’t feel “love” for him at all. Nor hate either. He is just sort of like a character I saw in a movie once—HOW TO DO IT? I’m not sure, I think it may be like “happiness” the more we SEARCH for it, the more ellusive it is. I think happiness comes as a byproduct of doing what is good, right, etc. and maybe falling “out of love” or “falling in love” or changing our feelings for that person are also byproducts of living life with or without them.
My P son has not been a physical presence in my life since he left home at age 17, that’s 20+ yrs ago. He has been a very BIG emotional presence in my life though. The hopes and dreams I had, the 3-5 letters a week to and from him, visits to him in prison, etc. Now, I don’t even have the desire to visit him, to get a letter or to write one. He just is NOT A PRESENCE in my life any more. What happens to him isn’t a concern for me. Unless he gets out, then it would be, because I have no doubt that sooner or later he would come to find me and one of us would kill the other. I’m also prepared to do that if I had to. That may sound COLD, and maybe it IS cold, but I don’t doubt that I could do it. I imagine it would cause some emotional reprocussions just like it does for a policeman or a soldier who has to kill anyone, even to protect their own lives. Killing another person is something that none of us should have to experience. Even in the medical profession when we try to save a life and fail sometimes we have to “decompress” from the stress and loss of that failure. AT the small Rural Volunteer fire department we would have post trauma sessions when we had to do CPR or when we had to pick up a neighbor that had blown their brains out and one of us was the first to arrive. Or go to the grizzly scene of a car crash, or fight a fire that took the life of one of our friends. Just like the airplane crash for my husband, the people who responded first were my FRIENDS, and his friends, not just strangers who didn’t know him personally and could be more “objective” about the situation.
AFter the plane crash though, I realized I didn’t need to be experiencing more trauma like that, and I retired from the fire department, though I felt bad in a way about doing so as especially in hte day time when most volunteers are away in town at work, people who are HERE MOST DAYS during the day are rare and response time is slower, but though I wanted to continue to help, I knew that FOR ME, I didn’t need to continue to experience that kind of trauma over and over again, I just didn’t have the reserve strength to do it. That was also why I retired. Though in many ways I hated to, I knew that my lack of strength emotionally etc. would put me more at risk of doing something “stupid” and hurting a patient, and I couldn’t live with that if I had done it. I don’t regret retirement at all except I do miss the money sometime but living on a fixed income is do-able, and the chance of the alternative, hurting someone, isn’t an option.
Cutting out the stress of my life, even little stresses of doing just about anything that I really don’t want to do, no matter how minor seeming, is helping a great deal. My therapist is always nagging me to “get out and do more recreation” but I think that he really doesn’t get the idea that to ME–recreation is right here, spending time with my dogs, my donkeys, my son C, close friends who are frequently here, or just talking on the phone to them if we can’t get together physically IS MY RECREATION. I’ve seen the darned world, or most of it that I want to see, and I’ve seen cities and plays, and tennis matches, and the Olympics, and horse races, and they don’t appeal to me any more. Peace is within me—and my days are as full as I want them to be with lots of things.
Orphan, if my “loving that person” you still feel that you are “pining” for him, wishing he was there, etc. I think maybe as you fill up your life with REAL things and real people, the feelings you have for him will decrease and one day you will just finally notice that they aRE GONE, an d have been gone for a while.
LOL on the itals and bolds, Free. They’ll come, in time.
I do love me and my life is very full. There was this piece of him that I thought was my soulmate, even when we were apart and then even when we were together. Like just being held on the couch or sleeping in the bed together, I felt it was where I intrinsically belonged, somehow.
And it is so hard to separate that from the rest of it, or maybe I mean to integrate that with the rest of it.
Was raised to dislike the sin but love the person, and in a way that’s how I feel about him: I can’t not care about him, even when I try. I can despise whatever it is inside of him that makes him feel compelled to toy with my emotions, cat and mouse me, spin my insecurities….but I seem very much able to separate that part of him from the good parts.
It’s not upsetting at the moment, just baffling me. I used to believe that was love, you know, loving a person despite their faults. We all have faults. And that’s true, to some extent, that is what love is. It was only when it felt like having to make a choice between the two of us, who I was gonna save, that I gave up. Felt like I had to.
And that denial thing, where you go…well, what he did wasn’t so bad compared to what others have done….blah, blah, blah…and even though this is true, because he never hit me or tried to kill me, I know the dynamic between us was unhealthy for both of us.
But the love thing….well, I haven’t loved many men at all. Two, actually. Seems such a waste and such a shame, all those years and all those feelings….just poof. Where do you put them?
LilOrphan:
For me, that feeling of love for someone does not just go away, at least not easily. Otherwise, we’d be right alongside the very socios we complain about.
Even after all we’ve been through with these people, we can still feel that love. I’m not sure we have to stop loving. Why should we? It may seem contradictory to love someone who does not exist, but we love other ideas and intangible things, so why not the person we thought that person was. And, to me, the person we thought that person was is really made up of different aspects of who we want to be.
I say we don’t worry about the loving aspect–loving them would be the opposite of what they would want anyway, just so they could prove to themselves we are all terrible people and out to get them.
I believe the most important, and hardest, part is being able to move on and stop wanting them in our lives. Keep the love–love is only good. Love ourselves, love those around us, love the earth. Once I realized that I still loved the person he was when he was with me, those small moments of friendship and tenderness that I BELIEVED was real, only then did I know that I could move on and that it was okay.
I am FAR from being near closure on this, but I know that I don’t want to change what is in my heart, only what is in my head.
I hope I’m explaining myself well enough; I do have some communication problems in that I think the person I’m talking to must absolutely know what I’m talking about — ha!
” do have some communication problems in that I think the person I’m talking to must absolutely know what I’m talking about ha!
Um, are you kidding with the “ha” or something else? Because you came across perfectly clear. In speaking I do tend to ramble a bit and half-think something before saying it – so it does come out like…”huh?” But in writing am pretty clear. You seem very clear.
Love for me is something hard to dissipate, in whatever form it takes, whether friends or lovers or family or pets or whatever. I really wouldn’t want to be any other way, but I do want to protect myself, draw my boundaries with people, keep being assertive and standing up for myself in all areas of life.
My head seems really strong. It’s thinking with my heart that invariably gets me into trouble, and being feelings-driven as a human, there’s little way around that.
It’s nice to hear you say you embrace what was positive about your situation and relationship. You know, I do, too. But I forget the negatives very easily (FOO made this not just possible but inevitable.)
Thanks for providing a new way of looking at the subject!