Ok it's long and rambly and jumps around.. has no beginning and no end yet but here is the weird fragment I found of my recovered past. It's a bit bleak, but I didn't feel bleak writing it. It just felt really good to let it out.
Sometimes while I'm struggling up the mountain, battered by the elements and trying not to fall off the edge I paradoxically come across a door. I can walk through into a space where I'm sheltered from the elements for a while (usually a very meticulously timed hour, half hour or quarter hour).
There are a quite few of these doors scattered around, but it's a big and treacherous mountain, so when I find a place I can shelter from the elements for a spell, I tend to come back to it as often as allowed.
It's hard work exploring the mountain for places to shelter, so I take what shelter I can to try and gain energy. When the weather is better or my courage and strength picks up, I might launch an expedition to find other shelters and investigate what might be inside.
At one such shelter, I open the door to find a completely windowless space. It's very pleasant, well appointed and wonderfully climate controlled. The receptionist is calm and friendly. How this shelter or it's occupants got to the mountain or seem to be entirely oblivious of the conditions outside is a mystery. They seem to have what I crave in their calm and perfect demeanor, and perhaps if I sit and follow their direction, I too will spend my life comfortable in a calm climate controlled world, making pleasantries and eating tea-cakes oblivious of what's going on outside. I may even come to forget it entirely, surely it was just a dream and this calm and perfectly regulated world is the real one?
My name is called and I walk into another room to meet a man with a concerned but contained and confident demeanor. He has studied many drawings of the "mountain people" and even talks directly to some of them on a daily basis. He is clearly the man who knows what to do in this situation and has had great success with 'them', particularly the young ones. The others in the space recognise this and look to him with unspoken deference and respect. He carries the responsibility well, not too arrogant, not too humble. The others are satisfied with this and all seem to feel adequately acknowledged and comfortable with their lot.
After a few visits to this particular shelter, I come to realise that my rocked and tired, fritzed or shaken fresh-from-surviving-another-day-on-the-mountain demeanor is making the occupants of this space uncomfortable. It is after all, not for nothing that they built such thick and windowless walls against the world outside.
I realise that if I wish to be admitted inside- not just to visit for my 1 hour blocks in the waiting room and office but to be allowed to live deep into the shelter and far away from the mountain and its storms - then I will need to learn how to look, think and act just like the folks in here. I must carefully screen out any slight nuance or variation from that. I must learn not to talk too much or too loud, express any anger, any bitterness, show any fear or dare disagree.
Disagreement is the most cardinal of sins as it demonstrates a clear 'lack of insight'. The drawings of the mountain-folk are very clear in their neat and careful annotations, and bear the official seal-of-knowledge that marks them as fact. My concerned and caring helper has 15 years of experience interpreting the diagrams and recognising the neatly numbered features in my face, speech, dress, action and demeanor. If I wish to be admitted to this shelter, I had best remember that.
I keep quiet. Perhaps there is a price to pay but I don't yet know how to safely navigate the mountain and I have rebelled enough times to know by now that there are shelters out there far worse than this one, shelters that one has to battle out of, far more dangerous than the mountain itself and where doors are locked.
He was a list-checker, a gate-keeper and the price I would need to pay to try and get in from the cold through his particular doorway was to check all of the right boxes on his list.
His soul seemed as rigid and walled off as the windowless office in which he worked, as meticulously controlled and organised as the lists and diagrams from which he drew his pride. His idea of safety was certainty and there would be no room for nuance, for subtlety, for feeling - for the mess and the wildness - the confusion of life, of loss, of hurt and of growth.
What he was like outside that office I never knew, but inside it there was no getting through to that one. I gave up on his doorway and took my chances on the mountain, returning every six months or so to get a stamp that I had been certified by one of his lists and was thus eligible to get special dispensation for struggling to pass through a different doorway through which I was trying to enter. Each visit was the same, he asked a list of questions, word for word the same each time. I answered. Nothing more. I got my certificate and I left.
It was such a small amount of time. Half an hour or so once every six months. Yet somehow these visits were implanting strings that would come to shape and distort every aspect of my life. They tied me to an experience, a time of crisis that had happened, by now, many years ago. A time when I had wanted to make sense of my experience, of the turmoil out on the mountain where there had been, I could vaguely remember, other people, goings on, problems that worried and concerned me and I wanted to solve and understand. But for years now it had been unvisited, unconsidered. It didn't matter, there was nothing but the list. In that office, I was the list and the list was me and he, who had never really seen me, was the keeper of all who I was. Neatly summarised in two short words at the top of the certificate I left with once every six months.
Ok .. so that's all I have bit raw n bleak
There's an arc, no doubt, but I haven't got there yet...
Emergency, police & ambulance (24 Hrs)
Connect with a lifeline crisis supporter (24 Hrs)
Suicide callback service (24 Hrs)
Kids helpline (24 Hrs)
13 YARN