I Got Out!!!

I GOT OUT……

it was around Easter 2022, a string of seemingly small events that had me unable to ignore the feeling in my gut that this was not going to end well. I hadn’t consciously planned on leaving, there were significant moments that led me closer to that exit doorway. 

On reflection, I cannot help but feel that the Greater “I” was involved, not sure for how long - slowly, surely orchestrating events and feelings for me to be honest with - ‘this is how it feels when I don’t do something with the feeling - like squash it, push it out the window, swallow it, ignore it, justify it. Being in the experience I was in - it was out or die.

WHEN I….. think back to some of those events, I feel my blood pressure increase, my temperature goes up, my nervous system is not docked in regulation - the sounds are too many and too loud, the pressure of my clothes touching me has me wanting to rip them off and have nothing touch me. 

The silence is deafening, I can hear my blood pulsing through my head and chest. I want to scream yet don’t want anyone to hear me, judge me or lock me up. I couldn’t always find my voice, it wasn’t an open space for sharing, or being invited to have a voice, particularly when mine sounded so different - it was kinder to myself to be silent. 

There were moments over the years when I did share, some of those moments were ok, others were followed by the blood draining from my body, suddenly feeling very cold and a bit disoriented while my experience was ‘corrected’ in a way that felt like public humiliation - shame. Shame feels cold.

AND NOW……I’m beginning to see how people create unhealthy group dynamics -  instigated from the top and sometimes the bottom we all go along with, silently at first, perhaps these are the seeds that begin to grow into the tree that’s big enough to climb and peer over the fence to the other side. 

I sometimes wonder - how would they respond if they knew of my experience….. every few words would be met with a group speak phrase, a perspective which cannot accommodate what’s been said, I’d be talked over, talked at, leadership would be defended, some would nail me to the wall in a hail of ‘transmissions’.  

I’m pretty sure they could do nothing but invalidate what I have just shared, unable to accept it. They can do nothing else. I cannot not have my experience, which I must accept, I cannot abandon myself……not even for belonging.

~One