For years I have been seeking - journeying - searching... to find the way, any way to be able to live my life with a feeling of freedom. To be in the present tense, I like to think of it. It's been decades, really, and it continually seems to elude me. I've done all kinds of "work": therapy, keeping a journal, writing letters to the (many) perpetrators in my life (never sent), creating collages, other art projects, reading all I could get my hands on, painstakingly learning to discover my instincts and then listen to them. So many things I have done, worked on, for a very long time.
As long as I can remember, I have uttered two phrases more than perhaps any other when it has come to my search for life in the present-tense: "I was born too sensitive for this world", and "I'm so afraid too much has happened - maybe I can't fully live the life that was to have been my birthright because too much has been stripped away.
Recently, the connection between cancer cells and what may be lurking within my own cells continually comes to mind. With cancer cells, healthy "normal" cells are invaded by the vicious cancer and literally taken over. The cancer, once discovered, may be treatable - there's radiation, chemotherapy, other less common therapies - and it could possibly be eradicated, and life can go on. Of course there is the sad truth of the cancers that are found too late to save a person.
Then I think of the cells in a person who has been traumatized repeatedly from birth. Yes, from birth. I think the cell structure is different. Trust is stripped away if there was ever any there initially, and an invasive fear invades each cell - whatever is needed to survive is replaced in that cellular structure, given the basic human need above all else is survival itself. The constant (I once called it near-constant, however I realize now it is truly constant) surveillance that must take place... looking always for the next "attack" however real or imagined, there seems to be one at every turn. Those who have been stripped of the right to a LIFE at its onset will spend their days knowing - not thinking, but knowing - that Safe Is Never REALLY Safe.
I titled this "Present-Tense Life" because I am striving, working will all my might, to come to a place where I can live in the present. Where I am not wondering (or worse, expecting) if someone is about to come up behind me and smash the back of my head just because. If someone who has given me every - EVERY - reason, to know and to believe they are there for me and not leaving me - will, in fact, leave. If I can enter a store, a meeting, a gathering of friends, and ever truly relax. If I will ever really know what relaxing is, for that matter.
Oh, I've had moments, many of them, where life has felt good. Laughter, love, the kindness of strangers, the way the air smells on a beautiful spring day... plenty of moments when I feel optimistic. In fact, I write because I've no intention of giving up.
It's the lingering fears - sometimes looming so large I can see nothing else, and at times distant whispers that, though faint, I always hear - it is those very things that have me questioning just how fully I can be in a relationship with others. Is it fair to them when I am riddled with fears that have been in my cells for nearly a half-century now? Should I be attempting to "right the ship" on my own - yet knowing the very second I put that sentence down, that I am only at the place I have reached today because there is now someone in my life who stands by me no matter what.
I am keenly aware that what I have been through is not going to disappear - and with all the downsides, it is that very life experience itself that has created the sensitive, caring, and loving person I am (who, sadly, also can't help but feel desperate so often).
Is a morning going to dawn in my lifetime when I can smile even before opening my eyes because I am honestly, truly, living in the present? I can only pray for that, and continue the "work" I am doing today.
