A Slow Trickle of Blood

This is hard to write. Hard to write because long ago I learned the hard way that writing about other people can lead to misunderstandings that don't untangle easily.

But I've been thinking over the past few days about old wounds. The kind that never heal. The kind that don't boil over, but instead just trickle.

Its strange how much power these wounds have, leaping forward from the past to the present, seeping into the day to day living. Like, lets say for the sake of argument, a little girl who didn't just feel unloved, but who felt in the core of her being that she was unlovable. She isn't of course. In fact she is adored. But lets say that there was a parent who had a problem. And that problem came from something completely unassociated with the little girl, but the little girl became the emodiment in the parent's mind of the problem. In that case, at the age of three and six and nine and twelve, does the little girl have the sophistication to understand whats really going on. Probably not. Definitely not. She is only going to see what is in front of her, and feel only the effects of the parent's reaction.

Lets say she remembers trying to be good. And she remembers trying to be pretty. And she remembers that nothing she ever did made any difference. She tried to love more, and was rebuffed. She tried to be beautiful and was mocked. Is there every going to be a time when she is enough? In her own mind?

Years and years go by. The people around her are confused. The more she tries the more they wonder. The more they wonder the more she tries. She grows into a beautiful and accomplished woman, but the mirror still reflects the little girl. The one whose brother tied her hair into pigtails with bailing twine because he was helping her to be enough. Which somehow didn't work.

What happens next? She is able to understand now, with her adult mind and her advanced training, she is able to understand what was happening. And yet the wound still slowly bleeds. The struggle now involves more people, and more efforts, and it is becoming exhausting. Not becoming, it has always been exhausting, only now the weight is becoming unbearable.

How does she unlearn the false lesson of those many years ago, and come into an understanding of her own worth as a person, not based on what she does, or how she looks, or how much she makes, but simply her own worth as a person on this planet whose space and value never had anything to do with anything more than her presence.

Can she learn to see the love that is around her as all the love she needs, and let go of the need for that one love? Can she learn to walk past the dry and ungiving well without longing to look one last time for a drop of water?

Does a wound inflicted on the giving flesh of a child ever heal enough? Can love withheld ever be replaced even if it can't be restored?

I have my own answers. But then my life is my own, my experiences, my wounds, my loves, my accomplishments. I don't know about the wounds of others. I know the answers that have staunched my own bleeding, but this slow trickle is not etched into me.

I wonder.