So I’m posting instead of hiding.

I’ve no idea where to start as I don’t want to write, don’t want to reach out here. Why? It’s an old survival pattern. Get hurt, shut up. Don’t ask for what I need so I won’t get hurt. Stay small, be invisible and no one will get me.

It’s been a while since I’ve been like this. But then again it’s a long time since I had anything to do with my family. A few weeks dealing with dad in hospital and my brother was like being the bullseye for poison arrows.

During this period over mid June to the end of July I start getting chest pains. I try to ignore them and figure they’ll go away. They don’t. The doctor sends me straight to the heart institute here. Heart disease, angina. They want to put a camera in my heart, put me on this pill, that pill. It’s scary. I carry a glycerin spray to use whenever I have a pain. This gives me a terrible head ache. I call it my anti heart attack spray. Tastes like shit as well.

I tried, for the sake of my dad, to bring the 3 children together to talk about what’s going on. I was the only one who went to the hospital, I’m the only one who has the information from nurses,doc,OT. My sister said yes, but pulls out because a friend was in labour which apparently means you can’t send messages etc for 48hrs. My brother doesn’t reply to any of the messages from me or my sister.

I fall into a dark hole. Suicidal fantasies a constant companion for a while. Stopping as I choose to detach from the family again. They’re dangerous to me. Sure, the heart stuff was there and it’s not lost on me that dealing with the family triggered it. Collectively doing their best to keep me in my place,to keep me the outcast.

The heart I’m taking care of with diet. I’m not doing pills even the doc says are a crapshoot if they even work and funky side effects. I get excited if I go a day without a chest pain. But I had the worst one yet on Friday. I’m exercising- walking,swimming. It’s super scary. Yet I also see this as a gift.

Less than a year after it sinks into my body I’m alive having died after an overdose the gods are yelling at me…wtf!!!! You’re still not living,not embracing your opportunity. You had you’re celebration trip but what else? Living so badly,so afraid. Get your ass into gear.

Scary. I feel alone. Alone with the path I want to take. Afraid. Afraid to leap. There was never anyone to catch me. My heart is wounded. I’ve had memories and knowing a arise. I’ve re felt the terror of being a baby and small child and not being held,a terror that damages the heart in so many ways.

I know I need to trust Spirit. I know I need to live rather than survive, hide. But being single and having no kids at 46 it’s really easy to think what is there to live for? Faith, love, trust were ripped out early and gleefully skewered and roasted to death. They tried to destroy me but somehow they didn’t. Somehow I had the fire in me still to not fully bend. Dad says he wishes he’d hit me harder as a child so I’d have learned my lesson. I celebrate I fraught back, that I took the beatings and kept my will,myself somehow. But the price is being ostracised for 40 years. Being labelled the trouble maker, arrogant for having different opinions.

I’m scared. I want to live in the country, by nature, I want to kiss the earth and the sky. I want to meet someone who’ll kiss me with her breath lingering on my heart, squeezing tears of wonder from me. And write and dance, and laugh and play. And as I write that to tendrils of death that claw at me everyday rise, say don’t expect that, you can’t be happy, you can’t be loved. Don’t be so arrogant. Suffer. Get back in your box. Go on. And the blows rain down. Tears of an opening heart to hope stop, numbness descends.