Doubt and forgiveness

It has not necessarily been the best day. Lots of fears that I will not get theough life or feel whole in any way at the end of it. I had a really terrible dream. These dreams make me feel like the hopelessness is so real. I don’t remember much of it but it involved this room and feeling abandoned and getting arrested or the fear of getting arrested or something. It came with tbis fear that everything is fixed and I’ll never get to live my own life because my own family has conspired to make it the most depressing thing imaginable. It was after I fell back to sleep after Quaker meeting this morning.

When I woke up I thought, I don’t l think I will ever recover from whatever it is that happened to me in those hospitals and especially my own family’s involvement with that; not sure if I can ever completely trust that my own mother was not part of this thing that was done to me that was clearly meant to destroy my soul. If she was not part of it, I know that her husband was, and I will never be able to explain to her that as long as he is around I’m never going to feel anything but scared.

I have such horror and trauma around him and now his older brother and I am okay with having no family but having absolutely no idea how to take my mother’s eords and actions in my heart… it is terrifying, I know the whole rest of the family would doom me to hell, but I really do not know about her; it eould almost be so much harder if she really truly loves me and hasn’t meant to hurt me, sad for her and sad for the workd, heartbroken beyond belief. She has been there for me in so many ways over the years and I can’t deny that; and I still believe her expressions of care, and the last few days they just seem more genuine. Maybe she just doesn’t know me and how to get along eith me, but then, sometimes I think she uses all sorts of things she thinks she knows about me just to hurt ke, and it feels like, you do know enough about me to try to relate. I feel broken; regardless of the truth nothing broken in my family is going to be fixed and whether my mother is in on these too much nbearable to fathom betrayals or she does not actually know about them but in any case that what-is that I cannot change is unbearable. It is a complete mess I cannot embroil myself in, I have to do what has always been so hard, finding the strength to see what happiness might mean on my own terms, and right now I think I just need to keep up boundaries as much as possible, and not confuse her occasional statements of love and care with a relationship.

I am huge moments of peace and even desire for affectionate connection when I do this self-forgiveness practice. I feel like there is everything to need forgiveness and if the whole world thinks I am bad then how can I possibly believe that I, too, deserve live and forgiveness? It is terrifying to realise that but powerful because it takes soooo little willingness to self-forgive for me to feel it enormously because there is so much of it that needs to be done and it is so powerful. I think it does bring up these fears of powerlessness and the future just being worse than the past and it is hard to trust that my life is a process I can trust. I do not even know what they did or how they did it but they took everything out of me and I am even afraid of just ending up dying in a hospital that is as bad as that one one day. I don’t ever want to set foot into a hospital again. Everything feels too tragic. I need something to believe in…

I realise there is so much in my heart that needs self-forgiveness but I also need so much of it about stuff that was done to me and somehow that is a process of self-forgiveness too: I need to forgive myself that these things happened to me. I need to forgive myself for so mych that happened to me. My heart though is so full of some yearning for transformation, for letting go, terrified nothing familiar or trustworthy will be found in the other side. Oh, often I do not know it is Rosh Hashanah, I just feel it; and that must be part of what I am feeling, this deep and tender longing for intimacy in my heart.

I went to a queer recovery meeting tonight. It was so helpful and that feels like another part of me that has been broken off, deprived of breathing room, exiled… I do not think about gender much at all these days because I am so hurt with how intentionally I have been hurt by it and I am looking for community that is just a safe space to explore being me? But where can you get that for longer than four days? Where can you even get that for four days, when it is like the one you trusted to hold that kind of space seems to hate you and won’t tell you why? Or that is my gut feeling and maybe knowing the truth would really clarify some things but I don’t know if anyone cares enough about me to do that. Anyway, there are parts of myself I have shut off, because I have been intimidated and found no safe space to escape to; my queer identity is something I have hardly given a thought to in forever. However people want to gender me, I’m too tired to put up a fight; and I basically just identify as non-binary which basically means I’d rather not think about gender or have gender be a consideration in who you think I am, I just want to be myself. It was so strange to feel a step closer to where I belong but everything is so fragmented; like, these are spaces I have been removed from, places where I can find mirrors, people like me in even the most basic way. People more likely to be like me in other ways that, after being trapped in a cage where I have been shamed for who I am for so long, make it feel almost impossible to find my way back into spaces where I am not just fitting into the mainstream but see people like myself, who are easier to talk to, maybe, because of what we have in common. I doubt so much these days and one if the things I doubt is whether it is even worth exploring my gender identity anymore because I’ll never get to be myself anyway and the forces that are opposed to that are always going to want to break my heart. If you need chosen family really soon where do you go about looking, and come on, it can’t be that easy to find people you trust to hold you if you fall… but I want to have that experience like others do. If it’s not happening for me is there something wrong with me? What would it even mean right now to speak a word that is spiritually wise?

There is so much that is just not right, so many ways I need safety and clarity and more opportunities for safely being and expressing who I am, and I don’t know if I have it in me to break through the depression… and the feelings that can come on about how undeserving and worthy I am when i try to forgive myself just a luttle bit are so, so strong…