On the anger that’s eating me alive.

This is part three in the Louisa series, find them all here.

Maybe this is the end. Maybe my body really can’t handle any of this anymore. And I shall begin to waste away from the inside out, as I continue to reverberate this rage back into my own skeleton.

My soul has screamed so loudly in pain about this, about her, that for the last three days my throat has been burning a tiny fire of its own. No flu or swollen tonsils to accompany it. No medication or treatment that is making any difference. I can’t sleep for swallowing the bark chips down my throat. I can’t think for all I see is red. My body has had enough. The anger is too much and now my physical body is taking the load itself. It is the end. There is no more.

I read a post the other day that said:

“Only when we find deep empathy and compassion for our own suffering and allow ourselves to feel it, that is when we may choose to turn that compassion outwards [and forgive]. Not before”

So I think that must be my new approach. This one surely isn’t working. The only person anger truly damages is the person who feels it. Self-destructing because of the things someone else has done to me seems like a pretty sad ending. Do I heal this pain in revenge? Neutralise your actions as a peace offering to my own heart? It feels…unachievable.

But let us start with my own suffering, no? Perhaps there is compassion hidden in there still. In lost corners and treasure troves on levels of the game I haven’t unlocked yet.

I wish we’d been taken into care. That the social workers had stayed just a little bit longer that day. That they’d have overlooked the wealth around us and focused on the damage. That they’d asked more questions. That they’d not been fresh out of uni, inexperienced and nervous around hostile men. I wish they’d have taken us away right there and then.

I could have handled more abuse. (I did, handle more abuse). What tipped me over the edge though was the neglect.

After social services intervened, we began spending more time with my mother, until eventually, at different stages, we both ended up living in her home.

And then she left. Well, sort of.

She’d pop by on weekends and the occasional mid-week evening, when we were already in bed. We had money, and permission to do as adults did. But we weren’t adults. We were children, only recently distanced from a decade of physical and sexual abuse.

Together, Louisa and I were a trauma tornado.