Healing

My soul wanted to write. The little bird she is, warm in hands.

Just wanted to breathe, wanted to send her soft song into the loud, loud world.

I’m lazing by the fire, once again: a little girl’s shame in one hand, and the entire universe in the other. How profound it is to be human. If only everybody understood how truly epic a journey it is.

I had a dream in the early hours of the morning. At the time it seemed odd, but as I sat on the couch cupping my morning coffee, eyes closed to the chaos around me, it struck. Like a town centre bell, vibrating in rings, shaking the core of my little girl heart.

Shame. The dream was pointing me towards a shame I didn’t realise I’d been carrying.

The man at the library desk is speaking to me as though I am the number on my library card. I mumble politely. He mumbles politely. And then he flicks the computer screen to an image of the toilet floor; of a small, brown McDonalds bag and a large take way coffee cup.

I recognise this as the bag and cup I had left on a previous visit. A choice not to put it in the bin, purely due to laziness I can only presume.

‘We have a fine on your file for littering, Mam,’ said the man and his dead eyes, as he pointed to the screen. I focused on the crinkled edges of the paper bag, my body oozing with thick, aching guilt.

‘Oh, yes. I remember those. I must have forgotten them there.’

The thing was this: I had not forgotten them. I knew I had left them on purpose. And shame was waiting there on the dusty floor of my consciousness to remind me.

This dream was giving me a chance to accept my humanity as it was.

At this point (and probably far too deep into the story) I should let you know I have never actually left a Mc Donalds bag and a Coffee cup in a library toilet cubicle.

But I sure did recognise that shame.

‘Little girl me’ felt it when she’d done something she felt was unforgivable. And as an act of self preservation, she had carried it into adulthood, made up stories, like, ‘Oh I must have forgotten it there,’ to ensure she remained the ‘good girl’ she had so desperately needed to be for the world.

This dream was a gift. It allowed me to return to that toilet cubicle of shame and set myself free.

And if I could go back to the dream and speak to the bored librarian again, I would say this:

‘Life can be so hard. So complex. On that day, I remember feeling lazy, and like I just couldn’t lift another foot in the direction of my choosing. It doesn’t excuse what I did. But I’d like to think I can be held in love as I make my way through this thing that it is to be human.‘

Remarkable, isn’t it? How we carry our ‘inner children’ through the world until they somehow break through in the form of an incredibly bored librarian to express their unhealed pain.