CAN ANYONE HEAR ME WHEN I SCREAM
Pain, heartache, struggle, any form of suffering, abstract oblique undefined places, we have all been there at some point or other. Times when we would not have wanted anyone to even know about. Being a very private person and not wanting a lot of my life known it’s difficult for me to talk or ask for help in many of these scenarios’ and so I go in silences. I frequently ask myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, I generally answered to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in on my gloom. One day as I was looking for something to read I came across the memoires of one of my favorite writers and came to a passage which related to his father’s death. It immediately brought back memories of the death of my beloved husband and how I was left to raise our four children alone, the distressed position of my family. Like him I felt and tried to make my children feel that I would be everything to them, would supply the place of the loss of their father. With a vivid conception of the scene, and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From that moment, my burden grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless. I was not stock or stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character and all capacity for happiness are made. To live is to feel oneself lost, if you accept this you have already begun to find yourself on firm ground. Instinctively as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, and posturing farce. I now misinterpret myself whenever I suffer over anything. That sounds rather false to you, probably, as if I were deserting the ship that we are all floating in. But really I do begin to think that we can step out of the door like the hummingbird. It’s open all the time. We seem to resist the vitality of healing. One day you will no longer see what is exalted in you, and what is base in you, you will see all too closely, one day you will cry, everything is false. One who has come through the fire will not fade in the sun.