I have watched the “film” at least a few hundred times. Me, standing off to the side of the playground, between the swing set and the road. Watching the kids during recess, running up and down the field and lawn between the elementary school and junior high buildings. It was cloudy and very cold that day. I’m watching intently, trying to understand. To comprehend what I’m seeing. It looks like any other day, except everything has changed in some mysterious way. It’s all slightly off. Foreign. Something has gone terribly wrong with the world and I’m seeking the tiniest of clues to help me understand. Something that will help me make sense of what I am seeing and sensing. Nothing is the same, even though, at first glance, it looks as if nothing has changed. Something has shifted and that shift changed the whole world.
The only sound I hear is that of the other kids laughing and yelling as they kick balls down the field, play tether ball, jump on the merry-go-round or jump rope. Otherwise, I am alone in a cone of silence and darkness. I am numb. Emotionless. Hyper-vigilant.
My mind races. “The world has changed. Everything has changed. Something changed the word. What changed the world?” I no longer belong; am no longer a part of the life unfolding before me.
Several years ago, while in therapy, in a flash, God revealed to me that the world didn’t change. I did. I was being sexually abused by my father and had reached an age where I could no longer cloak what was happening to me in fantasy, nor could I block it out. Reality had broken through. And it was far easier, though not accurate, to believe the world had changed than to believe what my father was doing to me had changed and damaged me.
That revelation turned everything upside down. Or maybe it turned everything right side up. Still, in spite of the revelation, as I viewed the scene that happened all those years ago, I felt nothing.
But yesterday, I felt.
Yesterday, I felt the dizzying confusion, the overwhelming terror, the desperation and pain. Yesterday, after all these years, I finally felt what I had evidently suppressed almost my entire life. The emotion I had repressed even as I was living and feeling it because it was so overwhelming, I couldn’t process it. Yesterday, I hurt. I felt what it felt like, standing there watching. I was frantically trying to manage, to comprehend, to make sense of the fact that I no longer belonged among my classmates. I was suddenly profoundly different. An alien on an unfamiliar planet. In disguise. Determined to keep the mask in place and to appear to be a normal child.
Inside, I was torn, broken, screaming a silent, gut-wrenching scream. Inside, I was in unbearable pain. All of the air had been knocked out of my lungs and I was gasping for breath, suffocating in agony. And I was utterly alone.
Before, I only remembered being confused. But confusion was the one piece of what I was feeling that could be acknowledged because it was the safest emotion in which to retreat. It was the only emotion I could allow because in my empty, unsafe world, I would not survive if I allowed myself to feel anything else.
I connected. And it was terrifying. But it was real. It was what I felt as a child standing in the cold watching everyone laughing and playing. Doing the things I used to do. I had been marked by darkness. By the evil things that happen in darkness. And the child I once was had been destroyed.
Broken Wings 