(no subject)

[maevele]

people aren't always stronger for their griefs. they don't always overcome that shit. sometimes people are just broken for good.

Surviving it isn't the same as overcoming it, or whatever.

I'm really not okay.

Comments

[keeva]

*hug*

i hear you.

[voz-latina.livejournal.com]

I haven't been around, but u are still in my thoughts. I hope things get better soon, and the strength you need finds you.

[maevele.livejournal.com]

thanks. I'll get it together again soon, or pretend to

[leeoakfire.livejournal.com]

safe hugs, if you want them: ((((hugs))))

I am sorry you are dealing with old trauma; that can be very difficult. When I get in the space you are expressing (and I do!) then I like to read this poem. I hope it helps.

“For strong women”
by Marge Piercy

A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Godunov.
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears
in her nose.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t
you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why
aren’t you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

[eriktrips.livejournal.com]

yeah I often feel that not ceasing to breathe is not necessarily cause for great celebration. "you survived!" whoop. I mean how hard is that really? people are hell bent on surviving. we persist in the worst of circumstances because life is just really fucking full of itself no matter who has to suffer for it.

it may be that being broken for good is what it means to persist. it may be that "overcoming" is "overrated" and that what we have to love is what does not overcome. what fails to overcome. because right there is where we need it the most: where there are no bootstraps or affirmations or baby steps to take towards self-sufficiency.

but I think self-sufficiency is a spurious ideal.

I hope you get something of what you need from someone or others around you. even if it's not a cure.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

Amen and frigging YES. And I'm sorry it's true for you too.