If you only knew how frightened I was at the time, how I didn't sleep without medication for more than 40 mins to an hour a night because I didn't know what was going to happen next. How it was like I was wound so tight that the slightest thing and I would shatter into pieces. How I even kept it all vaguely together I will never know...well honestly I didn't, I was a mess I just tried very hard to keep up the pretence that "everything was fine".
I truthfully can't see myself as brave and maybe that is a remnant, one of those invisible scars, that what has happened has left me with, and indelible mark that blurs my view of myself.
You see for me a brave person would have gone long before I did, a brave person would have walked away from the vicious, nasty mind games... but I didn't go, I did try, but I went back when he called. I kept telling myself it would be ok, that I could fix it, I could be better, I could make him better, but I couldn't. You know at the end I don't think I even loved him anymore, I didn't know him, I was just afraid, not brave, just terrified and hurt.
What I will say about myself is that I do seem to have this enormous tenacity to keep going despite everything, but I don't believe that makes me brave, it just makes me a fighter and a survivor. When faced with the choice of life or death, I choose to live, to keep going, the alternative, despite having seemed tempting in darker days, is no alternative. We have to live, we have to survive, life can be good, no, life can be fucking amazing, the bad times never last forever. I am walking, talking and, thank fuck, breathing proof of that.
I have a tattoo on my left wrist which reads, "So it goes", I only got it done recently and I wanted something that meant something to me after all that had happened.
To explain, it's a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, which is probably best described as a science fiction war novel although that really sells it short. The aliens within the story, the Tralmafadorians, being infinitely superior to homo sapiens, can see all of time, all at once, so when people die for them there is no need for sadness because they are only dead in that particular moment, in another moment they are alive. They simply say "So it goes", because well, it does.
I love the idea that all the moments that make up our lives are playing out simultaneously that my bad moments can play out because my good moments are always there.
So for me my (slightly geeky) tattoo is a testament to how I have survived and how despite the bad, the good is always there and that I will always move forward. Does that make sense? I want to live for now and for the future, not be held back by the past because the past can't be changed and though you can look back, it will always be to your detriment to dwell for too long on what is unchangeable. Things have happened, are happening and will continue to happen, both good and bad, but as my left wrist says, So it goes.
(N.B. The Tralmafadorians maintain in the novel that the future is also fixed and known but hey I'm an earthling and I still rail against predestination!)
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