Needing You

I have said, quite truthfully, that I do not much care what other people think about me. It is just another opinion. This does not mean I do not listen to what they might say. Neither does it mean that I will dismiss their comments as "just another opinion" if something resonates deep within my spirit.

All the introspection in the world will not tell me everything I need to know about myself. I know what I work on, those things I have decided do not serve me well and need to be discarded; the nascent strengths I find lurking in some corner and coax out into daylight, indeed, sometimes drag kicking and screaming, shrinking back towards the shadows because I have decided it is time to deal with this.

The best and saddest compliment I ever received was from my father. It was his birthday, 1982. I was going to be leaving for the States and marriage in just twenty days and I turned up at his restaurant with fish and chips and a bottle of very good wine. We talked of this and that, of past and future possibilities and then a silence fell, as silence does.

Suddenly he said "Everything you are, everything you have done, you have done it on your own. No one has ever stopped to help you. Not me, not your mother. You have done it all alone. You have done a good job, I am proud of you." I heard that he was proud and my heart swelled with blood, eyes burned with tears that did not fall as I was not the one allowed to cry in our family. It was only later that the echoes of alone resounded in my ears.

I had become accustomed early to being told, on asking for help, you are big enough old enough intelligent enough to look that up, find a way to do it, take care of that yourself. As children tend to, I believed the adults and stopped asking for help. It was my job to look after the things I needed. Later it was my job to look after what my sisters needed too.

Years later, one of the pivotal moments in my life was sitting listening to a friend on the phone going through her woes, when reaching into that internal store of comfort that I offered other people I came up empty. there was no substance inside me, I was hollowed out.

This was a dreadful time. I was gutted and I had no idea that I was allowed to ask for help. I tried to mend it, fix it, put it back the way I was used to, as I always had. It was my job. And I had naturally drawn to myself those people who needed me to give to them, so I embarked on a path of amazing self dissolution and destruction.

I ate myself down to the bone and watched it happen helplessly. One morning I woke up, calm and centered as I had not been in years and said out loud, 'This has got to stop.' That was step one. Step two was asking for help, repeatedly until I found a place that said you do not have to do this alone. I wept. The tears frozen in my soul for most of my life tore from me like uncaged birds and strangers told me go ahead and cry, just let it out, you don't have to hold this in any more.

So now I write the secrets of my soul in the most public of all forums, sometimes brazenly, as now, other times wrapped delicately in a froth of words that will melt before the burning gaze of those who look in closely. My shy heart shudders at times at twisting naked in the wind, and spirit quails now and then at the thought of being misunderstood but I will not freeze my tears or shutter down my soul again.

I shall weep and shriek if need be, laugh from the bottom of my heart, and though I do not need there to be a 'you' to be happy, my happy will be bigger if you are there.