It’s Not Your Fault

I failed my board exam. I had spent months studying, and done everything I thought I could and I should. I bombed it.

I have to retake it in June, and hope to still graduate residency in time. I’m really upset about it.

I pray that it’s a glitch, a electronic error on the part of the testing administrator, and this will all be a bad dream. But it brings me back to dark places.

I’ve spent the past few months writing reflective journal entries about my life. I am starting to recognize how many harmful patterns in my life are the result of what I went through as a kid, terrified and humiliated and neglected, beaten by my brother and verbally abused and sometimes physically abused by my dad, neglected by my mom, and made to watch her have sex when she and her boyfriend were drunk, and all the kids were in one hotel room together.

I was starting to heal, as difficult as it all was. Now I’m questioning myself all over again. And I have to go back into study mode, where I have to sit at a computer all day, mentally roasting myself while trying to stay focused.

I thought I had gotten to a place where I could get back to my writing, creative and spiritual interests, and move past all the hurt and shame and pain of the past. But it’s still here, and I have to live in that pit for another three months.

I’m reminded of this gut wrenching scene, Matt Damon and Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting: https://youtu.be/ZQht2yOX9Js

For all the internalizers out there, the ones who always had to be strong, smile and say that nothing was wrong, they were fine and didn’t need anything. For those who saw what no one else saw, and bore what no one should bear. For the lonely and the devastated, for all who suffer in silence when they want to scream. For the marks that don’t show and the wounds that won’t heal.

Being an abused and neglected kid, you never leave the pit. It stays in you. I relate to this sequence from Tom Kong’s Mister Miracle, because I always want someone to see the good in me, accept the hurt I’ve felt, and help me to move through it. I have to become that person for myself. I have to hug that boy, and tell him he’s loved and wanted and doesn’t have to prove anything.

Manalive!

He flitters and he

Flutters through my mind all day

Long, and I want to

Suck him dry. Where is

He? Soaking here on my own,

This can’t all go to

Waste. How he murmurs

Nasty phrases in my ear

When we are fucking,

My deepest muscles

Tighten. He makes me feel like

A goddess and a

Whore, newborn and as

Old as time. We vibrate, and

Transcend existence.

Aroma Mortis 💀

Grandfather has been

Dead fifteen years. I put on

My mask today, and

Smelled him in my stale

Sweat, like a revenant. Deep

In my glands, lingers

The old man. Coming

For my youth. Vitality.

Aroma of death.

“Rational truth, root of evil and good.
Round me flew the flaming sword;
Round her snowy whirlwinds roar’d,
Freezing her veil, the mundane shell.
I rent the veil where the dead dwell:
When weary man enters his cave,
He meets his Saviour in the grave.
Some find a female garment there,
And some a male, woven with care,
Lest the sexual garments sweet
Should grow a devouring winding sheet.
One dies! alas! the living and dead!
One is slain! and one is fled!
In vain-glory hatcht and nurst,
By double Spectres, self accurst.” William Blake

Nudity as Archetype

The strangeness of the

Nude form. By undressing, we

Become someone else.

My binary logic:

Nude woman is a gift, nude

Man is a threat. Man

Is ugly, woman

Is beautiful. The way it

Is and will remain.

Leaking nudes without

Consent, a violation,

Worse than a theft. The

Genie, released, the

Damage is done. The tree from

which Eve ate revealed

Her, like how after

Orgasm, you think so clear.

Ham, cursed by his Dad’s

Cock. So it goes. What

We hide from outside is our

Similarity.