Falling Into Grace
Prologue
I couldn’t remember walking in through the rounded door behind me. I was in a small vestibule, but one that did not open into a larger room as one would expect. There was a stairway spiraling up the center of this room. The vestibule was circular. I walked two dozen steps around the central stairs and found myself back at the rustic wooden door…did I come in through that door?… its panels held together with wide straps of a steely gray metal, its hinges and handle glistening.
A queasy feeling came over me, my stomach tightened into knots, my legs went from numb to shaking. I did not feel safe here. I turned the handle on the door to leave. It was locked. Flustered, I walked around the doughnut shaped room once more, tried the handle once again. Still locked. But the door looked… well, it looked smaller now than it had moments before. Repeating this exercise as my unease grew did not change the outcome. I was living the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over again and expecting a different outcome. Adding to my agitation, each time I walked around the room and came back to the starting point, the door grew ever smaller. There was no way out other than this door that I could see, that I must have come in. Exasperated, I decided to find the another way out by climbing the central stairwell. Perhaps this was a one-way room and I could only get out where I had not come in from. The fact that did not seem like reality never occured to me. The stone steps of the stairwell were wide and deep, not very high, looked easy to climb. Surely there was a way out where they ended at the top.
After climbing for a while, a feeling of dread made me turn around to go back down and wait for help. I did not question if there was help available or from where, or how I found myself in this eccentric room. Turning back around to face up, I saw the central pillar the stairs were built around had gone from stone to the slick shine of the metal on the door below. There was no handrail or any other handhold and the wide and shallow steps which I had climbed up easily were suddenly too steep and narrow to descend. I was too tired to question the cause or the method of this transformation of my surroundings. I sat down on the last step I had climbed and leaned against the central pillar, falling asleep in exhaustion with tears of impotent despair staining my face.
When I woke it was getting dark. I had no idea how long I had been asleep. With a new resolve I began my climb again. There appeared to be very narrow vertical windows on the outer wall, like arrow-slits in medieval towers. But these were translucent and did not look like they opened to the outside. They were at a precarious angle for me to see through, but as it got darker they provided enough light from the outside to make the steps visible. The first few windows sat flush with the outside wall, but this soon changed. Round the bend from where I stood each window was built deeper into the wall, leaving a wide ledge around it on all four rectangular sides, wide enough to sit upon. Perhaps there was hope for rest as I climbed to safety, if none for rescue.
In the cooling light of dusk I saw…more than saw, surely my eyes were playing tricks on me… I felt a small wraith at each window. Terrified, my feet froze and refused to carry me forward. Don’t be scared, there’s nothing to be afraid of… the voices were childlike, but the figures at the window were too indistinct for me to identify. Whether the voices were coming from them or from my own nebulous mind, I could not tell. The terror lasted for the longest time as I stood paralyzed between windows. Eventually the need to get out won over the fear of these conjured apparitions and my unsteady climb resumed. With every step up, the voices continued to even out into one gentle litany of “It’s alright, you’re okay”…. I began to trust I would be safe and my steps became filled with purpose.
After years of climbing out of this never ending tower I learned that each young child in those windows was a moment of my life. Not like the dissociations I was discovering in the world outside this tower, filled with childhood memories in the offices of therapists and psychiatrists, but of every moment that I had been conscious since birth. This tower was the way my spirit had learned to connect me to my past. Fear had long given way to discovering the truths these younger me’s held. The more I read and educated myself about abuse and trauma, the more trauma informed I became, the more I was able to zoom out of my own pain and become a witness to the pain of others. The strong intentional work of this recovery and healing journey opened windows at times when I needed them most, allowing me to step out into small footholds and resting areas of integration, learning to trust myself and the spirit of the Universe. I learned the simple truth that
terrible things happen to everyone, everywhere, everyday.
There may someday be an end to this journey of self discovery and a door at the top of the tower might open into a vista of fields of sunflower and jasmine blooms. I may find myself twirling in the billowing grass like Maria, singing The Hills are Alive with The Sound of Music. This journey only ends when I do. And I hope to keep climbing these stairs for a long long time.
This is the telling of my journey of how being lost at first led to being terrified of being found, and how finding out about myself and even the harshest parts of my lost childhood released me from unnamed fears into a world of perpetual and unbridled joy where I now reside.
*There have been profound changes in the lives of most people in 2020, so I don’t think of myself as special in this. I have learned many new skills in the last nine months of isolation. I began a YouTube channel and posted the videos I created on my Medium posts in March and April, making a V-log. I cooked non-stop from June to the present, learning about new cuisines, using new ingredients, actually using recipes! After two months of Corona-fear-fever I got to see my little munchkin grandbaby on Mother’s Day, and have been lucky enought to see her regularly since then because of being able to maintain a small closed family pod. Most of her life so far has been spent in Covid restrictions, but she is a year old this week. How Time flies and drags simultaneously.
*What affected me most was that in early July my friend Michele Harper’s brilliant memoir about racism in the medical field and her own recovery, titled The Beauty in Breaking, was published. Reading it, something in my that had been stuck simply broke. I reached out to her and she graciously put me in touch with a wonderful editor/consultant. Within a week I began re-writing and editing my memoir in earnest. My body was not able to keep up, either with the speed of my writing or with the processing of my memories. Within a month, I was lying on the floor of my room, flowing and purging from every available orifice. Food and water would not go in, stay down, or stay in. With much regret but also relief, memoir writing stopped. This prologue came to me in my sleep from an image I have carried for over a decade. Thousands of words in many chapters have already been written. Maybe if I take teeny tiny steps and go vewy vewy slowly, the rest of the book will choose to reveal itself. Or perhaps other titles and subjects that I have not considered yet will be fleshed out. Fingers crossed. Just as we have been able to exhale this weekend after the relentless ravaging of our nation’s soul, I am waiting to exhale from the effects of the virus that has ravaged the world this year. Fingers and toes crossed for a kinder, gentler, virus-free 2021.
I am tagging some friends who I have not been able to keep in touch with. Apologies and hugs go out to everyone I have not read through most of this pandemic. Please feel free to tag others in comments if Medium still allows it.
