The Unsung Efforts in the Process of Healing
There is an odd sort of landscape that resides in the human psyche. It is a place where unspeakable sorrows have made their home, where they have developed intricate layers of sorrow.
They exist between the interstices of consciousness, unnamed yet very much alive, working through a perceptivity whose power is largely hidden.
They live inside oneself without making any outward manifestation. They lurk in the spaces that last for just one extra moment, in the laughter that trips over its own edge, in the inexplicable lethargy of an afternoon. Their very existence defies description because the language needed to do so demands a kind of precision they don’t allow.
The process here is non-linear and non-simultaneous.
This is something that does not take place in a linear, logical fashion, nor is it a matter of deliberate choice on behalf of the person going through the process of loss.
Instead, it is a matter of an unconscious metamorphosis, similar to erosion happening gradually upon a piece of stone by unseen forces. And in doing so, the psyche begins to change the very presence of the loss.
Such silent work does not call for approval or acknowledgment, nor is it intended to make any announcements about its progress along the way, for it happens alone, in the privacy of one’s own thoughts and musings.
Someday, without warning, things will have changed.
The same memories that used to choke breathing will now begin to loosen, as if there is an agreement with time made by the soul.
It is a process in which there is no erasure. Erasure entails violence, the violent act of turning away from experiences. Instead, healing entails the reshaping of the link between the self and its hidden illness.
This illness lies buried within the physical self only as a faint memory. However, this is no longer the illness that dictates how life will be lived.
This is something that one holds; it is not something that controls one’s existence.
Within this alteration, there is –
A hope that speaks nothing at all
A hope that demands nothing but presence.
The very act of remaining alive and moving through the world with a grace one had never before imagined.
And thus, let us hope, without ceremony, without proclamation, that –
The invisible scars will heal in their incomprehensible time, that which cannot be spoken will come to rest, and in the vast, unspoken entity of oneself, there exists something fragile which will not be shattered by what was never said.