Every so often I get the breath knocked from out of me. My lungs constrict and trap air like iron fists. I can feel my stomach turning, my heart racing, and my hands sweating. My legs start to shake, like my bones are quivering from the pain. It can be as simple as a photograph of an abandoned building that some lost soul has made their dirty home. It could be a song, a smell, a phrase or touch that feels too familiar. All of a sudden I am a quivering shaking fool. All of a sudden my guts feel like they are being ripped out from inside of me.
It can be a terrible thing, to remember.
Perhaps that is why I tried so hard to cut my past out of the tapestry of my life like a cancer. It is making me sick, I scream, as my hands tear the past to shreds. Stop following me! Stop forcing your way back into the present! The past ghosts and terrorizing memories laugh quietly at my absurd outbursts. They go into hiding, but they always come back. They always knock the breath out of me when I am least suspecting.
It may be time for a new way of dealing with this.
With this gap between what used to be and what now is. This huge hole that I have dug between my history and my present, afraid that my history may infect my future if it is allowed out of its quarantine. I lay awake at night with eyes wide open, and terror gripping my heart. What if it happens again? I can hardly even dare ask the question, barely whisper it to myself alone in the dark at night. What if all that pain and addiction and despair and loathing comes back? My husband will be a widower, my children will be orphans. I violently shake the thoughts out my head. No, I insist, that is an impossibility. I would never allow it; a fate worse than death.
But my past hunts me like a wild animal, and I cower in fear.
I throw my hands up in exasperation. But what I can do? I wail to myself. I cannot allow that old me to come back again to destroy everything I have worked for. I cannot possibly survive if I allow myself to feel the pain of those years. I would never stop crying. I would go mad. I would drown in a thousand tears.
Is it true? Would I never survive it?
Even now my chest is tightening and am fighting back those bastard tears.
Could I ever survive the memory of being held down and torn into and broken inside? Could I ever handle the enormity of that pain? Can I look at that broken and lost teenager I was, sleeping outside on top of cardboard boxes, bartering her body away after it had been taken from her? Can I remember what it felt like to dig crooked needles into my arms? The blood and water sprayed on the walls, down my clothing, heart pounding, eyes wide?
Can I ever survive the memories of dirty mattresses on the floor? Of skinny children begging for food in the project halls? Of the men, oh the many men, who grabbed and stole and took and broke me in until I was nothing but a hallow shell of a girl, filling myself with drugs to numb the pain?
What about when I realized that I was addicted? What about when I realized that I couldn’t stop? What about when I dragged razor blades across my arms and went mad because of the unrelenting suffering of it all? The despair of utter hopelessness and disdain for my life? The hatred that I felt after allowing them to abuse me, over and over again.
The confusing whirlwind of emotions that the doctors tried to drug into oblivion and lock me away for? It never worked, their drugs. I never believed that they could understand or help me. They never did.
How could it have become normal to sleep in crack houses and sidewalks? How could it become normal to treat my body like a dollar bill? How could it ever have been acceptable to hurt myself the way I did? I don’t understand how it got that bad, and I didn’t know it was that bad until I had escaped it.
Escape? Or was it more like a beautiful liberation?
Standing between two godly men, they lowered me into the waters of baptism and I declared my faith. In a faith that saved me. In a God who was able to rescue a dying girl like me. Faith that binds the broken and sets the captives free; leaping like gazelles. A birth just as real as when I came wet and screaming from my mother. A new beginning that will never end. A love from a Father who will never leave me. Forgiveness that makes what was red like blood and filthy, white as the purest of snow.
He who reached out to me and said, “Go, and sin no more. Your sins are forgiven.”
Those who have been forgiven much, love much, the Savior says. It is true. Truth that can never be destroyed; even by a thousand lies.
But how do I cope with the old me? How do I endure these crippling memories?
Maybe I need to bridge that hole that I dug. Maybe I need to embrace my history, with all its hurt and suffering and filthiness. Maybe I need to accept who I was in order to fully understand who I am today. I do not have to be that person again, but she did exist. I need to allow her to have existed. I need to allow her history to flow into my present and future, as new. She was, and she felt, and she endured, and she survived and she was reborn into this fresh new creature in faith and truth and love.
She was redeemed, cleansed, forgiven. I need to forgive her too. She needs space in my life, my emotions, because these memories will not go away. I cannot run forever.
I can stare my past in the face with all its ugliness and say “I survived you” or I can run and hide and wait for it to attack me again.
I think I may start standing up and facing what once was, so that I can keep going forward without being terrified of the past.
Thy Word is a Lamp unto my Feet 