There Was a Time — Hannah Louise Barnard

There was a time when Shame was the loudest voice in my body.

The silent scream of that black abyss coursed in me, around me, through me, and throughout me, utterly consuming, shutting out any and every Other voice that could not squeeze itself into her paradigm of Total Self-Annihilation.

Nothing that didn’t make sense to Shame could make sense to me.
I couldn’t hear anyone else. couldn’t feel anyone else. couldn’t be reached. couldn’t be touched.
I could see other people, but they couldn’t see me.

Is Shame really gone?
Or is she chained down and locked up behind brightly painted, tightly sealed doors, all throughout the haunted house of my Body?

There was a time when I ached every goddamn day.

My whole body ached with sorrow, loss, forgottenness.

The heartache was so big, it just didn’t fit inside my heart anymore. That tender organ burst open, leaking rivers and rivers of ache all throughout my being.

I thought those rivers might never cease to overflow.

I remember writing, “It feels as though my heart is having a miscarriage.”

There was a time when I learned how to breathe fire.
Like any hard lesson, it started with a smackdown.
I was already so low, I didn’t think I could get any lower.
“Surprise,” said the smackdown.

I cried in the woods that day.
If I hadn’t, I never would have heard that little girl fall off her scooter. She was crying too.
I never would have been there to sop up her blood with my scarf, or to teach her how to breathe through the pain.

There was a time when my faith crumbled into pieces all around me.
I saw it one day, laying at my feet, a great and glorious tragedy of ancient stone ruins.

I remember writing around that time that I felt like the burning bush in the middle of the wilderness.* I burned and I burned and I burned, and yet even the sweet relief of death was not in the cards for me.

My teacher asked me, “What is the texture of your crisis?”

I said my chest had collapsed in on herself like a cave, and every last shred of hope and meaning I’d ever clung to had been gouged out of my heart.

She said, “That sounds viscerally painful.”

All the same, when you see that vast expanse of open sky where the roof used to be, it’s hard to want to unsee it.

There was a time when I decided I could handle it all.

Work seven days a week this month? No problem.
Manage nine projects at once? I’m on it.
Family’s still dysfunctional? I’ve got it under control.
World’s falling apart? Not to worry. I’ve been TRAINED for this!!

Then she died.

I went into shock.
Found out between two gigs, and just went to the next one.
Inertia is a property of matter.

When it finally hit me, my world stopped.

I remember kneeling before her body. She was still 15.
I thought I might have shredded that plush velvet communion rail, my fingernails were scratching it so hard.
Only her little brother recognized me.

At her remembrance ceremony, I read the journal entry I’d written years earlier about her 5th-grade graduation speech. They all laughed. Then they all cried.

All the while, the pain was creeping up the back of my neck.

There was a time when I decided to leave Shame behind.

“If I can’t have my faith anymore, then at least I can have everything else,” was something along the lines of how that logic went.

I did everything that had once been forbidden, claimed each experience that had been kept JUST out of reach.

Why didn’t I feel better?

All the while, the pain kept creeping up the back of my neck.

There was a time when the pain reached a fever pitch.

It had crawled up my skull, blaring like two silent smoke alarms I could never shut off.

I said, “Enough.”
I said, “Let’s fix this.”

I waged a holy war against everything and everyone that was hurting me.

I cut, I burned, I cleansed, I purged.
I quit, I left, I resigned.
I deconstructed, reconstructed, destroyed, disarmed, dismantled.

I coughed shit up, I spat people out, and I renounced every non-consensual role to which I’d ever been relegated.

I told my friend I was on a killing spree.
She said I reminded her of Kali.**

There is a time called “Repair.”
The pain is still there.

Sometimes she sears, like a hot welding torch.
Sometimes she cracks, like sharp, jagged stones.
Sometimes she’s raw and tender, like a fox’s leg caught in a trap.
Sometimes she sits and sits and sits in a tense, agitated state, squirming like a restless child who’s been forcibly instructed not to move.
Sometimes she’s brittle and dry, like fragile autumn leaves.

Is Shame really gone?

I still catch glimpses of her silent screams, just under my skin.
Are they echoes? memories? ghosts?

Or is Shame chained down and locked up behind brightly painted, tightly sealed doors, all throughout the haunted house of my Body?

References:

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8: https://poets.org/poem/ecclesiastes-31-8

*Exodus 3:1-17: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%203:1-17&version=NIV

**Hindu Goddess of Time, Creation, Destruction, and Power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali