Wagashi

🌸🍡 wagashi ☆

“Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, whiles like a puffed and reckless libertine himself the primrose path of dalliance treads and recks not his own rede.”

— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3

Would you take my cold hands in yours and blow on them to warm them up?

One of the strongest indicators of trauma is overwhelming guilt for something that happened to you. You didn’t harm anyone, you weren’t cruel to anyone, yet you feel ashamed of everything that happened, you feel mortified and believe you somehow caused it, or participated in it, you feel overwhelming shame and guilt for your feelings about it now, you feel ashamed for being hurt by it, because someone indicated you should not be. 

If you feel this way, what happened to you isn’t normal or okay. It means you were put in circumstances completely out of your control and then forced to take responsibility for whatever took place, as if you made it happen. You were not only forced to take responsibility for someone else’s cruelty to you, but even conditioned to not be able to acknowledge just how much it hurt you, how much damage you’re still bearing. It means someone hurt you very, very severely and then, for their own convenience, decided that it was you who caused that, and dictated just how you’re allowed to feel about it, to make it more convenient on the perpetrator. You do not owe them a life free of responsibility for what they’ve done to you.

You are not obliged to feel only in ways they tell you to. You already know your feelings about it, and they’re not wrong. You are not in the wrong to be upset, to feel that it was wrong, that you’ve been hurt and someone is guilty of hurting you. The fact they tried to make you responsible for it, and to make themselves look blameless, only makes it worse, it means they didn’t only hurt you once, they hurt you thousand times after, they hurt you every single time you tried and couldn’t acknowledge what happened, they hurt you every single time you had to pretend that what happened to you wasn’t traumatic abuse.

Paul Jones (Australian, 1921-1997) - Morning Glory, 1950s

lithograph

— ophelia in paintings: moodboard