A Hidden Garden
Over the past two years I’ve left behind some people and places. They experienced my respect for my own health and well-being as a person living with cancer and immunocompromise as burdensome, as a complaint, as excessive, as inconvenient, or as a political opinion. The choice was to stay and expose myself to harm, or regard myself and leave.
When faced with this choice, whenever possible, I leave. Usually, even my leaving they consider to be my failure and my sin - characterized as an extreme response by someone who wants me to stay and keep exposing myself to intentional or unintentional harm and to just keep quiet about it.
I’m not that person.
Some places, relationships I cannot leave because severence would be more disruptive to those who do love and support me, than the necessary workarounds. Then I am hostage, and apply my all efforts to protect myself from the injury or exposure that has been forced upon me and my household.
These aren’t the first damaging relationships I have had to leave to self-preserve. I’ve left many primary and extended kin, as well as those brought into my world by marriage. I’ve left bad work environments, imbalanced friendships, and whole toxic towns. These leavings were often sorrowful.
The first batch felt like violent self-amputations, and the grief burned in my chest like fire that smouldered for years. Later loses were initiated sooner and felt more like clipping an unfortunate broken nail, and less like chewing off my own foot to escape a bear-trap.
Sometimes, looking back really can turn you into a pillar of salt. And it is often absolutely necessary to shake the dust off your shoes when you have determined it is time to leave a place where no one can receive you. But always, underneath the waves of sorrow, disappointment, and the well-established, evidence-based hopelessness that led to the severance has been a fertile hidden meadow of relief and healing.
The day my father died was crushing and disorienting. But every single day after his death I grew healthier, happier, more able to love more people more deeply - especially myself.
And my dreams almost always offer soothing confirmation:
After leaving a friendship who couldn’t or wouldn’t hold pandemic boundaries necessary to keep me safe, I dreamed that a child that I had forgetten about and neglected, left dirty, unprotected and over-exposed to the elements - came running back into my arms, crawled into my lap, stuck his thumb in his sweet little mouth and fell soundly asleep on my chest as I rocked him and promised I would never forget him again.
And recently, after leaving a program that stated that they hoped to pressure people to gather in person by eliminating remote participation, I dreamed that I came up on deck - leaving a stuffy under-deck cabin, crowded with too many people - and sat on the bow enjoying the gentle breeze, the sun and the rocking of the waves, a peaceful floating, cradle.
It is hard, sorrowful, dissappointing, painful to leave inadequate, neglectful, harmful or abusive circumstances. It is harder to leave a harmful bird in the hand when you see nothing else in the bush. But truly, there are times when nothing is better than something.
And most healing and beautiful of all is when the tears of such losses serve to water a secret garden you couldn’t see and didn’t even know existed at the time - that truly nourishes, and protects, cherishes and keeps you.
