The weight of the world...

Weighs heavily on my shoulders at present. I am not ashamed to say I am struggling.

Wow, that is a huge statement for me. Shame thrives in me; I come from a place of shame. But I have been working on it and obviously a glint of light is breaking through the dense darkness of shame. I am gradually understanding that much of the shame I carry is not mine. It belongs to others. They have dumped their shame on me and being the person I am, I have accepted it and added it to my load.

[Hmm, that is the gift of writing. I had no idea when I sat down to offload in this blog today that shame would raise it's ugly head. But that's what writing gives you. It provides you with a time and space for reflection. A time for your mind to offload the issues you know are causing you concern. But also a time for those other thoughts that have been locked away to emerge. They will emerge and find ways to be expressed whether it be in prose, poetry, vocalisation, painting, clay or any other creative mode you use.]

Now I see what I have written in my first paragraph, I realise the weight of the world I am carrying that is dragging me down into the depths is also connected to others. Once again I am carrying another's load. In this case, tis the brevity of world issues. That is impossible, no one can manage to do that. As we regularly observe, politicians cannot even manage to deal with those issues. So why does it all affect me so much?

I am one of those people when in a group that if someone starts crying, I will tear up too. I have always wondered why. Whatever the cause of their sadness, it did not belong to me. Perhaps I felt sad as I understood what and why they were feeling that way but it was not my sadness. Had it unlocked a sadness within me that had been closed to the world and almost forgotten. At times I recognise the connection but other times I have not got the foggiest clue why I do that. It occurs with people I know but also with others I have never met.

In training to be a play therapist, we learnt about the collective unconscious. That was a lightbulb moment for me. We are all humans living on one planet and humans have emotions. We feel, well most of us do. [This blog relates to someone who does not seem to experience the variety of emotions, only anger it seems.] So if a tragedy happens on the other side of the world, it is still a relatable tragedy. I suppose the core fight of my soul concerns children and animals. I cannot abide seeing children or animals hurt. My body wants to react violently towards the perpetrators. Just writing about it, I can feel my body tense up.

That reaction obviously arises from my own childhood, where no-one spoke up for me when I was being hurt. And as I have mentioned previously, all the energy that was imparted into my body through the crashing blows of beatings must have gone somewhere. Some of it caused my body to jerk awkwardly as each hit landed but I am certain a lot of that energy, stayed within my body. That is the energy I feel now surges within me when I hear about children or animals being hurt. The horrific event relating to the young nursery children in Thailand broke my heart. Closer to home, children in my neighbourhood are struggling to find food to eat and places to keep warm. That is also heartbreaking. A part of my heart is still in Africa and that is an ongoing heartsore. I could continue. But although I can do my bit by helping or giving what I can, I cannot change it. These events in my time have occurred so often in the past and yet life still goes on.

When I have asked others how they deal with these issues. Most people explain that they hear it, they have an immediate reaction to it and then they get on with their day. I wish I could do that....or do I?