A Council of Dolls

by Mona Susan Power

I let out a shaky breath and learn an awful lesson I still don’t understand. How when a dream comes true you have to feel deserving or else it brings only guilt and shame.

After a lifetime of running from uncomfortable memories which can trigger anxiety attacks or months of prolonged depression that shut down my life, it’s like I’ve been dropped in the ocean of everything I avoided. No land in sight, no friend to pull me to shore. I must swim through each moment and episode to keep afloat and get anywhere. Of course, maybe I did choose this, on some deeper level. Maybe a grounded, secure part of me decided, it’s time, confident that nothing I remember will actually kill me.

Some of them events that happened in my childhood, and some of them family experiences I apparently remember in minute detail though they happened before I was born; it’s like they live in my body, swirl through the coiled rope of my DNA.

Remember what you told me one time, how you felt your main job some years was to stay alive? Well, you did your job, you made it through. Not everyone does. It takes fortitude.” “And a little help from your friends.”

There’s so much we don’t admit to ourselves, in order to keep our little boats afloat.

In the end that’s what we’re really made of: Love Love Love Love Love.