A message from my childhood self

Please note: this piece contains descriptions some readers may find upsetting.

Once upon a harrowing time, in a world awash with malevolent harms, and cruel unspeakable injustices, that conjured outrage, I crawled along an unyielding ground, alive with all manner of despicable dementors. Hunted like prey in the evening shadows, the twists and turns of a life of uncertainty invoke terror, as the fearful unknown niggles doggedly at my subconscious. Some of us are born into houses cursed by adult wants, gluttony and rage. The scent of raw fear lingers, as chatters of a domestic bliss that didn’t exist assault my mind, as I navigate the relentless unforgiving ghosts and shadows of the past that continue to taunt me. Awaiting the unwarranted and enduring attacks, my stomach flips somersaults as I lay there, paralysed by the terror incarcerating me.

Exposed to monsters who looted my childhood, in the blink of an eye, my world turned upside down. Making a deeply awful situation worse, the ship of innocence capsized into the nothingness, in unison with foreboding monsters of guilt and shame, that in that moment were borne to the unforgiving world at large.

An eight-year-old inmate at the helm of hell, I’m detained within the confines of perpetual pain and torture, like a storm that never ends. A prisoner to the terror occupying my existence, I’m enslaved to the cruel and unjust wants of my dementors that held me there, in unpleasant misfortune.

Finality reigned as the committee of curious vultures zipping menacing circle overhead, signalled my end. Joining the great fallen in the war of a stolen childhood, my impounded soul succumbs, and I surrender to my fate. Most troubling, not all who are fallen want to be saved. Echoes of guttural hissing echoed on the edge of my awareness, as the merciless scavengers feast on my carcass.

Swallowed by an all-consuming hopelessness, a tormented and broken soul, I spent the rest of my childhood running into the stranger that was myself in my head, and monsters uninvited who relented. I clawed my way through the dizzying emptiness, clinging to a glimmer of hope, hope for a life free of my dementors.

Squinting into the naked light, someone screamed that I wasn’t finished yet. Although its presence barely felt, as entrenched shame and self-repulsion lingered, however unwarranted they may have been, hope twinkled, beckoning me forward with witch like fingers. Feeling the old tug of a familiar voice, the cogs of my mind turn in dizzying circles, and I recognise my own voice. Awakened, laments of my inner child beckon me forth to build walls of courage to block the tsunami of fear. Not Resounds of defiance, not compliance, echo loudly, and I realise I wasn’t built to break.

My awakening eyes absorbed renewed hope, and I’m born again. A perfect irony, I realise I’m as powerful as I am fragile. Standing heavy on my boundaries, I survived, driven by hope. The truth remains that not everyone can be cured, but everyone can heal.

With heart in hand, I accept the unvarnished truth that I’ll never be wholly repaired, but come hell or come healing, I face life head on. Rising in resistance, I bid weakness a final farewell and never pledge allegiance to symptoms of my trauma. Once you have hope, anything is possible. Armed, I encounter the world with awe. Hope never asks anything back from me, and although I may be unsure of what the future holds, I know that I hold my own future. A warrior within, yet forever a work in progress, it’s my allegiance with hope that keeps my world turning.

The question then remains, how do we fix the tormented and broken when they can’t see light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. How do we fix them when they need the pain that burdens their soul gone. When their dementors circle like vultures, waiting to feast on the bones of misery, what we do is we fix them on hope. Considerable doses prescribed from the heart, always work best.

So, what then is hope. Well, hope is the passport we hold in our hands, that steals us into fantastical new worlds and new lands. Birthing renewed purpose, hope is an open road mapping the hands of time, that caress life’s adventures, and mountains we climb. Hope is the intrinsic quality that imbues us with grace when life’s hardships and misfortunes stare us straight in the face.

Hope maps out life’s journey and the lines of the story of who I am and who I am becoming, and it carries us through desperate times that are entirely numbing. Hope lives in the soul, it is honest and humble, hope shines a bright light where misery grumbles. It is the unturned pages of a future so bright in the pits of a nothingness, that sparks renewed ventures to override the numbness. Much simpler than optimism and more fragile than dreams, in the land of hope, nothing is quite as it seems. Its like praying for rain, yet armed with an umbrella just in case, and we dance through the rainstorms with effortless grace. We don’t wait for the storm to pass, what we do is we learn to dance in the rain, and hope for the sunshine, it won’t be in vain. The things we have to question, such as the intentions or the motives of others, hope gathers up doubts and determinedly smothers. When the sun never stops shining, yet dark clouds get in the way, we must hang onto hope, and skies returning to blue from the grey. It’s the feeling we get when we have wants and we have needs, hope cultivates the rich soil, and we sow its fine seeds. From the seeds of our yesteryears, we grow the path we are on, and stories that matter, to feel the enchantment of life through moments that shatter. In the agonies of challenge and the darkest of seams, hope remains interminable in the pits of an emptiness that swallows our dreams.