Laying ghosts to rest

Heavy sigh. Weary heart. Lighter load, I think.

Today I went back to a place that has for 17 years been a place of trauma for me. I walked with an old friend up roads that I remember in my bones, through spaces and geographies that my mind didn't know it still knew, but that my body could still feel. We came to a school, a private girls' school - I started there when I was 12, and I developed my first major troublesome crush on a woman there. CS, my history teacher. She had a black MGB, she was young, confident, DPhil form Oxford, seemed smart. I didn't know what to do with my feelings and they raged through me, filling every cell in my body and making me incapable.

I stood with my friend at the school gates, which were open although I dared not pass through them - last time I had done that I was told I would have a court order taken out to prevent me going back on the premises if I ever went on them again - and we smoked. We talked about what places mean, how places come to have power even though they don't really. I remembered all the times I had thought about CS, while I was at the school and since. I understood how they just didn't get it. That system doesn't want to think about individuals - it wants girls to get good grades - the same system is screwing over Madd too. She's so smart, but being crushed by the system that can't think outside its box.

I cried. Last time I was there, I couldn't cry. When I was told not to come back, I was totally numb. A year later I was forcing other bodily fluids out of me, cutting myself and substituting blood for tears, giving myself a physical pain to feel. Today, I cried and it felt such a relief.

I experienced so many of my weaknesses while I was at that school, and in the years following my departure at the age of 14. I didn't understand them then, but I learned everything I needed to know about my weaknesses and failings. They are all the same weaknesses as I experience today - the leopard cannot change these spots. I am better at managing my weaknesses now, and its a little bit easier to wait for IQ's response to my latest inconsequential email than it would have been 10 years ago. But I guess what I have to understand is that this is just a lot of the way I am. I fall for women who are unattainable and unsuitable - truth be told, undesirable in their unsuitability. And I frequently find it hard to shake them from my feelings. It's like a bad habit, like biting fingernails. It doesn't have to get in the way, it doesn't have to cause trouble, unless I allow it to.

So there's a scab picked. I went to pore over the details of what has caused me trauma all these years, and it made me cry. But I have come away feeling stronger, just a little bit. I feel much less desire now to find CS again and have some kind of showdown with her. Not sure what I would have said anyway, but at least now I feel like I'm moving on on my own merits. That school, and everything that it has carried with it for over half my life, truly are fallen heroes, and I'm happy to be able to walk away from them on this battlefield.