Love needs to know where to go

Many moons ago I started to draw road maps to the forgotten land situated behind a mysterious swamp and a deep dark valley. I knew there to be many stories of the similar kind of adventures made before, but it is the kind of journey each, and one of us must make on our own. The maps to that land need to be drawn separately, but we can, of course, ask for help from others. There are common principles. During many moons, I kept on drawing the maps and seeking the path. I understood very well these maps to be such that after drawing one piece in the map, love would know where to go inside me. Every part of those maps gave me new words to tell my story. Those little personal accomplishments gave strength to keep on going. I also lived by many other stories during the process since making that kind of a journey takes time and muscles, maturity too. The journey there went mostly through reading, that is how I have managed to draw the maps gradually during the years. My first encounter with a therapist over ten years ago also went all wrong, I only got a new wound to deal with. I couldn’t talk about my experiences yet, and somehow the therapist didn’t apparently understand that when someone’s words stop to the mouth, there is a trauma which has no words or only comes out as a few sentences and not as a full story. I should have found the courage to go to see another one, but I didn’t. I was still a young woman and didn’t have the life experience or flexibility which usually comes later in life anyway. So, instead I started to look for the right words in the literature, I became my own healer. I also began to cultivate the things in my life I naturally enjoyed doing as a child, to find my way there to the forgotten land. I guess that is what this blog has been about, a blog I started after a burnout almost ten years ago. I have been hooking my way into a better connection with my heart and soul, and I found my way there, to that land. 

In the forgotten land time seems to stand still and the clock makes empty rounds backward. No matter the age of a person, everyone is of the same age. It is the land of wounded children where when one child throws a tantrum another becomes invisible. No parents are comforting and meeting the difficult emotions of the children. No parents are helping the children to learn about their emotions. There are no parents who hold the faces of these children between their two loving hands so that these children too are seen. No parents are holding these children in their comforting laps when the children are scared and need a safe place. In that land, everything seems to be a theater setting in a kindergarten, and the mirrors are either missing or reflect a distorted reality. In that land, the houses have soaked in the atmosphere from the swampland of shame and the valley of death, valley of fear surrounding the land, and that is how everyone is kept on their place. With the wisdom of a child, at least some of the inhabitants have boxed their hearts and hidden them under their bed leaving a favorite teddy bear as a guard. I don't know how it is for others, but at least for me, this was the case. I let rest of my body to take the hits, and I tried to shut out emotions to survive in that land mostly made of stone. 

The coin the children inherit from that land is either such that they learn to get their nourishment from others, or they become those who keep on giving, take the role of a parent in that land, and hope for a change towards better. And somehow that world too keeps on existing, but not much more, breadcrumbs being the main nutrition. Maybe some of the inhabitants invest their coin in lottery tickets and gamble, some of them use the coin in the local pub, and some of them give it to a religious organization. Perhaps some of them save the coin and spend all the possible time at work, some of them keep on building their houses bigger – each and one of them having a feeling inside that something essential is missing. The children there are just looking for a ticket away from the land the best way they know, the best way they can do. They may realize or then not that they are all just waiting for a parent to come and to take them home. They are waiting for the love they have been left without to find its way there. And when we understand this, there is no need to judge, to blame or to criticize anyone. Life becomes a matter of taking care of our own child and helping others with the resources we have, to try to send packages of love to that land.  

Luckily many parents make a journey to that land at some point in their lives. It is never too late to embark on that journey either. They grab the child in their loving arms, when they have developed the necessary muscles to do that carrying and encouraging, that nourishing and protecting any parenthood takes. Perhaps at that point, they have practiced mindlessness and mindfulness enough and have the necessary life experience and maturity needed. There must be different ways to find a way there, to the child, I only know how to tell one version. And luckily with time, there has been more and more people who have found their way to the forgotten land, times have changed and the level of awareness. And when it comes to Finland, enough time has passed from the wars and the time where there was no place for showing emotions. Perhaps many of us parents also make the journey when our own clocks have stopped going for a reason or another, or we feel that our clock is going backward, repeating the same circle, again and again, no matter how much we try to change conditions and surroundings in the outer world. The past may also haunt somewhere deep down as a mystery as it was for me. A story, my story, I could not put together in a meaningful way, and therefore the same stories kept on repeating in my life causing more pain. And there has been a deep yearning for something else, I was looking for the child just as the child was looking for me. So, what we do then is that we turn our clocks backward on purpose and become time travelers and map makers of our own right.

Whenever someone comes and takes their child in their loving arms, she or he may not get an appraisal in the forgotten land. It is understandable, many of us remember how it felt to be the last child to be taken home from the kindergarten, and we all know how it also feels when our ways go to a separate direction with a friend, someone we liked playing with. Yet none of us parents can take another child in our lap on such a journey. There is only space for one child, the child of our own we have the responsibility for. We can just kindly ask for other parents to join us on the same journey, but the journey is individual. So often we also can't make the journey together with the other children even though we would be making that journey at the same time. It is just pure parental instinct to protect our own child especially if he or she has been bullied by the other children, and therefore we sometimes must make decisions which may be difficult as well. So, many moons ago, in 2012, I also found to the right house and grabbed the little girl in my lap. I think she was around five years old sitting alone in her room listening to scary things going on outside and I started carrying her away from the forgotten land. I took the box hidden under the bed and the teddy bear too, and I haven’t looked back.

What probably has kept so many children captivated in the forgotten land are the swamp and the valley surrounding it. To be able to walk them through, the task needs to be left to the adult, her or his muscles and life experience. A swamp is a place where negative voices whisper to our ears that we have no worth, that we are wrong altogether. The beautiful thing though is that when we just keep on marching forward, love comes to meet us on the swamp again and again. What happened to me was that in the middle of the swamp I started to understand the difference between shame and guilt, I realized the difference between authenticity and perfection. I learned to regret instead to think that everything is my fault. I started to see what my responsibility was and what had been for others to carry while I sorted out entangled yarns to make crocheted rugs out of them with new patterns. It is here in the swamp we begin to belong in a different way than before I have noticed, in a way which is not tied to our performance. Inner validation becomes most important and that is beautiful. 

When we walk through the valley of death, the valley of fear where the wind sometimes blows so hard on our faces that we don't have the energy to go forward, we lack in strength and in courage, love comes to meet us there as well again and again. I learned to trust life in that valley, I had a meeting with death and my mortality too (as I guess many of us in our 40s have it is part of our natural progression in life). Whenever I didn’t have the strength to take even one step forward, I rested. If anyone is there now, I would just want to say: “Hold on, hold on and leave everything you can for tomorrow. Today it is enough to just exist and gather your strength back." I knew I was on the right path, the child with her wisdom guiding me, the child amusing and distracting me with her joy and silliness in the middle of it all as well. The adult in me, on the other hand, learned about parenting and how vital it is to listen to the child. A child always has a world of her own. Interpretations a child sometimes makes are not real either, and it is the task of an adult to see that, no matter if we are talking about the child inside or a real child. And to give space for the child in my life, her creativity, and the healing process, there has been a need to release many things during the years. I learned to let go. 

In the end, I also dared to turn the mirror back towards the forgotten land when I had come far enough and had words to tell about the experience of the girl inside. These are the challenging parts of humanity, how to turn the mirror back toward the land of broken children. My message was of love and hopefully it was taken as such. Yet, I couldn’t be too kind. I needed to show what was wrong when I finally had the words for that to get my boundaries on the place. So, I hoped it was taken with an understanding that when we heal, others can heal their emotional homes as well. I loan Brené Brown here again: Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. Had I been able to speak my truth earlier, it would have probably benefited everyone. I regret that I wasn’t able to do that. So often we are also afraid to speak up, we are too worried to hurt others. Yet, so often the truth is better, a relief for all the parties involved. Our truth is of course also only ours, others have the right for theirs, and we need to be respectful towards each other’s personal homes. I find emotional skills to be such a challenging topic in general. We want to be kind to others, yet if we abandon ourselves, we may end up in the situation I have been, carrying in my body emotions which were never for me to carry, a feeling that I have the whole responsibility of a story on my shoulders, literally inside my body as a locked-up emotion. Emotional body map is, by the way, a useful tool if someone else wants to analyze what is going on emotionally in the body if there is a pain somewhere and it has no physical explanation. Those maps can luckily be directly found through Google.

During the long journey of mine towards home, by the bonfire, I started to tell my own stories, to soothe and to comfort. Since my wounds have come from words, I allied with the best ones I had in use. I think that those stories were mostly told to the wounded girl at her level, to heal her, to start making her visible. First, at the same time, when I had grabbed her in my arms, a tale about Lenni and Laila, brave dream-catchers protecting the night sky from nightmares came into daylight. There was also a story told about a kind ghost who would keep under control all the nasty little creatures lurking under the bed each night. Those were stories about safety that there is no need to fear the darkness. There were many stories told I have not made visible; have not known yet how they would visually look like. Among them is a grumpy little critter who does not have the best life strategy. He likes to give silent treatment and makes it very clear to everyone that he is in a bad mood. There is Mrs. Teapot with a leaking spout (we call it nose in Finnish), the best friend whenever being sick, and I think she has a hubby too or some other male friend. And there is a little snake which has not yet learned to sleep and needs some help every night. There is space in all these critters for love to find where to go, they all have a crack in them.

There was also a story I told about love at the level of a child. It is also a story about the balance between masculinity and femininity, a story about Mange and Monique. And there were other stories told while waiting for the healing process to go forward inside. The courage also grew in the process and the swampland of shame, the valley of fear was gradually left behind, step by step. As the last story told was a story about finding our own uniqueness and beauty, a story about a small cloud two years ago. At some point, I hope I manage to gather these stories and characters together and make something of them. At least now, this blog starts making some sense as a whole. During the journey I also learned patience, to respect the pace of the child which so often doesn't follow the same rhythm as our outside adult world. And it wasn't a perfect journey, it so seldom is. When the adult in us doesn't manage to listen to the child inside, then things often go wrong. And as in any good parenting, I probably got the girl traumatized a couple of times during the journey too :-).

In the end, I got to take my shoes off, we had arrived home. I thought that to be the end of the journey, but what I did not know back then was that there was one more task to do. For others the journey may look different, they may not have a box hidden underneath the bed of the wounded child which needs to be opened, the locked-up emotions in the body requiring to come out, the voice of the girl never heard as well. So, I sat down on my knees, I think I opened up the box for the first time in summer 2017. That box really took me down to my knees, I have described it before as opening up a Pandora’s box or swimming through the gutter in Shawshank Redemption. All the miseries of the world started coming out one by one, the old cemented emotions. I guess the box also starts opening up when we encounter something similar in the outside world which has caused the original trauma. Perhaps that is what happened, maybe I also partly created it when I knew I was strong enough to deal with and to heal a significant trauma from my adulthood and to see what emotion belonged where in my story. The box also seems to have its own natural rhythm when opening, there has been time between to gather well-being before the next secret has revealed itself. In the box was the coin I had inherited, the child of an alcoholic who always hoped and got disappointed. And on the other side of the coin, the inheritance of an abused child, someone who learned to mix love with pain. It can be difficult to understand how someone’s body gets some weird pleasure of pain and can’t tolerate love instead. Love is unfortunately behind all the pain and therefore opening up to love has to happen gradually. There has been so much need for healing inside that I’ve often been all exhausted and not knowing what to do since the inheritance has so much power over us and the pain is sometimes so real and deep. Yet, at least I had my soul alive, and the boundaries of my body were mostly intact. At least I had a home I could start building on. Not everyone is even that lucky. I thought I just bravely write it down here, there are not enough stories of the brokenness of this kind. And that it is possible to heal and what I also hope people to understand is that these experiences don’t make us any less capable, it may not be very visible either when we keep the control of our lives with our adult minds. 

Going back to the Pandora’s box, at the symbolic level, there were also the whale in the box and the mystery it revealed to me about myself, post-traumatic stress, a tiger to tame and the most disgusting of them all, a snake. I have always been very scared towards snakes since their lack a backbone and can spread their toxicity everywhere. And I don’t recognize it to belong to my own family heritage, the brokenness there is very straight-forward and visible and much of it stemmed from lack of education and cultural background of raising up children in a violent manner. So, a snake in my hand I wondered that from where on earth did this end up in my body as well (I know the story, but some sense of humor is needed in the middle of such darkness). And when we look at all these symbols though, they have many meanings, they are also symbols of healing, inner wisdom, our own power, etc. That is what is luckily on the other side of the tough process. And what is good to remember in the middle of the process is that the emotions are old, they don't exist here and now even though they often have a mighty force in them. Emotions are energy and I had them nicely tapped inside for so long, it was my survival strategy. The box also kept noise whenever opening up, locked up emotions looking for connection so that they can come out shouting expressions like: "Shut up!""You deserve to get from the belt!" with the voices of family members trying to silence me. Therefore, I had another blog where I published the texts and didn’t want to mix up that process with my makings (most of the days, energy has not been benign either). I just had the need to bring out the pain of the child inside and publishing the texts was part of the process. Perhaps I have also used English to simply overrun the intrusive voices. I have of course been talking about my story and experiences in Finnish. Luckily, these intrusive voices have been diminishing all the time (writing and publishing texts really helps). I know quite well where I am in the process, on the other side so I can write about it openly. I guess I have also been able to go through the releasing process only at this stage of my life since there has been a need to be a very level-headed person to travel through such an experience emotionally. It may not come as a surprise that I’ve been angry. 

When it comes to the old emotions, they have come out f ex as nausea (disgust) and coughing (anger), or then I have felt like I would have open wounds in my upper back (all the blaming) while writing. The wounded girl is just healing inside and growing, perhaps becoming the person and the woman I was meant to be in the beginning had there been love and emotional support available as a child. I feel more relaxed and at home in myself than ever before. Behind all the writings of this year are also two big emotions, anger, and grief, nearby friends. As in the wise story about the invisible child by Tove Jansson, it was through anger the head of the invisible girl finally came out. When it comes to grief, I think it may always remain in the background, as a hint of sadness in the eyes. Life leaves its scars to all of us and perhaps this way those of us, who have encountered something similar can find each other and without words feel connected, without touching, hold each other’s hand. 

I have a feeling that I know now what is at the bottom of Pandora's box. I’ve known it for some time. After everything has come out, what remains is hope as in the original story. I think there is also freedom, balance, and acceptance (what a beautiful word and a place to be). And I hope there to be a healed heart and a soul left in the box. And then the clock on the wall of this home starts to tick again towards the right direction, towards the future. And there and then, I think it starts to tick rounds of forgiveness. I guess it already did that whenever the healing went forward, the old emotions came out in the form of a text during this year, one by one.

I also went and wrote on the door of my home alongside the existing text Peace, love and crochet the word respect. I also hope to deepen love towards the child inside the rest of my life, to love her beyond any measure and to keep on looking inside to the parts which have not yet been seen with love. Then I think I am getting the inner parenthood, inner motherhood right. One of the guiding words towards the future on my journey is the word "childlike" anyway, and it must be for all of us who have creative aspirations. 

Hope you have had time for the child inside today! The time of the year is also a good time to celebrate the child, to celebrate creativity. :-)

Ps. I’ve always had a yearning towards other countries and cultures, from the teenage years. Somehow the Finnish culture has always felt like a cage to me and I have never felt our culture to vibrate life (only my experience). The film Shawshank Redemption revealed to me, why I have felt this way. There is a line Andy says to Red. It goes like this: Do you know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life; A warm place with no memory. Sometimes geography can be a friend. I also used Shawshank as an example since it explains the process I have gone through so well, drawing maps and digging the way out are the same, both taking years, just as opening up the Pandora’s box and swimming through the gutter are the same as well. And it has taken me over a year to crawl through that gutter. I used the story as an example also because my late father worked in a prison and unfortunately remained in another, in the forgotten land, so there is a connection. And just as in the story of Andy, there so often is very little justice in these kinds of stories, when children are put into a prison like the one, I was sent to not being able to defend myself back then. Yet, don’t we all have smaller or bigger parts in the prison or in the forgotten land? So, here is the whole letter Andy left for Red to find. Welcome to the peaceful shores and I wish you all the best for the journey if you are somewhere there digging or crawling: