Deepen

There's this term that I've learned from doing yoga. It's 'deepen'.  For whatever reason that word really struck a note deep inside of me. Deepen into the stretch, deepen into life. Deepen into love. Deepen into trust.

It's a conscious thing-- deepening. It requires control as well as letting go, consciously relaxing your muscles and being into places you couldn't go before. Allowing yourself to feel and breathe and exist as part of the universe for a moment-- stretching your beliefs in reality-- creating you into something altogether different.

Deepening into experience instead of letting it destroy me is a challenge, and one that I don't always feel up to. I wake up with storms inside my head and it's all I can do to breathe, let alone get up, take care of the kids and a house, and pretend that I actually exist. I have a hard time with trust. I've been betrayed by all that I have ever loved. My mother hit me-- cliche, isn't it? Not really when I was little, but when I was older-- fifteen to about twenty. It was humiliating, being that old and unable to defend myself. The constant barrage of negativity in my home was eating my soul alive and I fled towards the person who touched my soul. He broke my heart time and time again, and yet I married him and I feel, in many ways, I have enslaved myself to him. Not that he desires it to be that way, but that I don't know how to be anyone but this person.

I cannot trust him. I try. He has betrayed me so many times, and he does not see how he hurts me still. I tell him, and yet he refuses to understand, and so I withdraw, and I hold my screaming baby, and I feel my soul drain of anything that is left of me. He has no drive-- no ambition-- and I have to squash down mine-- enough for the two of us.

I will rupture. I will burst. There is only so much a person can hold inside before they cannot hold more.

All I ever wanted was to be loved. Isn't that pathetic? I keep begging for it, but I am not enough to deserve it.

Deepen into it-- breathe-- accept-- bend-- stretch.

Can no one see the victory that I am still alive?

I watch him look at other guys and wonder why I cannot fulfill him. He ignores me, pushes my advances away. I beg for attention and cannot get it.

I am not enough. I am never enough.