Let me be

Let me be

Day 7 of 21 days sharing drawings from my book, I AM ALIVE: Creating Resilience and Healing Trauma with Art published by Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam.

When I drew during the first seven years of recovering from radiation, it was to prove to me that I was alive. Each drawing was a witness that I was still in the land of the living. I never imagined that I would make a book, but over the years, seeing the amount of drawings I had made, it seemed obvious to a handful of friends that there was something there to share.

The obstacle in creating a book was that, for over a decade I could not look at most of the drawings. There was too much pain in them. I would feel overwhelmed. Many drawings of the book hold a very strong energy of a particular (very difficult) moment or emotion lived. So, the sketch pads were placed in boxes, the boxes were piled upon eachother, until I had enough distance to return back to those moments lived within my body.

There are a handful of drawings from the first 7 years, where I can feel an inner sigh of relief and this is one of them. There is no residue of trauma here.

In the process of recovery from intensive radiation treatment/ surgically induced menopause, depression, PTSD… there were many people who had the best of intentions: how I should be… what I should be… had I tried x, y z? These best-of-intentions felt overwhelming and that something was wrong with me. Why, after years, was I still unwell, still struggling with everything when I had been cured of cancer within the first months of my diagnosis?

It is a curious place to be. But how could anyone understand how brutal the treatment had been and how I had been stripped away of everything that made me, me? Stripped away of my vital force, my desire to live, my inner strength, my joy, my sexual being... My body had been internally burnt around the clock for 7 days and nights and it was taking time to recover.

What I longed for was space to just be.

The message of this drawing, Let me be reminds me, there is nothing to do, no one to be. It appears as a message to myself that it is OK to relax and just be me. I am enough.

Looking back at the time, I thought I had been stripped away of desire for life. However, I see in this drawing that I did have a desire: for those around me to let me be.

It took time, however, I did heal. I did return to life and I became whole again.

Meditation: How does it feel to sit and simply be, you? No expectation of any result. Simply be… you.