This is Me. Self Portrait

Like most people, my desire is to love and to be loved. 
From a wounded child I became a wounded adult. 
Matching the scars from the inside to the scars on the outside. 
 
I don’t know if I am ready to be seen, but I am ready to find out. 
Without the perfect body. 
Without the perfect age. 
Without the perfect art,
and to admit the truth. 
 
I just want to be me.
 
I want to paint.
I want to draw.
And I want you to love me,
Just as I am.
 
That’s it. 

​This is me.

A Thousand Shards of Glass
As I am shattered over the pain from a friend, I am reminded of how it begins. 

When you are raised with the validation that you are okay, when you hear ‘I see you, I hear you, I feel you.’ And you are acknowledged for being hungry, tired, sleepless, stressed, broken, abused or abandoned. And there is someone to hold your hand and tell you that they hear your words, they see your pain, they know your worth. And they tell you yes, I get it.

You know you are valued. 

Then, when a wounded soul comes along and says you are not lovable, you cannot receive it. Because every fibre of your being has been strengthened by the validation that you are loved. You see it for what it is; Someone else’s pain coming at you.

But when you’ve been abandoned, beaten, raped, abused, neglected and sneered at. When the people who love you, can't. Every dismissal of how you feel and who you are, are like nails driven into your nervous system, until there are so many nails, your soul shatters into a thousand pieces. 
And when that wounded soul comes to shout their pain at you, you fall apart. Because it slides right down on sharpened nails into your nervous system, and cuts like glass.

Their disapproval feels like it used to feel. The way they used to treat you. And before you can take your next breath you’ve been triggered into agony, and you spend your life trying to please strangers because that pain is too much.

There comes a time when you believe it would be easier on the other side, that if you just slid your soul out of this body, there would be relief. 

But you can't. Because you love. You love so deeply these people you have birthed and the family you have created.

So you go back to finding a way through. 

Every morning before you step out of the house, you wear your cloak of protection. But in your loneliness, and in the dark of the night, you pray to your guardian angels to do for you what your parents were unable to, and that is to love you. To tell you that you are safe, and it’s okay to cry and feel broken and sad and messed up. That even if you can’t keep the house clean and your art is shit. That you are okay, and loved, and worthy of a good life. That you will be forgiven for all the mistakes you made, just like you are forgiving those who hurt you.

Eventually.

You mend each wound with care. 

And you show the world who you are.
Just as you are. 
​
And know that you're going to be ok.

Monica Batiste