When I was with him, I waited. Every day. Day in. Day out. I waited. Breathless. Expectant. Frightened. I waited.

For something. Someone. Somebody to stop the craziness. Something. Someone. Somebody to make it all ‘go away�? To awaken me from the nightmare of his abuse disguised as love and make the pain stop. Make the terror end.

But everyday. Day in. Day out. It was there. Waiting.

The terror. The horror. The pain. And so, I pushed down my fears and my anxiety and sleepwalked through my day in hopeful anticipation of awakening to a better day, tomorrow.

With him.

It never came. In its absence I fell into the big sleep of the abused. That time and place where each breath evaporated into thin air and I walked in numbing silence through my never ending story of searching for meaning in someone else’s bad behaviour, someone else’s arms.

When first I met him, I thought he was my shortcut to happiness. I thought he was my dream of true love everlasting come true. In his unholy embrace, I got lost on the road to hell and told myself I had no choice but to believe him when he said he was the one who held all the answers. He was the one who would make it all better. To make it happen, I let go of the power I had lived my life in fear of claiming and bought into the myth of his make-believe. He was all that I would ever need to live, happily ever after.

But, happily ever after never came.  I wasn’t happy with him and in the end, I didn’t want to live.

Happily, I was given a chance to end it.

And I did. After he was gone.

While in it, though, I never saw that I could end it.  I never accepted I could  ï¿½?confront his lies. Leave him when the abuse overwhelmed me. Make it stop. Because, even before I met him, I never accepted I had the power �?to make my dreams come true. To create my own happiness. To fill my hungry heart from within, without losing myself to another.

While with him, in a last ditched effort to lighten the load lest I sink beneath the weight of my despair, I jettisoned components of my life. I couldn’t work. I quit my job. I couldn’t support my daughters. They went to live with their father. I couldn’t see my life free of him. I threw away rational thought and buried my pain beneath my belief that he would save me.

With the desperation of a balloonist casting overboard those items that threatened to crash his fragile craft upon the rocks below, I manically let go of responsibility for taking an active role in my own life as I attempted to float above my pain. I did anything to stay aloft. To fly above the angst. The terror. To keep myself from feeling the enormous cost of giving up on me and giving into him. I focused on the futility of doing anything by immersing myself in doing nothing. I held his disorderly conduct close to my heart so that I could remain exempt from taking action to end the pain ripping my heart apart.

And through it all, I waited. For someone. Something to save me.

I prayed to the angels. To God. To anyone who would listen to please stop it. To make it stop. To help me. I prayed and relinquished responsibility to take a step to help myself. I told myself I was helpless. Lost. Frozen. I convinced myself I had no power and I believed me.

Two years, five months after gaining my freedom, I still wait in anticipation of my life beginning.

I wait for that moment to appear that says, this is it. Here’s my life. Isn’t it beautiful?

Underlying my anticipatory mode is a deeply buried truth that reveals itself in my passive voice. In my waiting for life to happen. In my not taking steps in the right direction to reach my goals. To attain the summit of my dreams. To step into the void and fly.

And with every moment of inaction, my goals drift further from fulfillment as I waver between taking that leap that will save me from living a life mired in inertia as I cling to the fear of never being all that I am meant to be.

Keeping me from stepping forward today are the same truths that dragged me so deeply into the quagmire of his abuse long ago. It is these truths that kept me looking for myself throughout my life in someone else’s needy arms, in someone else’s dreams, in someone else’s voice. These truths kept me believing someone else held the key to my happiness. To my fulfillment.

The truth is, I feel helpless.

Helpless in my life. Helpless in my power. Helpless to be all of me.

This morning, as I journalled, I asked myself, where does this sense of helplessness come from?

The answer enlightened me, and, as long as I have the courage to step into it and move through my fear of what I found, the truth will free me.

My truth is founded on voices from the past. Voices from a childhood spent yearning to be heard, to be noticed, to be acknowledged. They are my mother’s voice. My father’s silence. Voices long forgotten. They are founded in my belief that I could never be enough of what anyone else wanted. Even though, what they wanted was more than I could fathom. My helplessness is founded in my belief that I needed to live according to someone else’s standards, someone else’s dream.

My truth is found in my belief that I was helpless. And, because I feared claiming the  power that would dispel the myth of my powerlessness, I did nothing. I skimmed the surface of my life, going through the motions without truly believing this was my life to live. Fearlessly. Impassioned. Passionate about life. Passionate about me.

It’s time to grow up.

My father has passed on. My mother remains locked within her mind, spinning tales of make believe that reassure her that nothing changes. Especially life today. For the past is comforting in her mind for in the past, she can live without fear of ever having to take responsibility for her pain today.

There’s no pleasing them now.

It’s time to please me.

The voices of the past are irrelevant. Guardians of the threshold of my future, they taunt me to dare to take this step into the unknown, to let go of my fears and leap. They challenge me to ‘do it�?as I tentatively step into the challenge of claiming my life for me.

The voices of the past remain silent when I move forward, but I am clinging to my helplessness in fear of letting go.

The truth hurts. It catches my breath in my chest. It pushes my mind into the corners of the room, somewhere up there, high above my pain.

But the truth will set me free. The truth will unchain me from the past, if I am fearless enough to face it without judging myself for having waited so long for someone else, anyone else, to come and set me free.

This morning, as I looked at the words written upon the page I realized, my waiting time is over.

It’s time.

Time to pick up the mantle of my power. To step into my hero shoes that have waited in anticipation of my realization that there will never be a better fit than right now. A better time to step into my truth and fly.

It’s time to put my fears to rest. Time to claim my place within my life without fear that I shall fall into the void left behind by voices that have finally found their place in time where they belong. The past.

I have waited my life for this moment. Waited for that time when the stars aligned, when Jupiter met Mars, or Pluto collided with Venus.

It’s time to quit waiting and to take action.

There is no better time than now. No better time to quit making excuses for not making my dreams come true. My time is now and there’s no time like now to turn off the faucet of my neediness to let the past control my today and keep me from being all that I am meant to be.

It’s time.

Copyright 2005
MLG