The Demon Diet

There is too much of me lately.

I don't know where to fit all of me. There are the hours at work, and the hours fretting about work. There is the time I spend with my son, and the hours fretting about the time I rarely get to spend with my husband. If it were a simple matter of time, though, that would be something I could attempt to address with some little self-help book and a daily planner.

Its more that there is so much going on inside of me, behind all the number crunching and board book reading, in the space that I hollowed out for myself within all that and there are not enough places for it to go.

In Meeting last Sunday, I tried to hold my heart open to the going on inside and I quickly got to tears. That was easy and the tears eased the pressure a bit but I still felt remote from all the going on, I could not find the lock to that room nor the key. I'd cry and cry some more, but all the dancing sorrows were untouched. I knew they were still in there, but could not see them. I handed it over to Spirit, I asked for help letting finding my way in.

When I was a child I had these delicate, blown glass swan sculptures I had gotten at a fair that you fill with colored water of your choice. The glass was so thin that after refilling them with the emerald-hued water I favored, I was affixing them back to their stand and one shattered in my hand. Splinters of glass too tiny to be seen entered several of my fingers and there was nothing to be done about it, no one could see the splinters to remove them. Because no one could see them and everyone around me felt powerless to do anything about them, there was little patience with my pain. My fingers felt full of glass every time I picked up a pencil, but still I was expected to write because no one could perceive the glass but me.

I've felt full of glass for a long while now. Its habit to say I've felt full of sharp shards that have embedded in my flesh and not left since Eli's traumatic birth but I don't know, maybe that's just the experience that brought the glass back up to the surface where it could be felt each time a little pressure was applied to my heart. Maybe the glass has been there much longer, I really don't know any more. Maybe the glass has been there since I figured out life is not fair and didn't get an acceptable answer as to why that might be.

When I was done crying, after I'd turned to Spirit and asked it to help me get to the glass, to release it or dissolve it, then the tears dried up. As I sat, praying, I lost track of the sorrows and instead found myself filling with heat. More and more heat. Hot and white. Then hotter, whiter. It started at the core of me and relentlessly built up and then spread, a little at a time, still building in strength as it spread. Hotter. So hot that if you touched me I would have feared for your fingers. All I could do was be still and let it take over, and take over it did. Hotter, whiter. More and more powerful.

Anger. What the hell was an anger this powerful doing in me? Who the hell was I angry with? I have been though my blaming stages after what happened with Eli, its a game that could go on forever and has no winners. I thought it set aside for good. Yet, the white ragging heat continued to grow and pulse in me, resetting my breath and my heartbeat to its rhythms.

I hate anger. I know how ridiculous that sounds, I hear the irony and I set it down here to show to myself in black and white because it really is what popped into my head. To "hate" anger - how preposterous! What I wouldn't do to be mild mannered and of gentle emotion. Actually, I've been trying to force myself to be that way for a long time. I don't want to be an angry person. That label is one no one wants to wear. But do I have to wear it if I own my anger from time to time, more than most do, does that make me an angry person? Not if I get around to owning it, instead of walking around a human inferno pretending not to be burning.

I was raging at "god", I was raging at all the gods I'd let others fill my head up with that I have not yet figured out how to evict. All that glass melting in the heat and starting to pour out.

I am tired of being angry. I want rules and I want to play by them and one of the rules is, "don't be angry for more than 5 seconds at a time, more often than once a month." Okay, I made those exact parameters up, but its something like that. I am a girl scout, always trying to be pristine and good. I don't live up to it for shit, but I hide behind it. Good. Hard-working. Self-sacrificing. Giving. Caring. Understanding. Long suffering.

I was reminded, sitting their in spiritual space with dozens of others, my soul on fire, that Spirit is both beautiful and terrible, creative and destructive, brutal and tender and so I can not be otherwise, as everything is just made from more of the same. I can't be right all the time. I can't be enlightened or kind all the time. I can't stop others from thinking I am a bitch sometimes, and even can't stop them for being right about me when they think that. I am a bitch. I am self-centered. I am whiny. I am petty. I am disorganized. I am lazy. I am annoying. I am tedious. I am clueless. I am all these things. And I am going to go on filling up with rage as long as I can't accept these things.

There was a comic, of all things, where several "good" characters are fighting a horde of demons. There are too many and they are overwhelmed, no matter how many they chop up with their swords. Finally, one of the "good" warriors lays down her sword and grabs one of the smaller demons by the tail and names her, one of the lesser demons - a demon of jealousy that leads to undermining those we claim to care for or support. There is something ugly. Who would ever admit to doing that? To even being jealous, much less to acting on that jealousy in subtle, vindictive ways? And yet, who could possibly be innocent? The warrior looks the demon in the eyes, names it and says, "okay. yes. I have been you. I take you into myself." And she puts the demon in her mouth and swallows. Afterwards she smiles and says, "okay, who's next?" And, of course, the horde responds with fear and running away as she grabs, faces, and accepts into herself every demon she can get her hands on.

I am naming my rage in one big, undisected whole here, I am saying, "yup, the horde lives in here too" but I have yet to have the courage to name each piece and swallow it, to accept my nature as the same at its core as that of everything else I loathe, fear, and disown. So much so, that I have been embarrassed to be admitting my anger. I told some dear friends of the Spirit today about my experience Sunday and all the rage I am filled with and have spent a lot of time since wishing I could take it back. Did I sound whiny? Did I take up too much time going on about my experiences? Should those pieces of me stay politely inside? Surely I'd never heard them express such rage.

But that doesn't hold water either. That's just me trying to stay a girl scout. That's just me being frightened of owning my demons. The only person there is too much of me for is me. I'd like to cut off and cut away all the extra me, specifically the parts of me that embody the terrible part of the "beautiful and terrible" that is Spirit, that is all creation, that is all of us.