Waltzing with trauma

Yesterday, a friend shared a recording of a waltz he sang.

It was lovely and inspiring.

I danced around my living room, true form and moves and everything; I felt it all through my back, that fabulous stress of tension that looks just glorious in the posture while waltzing… and I loved it.

And, while I was doing it, at one point, as I stumbled mentally on certain moves, I had the thought – the kind of thought that is more of an all-encompassing feeling and experience than it is actual words in my brain – of wanting to dance with a specific individual, as it would be so much easier if I were just waltzing with him.. it always was so easy to waltz with him…

It was a thought that made me open my eyes wider… it made me want to consider, but not too hard… for the moment, I would dance, and just set the thought to the side, and allow myself to return to it later on, so that I could enjoy my waltzing for the moment.

Today, listening to a faster waltz – a Viennese waltz – I found myself thinking again on how easy it always was, and therefore nice, to waltz with that same person who had come to mind yesterday…

I had, yesterday, found discomfort in my thoughts, via a slight worry that I actually would put myself back into interactions with this person – a person who hurt me terribly – , and thereby degrade my terrible experiences and all the feelings associated with them… kind of like just ignoring that they ever happened…

And that would feel like a disservice to myself, and a denial of my own value – for it was terrible, because I deserved and deserve so much better than the treatment I had been given – and I don’t want that to happen.

Yet, tonight, as those same thoughts arose again upon consideration of the somewhat surprising desire (?) to dance with him, I asked myself if there were something beyond that concern… What if that weren’t an issue? Is there something else to be noticed about this current scenario?

And there was, as it happens.

Just as I have said lately, and have very recently not so much discovered, but begun truly to acknowledge as being so within my own life, people are more than their good deeds or their bad deeds…. also, the good do not negate the bad, and the bad do not negate the good of an individual.

Said differently, if someone does loads of amazing things, and then does one bad thing, that one bad thing does not erase all the good things… and the reverse is true, as well, with one good thing not erasing all the bad things an individual has done.

What is the case, however, is that each action can stand for itself… a good deed can be taken as a good deed, a bad as a bad, and the one does not have to affect the other.

So, applied here, the terrible string of events and everything that happened because of that individual does not mean I need to feel guilty or worried or paranoid about wanting to waltz with him… I enjoyed waltzing with him, because he was good at waltzing… period.

And, just because I want to waltz with him, does not mean I am excusing him of all of the terrible he gave to me and my life, or even than I am saying it wasn’t a whole lot of terrible (because it certainly was a whole lot of terrible).

It simply means that, despite all the terrible, there was good, and I valued and still do value that good – in this case, the waltzing.

So, yeah… there’s that to think on for a while, I suppose.

Post-a-day 2020

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