Wounded Healer

I had an interesting 4th.
My youngest was sick, fever to 103 most of the day. I stayed home, read when he napped and sat with him while he was awake and miserable. I coincidentally was reading about carving out time for myself, taking/making the time to be in solitude, to seek replenishment, to care for myself.

I often wonder why I am so wrapped up in the Healer archetype. I am definitely a wounded healer.
I do make time for solitude, but that means I get up at least 30 minutes before everyone else to do yoga and meditate and journal. In the summer I take an hour or more for all of this, it's like a retreat everyday. In the fall, winter and spring it becomes an obligation at times. Sometimes disciplines and practices seem like they are getting me no where, but they really are teaching valuable lessons. I also walk almost daily for physical and mental health.
Getting back to the Healer...I will readily give up my practices when someone needs me.
I do it with love, but there is an underlying sense of duty in it which can breed resentment.
Somehow it feeds me and depletes me simultaneously.
I need to learn to read myself better and develop the ability to say politely, "I can't do that at this time". But then I risk my sense of self-worth...I am only as good as my last, recent deed.

I wonder what makes some abused people develop a sense of worth that is tied to helping and sacrificing and others fail to develop the sense of worth and spend their lives hurting themselves...
Do any of us end up normal?
What is normal?
What is it like to not expect the next bad thing to happen?
What is it like to not catastrophize every potential outcome before I can give my kids and myself permission to enjoy an activity? I analyze everything.
What does it feel like to just relax and savor a moment, an hour, a day of our life?
Is sacrificing and helping a "socially acceptable" method of self-harm? Always giving up your own resources...because everyone else deserves them more than you do?

I am always "on";
"on" edge, hypervigilant for danger,
"on" in the sense that I have my plastic face ready to be whatever the other needs me to be, performing so that I am perceived as good enough.
Very few people glimpse the real me...I am not even sure what the real me looks like.
I am searching though, attempting to discover who I am without the shroud of abuse holding me down.
That's why we are in the swampland, combing the murky waters and bottom for the bits and pieces that we left behind.
Retrieving the soul and spirit that was silenced and put away for safe keeping...
not discarded, we are too intelligent to discard parts of ourselves.
They are all there waiting to be called back...I need to discover the song that will call them back.
I will reintegrate all of those parts...that's what this journey is about...and so will you.
You are already further along...having access to all of the memories...
How did you survive all of these years in silence while holding all of those memories? Did you share them with your closest friend? What an incredible load that was/is.

I am full of questions today...
I think I will walk to try to sort some of these things out.
I love you,
Maggie