This week, I have been doing more work on abuse and the effects that I find in myself. It's helping with my anger by showing me what it guards.

I am the oldest daughter of an abusive family. Not the kind of abuse that is brutal or forceful but the kind professionals call "narcissistic" in which the needs of individual family members are minimized or neglected to protect family members or habits or a status quo that is not healthy. Not the lightning strike or earthquake but the steady erosion of ground beneath your feet. 

I became the first line of defense, offense, whatever was needed. Our parents had already partially failed by the time I took on the mantel of being the stop-gap, plan B, the soldier who never gave up because all I had to lose was loss itself.

I am the oldest daughter and I learned to volunteer to go without or go to war as a means of controlling my environment. If you volunteer, you feel like you have more agency or identity or will than if they rip it from you. 

And I am nothing without my will to survive. 

Oldest daughter. Older sister. The first to gain her voice is not necessarily the first to be attacked. And nothing will make you yell like love. 

And I am nothing without my love for my sisters.

I volunteered. To need less, to fight, to heal those who cannot heal themselves. But no one told me that no one can control the trajectory of their gifts. People will do what they like with your iron-willed effort, your carefully given love, your dutifully surrendered gifts. There are no rules that dictate the use and administration of such sacrifices even if it leaves you gasping

I am nothing...
I am nothing...
What was it all for?

If it wasn't for healing, then it was for love. If it wasn't for love, then it was for hope. If it wasn't for hope, then it was for the next best thing. 

And what is that?

I am still looking for the answer. But I'll give it to you when I find it. Because the world is full of takers and I am trying my very best not to be one of them. 

Oldest daughter. Older sister. The biggest of the small warriors. I did what I could. I gave what I had. Now they want me to bury me weapons and wipe away my scars. 

"Drink from the cup of forgiveness." They say.

But I need a drenching not a cup. A long soak in the pool of Siloam. There are so many to forgive. I think of them when the sun rises. And, when the sun sets, I think of myself and how it still hurts to try to name the ways I gave too much to mouths that chose hunger and too much to wounds that chose blood. And yet I also never had enough. I think of how I didn't know any better and in so many ways, I still don't. Who will forgive me?

I am nothing without my will, my love, and my mistakes.