When I was a kid, 5 or 6 maybe, my dad swung one of those massive, heavy, glass Sears doors over my sandaled foot, ripping my toenail off under my sock. I don't remember precisely how bright the pain was, but I do remember it did hurt, and while my sock filled with blood, my dad angrily told me this wasn’t painful.
He was always doing that - dousing me with his hostility, aggressively dismissing my feelings about whatever harm he had inflicted, never apologizing for the damage he’d cause.
Just the other day, I had that same toenail removed after losing a 4+ year long battle to toenail fungus.
I am certain these two events are connected.
During a reiki session about 2 years ago, I received insight that my toenail is stubbornly sick because I store sadness in my toes.
That might seem odd to you, but it makes sense to me.
About a year before that, I stood facing a Jesus statue in the cemetery my gramma is buried in, and felt a shift of energy move through my being as I begged Jesus to heal me. I woke up the next morning gasping for breath, lungs weighed down by a depth of sorrow that was previously unimaginable to me for one person to feel at one time. I could hardly breathe during what seemed to me to be a divinely held transformation. I understood pretty quickly that to heal is to feel all the bits of sorrow I had shoved down due to conditioned fear, and that recovery as an adult meant feeling now anything I wasn’t safe to feel as a child, and that I must be intentional in acknowledging and validating all my emboldened childlike varieties of pain.
So I wrote this poem:
MINISTRY OF SADNESS Jesus cracked open my fault lines, commanded stagnant energy into rushing water, plucked sorrow from my rib’s mariana’s trench, rubbed salty salve on my surface, marinated this soul in a body.
I cried, Jesus heal me. He said, Okay Sister, Feel This. sorrow stayed for months, a lifetime of downwards, upwards.
The gravestone ministered despair, preached seasons for everything, the grass on her plot was itchy, the angel headless, I stayed there for hours talking to the sky.
When we arrived home after our Sears shopping trip that day, instead of soaking my foot in water for gentle removal, my dad recklessly ripped the sock off my exposed, vulnerable, blood dried wound.
Now that I am an adult in recovery, my responsibility to myself is to be as mindful and honest about how I feel in any of my experiences; to nurture wild safety & acceptance with myself so that I may show up however I am showing up, and then to extend this loving kindness to the me of my childhood so I can acknowledge any connections or influence I feel in present time due to all that shoved down sorrow in past time.
This is how I care for present me and past me simultaneously.
On Friday evening, following doctor’s orders, I unwrapped the original gauze from my toenail removal, so I could soak my toe in warm salt water, and then rewrap with clean gauze. I had been warned by my doctor that this would hurt real bad, but because I didn’t remember the pain from when I was a child, I figured that my doctor was being so needlessly dramatic. I had already experienced this, I figured. This will be easy peasy.
Friends.
I have never in my life experienced physical pain so bright and fierce. This newly exposed toenail bed caused me so much pain Friday evening, that I panicked. I completely get now why toenail removal is a torture tactic.
As I was driving around yesterday, I reflected about not remembering how badly the toenail removal of my childhood hurt because I wasn’t allowed to feel pain. When I shoved it down as a kid, I removed access to the truth of that experience from my adult memory. I hadn’t given credence to that fact while my doctor looked at me the other day with concerned, caring eyes warning me about incoming pain. I now realize that part of childhood trauma recovery as an adult means experiencing life new and with curiosity, even if we have had a similar event in our childhood. I want to wrap child me in a cozy, warm, gentle hug and apologize for all the gaslit pain she wasn’t safe to feel. I hold such tender, pulsing grief that she had to experience that particular event the way she did. And that she survived it with as much grace as she did.
Or rather, that I survived it with as much grace as I did.
At the time of this writing, I’ve had to rewrap my foot a couple times since the removal, and each time my toenail bed has been exposed, I sob relentlessly, and do not in the moment understand why.
But now I wonder if the sadness I've store in my feet, no longer blocked by a gnarly toenail, is finally able to flow freely? Perhaps when I asked cement cemetery Jesus to heal me, toenail removal was always part of His plan for my emotional freedom; that surrendering my toenail was an integral event in my letting go; that this intensely bright pain as an adult is validation of where I’ve come from; that I have been blessed to shed a reminder of the cruelty I experienced as a child and that for the rest of my experience in this life, my nail-less toe will serve as a physical icon of how I survived.
That might seem odd to you, but it makes sense to me.
Wearing slippers as shoes for at least a few more days,
E
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