What a remarkably appropriate stick this is, how well fitted for today. How interesting that I pulled it out of my bunch now, of all times. Now that I sit in a hotel room in Poland, in Katowice, in the city I grew up in. The city I escaped from. The city that still haunts me in nightmares.
Here I am, shocked like a deer in the headlights, because I feel the past closing in around me. I feel a life that is over and done with, that is gone, long gone, coming back from its dark hole. Here I am. Not Pausha Foley anymore but Patrycja Gawronska. Again.
Clinging to Christopher with all my might – he is my shield against Polishness. My link to Pausha. My link to Pausha Foley. To the American life. To the French life. To the lives I created for myself.
But then this – this dark, hard, painful existence in this dirty, dark, crumbling city – have I created this too? Have I created my childhood full of fear and pain? Have I created the trauma that sent me for long years into apathy and obliviousness?
I would hesitate to answer this … maybe … has it not been for one night, long ago, in Los Angeles. I worked with the wizard that night. I went deep, deep into the source of me, into dark places and scary blanknesses filled with a terrifying father, with masculine abuse and feminine neglect, with collapse of my power, my autonomy, my soul. And then, when the time came to return to my body, I resurfaced accompanied by a thought:
interesting how I organized all those experiences for myself…
