Don't Stop
Text by Gabriel Robichaud
Illustration by Layloo Lapierre
Translation by Anita Anand
You feel it in your gut. Something that just won’t go down. That should never have gone down. The past growing embedded in time. Something that’s deeper than a question and not satisfied with an answer. You try but you can’t find the words. You don’t know how to find your path to a peaceful state where your gut, your head and the rest will leave you alone. How can you find your way back to trust when your trail is strewn with betrayals?
Memory has no age. Memory can leave, but that doesn’t stop it from coming back. Sleep is scarce when your silence speaks to you in snatches or through nightmares. Because a lump in your throat can take decades to disappear when speaking hurts more than shutting up.
It starts with a word. A word carefully placed in an ear that doesn’t just hear but also knows how to listen. An ear that can tell the difference when you’re out of control, when you get a lump in your throat, when you look at everything that’s all wrong, the stuff you never wanted but which grew there anyway deep inside of you. Then the words multiply. The ones that usually hurt the most. The first ones. The ones that state, that name, that acknowledge. The ones that make you relive everything the silence was protecting. But as you name, the pain moves, and the lump in your throat frees itself. Gradually, after a while, it hurts more to shut up than to speak.
You try to learn to maintain a sustainable belief in phrases like “it’s ok” “it’s going to be fine” and “everything’s going to be all right.” You learn to forget that you learned that those words didn’t apply to you. You start to see this idea of things getting better, and even if you’re wary, you try to get there, and even when you stumble, you tell yourself not to let that goal get too far away, like when you’re out of breath but you know the next breath is not too far away.
It doesn’t stop you from seeing the consequences again. Everything you’ve done and haven’t done to get in trouble, to get out of trouble, to cope with the trouble that you can’t forget. You search for the instructions which will let you sort the pain from forgiveness, make peace with everything that happened and everything that won’t come back. You realize you can round up all these bits of grief, but they’re not all equal; they don’t have the same way of ripping or repatching. And you begin to choose. You deal with the fear of life passing you by and you figure out the best way to act. It’s not just a pathway to discoveries. But somehow, it’s when you name it that you take the first step toward as far as you can go. And those words might sound great but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fucking tough.
You realize no sucker punch no powder no high will save you from the reality of what happened. It’s part of you despite all you’ve done to escape it. You understand that you can’t just erase a calamity, but when it’s surrounded by beauty, it’s possible that at some point it will take up less space. And it’s when you face all that that you learn to get over it. That you start building stuff around it, fixing things up for the time you’ve got left.
It seizes your guts; it just invades you. You realize how much room it takes up, so that you have none left for anything else. And then suddenly it changes. You discover the phrase, “shift the burden of shame.” It feels like being struck and penetrated by a powerful beam of light. A light to fight all the shadows that have collected, that try to make you believe you didn’t actually hear it. “Shift the burden of shame.” But you did hear it. You know it. You know it so well that you start saying it over and over like a mantra.
Shift the burden of shame. Shift the burden. Shift the shame. The burden of shame. Shift. Shift the burden. Of shame. Shift. The burden of shame.
And as you repeat it, you realize that a sense of lightness appears with the same rhythm as the weight on your soul you’d forgotten you were carrying begins to ease. As you repeat it, you realize what it means to free yourself from yourself.
You’ve always had trouble with the word “victim.” You distrust it like a smooth talker, like a lying word. You flee it like the fear of asserting what you never chose to be, like the pain of carrying it despite yourself, like the man who forgot the little boy who screamed when he didn’t understand.
And then at some point the words change. The words find. This surpasses the effect of a band aid, beyond thought, and it aids your stomach, the lump in your throat, your bandwidth, everything that had stopped you from believing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t too late for certain things, but it lets you make up for some and better choose what happens next. It doesn’t happen without tears, it doesn’t happen without screams, it doesn’t happen without pain, but it doesn’t happen anymore without a sense of feeling better afterwards. And even when it still hurts like hell, when the pain grows sharp again, even when it’s not fast enough, you know that it keeps continuing to get better.
This won’t erase your story. There’s no explanation that will turn into excuses, no excuses that will be able to explain everything, no magic potion that will make the wounds disappear. But there’s what happens next. When you’re no longer living against, when you’re no longer living without, when you live with, when you live despite, when you live beyond your story and what happened because of it. And suddenly you catch yourself redefining what you find beautiful. Obstacles turn into perspectives, limits become possibilities, restrictions constraints, rules ways to play.
They convinced you that you were alone, until you realized, until you accepted that you aren’t. You were convinced it wasn’t true, that it was impossible, that it was useless, that you weren’t worth it, until you found the strength to reverse all that. They talked to you about weakness so that you wouldn’t think you were strong, of silence, of fear of what you had to say, all of that to avoid confronting everything that a secret will hide.
Afterwards, they spoke to you of accomplishment, of happiness, and of success the way we celebrate instantaneousness without leaving any space for the hard work, or for the painful moments, for the discouragement, for the possibility of falling down and getting back up again. They took away your right to believe that this could belong to you, undoubtedly because other people believed that as well. You’re carrying all this when you speak. With all that in your gut you’ll say yes, that happened to me. It’ll end up reaching both good and not so good ears. It’s with all the will in the world and all the reasons to fail that you’ll succeed. Because an outstretched hand is hard to refuse. Sometimes, it even draws a kiss or a hug. Sometimes, it invites you in, invites you to supper. Sometimes, it keeps going, turns into a chat that does some good. And sometimes, it goes way beyond all expectations, there isn’t much that will stop you now. There will always be someone somewhere for you. Someone like me, who’ll thank you. Don’t stop.
