The Sixth Wound
Mercury went retrograde and I went into the washing machine.
That is the only honest way I can describe the last few weeks. A relentless spin cycle, my mind churning the same load. Every room I have gone quiet in, every moment I handled badly, all of it tumbling on repeat. Rumination has a physics of its own. It does not resolve. It agitates.
Somewhere in the spinning, though, something surprising surfaced. The old patterns were on display, yes. But so was the distance I have put between myself and them. I kept catching the exact moment where the old me would have reacted, and then watching a different response arrive instead. The washing machine was doing more than showing me the stains. It was showing me how much cleaner the water runs now. I have started to embody the opposite of what used to run me.
Here is where it got specific. I recently joined a weekly gathering, and week after week I have sat there unable to say the thing I came to say. It was not shyness exactly. Something older than that. In trying to name it, I came across a word: disavowal. The felt sense of not being welcome, of not being granted a place in the circle to begin with.
It shows up in the body before it finds words. A pit opening in my stomach, a throat that shuts before the words get out, fists I did not know I had clenched. A heat climbing my face. A heart that starts to race in the seconds before I speak or step onto a stage. And sometimes a floating-off, as if I have left the room without moving.
That word landed hard, because it named something Lise Bourbeau’s five wounds never quite did. Rejection, abandonment, betrayal, injustice, humiliation. I know these well. And yet none of them touches this particular ache. Rejection assumes you were seen and then pushed away. Disavowal is quieter and more total. It says there was never a place set for you at all. It is a wound of standing, of whether you have any right to be here at all.
I keep wondering why Bourbeau left it out. Maybe she folded it into rejection and moved on. Her five do not cover the whole territory, which leaves room, I think, for a sixth.
The word has teeth. I am using it for the ache of the uninvited. The unseen.
Once I could name it, I could not stop seeing it.
This week, I watched Sal, a regular guy from New York, take the golden buzzer on America’s Got Talent with his own version of “My Way.” A song that is one long act of self-avowal, a man insisting the life was his to live, meeting a room that stood up and avowed him right back. I watched Vozinha, the middle-aged goalkeeper who kept goal for little Cape Verde at its first World Cup, sign a professional contract with the Chilean club Colo Colo. Past the age when most players retire, barely known outside his island, and finally given a place. I watched a husky meet its family’s newborn for the first time, with curiosity and genuine care. Avowal, everywhere. You belong. There is room for you.
And then the other direction. I watched Argentina lose the World Cup final and turn their backs on the podium, unwilling to watch Spain lift the trophy, even though the Spanish players had lined up minutes earlier to applaud them as they collected their medals. Avowal offered, avowal withheld, in the same ceremony. Disavowal brings to mind a shelter dog waiting at the front of its kennel while one family after another looks and walks on, still wagging, never the one taken home. A place no one makes for him.
For a while I treated all of it like a code to crack, the news as a puzzle and me the clever one holding the pieces. Bayo Akomolafe would turn that around. He writes about the cracks, the fissures opening in the old order, and he treats them as doorways rather than damage to be sealed. Read his way, these avowals and disavowals are cracks. The old arrangements of who belongs and who does not are splitting open in public, and something is trying to come through.
Yes, I spent weeks tuned to a single frequency, and of course I hear it everywhere now. Salience works like that. What it cannot do is conjure the cracks. They were there long before I had a word for them.
Making amends is avowal too. When a boundary has been crossed, owning it rebuilds the bridge. Acknowledgement, recognition, taking responsibility. These are the mechanics of avowal, and they are how relational safety returns.
Reclaiming avowal for yourself requires grit, the refusal to abandon your own ground. And here is the strange part. When you finally claim your own avowal, when you stop waiting for the room to give you a place and give it to yourself, the outer world stops being the courtroom where your worth gets decided. Once you are not asking it for anything, the world is free to become beautiful again. The sun reaches the mouth of the tunnel, and you understand the light was coming to meet you the whole time.
The wound of not being welcome is real. So is the power to welcome. It starts with the small self that keeps score making way for the larger Self it was always part of. That is the truest avowal, the ego stepping aside to grant standing to the one who was here before it arrived. The one that cannot be hurt, for it isn’t tied to identity.
Then I carry this back into the places where it counts.