Family matters - Getting the story straight

I have been working on my story trying to piece together a timeline of the events of my childhood where things made sense to me.  This week I was talking to my sister about that time in our lives and she added some interesting additions. This is the first time we have ever talked about my mother's death or really anything about our past together.

It was one of her late night calls and I ask her about when mama got sick. I had always heard that she was sick for two and half years but she said three and a half years. She told me that the doctors said they caught the cancer early and removed it all. It was colon cancer in the early 70's and we believed the doctors. She had a year of good health until it came back with a vengeance a year later. She also said she was with my mother when she got that news and she shrieked. This fact is disturbing my mother never showed her emotions. 

This change in my own timeline explains a lot of confusion I had about other events. I thought I was almost nine when she got sick instead of eight. Our trips in the summer and a trip to south Georgia just before her diagnoses didn't fit quite right. On that trip we all ate a ton of pecans and she got deathly sick and my Grandmother said it was because the pecans were green. Later I thought pecans gave you cancer.

It is so strange that we have never talked about this. I have tried over the years but I think she was in survival mode in her own life. Like me she compartmentalizes to survive and for the first time we are both at a point in our lives where we not just surviving. Her kids are grown and learning to survive on their own and she is accepting it. She has some time to look at the past and talk things through with me. 

I am four years younger and she has mostly dismissed me as her kid sister. She was older and wiser plus didn't want to hear how I was treated by our father and ultimately banished by choice from the family.  She had a rift too but decided to return so her own kids would have that extended family. I can respect that and I did try once to mend my own rift but doing this set me back years in my own recovery. 

I went back for my wedding after four years thinking I was adult and could deal with the indifference they had for me. My stepmother was just as angry and vindictive as ever and my father the most passive person on the planet did nothing. Today in my sister's eyes he was a god an all knowing wise man that was pleasant and loving. I loved him too but to me standing by silently while others are mistreated makes you just as guilty as the person doing the mistreating.

My sister spent the years of my mother's sickness hiding out in books. It was how she coped with the real life tragedy she was experiencing. Because of our faith we weren't allowed to even speak of the cancer winning and I am sure she knew better than me that it would end badly for us all. One of my mother's best friends died around the same time as her diagnosis so we knew what could happen. 

I was young enough to believe that God was going to heal her because Daddy told me he would.  I stayed busy and out of the way as much as possible. I wasn't close with my mother because I was a "willful child"and during that time it seemed people were happier when I was not around. I learned to entertain myself and keep my mouth shut. This was and is my coping strategy today. 

It is good to test the memories I have created in my mind over the years.  Working on the real timeline I have noticed that a lot things happened closer together than I remembered. It has also helped me to be more compassionate towards myself and others in my story. I was 21 and very naive when I returned home for my wedding. I wanted reconciliation  and a sense of family.  My sister said she tried to talk me out of having a wedding there but I thought it would heal something broken.

The wedding is really the only mistake in my life and I have made plenty that I wish I could undo. I was still a girl wanting her daddy back. When I was little we did everything together and when my parents were in separate cars I rode with Daddy and my sister rode with Mama. He was wildly patient with me and didn't seem to mind my millions of questions.  

Writing about my past is healing me in places that I didn't know needed healing. It is good to face it one last time and a bonus to get my sister in on it. 

Shutting out the noise - Choose Peace

I could write about state of the our nation but I will leave that to others let's face it we have address our own lives and decide whether to let these things control us by filling us with fear.  I don't believe in the good old days every decade has sucked for someone somewhere. Life is full of scary things.

We have to just decide how to move on with the world that is presented to us today. Every intelligent awake person could see this coming a mile away.  I told someone that if he loses it will take tanks to get him out of the White House. He lives only in his mind and has no connection to reality. Surrounding himself with only people that agree with him. The "emperor's new clothes"comes to mind. 

Okay just a little politics.  I have been easing back into work and enjoying the little quiet time I have left and doing a lot of writing. Like I have said before I am writing my life story because it helps me to know where I am emotionally and what areas are still buried. 

In this process I have been doing a little fact checking and realized that my mental timeline has been off. Things actually took months not years. I believe that everyone has their version of the truth. When we have been hurt deeply we make up the story of that hurt and we carry it with us for as long as it serves us. We repeat the story to ourselves and depending on how creative we are we smooth over the details and maybe embellish them.

The worst thing we do is let the story we tell ourselves create a permanent scar on us emotionally. We then have to walk around as wounded adults that need to be fixed. For me I have carried the burden of my own story all my life and I have the embellished facts of my story to back me up. My story was the idea that I was not lovable.

Writing it all down even though very emotional and painful at times. Painful enough that I had to stop and take a break also lets me place these memories outside myself. It is more like a character in a novel and not really me anymore. It puts distance between the part of me that gets stuck in the past. 

Holding on to what hurt us keeps it alive while those that hurt us live on without a thought about what they did. Most of the people I have loved never really saw me and weren't capable of shared love. They couldn't show love or emotion except maybe anger. This is how I grew up and this kind love felt so familiar to me and I have picked it again and again. I know how to be invisible and I know how to be autonomous. In the past decade I have learned to love and take care of myself. I am no longer waiting for others to value me to value myself.. This has felt like freedom.  

When I write about my life I sometimes feel it is totally narcissistic but I get a sense of healing. I chance to see just how far I have come. I guess it takes a lifetime.

I know the world is an overwhelming place right now but we can only live minute to minute. We can  choose peace by finding a quiet place even if that sitting in car somewhere to just soak in the silence.Turn of the the news and our phones for 15 minutes and just soak up the silence.  Of course I recommend writing without censoring what is being written. The mind is always trying to heal itself. 

 

Rantings - Memories - Bat Crazy

I got the hee bee jee bees tonight.  I am restless and need some quiet and my roommate it moving about the house talking on the phone. She is always ranting about some injustice in her life.  This has only happened a dozen times or so but it makes me want to leave the house.

She is new to the program and I met her through my own sponsor and for the most part we are ships passing in the night but not tonight.

I remember when I lived own my soap box about how unfair life had been towards me. How nothing but bad things happened to me and everyone else had it good.  It only takes a few meetings to realize the second part isn't at all true. Even hearing the worst stories didn't phase me in the beginning I was too caught up in the drama of my own story to even acknowledge that other people had problems too.

I get where she is coming from and have to remember baby steps.  I had to finally stop talking about how nothing in my life worked before my life started working. Ask and you shall receive I think that works for good things as well as bad. If you say "nothing good ever happens to me" then some how life tries to make that come true so you will be right.

In the program we say fake it until you make it. This use to totally piss me off. Are you telling me I am suppose to just put on a happy face and pretend that everything is just fine.  I realized that really this just means to not let your emotions control you ever minute. It is okay to just let go and just do something other than dwell on the problems in your life.

I use to be so analytical. I thought I could think myself out of every situation but my best thinking kept me lost in the problem.  I have to admit I have lost big chunks of my life to analyses.  I was drawn to the alcoholic situation because I was a problem solver. It took me down because I couldn't solve it but I kept trying. A little tweak here a little there until I was bat crazy.

I was bat crazy later all by myself not an alcoholic in sight. Life can't be solved by thinking. People can't be solved by poking or tweaking and that includes myself. You have to just sit there and see the moment  for just what it is a moment a moment that will pass. It isn't permanent unless you want to hold on to it in your mind and relive it over and over.

Why do we get stuck on the bad stuff?  I have lived my whole life around the story of my childhood and how I was damaged. This story made me insecure and a slave to my emotions and sometimes to other people. I thought the best I could hope for was to just keep working on myself. This made my life still about the past.

I realized I had to just let go and see that my mind was the real problem.  I had to see that my story had become me and without it I would have felt like nothing. But that wasn't true because without it I could make a new story.

I can't explain how free I feel now without my story. Even in my last post about my parents it was written without the pain of something I didn't get from them or something I lost. It was just a story I put together from my memories I don't need it to be anything more.

These are my rantings for the evening. Thank God she has finally gone to bed it's almost midnight. Sweet dreams.  

A little story to tell - Life without emotions

I told my story this week the one about depression.  It came up during an appointment with a customer.  I am sure most people would say to keep it professional.  This isn't where I am in my life anymore. I kept it light and I have been so happy lately it is clear to anyone that interacts with me that I have recovered.

I don't tell my life story for sympathy like I use to and I don't tell it to get it out of my system like I use to either. In those days I was lost in my story and telling it was part of my own healing. Today I think I tell it more as a witness in a matter of fact way.  It puts my humanness on the table.  I think we all have secrets and and it helps other people to see that we are all in this together.

We fear that if the truth comes out it will be extreme and we will end up on some TV talk show or like that commercial where this ordinary guy with a normal life makes one wrong decision about his cable TV provider and ends up ruining his life.  That is our fear that we will end up locked up or living on the streets if we don't do everything right and keep our emotions in check.

The subject of depression came up when my customer said that they were fostering dogs for military personnel suffering from PTSD.  They were telling me how the dogs bring them back emotionally from being shut down with depression and without the will to live. The dogs keep other people at bay while the person is out in public and eases some of them back into a more normal life.

I shared about losing my own emotions and my own will to live. I told then that it wasn't that you want to die it is that you just don't want to live without feelings. There is a difference in being sad and hurting and when you can't bear the loss you have experienced and having absolutely no feelings at all. I didn't know this place existed I will take sadness over nothing any day.

I thought I would never feel anything again and I didn't think I could spend the rest of my life in that condition.  I probably should have taken something but coming from a family that scoffed at drugs I just did nothing and waited. I don't suggest this route for anyone else it was hard on me and hard on anyone that crossed my path for those years.

I have summed up my experience in this way too many things were happening at the same time and my mind and emotions could not adjust quickly enough and decided to take a break. I couldn't handle my reality and checked out for as long as it took.

I can't imagine what terrible things our troops have had to endured.  Obviously to the point of having their mind go into its own protection mode. It is good that that some are getting this pet therapy.

Sharing my story can only help people to know that depression can happen to anyone and that there is life after depression. I believe I came back from it because I was forced to see the fear at the core of it. The fear that without what I had lost I was nothing.

When I faced this story I was telling myself and got comfortable with the idea that I was nothing I was able to move forward.  I could see where my worth was based on my own idea of who I was and this was just another story I was telling myself. The things I lost were not me they were my idea of me.

I am happy today and that is enough.  Today I am a  blank slate without all the stories I use to have weighing me down. I feel my life is about just being and interacting with whoever might cross my path today. It is about not taking myself too seriously and getting on with my life.