Light

Briefly:

• My father is an uncommunicative man who has evinced very little interest in me, ever.
• My mother is bizarrely trapped in a mess of co-dependent relationships that do not do her, or anyone else, any good.
• Another in my household is a victim of this, and also is a user, and is utterly unable to take responsibility for himself.
• I do not speak with any of them.
• I felt ignored and unloved many times, and sometimes was physically abused as a child.
• I grew up in an alcoholic household, although the alcoholic in question was dead.
• I grew up in sexist household.
• I have suffered extreme depression in my life.  
• I have had little emotional support.
• Every day, a large or small part of me struggles with this.

These are the things that I have been trying to write about, and indeed have written about, although that particular entry has not been published and will not be published in it's current form.  I got a lot of the pain out of me (again), and I'm sorrier than you will ever know to realize that the pain and angst and yes, indeed, anger, still reside in my mind.  I had achieved a very real kind of peace in my life, peace and acceptance, but returning to those dim dead days is making me an anxious, nervous person (again) and a very sad one.  During the last two weeks, I was lost in my childhood experiences, and I was just making myself sick with it.  Remembering.  Remembering how things made me feel.  And becoming angry.  Becoming sick with anger.  And yet I want to revisit it.  I hate - hate! - to be one of those people who just dismiss their formative experiences out of hand.  No, I want to understand it.  I want to understand why.  You can't understand something if you cannot even articulate it.  

And I'm getting there.  I did articulate, to myself, a great deal.  And I feel that was helpful.  And I still want to write about it.  I want to make something out of those experiences that are burned into my soul.  But I'm learning (again) a larger lesson here:

17 Return evil for evil to no one. Provide fine things in the sight of all men. 18 If possible, as far as it depends upon YOU, be peaceable with all men. 19 Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but yield place to the wrath; for it is written: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says Jehovah.” 20 But, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by doing this you will heap fiery coals upon his head.” 21 Do not let yourself be conquered by the evil, but keep conquering the evil with the good.

- Romans 12: 17-21

Now please don't get me wrong.  I am not a Bible thumper.  I am not involved with organized religion of any kind at this time.  This is not a blog about religion.  This is not a blog about the Bible.  This blog is for me to say whatever I want to say, and share whatever I want to share.  This blog is to get me back into the writing habit, and if there is emotional growth, if there is spiritual growth, then it's all to the good.  I believe the Bible can be a very useful tool and can certainly guide you through life, a difficult, trying process.  And if some of you want to pick up your Bible and look around those verses, please do so, because in that chapter are some wonderful passages with some very life-affirming and useful and practical ideas.

Like I said, I was making myself sick trying to write about my experiences, trying to articulate them to myself and to you.  I realized that I was indulging in anger.  I do have a lot of anger.  I do believe a lot of it is entirely human and justifiable.  But you can't live like that!  I knew that, I knew it.  I learned it once in life, let the bad things go, things got good for me.  If I keep returning to that very negative experience, without enlightenment, without a view to the greater good, then I will succumb once again to anger, hate, hurt, sickness, and sadness.

The key phrase in the verses above is (italics mine): Do not let yourself be conquered by the evil, but keep conquering the evil with the good.

Not: conquer the evil, be done with it, and go on your merry way.  Keep conquering the evil.

Now do I feel evil was done to me?  Well, yeah.  When someone important in your life has no self-control, when they have no fruitage of the spirit, when violence is enacted against a person, when they brutally hit you, you better believe it's evil.  I can't call it a kiss, I can't call it love, I can't call it a fucking Valentine.  When a child is made to feel humiliated and helpless and useless and unwanted and unloved - this is not discipline, this is not a teaching experience, this is abuse, and it is evil.  And wrong!  And it hurts!  It trickles down into your life, into your years, into your actions and reactions, and it forms you, and it affects you terribly and there are steep prices to pay.

So yes, I want to write about it.  I want to gain understanding from it.  I am going to be still living with it when I am an old lady.  It happened to me, and I am important.  If I want to try to learn from it, why can't I?    Understanding is a tall order, but it's coming.  Nobody in my immediate family is going to help me understand it, no one is going to speak, so I have to sit here and have this conversation with myself, and with you.  I have to do this all by myself.  I have been rebuffed at every turn when I express interest in the past, or want to know any of my family's history.  A few people have given me very important pieces that do, in fact, explain a great deal.  Too little.  But not too late, not too late for me.  I can still live through this.  I can still make myself a better person.  I can still achieve a reasonable peace, a reasonable understanding.  And maybe then, I won't feel like writing about it any more.  But that has not happened yet.

What I realized was, I was going about it all in the wrong way.  Keep conquering the evil.  If I indulge in my anger, if I allow myself to feel just a little too deeply about it, I am just steeping myself in rage and horror and hell.  And I don't deserve that.  I deserve a LOT of peace and happiness and lightness and laughter and love.  I had to overcome these negative feelings and experiences.  I had to overcome major, clinical depression.  I had to learn to find a way to go on, when there was absolutely nobody able and/or willing to help me.  And I did it!  I did it!  Now is not the time to go back and start wrapping myself in negativity, not the time to be my own avenging angel, that's simply not my job.  My job is to be peaceable with all men.  My job is to yield place to the wrath.  My job is to keep overcoming the evil.  Because the evil is still there, and it still hurts me.  It doesn't go away entirely, not ever.  Well.  Maybe some day it will.  Ask me at the end of my life, and I will let you know.

When you give in to this particular knowledge, when you try to overcome the evil with good, there is a deep relief and peace in it.  I had a nice long talk today with Jehovah, and the answers came to me.  Now some of you will say, you had a meditative moment with yourself, and you figured it out.  You are free to think that.  That's fine.  But go back and read the Bible verses above, and tell me that's not good practical advice about how to live.  Tell me those are bad ideas.  I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't studied the Bible.  I would not have had it confirmed, if I hadn't had a little Bible education.  So right now I want to give a little shout out to the friends who made this happy moment possible - thank you for studying with me.  I am still getting it, but I am getting it.

I have to look at my experiences - for my own good - with, bizarrely, love and forgiveness.  Or no good is ever going to come out of it, it's just going to be evil and more evil.  So I am now actively in the process of forgiveness.  I am going to be a super-hero and look at it with love.  I am going to figure out a way to make what happened to me a shining light in this world.  I will overcome the evil, and I will make some good out of it.  Maybe the only good that will come out of it will reside solely within myself.  The desire to be peaceful, the desire to feel joy and happiness, the lessons of overcoming adversity and hardship - these may be the only good things that come out of it.  But I do have a light.  I do.  I can write.  I can share.  Maybe someone, someday, is going to read this blog and find their own light, their own forgiveness, their own little tiny thread, a piece, a straw, a tiny bit of a ray of light that helps them to figure it out for themselves.

That's my wish, and that's a little bit of good right there.

Of course, that's not the whole story, and this is not where I am going to end it.  I'm going to think about all this very carefully and try to advance it.  There are a lot of things I mentioned in the first part of this post that certainly could use a good airing-out.  There are many things I am not explaining here.  Growing up in a house where I was treated as a second-class citizen, that was pretty interesting!  That was massively wrong! That was pretty unbelievable!  To feel unimportant because I was a girl, that was really demeaning and got me off on the wrong foot in life!

To live with a ghost; to live as a child of a child of alcoholism - that was certainly a formative and very interesting experience!  That was a real mind-blower!  That really illustrated a lot for me!  To have something, someone haunt you forever and ever!  Somebody I never even knew?  That dictated my life?  Explain that!  I will!

To be, now, a person with no family...none that will talk to me...well, that, my friend, is a real interesting kettle of fucked up fish, and if I went a little nuts here, if I'm losing my mind by blogging about it to the entire world, are you going to blame me?

I have a story to tell and I will tell it.  I am not sure this blog is a place to do so.  I realize now I've got to write, think, BE in a position of love and forgiveness when I do choose to write about these things.  At this point, there has been a conception of how I can do this and not destroy myself.  I think, honestly, I should fictionalize these experiences and use them in what will be, ultimately, an uplifting way.  This way I can be true to myself and not take down so many people with me.

Are people going to be hurt by my words?  Well, yeah, if they know about it.  I'm not going to tell them, and don't you either.  People have already questioned me about why this has to be public.  Why would you ever want to put out so much about yourself?  Why would you do that?  Because I have a light.  Because I have a right!  And also because I have had to live with the cumulative effects of over 50 years of secrets.  Not a fair burden.  Not fair to a child, not fair to an adult.  Other people's damned secrets have been made mine for some time, and I have had to live under that burden for the first 39 years of my life.  

I utterly repudiate that burden.  I absolutely reject it in my life.  I can no longer bear it.  Some people will say these are not my secrets to tell.  To some degree, they're going to be right.  But time is on my side.  It's my turn to tell my story.  I'm sincerely sick and tired of this burden that I never asked for, that I had nothing to do with, that I've had to tote around with me for the first half of my one and only life.  I'm dropping it!  I'm putting it down.

It just so happens, I'm putting it down on paper.  (So to speak).

This is really not going to be terribly helpful in advancing communications with my family, but oh well.  Things are pretty bad already.  To be fair, I don't believe they realized that their secrets, and their behavior, marked me so terribly in life.  My writings are not an attack on them.  No vengeance.  In fact, I love them.  I'm working on loving them some more, in my own way, and preferably at arm's length.  They would never, I believe, understand this project.  But unless somebody drops a major dime, they'll never know.  And maybe they should and maybe they shouldn't.  I believe in personal growth, learning through your experiences, letting light and knowledge shine on in.  But they don't.  If they do, certainly that has not been shared with me, and it should have been.

I can't make their decisions for them.  I can't tell anyone how to live.  I'm not qualified to do so!  I have to be responsible for myself and myself alone.  Bad things happened to me, and hurt me, and created a great wellspring of grief and sadness and loneliness.  The wellspring exists.  I'm going to acknowledge it.  I'm going to share it.  I'm going to try to create something that is a GOOD in this life, something that others will be able to refer to and hopefully learn from.  That is my way of overcoming the evil with the good.  And I will keep on doing it.  And I'm going to try very, very hard to do it from a place of love and forgiveness.

Keep on.

Keep on.

Keep!