Perfectly Mistakable

Compassion

            I don't want to say it is a joke but maybe it is a cosmic joke that we all must be the butt of sometimes. Setting boundaries with my family was the hardest emotional work I have ever done, there were so many complex layers of trauma holding me in place and keeping me too afraid to stand up for myself... But then I did it. I sent the messages, and I endured the immediate chaos of messages and calls and surprise visits. But even now I must still endure the continual disregard for my boundaries. I do not know how many times I will need to say no to them before they understand but hoping for that understanding is what destroys me in the meantime. Training to become a therapist has been immensely and I have found myself on a deeper level than I thought possible. There is a whole world out there waiting for me and in seeing that I see the shadow world I was trying to stay in, to fit with, the same world that I have watched drain every member of my family so that none of them can say they are happy.

But in finding myself I have found how much generosity and compassion I have within me – especially for those I love – although it doesn't always serve in making things easier for me. Seeing the messages that continue to come through I feel like I should open them. That I should call my Dad like he has told me but I have told him that I need space and time and I will reach out when I am ready. I will not bend to his will when he has no respect for me. I will stop taking on the emotional weight of our family and be my own person away from them because that is the only way to have a relationship with them right now. The only way is to not have the relationship. It makes me angry that he thinks he can tell me what to do and that I will just roll over and do it. When I was brain damaged he took advantage of that and he used emotional abuse to con me into doing what was 'best for me'. How could he know what was best for me when he never listened to me? When he only told me to get over it and just work because looking for this arbitrary 'happiness' was a waste of time.

Which just testifies (I think) that there is so much more to just nature vs nurture in development. Whether you call is soul or spirit we are each made up of tiny universes that co-exist within this collective universe, creating a cacophony of souls trying to find their right constellations, their right alignment. It is not my job to judge if his life is right, only he can decide that, what I know for me is that if I kept trying to be what they wanted I would have ended up killing myself. And no, that is not an exaggeration. I tried, many times growing up and after coming home from overseas. Being something I was not destroyed me every second of everyday and if I had not found my wife and partner I may have died like that. Sure I had plans for the future that I felt I needed to achieve, but I did not want to be there to experience them, I only wanted the idea known.

When you're young it is hard to know that you have a true voice inside you, and it is even harder to learn how to recognise it amongst the chorus of others voices. The problem is that all these voices are inside us and the attachments we have too those who instilled them in us sometimes give greater capacity to those other voices than our own. For me, it is all about a desire to be loved and accepted – something I think we each strive for on a primal and spiritual level – yet growing up teaches you that there is a right and wrong, a suitable person and an unsavoury one. These ideas come from family, community and the larger society the individual interacts with, and without a positive view into an alternative mindset, we grow up thinking we need to grow into something, rather than letting ourselves become something. That we need to know what to aim for before we draw our bow, that the act of drawing the bow would not show us who we are along the way. To not be awake to spontaneity but to force form and conformity onto an act that cannot be mimicked ever again. Each moment we live in is rife with life that will never be the same ever again.