As we prepare for the turning of the calendar, I’m thinking about moments when your course is undeniably changed because you are changed. We may want to forget it, deny it or rewrite it, but we can’t. It’s just there. It’s now part of the fabric of who we are, and we must find a way to incorporate it into our beings. Life will not allow it to be ignored.
I wonder if some of the difficulty is not just pure anger at having such things delivered to the doorsteps of our psyches with no fanfare and no warning. No one wants to be the child of an alcoholic. No one wants to be an addict. No one wants to be “at risk.” No one wants to be a rape survivor. No one wants to be a victim of child abuse. But people are all of those things.
The real tragedy is that these things are thrust upon us, often before we are even able to understand them. We are left holding the bag, carrying the burden. Forever. Regardless of how much we process, how “healthy” we are to the outside world, only we are living in our heads where almost everything is passed through the filter of, “is this right… what will happen if I do this or that… can I say/do this or will there be hell to pay?” We don’t know any other way to live because this is all we’ve known since the moment we were changed, often through no decision we made other than to be alive and walking on the planet in that place at that time.
But, adversity also teaches us to be resilient, one of the greatest life skills a person can possess. It seems to be the determining factor in whether or not people are able to “move on” regardless of what happens. All of those things give us perspective, too. And they all play in role in making us who we are at this moment, in this place. The trick is how we move forward from this phase into the next.
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