Being cancelled

Have to post this quickly before it goes away, without pictures or preamble.

I am going on a trip to Dunhuang tomorrow (finally!) but last week my therapist said something that floored me. She said that parts of me had died in the presence of my mother (ages 1-3, the age basically where you don’t remember anything – the latter my interpretation) because her thoughts would flit from one thing to another, in the middle of a sentence, anything. I had the same experience with her (my therapist) because I naturally slotted into the role of my mother in front of her and made her my child. She said what she was experiencing was horrendous (well, the first time she said she is glad that she went up in price- this was in March, because it was so intolerable she might as well be paid well), but then last week she said that … well, being around someone like that I would have died as a child, well, parts of me.

I don’t know what else to say because I’m pretty speechless already. In fact I was speechless the whole time which is what happened to me when I was around her (this time my mum.) This made me then think about voice, and the power of voice, and how if I was raised by a woman who could not speak in front of me (jumping from thing to thing, never could land or be on the ground), then how did I find my voice? How was I able to do it?

Did my grandmother have something to do with it?

Repetitions

I remember a lot from this photo. I remember that my aunt-in-law had delivered one of the worst eviscerations of my Self… ostensibly she had been cooking for my family for over forty years (and still does) but when I walked in through the door she unloaded all of that lack of gratitude from the rest of my family on to me.

For some reason whoever took the photo decided to not include her in the photo.