Not just about being a lonely kid.
We were told that only the hard things were worth doing, growing up.
I was thinking the other day that having anxiety growing up (and now) wasn’t really a fault of my own.
A big part of my overhanging anxiety seems to be trying to “kick the shit out of option B“. When the overwhelming Option A wasn’t available (rejection from a young age) and I had to build everything by myself. The source of this, I have been told, is my mother.
In some ways, though, I’m really glad I had this extraordinary (not ordinary) upbringing, because I didn’t have the traditional home. It’s made sure that I look for other ways out. To me now family looks very different.
I’ve had a lot more time to figure out what I want and what a family means to me. Probably more than most people. It made me realise that the worst parts of life are also the best parts, and that to ignore these parts would be a bad idea. In that way I feel like I’ve been more fortunate than most people. I realised that Love in its forms doesn’t have to come in the conventional ways, and that has been fine for me.
It means that if everything falls apart I’m fine, because – for better or worse – I never had it in the first place.
I think this is a lot more reassuring than a lot of people. It also means that when I have something, I really feel great about where it came from.
It made me think a lot about the Japanese or Chinese art of kintsugi (where the art of repairing pottery with gold makes the piece more precious) and also the Leonard Cohen lyric “There is a crack in everything, that is where the light gets in,” which expresses the same sentiments. If there is no perfection in the first place, then how can it be broken?
But it was a way for me to find out what real love was and is. And it makes me happy in a way because I’ve had to really search for it. Also, by searching for it I’ve been able to replace any bitterness that I may have felt, because it made me feel less alone. I don’t know why looking for the meaning of love made my feel less alone, except just that it did and does. Family is about people who know you at the core. And because I discovered this, it’s almost as if I treasure this even more – and, here’s the kicker, I’m not elitist about it.
It’s almost as if I am trying to correct the perfectionism that came before. Maybe through perfectionism I tried to correct the fact that my biological family were never with me through my most important moments, and no amount of making up seems to do, because those moments when I was growing up have already passed.