Sometimes unkindness can last a lifetime, sometimes not.
It almost always felt like if I had control over the pain, or was the one who was doing it to myself, then no one else was essentially doing it to me.
And choosing to inflict pain on myself – now that became an art. I don’t know if it were to replace the pain I had experienced at the hands of my family, but that is certainly one explanation for it. If you’re used to pain, it can seem like you can never get enough of it. For some people this can be subconscious, in that they feel as if they have to keep repeating this pain upon themselves, but for others, I guess such as me, I’ve decided to become more liberated from the pain.
I discovered this over the weekend, that there were many kind people who helped me along the way, and I often wondered by it was that I gravitated towards them. Was it some kind of interest in spirituality or something similar of that kind that had come from me? But then over the weekend I had a revelation, which is what if I was the person who attracted the kind people to me, because they saw that I needed it?
I was in so much trouble. I might not have known it but the people around me did, and I don’t really know why they helped me, except that I was a person who needed help. And I wasn’t really available to be helped. But it was obviously apparent to other people that I needed to be helped.
I needed a path away from my problems, a lot of them stemming from a broken past. And I thought that running around broken was just what people did, that it was just what I did. Then things changed when I found a therapist, someone who could look me in the eye and stand what and who I was. It was so that I didn’t have to escape my problems, or believe that I could not be loved. And that’s when I understood how everything was linked to the broken past.
And the best part about it was that I didn’t really feel the need to fix it. I realised one absolute truth which is that so much cannot be fixed, and I’m fine with that, which means that that’s what I realised actually helped. If I’m able to understand that things cannot be fixed, then I wouldn’t even need to try to fix them, which feels like the best part.
Not making sure that it is something I have to fix, and that makes it a terrific thing.
What I also realised was what an impact my mother had, and I myself thought that sadness was something that I could not take. And it also developed a ‘saviour complex’ within myself, because of her way of making sure that I was her saviour. And so I was for so many years, I gladly accepted that role. But I didn’t want to play it for life.