There hasn't been a moment where I've felt like getting my thoughts down into a blog. Probably because the past 6 months I've confronted "the demons of my past" so to speak, and I don't like them. It's hard to look back on myself, and my formed self-image as it relates to everything I've said, and all the choices I've made in my twenties thus far. Well, it's hard up until the part where I stop being in shitty, unhealthy relationships, and stop creating drama in every aspect of my life to distract myself from the real deal.
In all honesty, it's embarrasing to reflect on...like the morning after a bender. I have replayed my genuine emotional responses to things in the past, and I've replayed the countless selection of bad choices over and over in my mind, and even though I'm alone, and even though most people might not care or even notice those choices...I'm still embarassed.
I've had a very late start of it, and I am grateful to be here now, but I still mourn the loss of many years of confidence, productivity, and health that I could have cultivated earlier. I know many people learn even later than me, and I know I'm by no means done with learning...but I can't help but feel an enormous amount of guilt for not seeing the patterns sooner...for not hearing myself screaming at me when I was 20, 21, 23, and 26 years old.
Part of my ongoing guilt stems from the massive role my parents play in my becoming. Part of it stems from this new found excitement and love that I have for what I'm trying to do in my life, and the wounds that I've given myself never fully healing...
they are always reminding me of where I've come from...and how I could have prevented them.
If I would have been 21, 23, 26 years old and writing this blog - I would be embarrased to read it now...
The more I read sociological theory, and specifically Symbolic Interaction Theory - the more I reflect on the importance other people have played in my identity. And God knows, my entire life I have been someone who wants to connect...
Maybe this is because I felt so lonely growing up...so strange and so isolated in my head and my heart. My parents did nothing but remind me of how amazing it was to be me...how absolutely special and unique I was...but it didn't take away that feeling that as special as I was, no one was like me...no one felt like me...no one thought like me...
and so I consciously, VERY consciously set out to connect with people...almost like a religious faith. I believed that it was impossible that nobody felt things the way I did, or experienced the world like me, and I was right. I waited my whole childhood to be an adult, and I don't miss my childhood like so many other people do. I wanted freedom of thought, of speech, of action --- I romanticized it so much because I wanted to see the world in the way that I imagined it. I wanted people to be my lovers, my kindred spirits...I wanted to be assured that who I was could be embraced because we are all the same.
and my conclusion up until now is that we are. I'm lucky that I wasn't born with the ability to have much anger or hate or resentment. It's not because my parents didn't have anything to do with it - and it's not to say that I don't feel these things at all...but I can't live in it, and that, I think, is just pure luck. I think it's easy to, from what I've seen in my life and my relationships.
I think it's easy to be so afraid and so alone and so unsure that you end up drowning in it.
I have said before that I'm grateful for what I have...but it's in relations to what I've been through, not just the opportunities and the luck. They play such a huge part in things, but so does my embarrasing past of following around a man that doesn't love me over and over again...ignoring my body and my disease and soaking all my insecurities in bars and drinks and smiles...distracting myself from my own passions, hiding in other people's relationships and feelings and needs...even in their music, punishing myself for being this weak person instead of changing it...and labeling myself as the victim of shitty circumstance instead of realizing that it was all my own doing from the start.
How hard is it to write these feelings down...to own the guilt of your own life...to forgive yourself so that you can love fully and be loved fully...so that your parents might really get to see you happy and healthy and maybe they will even get to see your babies...
I haven't wanted to write because I've been trying to figure out a way to let it go.
but, I think, sitting with Ben in the car on the way to Montreal one beautiful day last year, I finally started to see that you can't really let those things go.
I think it's an ongoing process of forgiving and evolving...to remember that I wasn't the person I wanted to be even a year ago, reminds me of who I am now.
There feelings of guilt and regret are actually feelings that help me make the right decisions and I guess that those things that I felt...the late night under the blankets on the phone with Chris asking him why I can't be happy...the screaming and yelling and door slamming between my bestfriend and I where I felt like my heart was exploding and the whole world would end...the day I couldn't get out of bed, lost time, and woke up with my head on my mother's lap...the moments where I pondered whether or not I would ever be able to be truly independent and alone, the countless pills I took to feel better in a relationship that just needed to end, dropping out of school time and time again, keeping all these things from the people who love me the most and want to help me the most...
I can't be without them. I have to carry them around...and I suppose that it's my own choice how much weight they put on me.
Getting back to sociology - there is this theory that our entire self-awareness comes from the interactions we have socially...and in this respect, I see that the weight is lifted and carried by the people in my life who have decided to know me for all of these things, and who love me anyway...
we do this for each other. This carrying of the burden of wounds, and history, and experience. We do it by constantly confirming to each other that we are the same, and that essentially, we get to the present moment only from the moments of the past.
anyway - there is so much more to be said. But I felt like it was time to get this all out.
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