I feel like I have spent my whole life, but most intensely so in the last two years waiting for permission to grieve the way I need to and to let go of people that hurt me. Like a person holding onto an electrical wire while they are being electrocuted, I have not been able to let go. No matter how much it hurt. Of course, many people have seen and experienced things in their lives that are far worse than my own experiences, however, that being said, experience is relative.
Unfortunately, I have experiences abandonment and abuse for as long as can remember. And a lot of it I don't remember at all because I completely blacked it out. People used to tease me about being forgetful or absent minded as a child and even as an adult, but this was just a symptom of the coping mechanism which was always accessible to me. No matter how powerless I was: Disassociation.
I have spent so much of my life running from pain that I have literally blanked out decades, including huge chunks of my own child's life. As a parent, that is a shockingly frightening and humiliating realization to come to, but deep down I've always known.
I have always put the people I love ahead of me, no matter the personal cost, but with my son having turned 13 this year, I realize that I can never get that time back. I am moving and swinging swiftly between the "stages of grief" as I battle to get my life back together, bleeding from wounds that should have healed years, if not decades ago.
It's like I am waiting and keeping the door open, just incase those people want to come and tell me they realize how awful they were and how sorry they are. The truth is that some of them even have and some of them never will, but I hold myself in constant purgatory. I spend my days and very long nights wishing for time travel so that I can take different turns at certain stages of my life, but we all know that the reality is that none of us get a do-over. Whether abusers stole decades or we self harmed, there is no going back. All that I have now it what lies ahead.
Self sacrifice and punishment has gotten me absolutely nowhere in life and has caused me to self-sabotage over and over again. And that is on me. What is not on me, is what I had no control over and the abusers who took advantage of my seemingly never-ending forgiveness and trust. But I continue to let them own a piece of me every day I allow myself to relive my trauma over and over.
It is definitely true that some people don't deserve forgiveness. And there are deeds that cannot be forgotten. But I cannot let them steal anymore of my joy, my life and my sanity from me.
I deserve more than that. My partner and my children deserve more than that.
There is a photograph of my father that my aunt sent me, just after he passed. It was of them walking down the main street in the centre of Durban in the 1960s.
That same look of fear in my father's eyes was present there as it was on the day he died. My father did not live. He was a man that life happened to. And life ran him over with a bus. I have always felt that I carry some kind of family curse with self speak like: you were born poor, and therefore you will surely die poor... and your father's life was a tragedy and so will yours be. But I know my father chose many of his failures. He chose to self-sabotage. He chose his own self-hatred and fear over his own family and that is terrifying to realize. I watched him do it. Again and again. Did people take advantage of him? Yes. Did people betray him? Yes. But, did that give him the right to hurt and abandon us? To even abandon himself?
The story of my father's life is over, but his legacy remains. I get to choose what that makes me.
I still have time left on the clock and I will not waste it. I am choosing myself over my grief and anger.
And I am letting go.
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference"