Coming out of the dark requires that you to allow the light of absolute truth to flood in. If you to are determined to heal, you must stop looking back and stay focused on the possibilities of a future! It is unfortunate and ironic that a diagnosis of "terminal" has a tendency to make you forget that but, more on that later.
I was truly born again now! The girl I spent a lifetime "beating up and tearing down" had finally started to fade away. I felt internally happy, peaceful and encouraged at what my future held. I was coming out of an alcohol addiction brought on after a high school rape (also kept secret) that had become more prevalent over time. Although sobriety was initiated by that 14 day coma, it was a conscious choice now to maintain it. I had wanted to do it many times, I tried many more. I no longer had that urge to drown or suppress, to hide or deny. It even seemed to me that I no longer had that fear that had goverened my behavior up to this point. By the time I composed A Time To Believe...I had found a new focus. I had literally in every sense of the word, been resurrected!
I was never able to establish a healthy relationship with my parents before their deaths and walked on broken glass with my siblings. All of us were fragile. They had their own issues and their perceptions that were vastly different from my own. I was no longer afraid of my future, I was just so very happy to even acknowledge I might have one. One thing I know for sure. Absence of any kind of faith is for me, almost always partnered with a sense hopelessness and fear. Where there is life, there is hope and where there is faith there is no fear.
I hated watching my brothers suffer too. I watched all of my siblings struggle in relationships, with their partners, children and siblings. I watched how the guilt they felt for being unable to ever feel "normal" would be a tool for self-imposed, lifelong separations from their children and a withdrawal from a civilized society at large. Earthbound misfits we all were!
I imagine guilt was never an emotion I supported because I could not see a benefit to allow it. I often thought that my inate ability to refuse to feel guilty came from not having had children myself. I think it often begins innocuous as a loving parental emotion for feeling that you can not do all you would like for your children, or that the demands of just trying to provide can get in the way of their hopes and dreams for their kids by stealing time. With the best intentions, life happens and the best laid plans come undone. They have to be away to provide but, the more the are away the more guilt they tend to feel for it being so. Although it was not ever apparent that my parents suffered such a malady, I know my brothers did. They lacked a model for good choices and strong commitments. A lifetime of bad choices, guilt for what they had done with their life and how it affected their children only encouraged an even deeper withdrawal and sense of isolation. Two of them would unexpectedly pass in their early forty's removing all possibilities of a redemption for themselves. They would be proud to know that their children have become wonderfully beautiful people who share their light with the world. Whatever their issues are for what they have endured, they seem to lack that desperate, self destructive disconnect that dims your inner light. For that, I am eternally grateful.
I believe, in order for you to know where you are headed you must acknowledge that from where you have come from. The poor circumstance becomes life lessons and you learn it is not possible to have one without the other. Self love and self forgiveness become our biggest allies in the war on life's adversities and inner demons alike. True redemption is not possible any other way. You have to accept and expect that you may get hurt again and again but, you can and eventually will reach a level where you are no longer willing to be the tool you use for your own internal suffering.
And so my life really began from here!
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