I recently found myself thinking if only I would have started this sooner but immediately stopped myself. Sometimes starting something too soon will surely set you up for failure and possibly quitting all together. I had this thought start to fester that I should have started the school process a few years ago but honestly I was in no position to pursue that road. I was in the midst of caring for Nana, M was a toddler, L had a hard second grade year and with the normal occurrences of running a house, I was beyond maxed.
I also had just started working through the layers and layers of trauma I had endured as a young child and that process was mentally exhausting.
Age is just that, a number. Yes, it would be awesome if I had my bachelor of science all wrapped up and I was starting that next step but the reality is I'm just starting this long arduous road and that is okay. My spirit is the strongest its been in my life and quite frankly that's saying something! My intense spirit is the one thing that has been my steadfast throughout my life, whispering and pulling me along. I can do it, I can do it, has always been softly emitting from inside, even when I was purposely deaf and had become my worst critic and my worst fan. There has always been that something that I assumed everyone had and than I started to realize that feeling, the one manifesting in me and in a few certain adults that I had met along the way, was an obvious sign of children forced to become adults too soon.
It was indeed a survival scar most noticeable to those that wore theirs as well. I guess it's always been easy for me to fall into those "bad" groups throughout my life, on the outside I surely don't look like I fit into a lot of those groups but on the inside, we were all just as fucked up. We all had our fucked up stories that we could roll up and snort into oblivion, losing that feeling of worthlessness, even if it was just for a split second. Thankfully, my inner voice was as loud and obnoxious as I currently was, so tuning it out proved wonderfully difficult.
I have spent the past decade, stripping and peeling, layer after layer, of the physical abuses that were bestowed onto me. I find the hardest part of the whole process has been accepting and contorting those images into words. I was 32 years old when I started my healing process when I was able to say this indeed happened and it's not my fault. That last sentence seems so cut and dry but is so much more involved than that.
I was able to present my rawest form to my mother as she lay dying in the hospital; I didn't know it was going to be the last time I saw her. I stood next to her a shell of myself as I opened up, all of me baring my soul and waiting to be judged, waiting to be exposed, waiting for all those awful words I spoke of myself to instantly become validated, yet there we stood both in tears. Tears that ran together yet for wildly different reasons. I don't regret baring it all or bestowing my pain onto my mother before she passed. It was one of the hardest things I've done in my life, yet a necessary one. It was just another piece to aid in my healing.
Someday, I hope to wear and acknowledge my pain as freely with all, to be a voice, to not let it define me, but definitely acknowledge that it has shaped me into whom I am today, but I'm not quite there yet. Or maybe judging by others reactions that they aren't quite ready yet.
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