Accepting life as it is

I have to confess, working on acceptance of life and being in life has not always been a strong point.  It took me many years to realise that my disappointment with things are they unfolded was in fact a form of perfectionism.  By my mid twenties I had suffered a lot of loss.  I had lost the last part of my adolescence after being crushed in a car and suffering a near fatal punctured lung.  A  complex fracture to my femur had landed me in hospital for the entire last term of school. Lucky as I was to escape with my life, I also missed out on the right of passage that was my formal graduation into young adult life.  Six months later my eldest sister suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and the close family unit we shared shattered under the psychic split she underwent, within four more years my father died of cancer.  That, I now realise, was a hell of a lot of trauma for one person to undergo within a four year period.

Alcohol for me became a kind of refuge, both following the accident, while struggling to deal with the fact my sister hovered near death in a two month long coma and following my father’s death.   Within nine years of that death I had developed a problem which was threatening the happiness of my life and relationships.    Married at the time I was lucky enough to have the loving support of my new partner when I finally decided to put down alcohol.  Thus began a long journey of healing and understanding the forces which drove me towards isolation and fear.

My father’s death left a vacancy of masculine energy in our family, my elder brother was emotionally unavailable and his wife distanced herself from us girls, his sisters due to her own unresolved issues.  In many ways, in the following years the fathering role has fallen to me.  I have never been more aware of this fact this week when I have been the only available family member to support my mother through the loss of her eldest daughter in practical ways, needing to clear out my sister’s room in the care home and being the one who will sit with my mother or try to shed some light and happiness on her life.  In the absence of my other sister who is currently residing in hospital and has been undergoing a years long struggle with depression the role of strong, supportive one is falling to me.

Acceptance of this as the way it needs to be is the only way through my current dilemma, for without this acceptance there is only room for self pity and bitterness.  I feel blessed to be able to shed tears for both sisters, honoured to understand the limits of my power to change things for my family and grateful for the programme of the 12 steps which help me every day to place things in their right order of priority while maintaining a sense of ongoing gratitude for all that I have been given, despite that which has been taken from me over years.

I was cleaning out my room today and I came across a beautiful card given to me by my first therapist.  I had entered therapy in 1999 when my ex husband and I moved to England.   Following an accident we made the very painful decision to return to Australia to support my mother and therefore my therapy in England the new start had to be cut short.  My marriage did not survive the tensions of the move and I was in a deep amount of psychological pain over the loss of a promised beginning far from the site of my traumatised past.  I was also, in a typical self punishing fashion beating myself up for my choices.

Reading this card always brings me to tears so for what it is worth I am sharing the words here.  TS Eliot has always been one of my favourite poets and my therapist did not know this.  I read a biography of Eliot whilst overseas and learned he suffered a breakdown during which the following poem was written.

In the card Wendy, my therapist wrote to me:

In no way do I see you as failing by returning to Australia.  I feel you are strong to have managed all of this on your own and I realise that you are suffering a really serious depression.  If it gets too much please seek help.  Some of T.S Eliot’s words come to me:

I said to my soul be still and wait without hope

For hope would be hope of the wrong thing

Wait without love for

For love would be love of the wrong thing

There is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope

Are all in the waiting

Wait without thought

You are not ready for thought

So the darkness shall be the light

And the stillness the dancing

Though it may not feel like it, I fee you are coming through and always remember the phoenix who arises fro the ashes.

It seemed to me that I had to spend years in a place where the will that I willed could not be what was chosen or meant for me.  I watched many things go into the flames.  Death and endings were a huge part of it, until at times it only seemed what was loved was doomed to be taken.  And now, following my sister’s death, these words of Wendy’s resonate so deeply with me.  For some reason, when I read them, they always bring me to tears in the way only words which speak directly to your deepest soul open up that underground river that is your life’s true flood feeling.  If you have experienced that, too, you will know what I mean.

My life has been far from perfect. And yet it has been amazing, I am really beginning to see and feel that at some deep level.  I think the key for me has rested ultimately in the emerging understanding that life must be accepted on its own terms.  It was what I would hear all the times in the rooms of AA where I found my recovery.  We accept life, on life’s terms and will find no peace until we do.  Demanding that life be other than it is sets us up for a kind of perfectionism which only ends up causing us deeper pain.

If we were perfect, we wouldn’t be human….Warm, breathing human life is a constantly unfolding wonder, not  static state of flawless sameness.  Being alive involves struggle and despair as well as joy and glory.  To demand perfection is to turn our backs on real life, the full range of human experience.

Kristin Neff

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