Waking up

I seem to be waking up from a deep dark sleep and a terribly black place, Partly its been breaking the destructive bond with the scammer last week, partly being confronted by what a mess I have made of things but then realising that a lot of the dumping came because a certain person feels I am now standing in the way of something they wish would have happened in a certain way. In this way I seem to have failed twice. But what I see is that I have just been enmeshed for a hell of a lot of my life in my family’s pain. I have been almost obsessed with it, to the point that there has been no life outside of it at all.

It became clear at the first part of the school reunion, last night that most of my old school friends are just out there living their lives, they have not endured my level of trauma, they seem to have been effective in either making careers and families, both things I have failed to do. That said I worked for a long time but never in a profession that I chose, more in an assortment of jobs that came to me through happenstance or built connections. And I see that I have been lost in a wilderness for a very long time now. This latest encounter with my oldest nephew has brought it all to a head and its made me realise there is a cocoon that needs to be shed in many ways. I don’t know if the solution involves making a new physical move, I know I have reached a new place inside of me and its funny how the weather mirrors things. Yesterday was a dark ominous windy day and then around the time I left for my reunion some rain began to fall. After 3 and a half hours when I had to run back to my car that I had to park a long way away it was pouring and today I have woken to a brisk bright washed clean clear windy morning with sunlight flooding the space and the green colours of surrounding vegetation intensified.

I only slept til 5 am, and I sat up a while after getting home. I had a lovely night as an old friend reached out to me via text early yesterday to ask if I was going and we agreed to meet at the drinks. I could tell her all that has been going on and it was so nice to be able to share it with someone who cared. There were probably only about 25 women there last night but it was a lovely catch up, there will be a bigger dinner tonight. Sadly I arranged to go to the volunteering expo with my sister today so I wont go to the school for the photo on the steps of the quadrangle, but I will go to the dinner tonight. The time spent with friends made me realise how much time I spend alone here and how much I miss that. Most of the people there last night live elsewhere and aren’t a fan of my home town which isn’t the most welcoming place on earth. It really made me think that I may be better moving somewhere else but at the moment I need my home environment here. I have to enter a new phase now that this last painful experience is moving behind me and its going to take some time to see a way forward.

There’s been a lot of tears shed over the past few hours. I listened to some old 70s songs last night and my girlfriend from teenage years was sharing with me her memories of my father. Now my Dad’s been dead for over 30 years I don’t have a lot of people around who knew him at all. The pain over scammer/Scott summons up a lot of the pain with my Dad, its very close to the anniversary of his final few months before dying on 8 January. Mum’s death anniversary is also looming closer as well as her birthday. One of the hardest things my nephew said was how upset Mum would be at the way things have turned out. But he is probably right, that said the Grandmother that he often defends left he and his brothers a pittance and that is part of the reason he is lashing out at me at the moment. Mum left it for me to make it right in the end, and now I have failed him too (well not totally as I have only lost a portion of my inheritance) that said it really is my money to do with what I wish now.

I hope to find some avenues out into the community at the volunteering expo today. I need to give some thought to positive and constructive ways to use my time and build a life worth having that doesn’t just involve me in retreat and isolation. I realised last night how much my spirit thrives on connection and how painful it has been to live in a disconnected family. I should have moved out of that old way a long time ago and yet as I write that sentence I wonder just how useful the word ‘should’ is because every step of the journey painful as it is has been essential to arrive in the place I am now. Life is often just what happens to us ‘while we are busy making other plans’, as John Lennon wrote but there are hundreds of decisions we take which lead us along certain pathways in life and often we don’t realise the outcome and cannot fully or adequately project it. That is why we need courage just to live in the now, wake up and front up on any day to what life brings. I see where my own avoidance defects have stopped me taking the bull by the horns in the past. I see where insecurity and fear have stopped me going forward but there have been some small steps forward lately. I shut the door on something toxic to me last week, opened it again for a brief time, then closed it again. And I have been opening new doors in the last few days. I have been saying yes to life more because I know I don’t want to sleep the rest of my life away but I also love a life filled with peace and rest too. The high anxiety that drove me for so long seems to be reducing over the past few days. I notice I am calmer. I was so so hurt and upset getting those painful messages from my nephew yesterday but I see he has every right to his feelings and opinion too, if he wants to judge me and cut me out of his life, that is his choice. I am obviously not successful or ‘together’ enough inn my life for him to want to know me and that is fair enough. I am not one of the ‘winners”!. It is often the way it goes in addictive families in my experience so I will just understand why and pray and cry and accept it. In the end the only power I have in this life is over the way I react after the heat of the initial ‘shock’ of being hit with something dies down. It is what I do in the aftermath of the pain that makes all the difference as well as how willing I am to embrace that pain in order to let it perform its healing alchemy upon me. Today sad as I feel and tired, I am so grateful to say, I feel a real, true, deep peace in my heart, body and soul.