On privilege and disadvantage : some personal reflections

Some times I look at all I own materially and consider how lucky I am to live in a town free of fear, stealing and violence and feel so privileged.. its hit home in past weeks with all the brutality and violence as well as calls against oppression in American and even here in Australia, how lucky I am to be able to walk out of my front door not fearing for my life. That said I have also known moments of the deepest despair and lonelieness in my life, times when internally I was in a dark place thousands of miles from home with no loved ones close, wondering what I was doing going on that search to separate and find myself..

One of those most painfully dark and lonely times came to me this morning as I lay listening to the Sting song A Thousand Years which takes me back to the year and a half after Jonathan left and after I had the head injury around 26 June 2005. In the months following had gone to an ashram in Glastonbury as the family I was lodging with in Cambridge told me I was triggering their pain over losing their daughter’s best friend… I was waiting for my residency application to come through and after my accident my ex husband said he would not give me any support to stay in the UK, despite the fact my family helped him to get his Australian residency and start up a business. I was thinking today on my bush walk of how my fear brought me home again. I did end up getting residency but by that time after 2 painful months in Glastonbury at the ashram and later at a B and B, it got too much and I booked a ticket home to Australia leaving on Christmas Day.

I remember I had a terrible stomach ache on the flight. I came home to no one, Mum was away at my sister’s place, in the end I ended up back at the coast house alone after hearing a ghost telling me to stay there.. sounds weird now, I know.. I had the beginnings of a life in the UK but I could not go forward, I was just PARALYSED IN FEAR AND TODAY I SAW THAT I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT CHOICE.. and I ended up being able to support and be connected to both my older sister and Mum in the final years before they died.

Coming back in 2006 at first I could not move from nature at the coast and the ghosts there, in time I met Phil who was very wounded himself and caused me so much anguish but I had the opportunity to move home before that with help from Mum I just could not take it. But then I remember my emotions were not validated and I had not yet processed half of the grief that I have since.. I had to go through those 4 painful years with Phil who was in no way as soft as my ex husband but similarly damaged. It took me until 2011 to be able to face moving back to my home town and site of all my trauma.

Discussing it all in therapy yesterday Kat, my therapist just said to me “But Deb you were so young when you met Jonathan and even with Phil you had not yet grown emotionally.” Yes I have to remember life is a journey and I did not have the skills emotionally to deal with so much…

When I look around at all I have materially I have to remember how I struggled emotionally and with a sense of being so young and having no adult part to support me or fill me with the courage to go on… I have always looked to God and higher power at the darkest of times and reading the introduction to Henri Nouwen’s book on the Beloved today it resonated when he spoke of the struggle to find meaning and purpose which happens in later life as some of us come to deal with experiences of separation, abandonment and sense of homelessness they feel in this world.

Nouwen was encouraged to write this book by a journalist he encouraged to leave a career that was not fulfilling.. Nouwen offer him a home in his seminary and then Fred encouraged Nouwen to write about his own suffering as well as the loveless state of the materialistic world he saw…..Fred said to him :

speak from the place in your heart, where you are most yourself. Speak directly, simply, lovingly, gently and without any apologies… Tell us what you see and what you want to see… trust your own heart… there is nothing to fear, those who need you most will help you most.

How often do we fear to speak about the darkest things we go through? How often do we misjudge a life of emotional struggle and suffering as less than, less privileged than a materially and emotionally ‘successful’ one and come to think of it what does ‘success’ actually mean to you in this complex culture where so many are cut off from deep roots?

Today I know I am lucky and also that I suffered deeply and that the suffering could either be the making or the breaking of me.. I chose not to have a child to the man I married and I feel the sadness that he had to leave to find someone who could give him that, I can also know I was not at that stage READY because I did not want to pass on my own neglect.. today it occurred to me that the having of that child may actually have been healing and yet it did not happen that way…I still had such a long way to go to parent myself and understand myself within the context of my family and society..

Today I feel privileged that I can write this blog and have a small following.. today I feel privileged I have a voice… and today I feel the need to want to recognise how much I do have and can give.. for life in the end must be about passing on what we can… learning what we can, suffering as much as we can for the insights that help us to understand what a complex and deeply mysterious journey this human spiritual journey truly is. The break down of our conditioned self is often the liberation of our eternal spiritual self.