Meeting up with friends

I wrote this yesterday as an update..

Meeting up with friends today on my cousin’s birthday felt healing even if the ending came suddenly due to everyone’s 2 hour parking period expiring.. I felt that usual sadness when we came to say goodbye as I do not know when I will see them again and I especially connected with someone I had not seen in 40 years until our reunion 2 years ago. This evening with the summer feeling I just sense myself being pulled back in time to summer 1979 and 1984, on that 79 summer I would be out of hospital in 3 weeks, in 1984 my Dad only had a few days before he went back in for the last and he was not yet out or maybe had not even had his op at this stage, I just cannot remember.

I felt a lot of self criticism again this evening, I feel my life has been so full of turmoil and at times lately I feel a little lost, maybe I am not and maybe others struggle too in similar ways.. As much as its important to know our story to make up stories about how our life compares to the lives of others, is at best, a fiction.

I can never go back to those two summers when I was 17 and 22, there has been so much water under the bridge since then and listening to something further shared on The Forgiveness Project Facebook page an interview with terrorist attack survivor Gill Hicks on trauma and forgiveness it came to my mind that sometimes my trauma does make me mean. Lately I have been saying really mean things to Scott out of frustration about the situation that is just a life experience evolving with a lot of chaos and unpredictability and things outside of my will and control having happened at random. I spin it into him having done evil to me and that is not the total truth, just a dark place I go to. To be honest , I look at the negativity that can spew out of me at times and see when I am seeing or framing things from a victim or glass half full perspective.. Yes, it was probably a stupid thing to keep giving money but staying with myself today and trying not to shame the earlier version of me I just had compassion for the level of desire to be connected that that giving came out of in me, especially in the difficult time after Mum died, my older sister was dead, my living sister was having one depressive breakdown after another and I was still coming out of the last relationship where I got put down a lot. Nothing I did was wrong but sometimes it came out of wounds that is all and that does not make me bad, only human. And Scott is not bad for wanting to get out of deployment or guilty for having his own account frozen after being betrayed himself, really its all just been a part of the chaotic things we have both endured.

We had some really lively discussion at lunch today too about this thing of the public trying to hang guilt and shame on certain politicians, we were discussing how often people judge others not really knowing the journey they have walked and we all shared the understanding that at time gullible people get hoodwinked by those more powerful or in the know. Is it really ‘all their fault’ if they trusted someone who later proved to be shonky in some way, underhand or untruthful and deceptive? Life can be so random at times and those intent on making black and white judgments do not always see this.

Anyway after the criticism of myself this afternoon I will quieten down now and relax and do something nice.. Summer brings up that sense of wanting to come alive and of the many ways I could not due to all of the trauma I underwent in the past.. Maybe I am coming to terms with it more now. I do not know but tonight feels lighter even as I struggle at times with the way my life has panned out, tonight I will look for the blessings hidden in that.