When you grow up in a family that’s volatile, it leaves some marks. Some are physical, some are not. The physical ones you dismiss, joke about, lie about and carry them around almost like a trophy of survival. You’ve survived. You’ve gotten through it all and made it out of that tunnel. Those hands that grasped at you and had latched on seemed to have loosened their hold. Or so you think.
Then one day, suddenly, it punches you in the gut and leaves you breathless. It creeps up on you sneakily, like an eerie ghost, making its presence felt. But you thought you survived! You thought you had gotten over everything that happened! Your lifelong coping skill of escaping comes to your rescue and you walk out. You wander about, think unconnected thoughts that make little or no sense, you think about what all needs to be done on the coming Monday and the work you have to catch up with. You think of all your loved ones and try to tell yourself to hold on. You try to gather strength through them. And your breathing normalizes.
You find yourself in a garden, on a bench surrounded by children screaming with joy, couples canoodling and senior citizens chatting merrily. You try to bring back all the lessons you learnt in therapy – breathing exercises, not escaping into books, not escaping, commending yourself on surviving, being kind to yourself. You think, what good is that when someone else is dealing with your past now, while you thought you had survived. You think you just dumped it on someone else instead of really moving ahead. And that person now struggles, now sucks it in and tries to make sense of it. But they can’t because it’s not their survival story, they haven’t lived it and they only really know the gist of it. And so they get fed up and confused and don’t know what to do with everything you’ve shared in all these years. You think what was the point of sharing? Of halving your burden, when someone else couldn’t deal with it?
And you try anew to make sense of the guilt and the eerie ghost now settling in back your system. You say hello to your old friend, your past.
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