No Need To Go Back Home
After 8 years of no contact with my family, I frequently find myself fantasizing about being able to go back home. Back home with my new-found emotional regulation skills so that I can save my parents from themselves. However, I also know how wrong that is on so many levels. On one level, I am making a judgement about their inner experience, and what I assume it is like to be them — to die alone in their co-dependency and regret.
But perhaps their journey is not one I can judge at all. It makes me wonder if forgiveness is really just letting go of judgement — which in turn, is real love. I have to believe that in spite of themselves, that my parents tried the best they could with the severe trauma they were carrying.
I know that I’ve always been a sensitive person who must have perceived the darkness that each of my parents had had inside of them. I remember a time when I was maybe 6 years old and observing how my mother needed to cry, but she wouldn’t allow herself to cry. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just cry — after all, it was only natural. I remember her response to me when I asked was, “I don’t cry. I just bottle it all up.” I remember feeling so sad to learn that she had felt this way. I suppose it also made me believe that there was something wrong with me for expressing any feelings as well — or eventually for feeling any feelings at all.
As a child, I suspect I had always been a mirror into which my parents had not liked to look. Perhaps I reminded them what they didn’t feel they were strong enough to face within their own hearts — the parts of them that they learned to disavow to survive in the world they grew up in. And I know from having undergone my own experiences with integrating my own disavowed pieces, how difficult it can be to let go of a way of being that you mistook as your very identity. I know that it feels like agonizing death upon having to surrender these aspects — to begin to become someone completely different for which there is no pre-existing blueprint.
Other versions of ourselves got us through so much until they mistook that as their primary job forever — until they couldn’t stop. Maybe just as we all cannot seem to stop…
Our nervous systems are on overdrive and we are all traumatized from having to work harder than ever just to stay afloat as the world seems to be crumbling all around us. It’s like we are being gaslit from both sides to continue our 40+ hour work weeks (at the most conservative) without so much of a mention of what we have all gone through — what we are still going through.
We have been in survival mode for so long that we’ve forgotten that there is another way to be. Another way that does not necessitate feeling shameful about who we used to be.
We have lost touch with our imaginations, our creativity — our hearts. We have too long ago stopped playing, stopped dancing, stopped wondering. We let this world convince us that this is our lot, that we are powerless to stop it — that we are just being strung along against our will and must make the best of it.
I have been alone for most of my life, or rather I had not experienced human love for most of it. I was cut off from friends and family, and in some cases (thankfully), I was cut off from civilization as well. My deep love of nature and animals got me through the hardest and most painful years of my life. And now…to begin to extend this same kind of love out to all is the most terrifying thing I have ever had to do because it necessitates that I must face within me, all that I fear in others.
To deeply understand that I, with such little power, must do all I can to claim my personal inner power, to enter into a state of full trust is not an easy task. But the way I have always seen it, is that I have no other option. I have thankfully learned that the pain from not living from my heart is far worse than being confronted with the loss of everything I may have once believed defined me — was me.
I don’t know when exactly I crossed this threshold, because I have definitely never had such a felt sense of fear before. I grew up with inconsistent human nurturance at best. The little I did receive, I had craved so badly that I would cut off the natural flow — only to convince myself that none of it had anything to do with me. I could maintain my belief that others couldn’t be trusted — I could be safe. And to now face the possibility that I am the only source of my own safety, that I can be alone without not only interrupting the flow, but contributing to it in an overall positive way, is revolutionary. To begin to see that the more I am able to let go, the more I am seeing things from a perspective I never knew existed before — and while I do not claim it is easy, it is the most deeply empowering thing I have ever done. It is a daily exercise in the conscious cultivation of courage. It is in my commitment to observing and pushing through my resistances daily, that little by little the clouds begin to part. And when I say little by little, I mean that I had to start with my very breath and build from there…
My loneliness for most of my life has been overwhelming, and I would have done almost anything to not have to feel the depths of it. But now, I have realized that my loneliness was never shameful, and it is also not shameful to be afraid — nor to be me. After all, it was this very loneliness that drove me to go deep within myself to find my own answers.
I am learning more and more that life is quite a mysterious act of becoming — that it is a law of nature that we cannot become aware of the light without the dark. Everything must and does have two sides, including ourselves.
Just because we all may be experiencing incredible difficulty right now does not mean it will always be this way. I know this to be true from my own lived experience, and this is what gives me the ability to believe that if I can get through having pushed through to the other side, then maybe there is hope we all can get through in whatever ways our hearts choose to lead us.
And if I actually believe this, then by extension I would know, that there is no need to go back home when I am home in my heart.
