This post is not about marriage. I've not yet found a woman who has the traits I admire AND an uncanny desire to handle my quirks. Though suggestions are welcome. No... this is about memories. A friend of mine challenged me to make a list of memories from when I was a kid. She'd recently done the same and had a lot of great childhood memories come up. What she didn't know is that most all of my good memories are overshadowed by darker ones.
To be clear, this is no attempt at melodrama. I left my emo stage back in the nineties with Seattle grunge where it belongs. The fact is that I have some really bad memories from childhood. This isn't to say that everyone else doesn't, just that as of yet I have been unable to separate the two. Like most, I need to learn to take the good with the bad, else I'll have neither.
I tell people that I don't have many memories from when I was a kid. This is not an untruth. As I've been discovering the last month or so, I have many memories that I blocked out as a child because I could not handle them. It's hard to go into detail without alienating people from my past, but I'll try to give an example or two to paint the picture. My first memory is of my mother laying in a pool of blood, a broken wooden chair on the floor next to her, her friend dialing 9-1-1, and a drunk man storming out of the small trailer we were in. I was two years old. This is really the only memory I have from before I was six or seven. A few years later I was the new target. To this day I know how to take a punch and how to get a drunk to focus on me instead of anyone else. It's easier than you might think. We also moved from place to place a lot - we didn't have a home for a long time. We subsisted on the help of friends, relatives, and cheap motels for longer than I can recall. Perhaps this is a factor of the nomadic streak I carry.
My mother is a good woman, who unfortunately made a few bad decisions that exploded in ways she never could have predicted - and they were not her fault. Sometimes things just happen. I neither blame her nor hold her in resent. Yet what happened happened. The trouble I now face is that I find difficulty looking on the past and remembering the good - but it is there. Perhaps I've developed a victim mentality. Perhaps there's just too much I've blocked out that needs to be resurfaced. Whatever the case, there is no sense ignoring the past. I may not be able to deal with everything today, but there is something to be said for remembering the good. [Some of my good memories are here]
I'm not really sure what all of this means for me at the moment. We are shaped daily by circumstance and choice into the person that we are. I see how I have allowed myself to become more of a pessimist over the years, probably as a result of not dealing with somethings from the past. This isn't who I want to be. I see it playing into my current situation. With everything that has happened this last year, I definitely got into a downward spiral for a while and saw no hope - hence the attempt to find it again. I believe that cyclical hell has been halted, but there is a long way to go to get back to good. I know it's possible for that distance to be covered quickly, but I'm not expecting it. And even in this I see the effects of pessimism..... oh boy.
No comments:
Post a Comment