Keeper of the Secrets
The thing about writing about my life experiences is that for a human being who lives in such a duality-driven time, my world has multiple points and divots. Even though for the first 27 years or so I was known as someone who could react loudly and aggressively towards anyone or anything that I felt threatened by, I was very good at keeping the secrets that threaded all throughout my family tree on both sides inside and out. Keeping them was relatively easy since I learned to take my catalyst self and spin inside of the maelstrom that was my life until the broken shards of stories stuck to me like duct tape on a shoe wrapping around and around evolving me into a scape goat for all so that any words that did come from me were often hard to hear because of the level of their sound and timbre.
Even before I took a little bit too much homemade LSD that seemed to find every nook and cranny of my consciousness revealing all my hidden fears ripping aside any filters I had left for comfort and peace which sent me running into years of individual psychotherapy, I also had the ability to see perspectives from many angles if I chose to do so.
For a child who is a keeper of seekers and is sensitive, intuitive and aware, being able to see many points of view but still function from the child-ID ego is painful at best. I often wondered if I had grown up in a distant country and served at the feet of a saint or guru daily who I might have become with such a potential of spirit. Maybe I would have found more pockets of golden beaming love and striven for Divine connection much earlier. But I grew up mostly in the U.S. and did a whole lot of living in Texas which meant, like all of us, I did the best I could with what I had. Often the outcome of a terrifying event such as my mother raging at me long after the sun had set would mean me visiting my heart for only a little space of time and then pushing it aside to see the perspective from my mom's point of view so I could understand why she sometimes acted the way she did. I imagine what kept my heart from petrifying to a flimsy hull of not feeling were the animals in my life and my love of nature which both of my parents taught me well how to see and love. That soft part of them was what was so confusing in comparison to the raging or shutting down because I knew even then that they were people just like you and me, doing the best they could do that couldn't quite fit into just one category of good and bad. Like some amphibians and fish, I liken my response to this world of mine as one of morphing for self preservation to whatever "being" was safest for me to become at any given moment.
No wonder when someone asked me in my early twenties what my favorite color was, I had no clue. It's amazing to recall that many of the messages I received from the adults at that time about myself were that I was very opinionated and strong headed. That's how my defenses looked back then.
The good news is that today I've learned how to be softer in the knitting together of the safety net that is my life. The yarns I twist and turn in the telling of my story have been softened with the love of understanding of what it means to be human in this world. I'm grateful to have learned that while memories of childhood will definitely make one hell of a bodacious story in the telling someday that I have a right to feel every feeling and do not have to raise shields and swords when I have them.
What's even sweeter is that in the telling of the secrets in the net of love, others may be helped in their journey through life as well.