Tag: forgiveness

Comes A Time

If I’ve learned one thing in my life, it is that I have a choice about who is admitted to my inner circle. I like to be on good terms with as many people as possible. I make that choice for me and for my happiness.

I used to be a world-class negative Nelly. There were few positive and joyous occasions that I couldn’t turn into misery. My “critical eye” as I called it, could see the downside of any situation, and filter out the joy to its’ true and dark core. What a sad little girl I was.

The only difference between then and now is that I see it was a choice. I was a troubled young adult. I tried to convince myself that my negativity and questionable behaviors were somehow mitigated and counter-balanced by the strengths I brought to the table.

As I fought to grow stronger and healthier and started to abandon habits and behaviors that did not serve me, my life experiences grew more positive. Eventually, I was able to appreciate the positivity in any situation. I was also able to more clearly see those who were still afflicted by negativity like I once was.

When you discover a negative Nelly within your own inner circle, it is disappointing. I learned on my journey to let go of blame. I forgave people because not forgiving them was hurting me more than it was hurting them. I believe the saying is: “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping your enemies get sick.”

Sure I have been badly hurt. Often. Many things happened in my life that I didn’t want to happen and wouldn’t wish on others. But one day I realized it was my choice whether I wanted to live in bitterness for the rest of my life. The answer was and is a hard no.

I realized how much comfort I took from the certainty I had about others who harmed me. I was right and they were wrong. They hurt me and so I had every reason to treat them with disdain and disrespect. The irony was the only person I ended up hurting most with my crummy behavior and attitude was myself.

As I pushed forward in healing, I started to abandon people. They held fast to the truth of their own narrative. There was nothing I could say or do or point out to them that would change their minds. Their minds were made up about what life was, how far they could go in it, and their opinion of me.

I had to let go. I am willfully estranged from my two sisters and their families. There are twinges of regret for some happy memories that we shared a long, long time ago. But those memories are too few and the narrative they hold on to is too unhealthy for me. I walked away.

I rarely think of them, in fact. I am on the brink of another painful estrangement with a family member. This one is even closer and harder to walk away from. I have learned that you can’t push a string. People are who they are who they are. If their position is utterly contrary to my well-being and they mistreat me without apology and accountability, I have no choice.

I find it odd how much license and power many people give to family to mistreat them. There is behavior that would have us turn on our heel, walk out and never again deal with a stranger who did the same thing to us. Yet in families, there is a tendency to tolerate abusive behavior. The forgiveness of “those who trespass against us” is one thing. Tolerance of chronic toxic behavior is self-destruction.

Many of the most powerful lessons I learned around this were from Al-Anon. When you are dealing with an addict, you are dealing with someone who is lost in their own illness. You are not dealing with a fully functioning human being. Similarly, when you are dealing with a toxic personality who blames and mistreats you for all of their ills, you are in a toxic and no-win situation.

It is a positive, if sad, day when you realize there are no words nor actions nor gifts nor any amount of money that will correct the situation. You do what you can until you can’t do anything any longer.

At some point, the weight and imbalance of a one-way relationship buckles and you break. More accurately, something breaks inside of you. What you once felt for that person and what once was in your relationship is over.

Anyone who has lived through any major relationship breakup – maybe several – will recognize the pattern of breaking down and growing apart and the pain that goes with it.

There was a saying in my family. I have only just started to realize the truth of it. “When Christmas is over, it is time to take down the tree.” There is a point at which hoping and loving and trying and wishing for someone to be other than who they are simply doesn’t work anymore. You accept what is.

Maybe that person will one day come around, treat you better, and apologize for their transgressions. Maybe not. That “point of departure” when you realize the relationship you have no longer feeds you is a sad day but also a liberating one.

It frees you from feeding a relationship that no longer serves you. It frees you from holding on to a fantasy of how things might be. And it lets you get on with the business of living your own life.

Which is, ultimately, all that any of us can do and be responsible for.

Graphs and Goals

In writing memoir, it is useful to have a tool to help you plot out the course of your life. It doesn’t mean everything that happened in your life will go into your book. Heaven forfend. But it is like taking a sentimental refresher to remind you where you were, what happened, and how it affected you.

Memoir is not an autobiography. Frankly, most of us don’t rate a fully-researched, detailed book that combs through every age and stage of our lives. That is reserved for global movers and shakers like presidents and Nobel prize winners. Most of us wouldn’t want that type of scrutiny anyway. I sure know I wouldn’t. What I do know is that there were key incidents in my life that shaped me. That mantra I had in the 80s about women “having it all” ruled my life for years. Turns out it wasn’t fully true.

Only in retrospect can I see what a bill of goods we women were sold. As we are just living our lives and trying to make ends meet, it is hard to see the significance of the events happening around you at the time. The power of hindsight is 20/20, so we can look back and see more clearly how a particular thing happening led to what happened next. And so on and so on until you die.

So at the suggestion of author Joanne Fedler, I am setting out to create a graph of my life from birth to the present day. Fedler advises us to create a spreadsheet starting with the year of your birth, your age in each year, significant events that occurred in your life, and also what occurred in the world at large. I remember how significant Woodstock was to me in 1969, mostly as a war story reported by those who had actually attended. I was dazzled by their coolness. Looking back now, I see it was a significant cultural event for a whole generation and marked an era of widespread social change. The music of Woodstock was just the tip of the iceberg.

I find it fascinating to reminisce with old friends about how we were and what we lived through. We had all the perfunctory life milestones to go through at the same time as big things happened in the wider world: marriage, babies, career-building, loss of parents, then friends. The predictable trajectory was often marked by outliers such as random tragic deaths close to us, a random financial windfall or reversal, or stupefying betrayals that shook our belief systems to the core. No matter how charmed, few of us get through life completely unscathed.

So I suppress my intense hatred of MS Excel to capture the signposts I need to guide me on my memoir journey. Signposts and goalposts. That is what comes next. By when will this book actually be written, revised, and published? Those goalposts keep changing.

I started this blog with the goal to have my own book in my hands within a year. I might not need that much time. The truth is I have been writing this book all my life. I filled countless journals as I struggled to make sense of the family craziness going on around me. I sent so many emails to friends that I’m convinced that by printing them all out and doing a deep edit, the book’s salient plot points would emerge. I have signed up for a couple of online challenges with the expectation that I’ll have a working first draft in a few weeks, not months. We’ll see about that.

I already know the theme of the book. Surviving the unsurvivable. Gratitude for life in spite of it all. Looking at brokenness with compassion and empathy – for myself and for others. There is so much out there about the value of forgiveness and to me, it’s pretty easy-peasy. You forgive your enemies not for their sake but for your own. I don’t want the damaging people in my life to take up any valuable real estate in my head any longer. I won’t likely have coffee with them, but I have forgiven them.

Effectively it has been a series of choices to get better instead of bitter. The only bitters I enjoy are Angostura in a glass of tonic water and ice with a generous slice of lemon. That is a beverage I fully plan to enjoy at each milestone that this book-writing process occasions. Chin-chin.