“My whole life I trusted and I was lied to.” – Everwood
I heard that line in an episode of Everwood. It was spoken by a woman who discovers, very late, that she has only one kidney – something that had been kept from her by her father – as she is faced with the possibility of then saving her father's life.
She was one of twins.
So am I.
Sometimes a line finds you at exactly the right moment.
Writing has always been one of the ways I try to understand. It is getting harder to do that when so much of what I am trying to understand involves other people. But I can only begin with what I know: my own experience, and the impact it has had on me.
There is something I am beginning to understand.
Recognising that something wasn't mine to carry doesn't make its consequences disappear.
It is one of the harder truths of healing.
You can come to understand that you were responding to circumstances you didn't create. You can look back with greater compassion for the person you were and recognise that some things were simply beyond your control.
But you are still the one living with the impact.
The anxiety may still be yours to manage. Difficulty trusting may still show up in your relationships. The ways you learned to protect yourself may still affect how you respond to situations today.
And that can create another kind of unease: if I am the one dealing with something now, does that somehow make it mine?
I don't think it does.
There is a difference between living with an impact and being responsible for how it began.
Something can become part of your life without having been yours to create.
For me, some of this is connected to growing up with a disability.
My physical needs were attended to. At the same time, much of what it meant for me to live with that disability remained unspoken. The practical realities were dealt with, but I don't remember the emotional experience – how I felt about being different, what I understood about myself, what I was making of it all – receiving the same attention.
I can hold both of those things as true.
What goes unspoken can still leave an impact.
Some of that became part of the way I understood myself and the ways I learned to cope. I carried those things forward, even before I had the language to understand what I was carrying.
I have that language now.
This is part of what happened to me. And I am living with what it left behind.
These statements are part of understanding.
What changes in adulthood is that I have choices I didn't have then.
I can notice the patterns I developed, and understand why I needed them.
I can give myself what I now recognise I need.
That isn't taking the blame for what happened.
It is taking care of myself in the aftermath of it.
Acknowledging the impact means I don't have to minimise what it meant for me.
The consequences are still part of my life.
The blame isn't.
