The Greatest Remedy is to Live Well

A friend of mine who knows and understands about the depth of my dysfunctional childhood, the impact of which I still occasionally feel, asked me how I was able to get past it all and maintain a happy and flourishing life. I tried to answer her question, although I felt curiously inarticulate as I explained the process that I took from being a young child to today.

True to form, a day or so later I read a passage in a book that explained it so much better than I did or could:

Your past is who you are. It is your particular fate. You may wish
it had been different, but it is what it is. It is your starting point,
the place you always go back to in memory. You carry it with you.
[The trick to a successful future is to] learn from your past,
analyse it, then close the door and move on. Though the past is still with you, it becomes less of a burden.

Significantly, the book proposed that what you do with your past is more important than what it threatens to do with you.

My youngest sister eloquently expresses the payment extracted from me during the dysfunction of my youth. She said, “Brenda, you had your dreams stolen from you”. And that is – or was – so true.

I grew up a product of divorce at a time, especially being Catholic, when divorce was a sin. Hence, children of divorced parents were looked up unsympathetically and with undisguised distain. I remember a year when, living just shy of the poverty line, my mother was seeking help from the Catholic Church for a Christmas Gift Basket. (At that time, the Catholic Church used to provide food and toys for the needy as part of their spiritual undertakings.) My mother was refused because she carried the stain of “divorced woman”. A Scarlet-Letter-brand. I remember my mother’s visible anger at an institution that she believed and worshipped in. More importantly, I will never forget the barely disguised pain in her eyes that she would now not be able to find a way to make our lives more “normalized”. Christmas would be barren. According to the Catholic dogma, we – our family, her, me -- were something to be ashamed of.

I can’t help but feel that this is one of the situations that drove my mother into the arms of a sociopath. A charming, intelligent, and manipulative man, yet a reptile at his core. Along with his reptilian sociopathic behaviour, he was also a pedophile. Early on, he attempted to convert me into a willing victim to his deviant and dysfunctional sexual tendencies. When I refused to succumb to his despotic control, I became expendable. He got back at me by stealing my dreams. He engineered it so that my mother wasn’t allowed to love me; he made sure I got kicked out of the house before I had even finished high school; he cut me off from my family; and he played upon my teenage insecurities to the point where I believed that I would never fulfill my aspirations.

Although I know there are many others who suffered more that I, there is no doubt that I could use my life story to excuse a future life of victimhood. There are many more examples that I could give beyond the ones I have cited in this passage to support my claim as a victim. But that approach would shift the power from the present to the past. And long ago, in a lonely time, I refused to do that.

I have spent a considerable amount of my life understanding how my past informs my future. I have analysed my behaviour to determine if it contributes to my quest to take back my dreams. I have made many mistakes along the way. I may regret those mistakes in the sense that, looking back, I wish I had taken a different path. Nevertheless, I have understood – and forgiven myself – that those faults are necessary. Had my development not been brutally arrested at seventeen years of age, I would have the benefit of excusing my mistakes to an immature psyche. With the grace of that pretext stolen from me, I can take full accountability and delight for the learning that all of my transgressions consequently deliver to me.

More significantly, in making my mistakes, analysing them, closing the door, and moving on, I am taking back control. I can now live my dreams on my own terms. There is power in that.

Back to the beginning. When answering my friend’s questions on how I have managed to re-claim myself despite my beginnings, I might have been best to borrow from The Talmud:

Live well. It is the greatest revenge.

Hey, sociopathic pedophile, you didn’t win. You tried to steal my dreams. Watch me; I’m living them. Despite and -- I fervently wish you’d appreciate the irony – because of you.