Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Acknowledge your brokenness

I would feel lost a kid in the joint family crowd that I used to live in - it didn't feel like family but as crowd for lack of better words and people sticking it out together through sheer tolerance and adjustments, and they become our conditioning. While the younger people did that more, the elders got to live their emotional immaturity and to survive this without lashing out at elders felt more hypocritical and far from being honest. All this to just stick it out as one huge family with all the broken people coming together to live in it!!

I am thankful for this in a way because even if my emotional maturity bloomed late, but I got to learn the lesson that in order to be respected as elders you need to start young - you need to work on respecting yourself and not expect it from others - validation from others is not respect and neither is fearful obedience to elders...what's the use of such respect anyway? 

Self motivation became my gradual go to after I have given up waiting on my mother who didn't know how to read my repressed silence, my difficulties with expressing myself and just wanted to focus only on my physical/material upbringing. I wish I had gone to self motivation not because there was no other choice. And exercising that overly stressed me a lot and felt fake to want to appear as if nothing has happened beneath the cracked surface within. But I would rather seem alright than weak and just followed the ego as it made me feel better if not feeling true to myself. And this contradiction kept me limited to knowing what I truly connect to or what do I really desire and so on. 
Ego is not one's life energy but it's sad if one is driven by that more than real self love and self belief.

I can't make the past all alright but by realizing this that it was broken and it lacked the guidance and direction from an elder no matter whoever it is allows me to make peace with the imperfections of life - that life is full and complete in itself and it's what we make of it that adds meaning or pushes us to seek some sense of purpose to our life. 

That people are broken and they need a sense of family to make them feel wanted, respected and so on is an undeniable truth. It's this feeling of real family that I had wanted to belong to and not just the number of members who maybe present in a house. A feeling of being at home is when you are secure with yourself and with how many ever members there maybe with you also adds its charm. And to feel secure with yourself from an early age needs a bit of trust from those who are present in the family - that she is more than just a bunch of physical ailments and that she has a world and hope and feelings and voice of her own. 
I was like the fallen star that everyone in the house wished the best for but with an air of despair and I just kept falling quietly and crashed in my heart's darkness again and again. To rise self motivated was my pursuit for happiness and feeling so empty just accompanied me no matter what I achieved..in repressing my feelings habitually from childhood I just learnt to give up on myself as some sort of reflection of others projected on me and I was quite at the edge of the mountain time and again, as if someone's validation outside of me will keep my self belief alive. 

To feel like you are emotionally dead or dysfunctional is like committing suicide when you are still alive and people in your family hardly notice that - as long as you are physically moving around, that's enough for them. 

To experience numbness for a long time was not part of my agenda, but to become defensive about it added more pain, more numbness than what I could hold in my heart. It's this outburst of pain, of longing to be understood, to express authentically without any fear of consequences, of what others would think, of how they would judge me or validate me that makes my voice what it is - to hear what I am truly feeling and acknowledge it simply and quietly is the best form of self expression. 

I am feeling alive for the past few years now and to feel all this pain, all this numbness that I went through as if it was some sort of rite of passage to get out from all the self imposed walls and ignorance makes me feel more sad but grateful that I am blessed with this life to experience all this as part of my life and not an entire life gone in vain if I were to realize all this at a later stage.


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