P2: Altered

Admittedly, what’s on this blog is selfish.  Or  desperate.  I haven’t decided, so consider it a combination of the two.  It's here because I need it to be, because I never fully recovered from being deemed an outcast.  I never came back from being abandoned by my family of origin, and rejected by my community of peers.  Years of reflection tell me I never will.   I've finally learned to accept that.

You don’t recover from cataclysmic events of the sort and magnitude like those were.  You get rearranged by them.  You get unrecognizably altered. You get disfigured.  Everything you knew yourself to be  is changed.  This is an explanation of the changes that remain in me.  

It’s an apology for not knowing how to keep those changes from interfering with the way I related to you.   

It’s an act of forgiveness toward myself for all the times I didn’t know what to do, or what to say, or what to ask, or how, or who, to be.  It's hard to know anything after so much destruction, and pain.  Most importantly, t’s an expression of gratitude, and a humble confession.   

The only consistently identifiable presence in my life has been an  emotional, and psychic, cloud of pain.  And (I can’t believe I’m saying this) if I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t change a thing.  Not  one.  The events that changed the ‘Me’ I was into the ‘Me’ I am today are the same events that showed me why that theme of pain had gathered, and always lived there, wherever I was, with me.  I’m not cursed.  I’m not jinxed, or a magnet for bad luck. I’m not a victim.  I’m not a loser, or a failure, like so many of those close to me told me I was.  I’m not an incompetent buffoon stumbling through life with no idea how to live one.  

I’m courage.  

I’m empathy.  

I’m resilience. 

I’m the first one through the wall, and the last to leave the abyss.  

I’m the one who goes alone into darkness so others won’t have to.