MickleaaNew Contributor
The past is not an anchor.
The reality is whatever happened to me as a child was not morally, ethically or in any form my fault. Being an abused child I have been held captive for most of life with the guilt regarding my reluctant involvement. I have always believed that should I have spoken about it, the perpetrator’s family would disintegrate, or harm would descend upon my family members. I have feared I would lose more by telling than not.
At ten years of age depression was not a word I knew, or an emotion I had witnessed, but I knew there was something wrong. My life had changed and it was not for the better. And it has remained so for the past forty-nine years. The peaks and troughs throughout my life have at times been far too high and suffocatingly low.
The wound was not visible so there must be nothing wrong. Hard to get close to so I must be weird. No girlfriends when I was young so I must be gay. The fits of uncontrolled anger, therefore I must be a left alone or shunned.
When I finally had the nerve to open up about my experience, I was shunned by family members and told by one sister to not say anymore as it would hurt/embarrass the family. So that proved to be a waste of time and a slap in the face when I thought I belonged to a close knit family.
As Kermit famously said; it’s wasn’t easy being green.
Each day I count my lucky stars that my wife came into my life. I know for a fact that without her love and constant support I would not have made it this far. She is without a doubt the beacon of light in what has been at times a stormy life.
There is still a number of mountains I need to climb, but for now I guess I need to stop apologising for my slip-ups and outbursts and taking the blame for the mistakes of others. It is almost impossible to move forward while being anchored to your past and that is what it is; just the past. You cannot change it, you cannot rewrite it the way you would like it to be; that chapter is closed.
I write these things to get it off my mind and out of my thoughts. I do not seek sympathy or plaudits for speaking out. We are today a result of our past, but we do not have to be held tied to it. Guilt is the responsibility of the perpetrator and not the victim. What occurred in the past is not a life sentence. I know it is hard to do, but we need to move on with our life and look forward to writing a new chapter.
