You should be so lucky

Often people don’t acknowledge the difficulty that comes with certain life events. Perhaps they think by doing so they’re picking at a scab. Maybe they feel that being positive would boost your mood. The thing is, it just makes you feel more alone and less understood. It can be a kick in the face when you’re finding it hard to get through the day but all you hear from people is that you should feel lucky to be alive. That just leaves me with extra guilt I didn’t need to add to my excessive pile of things I should get down on myself about. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m lucky. Logically speaking. But, the reality is that when you’ve been through a brain tumour, abusive parents and an abusive ex, to name a few, and your life has totally gone to shit, you feel anything but lucky. You kind of feel as though the true lucky ones are those who didn’t even have to endure any of that.

Maybe that makes me an ungrateful fuckwit. Maybe that’s a really negative way of viewing it. Or maybe people just deal with things differently and we should stop trying to tell them how they should feel when we haven’t been through the same thing.

It’s taken me some time to reach a point where I felt able to talk about all of this. Before it was too painful to glance over at, never mind stare into and actually touch. Things aren’t fine now by any means because the reality of going through a shit storm is that you have to pick up what little broken pieces are left and try to create some kind of life from the ground up, but at least the storm itself isn’t happening. By that I mean I’ve been no contact with all of my family for some years now, and fingers crossed my health is ok (long as my latest MRI says so, getting my results next month) so I’m finally able to start again, but it took me years to work out who I even was, what I even wanted and where to even start. A narcissistic mother and a brain tumour can really do that to you. They shake you in ways you didn’t feel were possible.

Then comes the pain. Grieving the loss of the family and life you never had. That shit hurts like a dagger to the chest.

I’m planning on documenting my journey from the beginning. I’m going to call this the beginning, because this is the day my old life stopped and my new one began. I finally know who I am, what I want to do with my life, and what I need to do to get there. I’ll be documenting the highs and the lows along the way, and no doubt will be touching on what led me here too. I can’t guarantee a happy ending of course, but what I can guarantee is something real and true and who knows, maybe I’ll get my happy ending one day.