That epiphany I shared last week—that I wasn’t a someone due to lack of me as a concept—felt afterward as if I were absolving my mother of the crap of my life.
I like that. Absolution is an emotional gesture and emotions are naught but internal convictions, neither right nor wrong. Their provoked behavior is another matter altogether, but if one (say, me, for example) is married to deconstructing perspective, motive, and agenda as part of their/my every day, then the proffering party (me again) can extend said release as far as I wanna. ‘Cause.
I’d never been comfortable casting my mother as a villain. Yes, she was malignantly narcissistic. Yes, she caused me harm that categorizers would box up as abuse. Yes, she nearly broke me.
But unlike Trump, she was not a bloated puppet in the hands of true evil. My heart cannot color her as intentionally destructive; there was too much motherness to her. The comparison only goes so far.
Moreover, if’n I accept that my non-comprehensibility is a no-blame life fact, it also absolves me for not recognizing our mother-daughter/non-daughter truth all those live-long decades.
Did ya folla’ that? Gads, I hope so. Not that it matters, onaccounta recovery from the kind of mishandling I experienced is absolutely, utterly, and in all other ways 100 percent internal. Personal. Such as most of life.
Every psych in the known universe claims the path to inner peace is to forgive yourself so you can forgive those who wronged you. That simple little equation, which only hundreds of billions of people throughout history have struggled with, is easier spoken than accomplished, and the gateway for uncountable self-help advisors, providers, and scam artists to pitch their books, services, and conferences.
And it’s counterintuitive when the wronging began so early as to be absolutely, utterly, blahblahblah, beyond the wrongee’s control. ♪But that don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing...♫ Sorry, music hath charms to distract the discombobulated mind. That shoulda typed out as But that doesn’t mean a thing in the recovery sequence because addition is commutative.
Forgive yourself so you can forgive whoever wronged you = forgive whoever wronged you so you can forgive yourself for letting yourself be wronged.
Bitch, ain’t it?
But letting my mother off the hook for non-knowing what most people at that time in our socio-religious culture didn’t know allowed me to stop beating myself up for non-knowing I was being hoodwinked and manipulated. Working it the other way around didn’t fly. Ditto forgiving Mom without acknowledging the external forces at play, even after I’d sussed out her who [KS1] and why. I had to take the 30,000-foot view to get where I needed to go.
Betcha I’m not the only one.
All of which begs the question: has forgiving myself for being dumbasfuck about my mother granted me inner peace?
It’s now a week later, and I’m gonna say yes. At least a piece of peace. Maybe not yet full-throttle serenity, but that particular angst has indeed gotten distant, which, for me, is the same as gone. “A problem delayed is a problem denied,” Wilson told House. Well, a problem detached is a problem resolved in my personal Twilight Zone.
I think a lotta people get hung up on the forgive-thyself part because it implies culpability, which goes against the comfortable grain. I suspect many in America today are just now realizing, as they peak over the lip of their self-dug hole, that they, too, have been hoodwinked and manipulated, and they’re righteously indignant. Forgiving is the last thing on their minds. They’re engrossed in spouting justifications and pointing at their wrongers.
“I was scammed,” they’re beginning to claim. “It’s not my fault.”
Sad, but true. It’s not their fault. In fact the “fault,” dear fellow citizens, lies not in the politics of the day but in the history of Western civilization itself, which brought us to this inevitable interlude, i.e., those “interesting times” of Chinese-curse fame.
It is, however, their responsibility.
And therein lies the catch. For Western society is steeped not in the nebulous ping-pong ball of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but in rigid absolution and damnation via supernatural intervention.
“Aw, that’s like comparing peaches and bobcats,” I hear you protest.
Nay, nay, it fucking well ain’t. It’s quite precisely comparing personal responsibility to abdication of the same.
Am I saying the carrot-stick overlay so prevalent in our country, the very concept the Founding Fathers sought to prevent during our hard-won founding, is in actuality cockblocking individual pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness?
Uh, does an ursid defecate in the forest?