What do our experiences do to us? Do they make us forget who
we are? What does culture do? These are
the sort of questions I have been contemplating.
I have been seeing a somatic therapist for quite a while
now, and every week since early spring. What I find striking about it is that
for the very first time in my life I am telling my story which seemed to be completely locked down inside of my body. In the past, I have tried to write my story a couple
of times, but it has always come out in disjointed, somewhat incoherent mini-stories with no
overarching storyline and has not been shared. But, as I tell my life story to the
therapist, piece by piece, the real story, a true story starts to reveal
itself. This "true" story, I am not sure it is a story that can be told in words;
perhaps this story exists in a world without, or before words. It is like a myth. The myth can be told, but the true meaning has no words.
My experiences I always assumed didn’t matter; of
course I grew up under the impression that nothing about me really mattered. And maybe it doesn’t.
There are also the stories adults told about me that I
adopted as my own, like that since I am a Leo I am self –centered and that
since no one listened to me, what I have to say must not matter, and since people get mad or jealous when I do something extraordinary, I must stop that. And then I wonder, how do those experiences I
had that I don’t really remember have on me?
When I was less than one, my mother and I were held at
knifepoint for over 8 hours, though much of the time it was my mother at
knifepoint and me alone on the dark forest floor, crying. When I was two my mother attempted suicide.
As she lay on the floor unconscious she said an angel came and told her she had
to live or I had no chance and I needed that chance. Around my fourth birthday my
best friend’s father killed his mother and just weeks after sentencing, killed
himself. I was aware of my missing
friend and my parents spending time in the courtroom as witnesses. They lost
two friends. But I didn’t understand. Not like adults understand. Those were my
first four and a half years.
Why would a life begin like this and what does this sort of beginning do? Do the parts of our lives we don't remember matter, do the dreams we don't remember, matter? And why have I
had so much trauma and loss in my life? And why didn't I realize this until recently? I often think it is simply in my lineage, which
is also full of betrayal, death, neglect, secrets, abuse, incest, rape, slaves and
slave-owners, ... But I have determined that it stop with me. I am determined not to pass this dysfunction
along. And I see the only way out as personal transformation. And I wonder, what does our lineage do to us? Lineage is another integral
piece of a life. How do our ancestors find their way into us? And why?
