6 years ago, I started on a journey. When I started, I had no idea where I was going or how it would end. In fact, several times I thought it was over, I told people it was over, but deep down I knew that was just wishful thinking. Other times, I was certain the journey would cost me my life, or my mind. But that too was just wishful thinking of another sort.
I was compelled forward by a feeling that I didn’t fully understand. In fact, several of the decisions I made throughout I could not have even explained at the time I made them, I just knew they were the decisions I had to make. I would not even say they were “right”, they were just the next turn of the page, the next bit of the narrative, as if I were a character in a book and the writer was crafting a story I couldn’t quite understand.
I think I understand it now. I know “why.”
It was so I could share my story.
I was born in hell. Of course, I mean that metaphorically because metaphor is the only way to really understand this truth. Our mothers are our creators, they are our God, they give us life and exercise complete power over us when we enter the world.
And my mother hated me. Because she hated me, she tortured me. She physically, emotionally, medically and sexually abused me. She brought others in to do the same. She took pleasure in my pain and overwhelmed me with feelings of guilt and shame.
There is no better word to describe a world where your God takes pleasure in your suffering than hell.
It lasted until my stepfather, Lyn, entered my life. He loved her and she loved him. He also loved me, and his love protected me. And with that love, I escaped hell.
I created a life for myself and a family. I raised children and had a successful career. But there was something nagging at me. I was lying to myself; I didn’t belong in this world. I didn’t deserve this world. It ate at me, until one day, I couldn’t take it anymore.
As my stepfather lay dying, afraid of my mother, I realized what I had to do. I had to go back into hell and face who I was.
I sacrificed everything. Every dollar I had earned, every bit of safety and security I had established for myself, every relationship that was built on the altar of shame, they all had to be sacrificed.
And underneath all of that, I found who I really am.
I am you. And because I made this journey, no one else has to.
A few days ago, I felt like I was approaching the end. So, I sat down to write in my journal. In fact, I felt I reached the destination I was describing as I wrote. The writing, it seemed, was the why.
This is what I wrote:
I often wonder what I would have been without by trauma, without my suffering. And the knee jerk “spiritually evolved” answer is that I would lack the experience that granted many of my insights and all of my wisdom. I needed my trauma, I value my trauma. I am grateful for my trauma, that line of thinking suggests.
But more and more I think that train of thought perpetuates a lie. A lie that my mother told me when should rape me and then buy me a gift. Or tell me how good I was after the abuse ended. That lie, I think, is one of the most pervasive and insidious lies ever told. The lie, that in order to deserve nice things you must pay the price in suffering, is everywhere.
We wear it as a badge of honor, our suffering. We think that our capacity to suffer is our capacity to enjoy. To create. To be worthy of love. It causes us all to “wait” for the good at the cost of the present moment, literally the only thing that’s real.
When we are born, we don’t know this. And we are the most powerful being in any room. People stop to look at us. People’s heart’s melt when they see us. They rush to bring us anything we want. They want to offer us gifts and we are not indebted and nor do they desire us to be.
Then our parents give us the lie, because they believe it too. In fact they will intentionally inflict suffering on us, because they think that will improve us or our prospects in life. In no other relationship is one expected to induce suffering on the other, except when we are dealing with the purest and most delicate among us. Our children.
And as children we look at these people, far stronger, far more powerful than us in our minds, who feel compelled to hurt us, despite the fact that we love them completely and that we would give anything to make them happy. In order to reconcile that feeling, we tell ourselves the lie. They hurt us because they love us. Because the only way to be “good” is to suffer. They are making us good. My suffering makes me good.
But that’s not the truth. The truth is that they hurt us because they are far less powerful than we are. They have to train us to limit our power so they can control us.
Each bit of trauma is an attempt to dim our light, a shroud draped over us. But the thing is no amount of darkness can extinguish light. We may fear it and we may hide it from ourselves, but it is still there. The fact that it can still shine in the darkest abyss is not a gift the abyss bestows upon the light. It is testimony to the eternal luminescence of the light.
If there is one gift at all of my experience it is that knowledge. The knowledge that my trauma did not give me my power or strength, it forced me to reveal it. That light exists in every single one of us and it can withstand anything. Suffering separates us from it. But no matter how far away from it we get, it still guides us, pushes us toward becoming the thing we truly are.
The light itself.
Love.
My mother did not make me better at love. She separated me from it. And the power that exists in me, the power of the light brought all the pieces back together, in spite of her, not because of her.
I don’t deserve good because I suffered. I deserve it because it is my birthright. It is yours too, and we will receive it the moment we stop fighting it.
I was cast into hell and I have returned. None of us ever need to go back.