Baggage

We all carry baggage of some sort. May try not to but it is inevitable. Some have beautiful, sleek items, some have joyful affairs stuffed full of love, some have pain and illness, and so forth. Mostly I bet, we have a combination to reflect who we are. I try to think of my baggage assortment and all I can see is a ratty, tatty odd ball assortment with one or two gems of potential.

Maybe it was always those gems of potential, or an inner faith if you like, that kept me going through my growing-up years and since. Not that I sit and wallow in my childhood and blame my parents and in fact it is the opposite and far too much that I blame myself time and again for every thing that goes wrong. In the past I have written a fair deal about my mother, who passed away last year, about her undiagnosed Aspergers* qualities that in her may have contributed to her psychological and physical violence towards us all. I have written a bit about my father's complicity in it as he too suffered and then also my brother's added violence towards me as the convenient family scapegoat.

All that adds up to quite a bit of baggage. Some of which has been processed through counselling and blogging and the love of good people around me. I may not talk or write about it much these days but all that stuff is still there. A rag of a rug ever present under my feet that I fear less will be pulled out from under me, but still often fear. It is very difficult living life always being on guard, trying to say things right and not make a mistake, always taking on board the blame, and many more self-destroying behaviours. All this without actually looking or behaving like I am a creepy-trying-to-do-right person. And there you go, I can kick myself for that behaviour too.

It would be easy to say to snap out of it. Very easy. If only.

*Aspergers: please note that I do not for one minute say that people with Aspergers are necessarily violent or horrible. What I do say is that my mother's behaviour is consistent with the diagnosis. She struggled through life trying to cope with it herself and her own violent childhood, though mainly, she was in a world of her own not aware of how others were affected by her behaviour. She was never kept in check (my dad, her husband could have lovingly done that) and so knew no boundaries. I have written a few posts, this being one Parents with aspergers and on account of the many emails I have received over the years about it and what people say, I shall start to put in some labelling on the blog so that other childhood incidents can be more easily found. The reason for that, is that when one goes through this sort of living madness, to read that you are not alone is a Eureka moment. To know it is not all your fault.