Hope

“Unless you have suffered and wept, you really don’t understand what compassion is, nor can you give comfort to someone who is suffering. If you haven’t cried, you can’t dry another’s eyes. Unless you’ve walked in darkness, you can’t help wanderers find the way. Unless you’ve looked into the eyes of menacing death and felt its hot breath, you can’t help another rise from the dead and taste anew the joy of being alive.”
—Takashi Nagai. Quoted from the book, “A Song for Nagasaki”.

If I could go back and talk to my younger self, at about age 19 or 20...I'd tell her to stop worrying so much. I'd ask her to look ahead to the future without fear. I'd tell her that all of the things that happened up to that point were what made her ready for the future. I'd tell her that she really didn't need to fight the battle against the priest who took over her family because in time, he was going to self destruct and show those able to see that he was much like the wizard in the wizard of Oz...not actually capable of more than blowing smoke and hiding in a castle. Every time he told me, "I'll break you. You're nothing." I could have had a vision in my head of what was to come for him. I don't mean that I hope he is in hell, but if he is...I wouldn't doubt that God knew what he was doing when he let him go there.

My hope for the next many years of my life is to leave all of that behind. It has been my hope since all of it happened. I find myself running in circles away from as far as I can go, only to find it in front of me again. I want a life free of the shame of being raised in a family where a priest was allowed to hurt me and others. I wish to be free of the shame I feel when I think of the money he diverted from the church to keep my mom in the golden handcuffs she felt made her powerless and that I felt made her blind. It wasn't our money. I had no right to live off of it. I resented so much the part-time jobs and babysitting money I earned while sacrificing any time I might have had for after-school clubs or activities. Looking back, I feel like that was the only honest money that I could actually feel good about having spent. So it was a blessing.

I feel so much shame about the ways that my anger and sadness changed me. I lost the ability to focus on anything that didn't bring me immediate pleasure. Being with friends was fun and so I put everything in to spending as much time as I could with them. I liked being admired by boys and so if one showed me the slightest interest...I gave everything. It never occurred to me to hold back long enough to find out whether I liked him. Doing homework didn't feel fun and so I let my grades slide. I enjoyed feeling thin and so savored the feeling of hunger rather than eating. I liked pushing myself to great lengths to avoid food. I burned myself out and experienced clinical depression which could not have been helped by my refusal to eat. Even though I enjoyed hearing people say that they wished they could be so thin, I didn't like the way I looked. I felt ugly, terrible and out of place all through my teenage and young adult years. The worst of it was that I felt helpless to change these feelings.

I have spent most of my years since trying to be the opposite of what I was growing up. I have been through years of deep devotion to religion and not always in a healthy way. I went through dozens and dozens of self-help books. I went through years and years of therapy. I have been hospitalized for depression and stayed while knowing that the circles of friends I once had dwindled each time I allowed the shame of my condition to be known. I knew that while getting this help I was becoming less employable. The weight of stigma is heavy. I didn't ask for an abusive home to grow up in or ptsd or a priest to be in my life. Still, my inability to live through those things without making a fool of myself at times earned me a lot of rejection and even more shame. I'm not saying I didn't make a fool of myself many times...I did. I just don't know that other people who didn't go through the same experiences would have known how to do better. I also don't know that the things I did were so greatly different from the things others do. I never got arrested. I never ran through the streets naked claiming that I was Jesus or anything. I wasn't violent or destructive. I just let myself become very sad and lost control of the sadness to the point that I saw no way out. I clung to hard to people who didn't care the way I did for them. Sometimes I got angry and yelled. Sometimes I wrote long emails asking why things were so fucked up. I must have looked exceedingly desperate for affirmation and friendship and love. I was all of those things. I behaved like a person who had no core of feeling that she mattered.

Now that I am a mother whose children are soon going to be entering the middle school and then high school years, I want to know that my past won't bury their futures. I am looking for hope. I want to find a way to feel that everything I have learned will in some way be of benefit to them and not a noose around their necks. I don't want them to feel the kind of pressure I did to be pretty, to be accepted. I will be happy if they are those things...but I don't want them to feel I wouldn't love them unless they were those things. They are smart, kind and loving. I couldn't ask for more from them.

My hope is that whatever my struggles were growing up...they will help me attend to the needs of my daughters as they grow. My hope is that the crazy in my family will be able to skip over their generation. If I had kept everything inside, I don't know that this would have been possible even this long in their lives. I didn't have others telling me that there is no reason to blame yourself for your genetics, but there are ways to deal with mental illness effectively if you face it head on. I had people in my life who told me to not embarrass them by showing signs of being defective and to keep secrets hidden no matter how they poisoned my life. My hope is that even if my daughters inherit from me the worst of the demons my family seems to be afflicted with, my husband's acceptance and love and my own will be enough to help them go further in life than I have been able to go. I don't think that would be possible if I kept all of this a secret. I wouldn't be helping anyone if I did that. All of this has always been bigger than me in my mind. My only weapon for getting out from under the shame of it has been to accept that it is real and go on building the other parts of my life. Yes, I am crazy. However, I also really like to read. Yes, I can go through bouts of deep depression. However, I have created a loving home for my family. Yes, I have been what my mom calls a terrible daughter. My sisters say I am a terrible sister. That's true. At the same time, I am also a faithful, loving wife. My children say I am a good mom. Those relationships that I failed in as a daughter, sister or others...they would have been so wonderful to keep forever. Still, they never would have meant more to me than being a good wife and mother. So I have hope.