Photo by Kellie Shepherd Moeller on Unsplash
Each of us has our own ‘personal narrative’. It reflects how we see ourselves, and so also how we see the world. For example, some people speak with a timidness. They talk about how they’re nothing special. To them, they had a ‘boring’ upbringing.
It’s not a surprise that such people aren’t particularly proud about where they’re from. Nor do they tend to be as confident either.
Compare that to someone who has a much more involved story about how they grew up. Their tales of upbringing can sound like a dazzling adventure.
The big irony is that these two stories could be the exact same person. It’s not really the history that matters, but the story crafted from it.
A tale of adversity can be a framing to demonstrate resilience. A tale of a calm and loving upbringing can be one that highlights stability and warmth. Ultimately, it’s down to the author, which also happens to be ourselves.
This is something I’ve understood. I’ve worked hard to shift my personal narrative from one that feels quite tragic to one of growth. Yet the last few weeks have also demonstrated a further layer that I never realised. My personal narrative was missing large segments.
For those of us who have grown up in different countries or societies, it can be far harder to connect the dots between everything that happened. I never realised how much that was the case for me. Whilst others could recall their earlier memories without an issue, I would often find it very difficult.
I’m not talking about normal amnesia of early years before the age of 6. I’m talking about big blanks between the ages of 8 to 16.
For some time, I ended up giving up figuring out this part of myself. Try as I might, I could not remember something that was not arriving in my head. Simply thinking harder didn’t work. I felt like I had hit a dead end.
Still, there are other ways to uncover the truth. What I ended up following was not my mind, but my body. The mind did not know where to look. It was grasping at bits of information that I had heard second-hand from other people. but my body had the reverberation of feelings. The process was allowing these to be experienced. When the feelings flowed, so did the memories. Once I had figured this out, It didn’t actually take long for a bunch of memories to flood back. Things that had transpired from around my early teens have come back.
Following the feelings meant also experiencing them. And it was painful. There’s no way of diminishing this fact. It’s not ‘normal’ for people to not remember their childhoods like has been the case for me. The very simple explanation is that most people experience their early lives in a more stable and functional way. I did not, and this affected my deeply. This is something I’ve had to come to terms with to reintegrate those memories.
What I learnt was that there was no ‘single’ incident that I was repressing. Instead, it was piecing together a mish-mash of events and circumstances. It was seeing that I had been at an age where I did not understand what was going on. The movement between countries, confusion between languages and my ‘different way of thinking’ – i.e. my sensitivity and autism – meant I felt without guidance.
It’s also important that I not beat around the bush. The communication in my family was also very poor, and this had a detrimental affect on my wellbeing. I did not understand why we moved to Bangladesh for two years. No one actually explained it to me. I think I was implicitly meant to understand this through osmosis from my older brothers. It is only now in adult life that I learnt that the aim of us moving their was to learn more about our Bangladeshi culture.
Uncovering such experiences is a delicate balance. It can be pretty easy to fall into rage and anger. I do not plan on blasting people about the events of 20 years ago. It helps no one, and only causes pain.
But having some internal anger is good. It revitalises my senses by rekindling that internal fire. I’ve had challenges feeling and expressing anger. Now, I understand why – I’ve been repressing plenty. So let the flame burn.
Bu it’s also very important to see the past for what it really was. I’ve chronically underplayed the effect it has had on me. Eventually this comes back to bite, which for me was through a complete body shutdown.
I’m now in a period that is best described as grieving. Certain illusions I’ve had about my life have been broken. There is a shock when core tenets of your life turn out to not be true.
But I also know that this is the process. It is through the purification of our false beliefs that we can truly let go of the past.
This is how we achieve freedom.