8. A Good Place To Be...

Right now I am feeling good. The horrible pressure that often drives me to seek out others has been seemingly banished to another realm.

Perhaps it's gone forever. Perhaps not. I do not know.

What I do know is this: I'm getting to know me. To most this would seem an uneventful thing, but to myself, to others who have gone through what I've been through, it's almost astounding.

To understand you need to see it through my eyes. From before I can remember, from the moment I was born, I was never really alone. Someone was always there. That someone was my mother. More than that, I was never allowed to be. After all, how can an extention of her become its own entity, its own being with individual thought, ideas, moods? It simply doesn't work.

This is why, even when I had left home, my sister had left home, her influence in our lives was as strong as if we were little children, still completely dependent on her for all the basic things in life. She was able, from hundreds of kilometres away, to rule our lives. She could stop us seeing our father with one phone call. With simply the promise there would be hell to pay if she found out we disobeyed her.

Yes, imagine being like that, and discovering yourself at the same time. It couldn't work like that for me. And when I was able to wiggle out from under her oppressive thumb, the thought of finding me was daunting. Not a conscious thought, but a thought there, lurking in the back of me, all the same.

The what ifs were too big, too frightening to examine closely. I had essentially been another part of my mother for most of my life and now I was alone and every single thing about that was frightening. Children learn their behaviours from home and my home wasn't a very good place for learning things correctly. The fear of being just like her was there, big and bold and loud, and I knew I didn't want to examine too closely, just in case I found an answer I didn't want.

So I hid among others, cultivating the mask I wore at home as who I was, running from the gawping maws of Alone. Alone meant lonely, abandoned, rejected, failure. My mother's illness bred those feelings in her when she was left alone and it was a frightening thing to see. Some of that had spilled into me.

There was also the idea of being alone as a time to concentrate on yourself, your feelings, and it wasn't something I was comfortable with. That kind of behaviour wasn't condoned in our house. Focus on my mother was. Anything else was selfish, self-centred, egotistical, wrong. How could I really do that now? Without guilt?

So I found others to concentrate on, to become my latest obsession. Obsession is easy, a one way street, the rules set in stone. Always the same ending of heartache and pain and disolusionment. Something I knew well. No set up to be flung, shattering, to the floor. With the focus so completely outward there was virtue in caring for someone else more than myself, there was safety in lack of self-examination, it was selfless rather than selfish. Now I see it was selfless in the worst possible sense of the word.

The need to run from self-examination, self-discovery. was so ingrained I found another easy way out, through drinking. Another aspect of this favoured crutch. If I drank enough I wouldn't have to be with me, deal with me.

Problem is, no matter how far you run, what drama or heartache you immerse yourself in, how much you drink or fuck yourself up so you no longer are able to think, in the end, you are still going to be there. You are never going away. In the end, you need to be alone, and make some discoveries, for better or worse.

At first, I longed for the man I lost with such wild heartache. I still miss him, but I'm at peace. I know there is love there still, and I hope we will work this out, but this is paramount. Even writing this, I feel that old guilt. But I sqaush it down without remorse as I say, no matter what he wants or needs, it's my needs, my wants that have to come first. Because I'm the only one I'm in control over. I'm the only one who can truly look out for me. It's no one else's responsibility.

From where I sit, deliberately alone, after the pain and fear and anxiousness has passed, I am able to see that what I have done is search for someone to give me what my mother never gave me as a child. All that unconditional love, affection, stability, support, that I crave, have always craved, will only now come from one person now, and that's myself. A hard, harsh lesson to learn, but one I have accepted fully. The moment I accepted that, I felt a strange peace come over me. I could clearly see all I had done wrong in the past.

I will not blame myself for those mistakes, no matter how much I want to. I wasn't in the place to see it, to know any better. Now I do.

And I can see, no matter how much I love and want to be with someone, I can't do that until I'm in the place I need to be. I feel it close. Sometimes I think I can almost touch that place, grasp the cool grass, smell the sweet flowers, but not yet. I owe this to myself to get there completely. And I will. Soon.

Yes, I miss him and want to be with him more than I can almost say, but I can still feel the love from myself, and this time it is true and untainted. I need to nurture myself to reach the place I can express that and, as importantly, receive love in return without that old, horrible fear. I know there will always be fear and doubt, but I am learning to control it, make it healthy rather than consuming and destructive.

Being alone is discovering self and it's something that is endlessly interesting and intriguing and completely therapeutic. I enjoy it. My room is slowly becoming a reflection of what I am growing to be within.

I am realising that aspects of me are like my mother, not my mother, and that is the most important difference of all. I refuse to allow myself to hate those aspects, because to know yourself you have to love and accept all parts. You can change and modify the ones you don't like, the ones that need to be changed, but you must love them, because they are you. Those aspects have brought me to this time and place in my life and they will be changed, modified, made acceptable in the life of the new, emerging me. It's good to be able to see those aspects, recognise them, know where they come from and why.

I would never have been able to know any of this without this time spent alone.

I look forward now to spending time with myself. I know there will be times I am so beside myself I will wonder how I can stand it. But I know that, too will pass. I know how to deal with it without obliterating it from my mind through drugs and alcohol. I am learning all the time.

This is such a good place to be.