From the Broken to the Sublime

Image courtesy NASA

Since my revelation earlier this week, I have been inundated with people who have not only offered words of support and encouragement, but also their own heartbreaking stories of abuse, neglect, and abandonment. Stories about parents who should have protected their children, but instead couldn't fix their own issues and resorted to abuse. The stories are all strikingly similar; parents are dealing with their own issues and took it out on their kids. Kids who were the ones who shouldn't have had to shoulder the burden of their parents' emotional scars, but were taught otherwise. We learned that parents aren't to be trusted for emotional well being or support. Some of us came to the realization at a young age, and thus had to grow up way before their years. Others had family who appeared to support them, only to reveal in their early adulthood that their love was conditional on them fitting a prescribed mold the parents decided they needed to fit.

My heart breaks for each and every one of these (now) adults. Each and every one of us struggle with the emotional scars of our experiences. Yet, somehow, we have all found a way to move forward; to be more than the sum of our upbringing. To figure out how to make ourselves whole, despite the numerous holes that have been left in our souls. We have looked at our emotional scars and have decided that, although they make up the fabric of our being, they don't have to define us. Some of us are parents; some are not. We are all in various stages of acceptance at our situations. Some are in the throes of trying to salvage what remains of the the parent-child relationship. Some of us have realized that there is nothing left to salvage; that it's better to write it off than try to fix that which is unfix-able.

What I have learned through all of this is that humans are far more resilient than I could have ever imagined. Many of us have overcome our parents' betrayal. We have realized that we are worth more than our experiences have led us to believe. It has been a humbling and encouraging experience to realize that not only am I not alone, but that so many have had to overcome their experiences to become some really amazing human beings. For those of us who are parents, that struggle becomes multiplied, if only because we have to overcome our lived experiences to realize that they weren't what was needed to create healthy, thriving adult human beings. We have to struggle with our built-in, gut-check experiences to realize that what has been so ingrained in our minds is not the way to protect our own loved ones from repeating the cycle. So, for every survivor who has overcome, I humbly bow down to you. You give me hope that it is possible to objectively observe, evaluate, and discard the default setting that was prescribed to us by the very people who were supposed to protect us.