Understanding my journey
As I was reviewing my
Facebook timeline yesterday, I came a across a quote that I could relate to in
every way, with respect to being afflicted and maybe not so much as it reflects
on others.
I have paraphrased
the quote a bit and having done a search, the providence is unknown.
“Not everyone will understand your
journey. That's fine. It's not their journey to make sense of. It's yours to
live your own life.”
My own journey
My journey as a life
has been easy at the start, exciting at other times, interesting and intriguing
at certain points and I dare say, difficult and challenging in the recent past.
My journey has literally
and exclusively been mine even if I have walked part of the way in company or
have been helped along to the way to reach the milestones that dot the road to
a destination yet unknown.
Many parts of the
journey some fully appreciate and other parts people are literally completely
clueless, they are the secrets and recesses in life that have happened and
become what I usually refer to as the story.
My hidden journey
Most interestingly,
the greater part of my journey is literally unknown to my blood relations. For
the affinity we might have, the truth is they cannot even begin to understand
the difficult and challenging parts of my journey. Where some might have been
interested in my journey, they seem to have a path they expect me to ply to a
destination they have chosen and hope that I put my vehicle on that road
without quibble – one such journey is the one of marriage.
I put paid to that
suggestion in one clear statement in a conversation with my dad a few weeks
ago, I categorically stated, it is not my life, the vehemence with which I made
that statement seemed to both shocked and have effect, but it might well not be
the end of that matter.
There were parts of
that conversation that felt like checking if my balls had already descended
into my ball sack, the ignorance of three decades of this journey will provide
accommodation for disrespect and contempt, it comes with the territory.
My private journey
The truth is, the
parts of the journey that they even think they know is hardly the journey that
was my reality, there are elements of depression and sexual abuse that I have
only better understood long after I was a victim in the care and the protection
of people assigned to care for us.
However, one journey
that has never been understood at all is the one where my life was almost
extinguished by cancer in 2009 and the process of losing everything within
three years of that.
They might have an
inkling, probably an idea, but hardly the knowledge not the experience. It is
not like anyone asked the questions that will elicit the responses that will
intimate them of the reality of things. Yet, if this knowledge were shared
unprompted, it will almost read like a pity party.
My unknown journey
Then again, in my
leaving one of my homes, for my homes are many, I probably abandoned them and
conversely, I should feel no hurt even when in my hour of need I felt I was
somewhat abandoned. A stoicism and desire to chart my own course has always
driven most of what I have sought to do and so in my rise and my fall and my
rise again, I am just living my own life.
The truth is, they
probably will never understand my journey, I do not expect them to understand
any part of my journey, but where conflict does arise is where in their
journeys which for each individual is unique and different, they forget that as
long as you are not walking in the same shoes, on the same road, with the same
mind and in the same person as the other, you might catch a glimpse of that
journey, but you may still never make sense of that journey.
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