A Resilient Fracture: When Your Personal History Changes

As an eleven-year-old child, I was angry I didn’t have a voice in the entire affair. I might have been born to take that stand, point at my mother, and set her free from duties and a situation she never wanted.

So why didn’t it happen?

Someone taught me the f-word, which alleviated my pain in the short term. Later, I decided that it was an inherent bias in the capability of mothers. With this explanation, I put my anger to rest and made peace with this sharp, unwanted turn that my personal history had taken.

About the abuse, I assumed that my dad never knew what his wife did to his children. We’d never been sat down collectively and told anything. Gossip and secrets were how my family rolled. Social power was extracted and maintained through information and access to it. Such is how you learn what a lesbian is, not from your mother, but from the school playground. It really sucked to find out that way.

After all, I figured that had he known, he would not have complied so willingly with the decision of the court. Someone suggested that if he had brought it up, then someone would have needed to testify. Surely, I thought, my dad would have known I would have willingly done that, despite too many assumptions that I don’t have my words. I’ve always had the hard ones.

It was the soft ones that were difficult to find. I was learning how to make the message less blunt, less direct, and the court is supposed to be able to handle the truth. You don’t have to manage around fragile egos, mistaken perceptions, and the propensity of people to jump to conclusions and take you out of the conversation.

Invisible Foundational Fractures

Unfortunately, I got it wrong. Over beer, my personal history changed. I found out that my dad knew someone could testify. More, he knew it would likely change the outcome, but decided not to mention it, to spare us the experience.

Spare me? Decisions made for me, and this I couldn’t stand, especially when they don’t work out the way I wanted. Spare me a short-term pain that ensures years of more pain? This logic from an engineer?

I was baffled, on top of newfound anger, but I was too busy to process it. Back to work I went.

When you break a bone, it’s obvious. You know you need rest; other people see a reason for it. When you break your personal history, it’s only obvious that you are no longer behaving the way that you used to act. Those who care and notice will ask, “Is everything alright?”

You will rage and say, “Of course it is!” The absurdity of your answer says everything to everyone but you.

Will you notice and act appropriately? Or did you do as I did, and pretend that you are keeping calm while you try to carry on?

Although you may do better than I, years later, you may trace it all back to wishing that you’d asked for the right help right when life fractured. Or had someone who loved you enough to force you to stop, sit down and talk about it.

Because if he wanted custody as much as he said he did, all he would have had to do was let me testify.

Stopping and Rewinding

Prior to this knowledge, I had made an assumption: that he thought it was just that one time it happened to my older sister. When it did, he came running.

To find out that he knew requires rewinding a couple of decades and updating the entire narration. It means that an entire spider web of new questions opens up – it’s not a matter of just one trajectory that changes. It’s every decision that you made because of that assumption. Your personal history, going back years.

It’s the decision to forgive the court system because they are always biased and old-school, and it takes rebellious people to force it to progress. My dad was always a good soldier, taking his orders and delivering his salute. The fact that he did not appeal, or even seem to fight hard, wasn’t to be held against him – he was always dutiful and obedient.

It’s the decision to become an engineer instead of a lawyer, because it’s a game of competition and winners and losers, and not what is right and what is wrong.

For the latter debate, there is only science, because that’s the only place you can still get a perfect score when the teacher hates you; correct answers in English and social sciences are a matter of debate and not logic, and therefore, for a rebel like me, there is only science.

So many decisions, going back over more than a decade, and what I learned is that I have no desire for secrets, gossip, and dependency in my life because it’s only going to hurt.

A New Personal History

When you break your personal history, you will mourn the loss, but don’t ignore the gift of the new lens of perception, like glasses for your soul.

Now your shaky foundation can be repaired, instead of continuing on a path of looming collapse. Things can be saved, and better, built stronger, taller, and more likely to reach the castles you built in the clouds.

Fractures can create a more beautiful object than the original, as is the Japanese principle of Kintsukuroi. Wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of appreciating beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

In life, these fractures take you from the mainstream path of expectations to one that is perfectly suited for you, and all your own. A better commute, a better view, and one where you aren’t only focused on, “Are we there yet?” Maybe you haven’t found your life, until you’ve found the perfection in the fracture.

You need time and thoughtful dedication to do that. For me, as for many, the silence and stoppage of the pandemic was an invitation we’d been able to avoid for decades. A resilient experience is seeing the beauty in the changes it forced, the light it shed, and the action it inspired.

But we don’t need world events to teach us that slowing down and going inward to evaluate, inspect, and re-evaluate is time well spent. As a young engineer, I had no time for this, and no value for it either, but life had taught me the power of slowing down. It’s power, because to rush around until you collapse is the default mode of living. It works, until it doesn’t.