A Resilient Hope: Learning that Life Can be Good

I can’t describe to you how I feel. I have struggled with translating feelings and intuitions into words for as long as I can remember.

Relationships are a constant war with communicating and failing to be seen, understood and appreciated as the separate entity I am. Yet, I try, because maybe next time I will have the words in real time, should these feelings ever occur again.

When I read in my horoscope that this year would bring an end to something started 18 to 19 years ago, I first thought of my research project, which resulted in the downloads you can access for free here, including a few book-length solutions to problems and conundrums I encountered.

However, the day I published my second post and prepared to release Resilience Now is the day that my mother died.

It was also 18 to 19 years ago when I decided to offer my house on a lake to my mother and her partner for their vacation, making a space for them in between the renters I had for the rest of the season.

The renters were horrible. One of them brought a dog in violation of my no-dogs policy and wreaked havoc on the place, only to find out that their deposit cheque had bounced. I called them and had words. I told them that I rely on karma, and she’s coming for them.

With my mom, I got a long letter. Eight typed, single-spaced pages that told me that I was wrong about everything and everyone in my life. How could I call my younger sister a thief? she asked. My younger sister had robbed me and my dad, and now, my boyfriend, who was hosting, was out several hundred dollars, and she was denying responsibility yet again.

A Perspective to Protect

I guess if you have nothing to steal, you never discover that trait about your daughter, but I did. I cursed myself for leaving her alone in his house for the few hours that became her window of opportunity.

The tell-tale sign was her bubble gum in our bedroom garbage can, stuck to the side of it for all time. Yet, it wasn’t the first time the evidence was on my side and my truth was being rejected in favour of someone else’s falsehoods. Gaslighting only works until the fog clears and you breathe clean air. Distance helps. Sometimes someone has to yank you out of it.

For me, it was the partner I have today who yanked me out of it. He pulled the letter away and told me not to read it, at least not for a long time.

Four years ago, when I packed up my house after selling it, I came across this final letter once again. It remains the last words I heard from my mom. I tried to read it, but I merely skimmed the accusations, harsh words, and outright untruths, and decided that there was nothing of value in the details.

My younger self would have gotten caught up in pain and anger, denying accusations and correcting untruths, and I’m relieved to have learned that you can’t. Not even lawyers and the justice system have it figured out. Perspective cannot be shifted from the outside.

Never argue. Just walk away, and maybe in time, perspectives will shift and paths will cross again.

I threw the letter out, along with memories of my childhood and some that weren’t even mine, like her wedding album.

An Anxiety to Release

I used to wake in cold sweat that I’d thrown out things that should have been passed along or preserved somehow, but by whom? I’d thrash and chide myself for my efficiency over emotion, and worry that I’d screwed up with no ability to fix it.

Today, I know that there’s someone who cleaned out her house who also removed all the paraphernalia related to my childhood. The baby book that she’d promised me, well into my twenties, that I never got. The realization seems to have balanced my emotional scale.

Today, I’m relieved that I didn’t have to play a role or get involved in what would have been an enormous effort and an emotional toll.

For the little involvement I had in my mother’s life, I knew she had a problem with space, or rather, stuffing as much as she could into whatever she had. She was full of ideas and creativity, and had more projects than time, a fact I pointed out once to her dozens of years ago.

A few years later, my younger sister brought over a bag of fabric from my mom. On one piece of cloth, there was a note that said that I’d wanted it when I was younger, and she should have let me have it then. I unfolded the fabric, and time had not been friendly.

The fabric was unsalvageable. I did not remember the fabric, nor the denial.

In the end, this was the closest thing to an apology that I’d get. Over a piece of fabric that I didn’t remember. Not even enough of it to make a dress.

But it was an apology, and I’ll take what I got.

A Resolution to Hold

I know she had a hard life, a life that wasn’t one she would have crafted or chosen, yet who else is to blame? This is also why I write what I do—to liberate people like my mom, like me—liberation from expectations, society, ideals, and beliefs that don’t serve us well, from lives that create and spread misery.

Death is sad because it takes all hope with it. There is no more hope that the future will unravel any differently. She died of cancer, and knowing it was coming, she did nothing to repair or resolve any issues.

Every day, you have the choice to bounce forward until you have no more days. Every day, you have options. Use them wisely, and because that sounded like a good idea to me, I researched and wrote about the specifics for you to download.

A woman listened to her horse and found that his behaviour was due to a wire buried in his forehead, which would have been painful. At no small expense, I’m sure, yet she doesn’t mention this; she mentions only that she’s glad she listened to him. “Maybe he can learn that life is good,” she says.

May we all learn that life can be good.

My family made me want to kill myself. I felt like nothing, inconsequential and meaningless, worthless and insignificant. Only a tool for others. With that experience and perspective, I decided that life was a lot of work for not much reward, and I wanted out.

I saw solidarity in the lives of enslaved people and serfs and wondered why and how they would endure knowing that they served a meaningless existence.

I asked, and someone told me that introspection and value contemplation, such as mine, are relatively new. Cheers to novelty, because why do some lives matter more than others? Not only globally, but every time you meet someone, they are wondering, assessing, analyzing who is on top.

My parents decided that they would rule. “Because I said so” was one of the detrimental phrases I heard too often. I must have asked too many questions, tested too many boundaries, rebelled a little too much and caused much exhaustion. Maybe they didn’t know the answer themselves, and I’ve learned that no one likes to say, “I don’t know.”

Once, it was the dress that was bought for me to wear to grade eight graduation.

I hated the dress. I made my position clear. If I had to wear it, I would not go. Yet, there is a photo of me hunched over, unsmiling, wearing that cleavage-revealing thing.

My mom wanted to win because “It was only $4.99,” and my dad didn’t think wardrobe was his department.

I lost that battle, yet it was the relationship that died. Shortly after that, I declared that I would join the other side in her divorce battle, and not long after that, I left her house for good.

Like Mother, Like Daughter

When I was young, I heard people say, “Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?” It confused me because I didn’t see how they were mutually exclusive options.

Today I’d say, “Do you want company or do you want to be alone?” Having company is the result of a shared perspective, and if you can’t share it, you must continue on your way alone.

With my mother’s death, I can’t help but notice a significant gap. A hole where an obituary should be, where comments and prayers should be, but there is only one and none from your immediate family. Did you annoy and alienate everyone, just as you did me?

I know an acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. I’ve alienated and annoyed everyone in my life. If I were gone tomorrow, I wouldn’t even register that one comment. I am invisible. As I’ve lived, I will die.

I am jealous of my sisters and their ability to maintain relationships, to convince people that they are in the right when they are not.

My younger sister had everyone convinced that I was to blame for the conflict between us, even though I was the victim. I won the criminal case, but lost my family of origin. It might have been the best thing for me.

After visiting my dad for a week and hearing nothing but brags about my siblings and their welfare, I asked my dad for an apology for the rough end I got of it, and he said, “Why would I apologize? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Apparently, I got a parent who thinks he did the job perfectly. I disagree entirely. I think it’s impossible for anyone to do the job perfectly.

From HR to the Hills

Here’s what I learned from HR: When you feel righteous, and the other party is indignant, what you say is, “I’m sorry you think that…” or “I’m sorry you feel that…” It’s akin to calling the other person stupid, ridiculous, or lacking in some other way, and when you say that, it is supposed to appease the other side.

I had two parents who didn’t know how to appease each other, nor did they show any interest in learning how to do so. I had a manager say to me, “I don’t think you know how to deal with conflict,” as her parting words when she laid me off.

No shit. I’m an autist and as such I’ve an extreme moral compass and hold people to unrealistic expectations. It’s a formula for conflict, and then, as an autist, I can’t navigate the social sensitivities that erupt. The situation I create scares me, and I run as fast and as far as I can.

When you don’t know how to deal with conflict, don’t take a job working for a drama queen. The problem is recognizing the situation until you are in it. It’s usually too late.

Too late, I realize, we are too similar to think differently. Why couldn’t we help each other? Because we couldn’t even help ourselves.

We were both cold and socially incompetent. Moreover, we were frustrated because we had the intelligence to notice that what we lacked was the key ingredient for success.

An intelligence that observes that success requires a thing that you don’t have, can’t learn and can only mimic with limited results if forced to grieve their dreams and settle for struggle.

Like a left-handed person, the world just isn’t built with your orientation or preferences.

With Words and Labels

My mom had said she was a writer, and too late, I want to suck up every word she wrote, yet, I know it’s a void.

A writer went unnoticed into the void with ample warning. Did not want to leave a word. She was not a writer. She was a creator, but words were perhaps not her vehicle.

We call this a poorly labelled soul, as many have experienced, tried to live up to and failed. It doesn’t end well.

Hope is replaced by disappointment. Disappointment is met with anger when you run out of chances to try again. Anger burns bridges (mine does anyway). Burnt bridges create lonesome lifestyles, and the repetitive story results in the sanity to refrain from trying again.

We can only say it ends well by drawing artificial finish lines.

That’s okay – they called me an artist, and I tried, but finally surrendered to my lack of talent and released the constant pressure created by piles of unused supplies.

Who was she? I hope she knew. I know I didn’t, but I hope to meet myself while I still have time.

In life, growth has only come after I needed it. I wasn’t a strong enough person to deal with the family I was born into, and I had to escape it to find the confidence and clarity of my personality and boundaries, which are unique to me.

First, you fail; then, you grow to fill the gap. If you never fail, you won’t succeed. Failures are opportunities to become smarter, stronger, and more adult.

Life’s Lesson

I hope we can all learn to judge choices by their outcomes and to stop defining successful lives by the number of children you produce and the capital you acquire, and instead focus on what you have to conquer to create a life outside the formulas, rather than celebrating those who live within them.

To risk sounding like a Liberal, it’s the difference that matters because the battle to create a new category is more work than rising to the top of one that’s already well defined.

Celebrating and searching for difference eliminates competition and makes space for everyone, and that’s not the world we have today. But maybe one day.