Living a lie!

Living a lie!(Zelda) LOOKING BACK.
If I close my eyes, I can visualise the day that I told myself that by the age of forty, certain things in my life had to change.
Some might call this a midlife crisis, I on the other hand had simply had enough of the way life had managed to sneak passed me, and I was not living my life to the fullest.
Something was seriously missing and I wanted to know what? I came to realise that my life was a lie. My happiness was a lie, my perfect marriage was a lie. Simply put, I was my greatest enemy because I chose not to see what was right in front of me all these years!
I had dreams that I had set aside for one day when I got the time, or when I had the money, or better still, acquired a degree of motivation to lift my now ever expanding butt off the couch, and go and do all the things that I had wanted to do up to this stage of my life.
Little did I know what I had set in motion! It was as if the universe itself woke up and said “okay, challenge accepted. If it’s a change you want, then it’s a change you are going to get!”
Within a matter of a few weeks, I went from this average thirty nine year old to a certifiably insane forty year old nut case.
My once mundane normal run of the mill life style got turned upside down and inside out. Life as I knew it was about to change, and with it came a whole new set of challenges and opportunities to grow as a person or self-destruct.
How I was going to handle these changes and challenges was totally up to me.
Far too often people had told me that I had changed over the years, and that I had lost the sparkle in my eyes, the softness in my face.
I no longer laughed with ease and from the gut like I used to.
This got me thinking. When did it all change? Was it gradual or did it happen overnight? I even tried to pin point that exact stage if my life when things took a turn in the direction I had now found myself in, and the sad thing is that there were so many defining moments in my life that I couldn’t.
The only difference was that the universe had now put me in a position that I could no longer ignore the changes and the woman I had become.

So much in my life had changed, which was the catalysts in me becoming the person I am today.
Anyone who tells you that we are not defined by external circumstances, in my opinion either don’t know what they’re talking about, haven’t done their research properly and don’t have all the facts.
Yes to a point, we are responsible for the person we are or become, however at what point does one’s soul slowly become so eroded by what life throws at us, that we lose track of our true self?
After how many disappointments, heartaches, failures and pain does it eventually take to give up and say ‘enough is enough?’
It’s always easy to pass judgement on others when your walk has been an easy one, when things have always gone your way and when life has been fair, and you have never had to struggle a day in your life.
How do you tell someone that has not had a proper meal in days to have faith and believe? Or a person who is about to lose everything, that they must not worry, everything will be ok, and they just need to have faith?
If you have not walked a mile in their steps, who are we to think we know or even remotely understand what their inner turmoil is, and most of all, who gives any of us the right to judge?
I recall knowing a lady whom was about to lose her home. She said that if one more person said to her that they would pray for her and she must have faith, that she would physically attach them. She did not need to hear that.
I asked her what she would have wanted to hear, and what would help her to cope with what she was going through, and she told me that she never knew, but what she did know was that she did not want to hear about having hope in the midst of what seemed a hopeless situation.
Ultimately she did lose everything, but being the resilient person she was, she later proceed to turn her life around, pick up the pieces of her shattered existence, and start over.
I applaud her for that. Not many of us are brave and determined enough to. So many just throw the towel in and accept the cards that life has dealt them.
This got me thinking, why did these people say those things to her? Was it to appease their own guilt for having things so easy, help them to sleep better at night, or because it fed their ego to feel as if they actually gave a hoot about another personas suffering?
The irony is that I used to do the same. I would tell people that I would pray for them, but no sooner were they out of sight, and I had all but forgotten about their problems and need for prayer.
Needless to say the ‘prayer’ part never happened, and this was another thing that I would later find myself repenting for. Even if a simple “God help them please” prayer passed my lips, or a silent prayer in my mind right there and then – I would make sure I had actually kept my word and prayed as I said I would. I wanted to become a better version of the person I had become.

If anything, life had come to teach me not to judge or blame, despite my circumstances, although it would have been easier to blame everyone else, the universe, God, the man on the street, the person who did me wrong, my parents and even the pastor. Would it have changed my circumstances? No! It may have made me feel a little vindicated for an hour or so, but it would have just been a short term, and would have done nothing to resolve the circumstances I had found myself in.
People often ask why we go through trials in our life? Honestly, I have no clue, but I choose to believe it is to learn, be it to learn self-love, compassion, humanity and most of all, to not judge what we do not know or understand?
I have pondered so many things lately, and questioned so much.
I recall someone once said, that in life we need to seek first to understand, and then to be understood. This is all good and well, if both parties are willing to try this approach, but when it is only the one person trying this approach, you find yourself fighting a futile battle that will only leave you exhausted and defeated.
There comes a time, when you accept things for what they are, and deal the hand that life has dealt you, no matter how unfair it may seem, you still have to play the game to the best of your ability because surrender is not an option.

Where to begin?
To understand how I found myself at this crossroad in my life, I understood that I needed to go back to the beginning.
Maybe it was during my childhood that things started to go wrong, but I can honestly not recall much of it. Statistics have shown that most (almost 70% of people) cannot remember our childhood. I think my subconscious brain has suppressed a lot of my memories that were just too painful to remember. The odd one that had surfaced had not been pleasant at all, and I very quickly pushed them back into the dark crevices of my mind. I was not ready emotionally to deal with these repressed memories, however a time would come, that I could no longer suppress them, and they would come oozing out like a infected wound that had not been treated properly, and been allowed to fester too long.
My teenage years were ‘tumultuous’ to say the least. I was a rebel without a cause. I made it my mission to defy my teachers and authority in general.
My mother and I were like two raging bulls, constantly charging and provoking each other. We both had strong personalities, and neither of us was willing to give an inch.
The irony of it all is that years later we would find ourselves running a business together, and it actually worked. Maybe it was because we had both mellowed over the years, or we had just come to the place of making peace with our own unique personalities and chose our fights better.

I grew up an only child. My mother was very career driven, so I spent most of my childhood alone in a big house, which to this day, I am convinced was haunted, so I would spend most of my days sitting outside waiting for her to come home, because I was too scared to go inside. I often sat outside until way after 6pm, even in the dead of winter, because I would rather brave the cold than the ghost or entity that seemed to lurk in the dark corners of the house.
Now, as an adult, having been through hell and back, and dealt with human demons, the unknown does not scare me, so I would kick the unwelcome guest out in a heartbeat, but as a child, fear of what I did not understand, would not allow me to conquer the unknown.

Being so goal and career driven, my mother was incredibly strict. In many ways I was a pawn in her game of life. I had to live the life she never got to live growing up, and do all the things she wanted to do, but never could, whether I enjoyed it or not. I was quite an introvert, but this never stopped her from entering me in beauty competitions, despite her knowing how standing in front of hundreds of people was so overwhelmingly scary and stressful for me, yet she still entered me.
I remember each time I was forced to do that, a part of me would crawl deeper and deeper into this abyss of emotional turmoil.
If I wasn’t being forced to do the things she wanted, then I had to do the things her friends or families children were doing. There was this unspoken competition between the mothers, and the children were the competitors’ in their games. Comparison was our greatest enemy, and our parents used this weapon with such ease.
We would constantly be ‘compared’ to how well someone else’s children did, however we would not dare compare how cool their parents were in comparison to our parents were, as we valued our lives above all.

As children we grew up being told that “children are to be seen and not heard”, so we seldom got to express our true emotions, and as a result, a lot of us carried these very suppressed emotions into adulthood, which explains why so many of us had to do inner child healing work at some point in our lives.
We were never truly allowed to be children. We were thrown into the throws of adulthood from an early age.
Many of us had to learn to cook, iron and clean by the age of 10. These days, there are some 8 year olds who can’t even fasten their own shoe laces. Some of us were expected to earn our own pocket money by 12 and be married by 18 years old and raising our own children by 20, thereby repeating this endless cycle, because our parents felt they had done their fair share of raising us, forgetting that we had basically raised ourselves in most cases. We could not wait to leave home as soon as it was legally possible, to break free and live this life of freedom we had envisaged in our minds eye.

Even crying would be met with the predictable “don’t make me come over there and give you something to cry about” comment.
We were left to our own devices most of the time. As long as we were doing what was expected of us, we were pretty much on our own.
There was no such thing as TV, play station or play dates. The park was our play station, and the old rusty swing and metal slide that would literally sear the meat off your legs as you slid down, was the only thing we needed.
On weekends our parents would throw us out the door to fend for ourselves until dusk, when in my mother’s case, she would stand outside the property wall and bellow for me to come home.
Upon hearing my mother, every child in the neighbourhood who had been hanging out at the park, would scatter in every direction, fleeing for their lives.
If you came home with half your knee cap scrapped off from falling off your bicycle, you were firstly scolded for messing on the floor, and then told to patch it up and move on.

My mother had a look that would slice into your soul and carve you up like a well versed butcher. She did not need to say anything if we were out in public. The ‘look’ alone was all that was needed to jolt me back into line, because I knew if I chose to ignore the ‘look’, that my life was about to get a whole lot uglier the minute I stepped foot into my room.
There were many nights as a teenager, that I would arrange to go out with my friends, and my mother would swoop into my room, open my cupboard and proceed to scoop all my clothing out onto the floor and tell me that when it was repacked to her satisfaction, I could go out.
This was just another way that she would try to show me she was in control and would ultimately always have the final say as long as I lived there.
This behaviour would ultimately drive me into the arms of a man whom I married for all the wrong reasons later in life. My desperate need to escape this ongoing psychological mind games she would play, drove me to make a decision out of desperation to escape, rather than out of true love.
Maybe a part of me wanted to believe that my now ex, was truly my knight in white armour who had come to save me from this life of heartache? Who knows, but later in life I was to regret this decision over and over again.
The knight in shining white armour was anything but a knight, but more of a battered warrior who had never even stepped onto the planes of war, but instead, somehow managed to reach adulthood emotionally detached and unstable. This charismatic man whom I fell in love with had the gift of the gab, and knew exactly how to charm all the girls. The competition was fierce, and if I knew then what I knew now, I would have happily conceded to all the other girls who fought for his attention.
The emotional hell he would later put me through, was not worth having had to compete for his affections. They would have saved me a life time of heartache if they just put in a little more effort!
We will cover this chapter of my life in more depth later on.

I doubt I was the only one who found themselves in this position growing up, as so many adults my age seemed to have a lot of unhealed childhood trauma.
Growing up, unless you had a death wish, you would not dare talk back to your parents, unless you wished to feel the wrath of your mother's back hand, wooden spoon or fathers belt.

We even got labelled Gen X – we were so unique that they could not even give us a name. The best they could come up with was a consonant to describe us, because we were such a unique generation that had the unique ability to survive so many challenges. We were the first to experience TV’s, cell phones, internet and electric cars.
We were the TV remote, car washer, domestic worker, cook and free labour. What is considered child labour and illegal today, was expected and accepted when we grew up.We were raised to be tough and resilient. It was that simple!

You didn't know better or expect better. This was the only life our parents had known and in their opinion we had it so much easier than they ever did, so we should just shut up and be grateful.

To be cont:………………
The blame game.