(From Seth Godin)
When it slams into your house and destroys it, we’re likely to pursue one of two lines of thinking:
–How did I cause this? What choices did I make, what mistakes did I permit, why did I deserve to have this damage, or who can I blame?
–Well, that happened, now what should I do?
Looking for reasons, blaming others, or worse, blaming ourselves is a waste. It’s self-defeating. It creates shame and second-guessing, separates us from our community and distracts us from the work at hand.
Sometimes there’s a lesson to be learned, but when actual bad luck leads to a significant bolt of lightning and all the pain it causes, there is no lesson.
There’s simply what happened.
Now what?
Blaming and blame-shifting has always been a huge part of my FOO dynamic.
Mom blamed Dad for EVERYTHING. She shamed him for being a “country bumpkin” because he was born in a small town in Iowa, even though he also joined the Coast Guard and traveled more than she ever did internationally; he even learned some of another language when he was stationed in the Marshall Islands in WWII. Plus he later moved to Chicago (where they met) and then he traveled all over the US for work. She moved with him to CT, VT, MA, MO and IA, but never willingly traveled anywhere as far as I know or in my living memory, except back to Chicago for holidays with my sister.
I believe my siblings learned this reaction to adversity from her example. They unilaterally blame Dad for the adversity we all experienced, from my mother’s hospitalizations & mental health diagnosis; they now blame me for things such as me “overreacting” to The Susan Incident.
I will bet a significant amount that my cancer is being ascribed to me being atheist, rather than simple bad luck or the more scientific likelihood, the effects of early childhood trauma. One reason for that is self-defense: if I got cancer because I am atheist, then they are safe from the same adversity. If it’s just bad luck, or the effects of trauma, then they are not so safe.
But what about all the praying they say they are doing for me? Should I go back to the god who apparently GAVE me the cancer, despite all their prayerful efforts?
Of course, the faithful would say the cancer is a sign to me from god saying TURN BACK NOW, REPENT YE SINNER or some such.
So if I had gone back to church today and prayed, does anyone really think I’d be cured tomorrow? Why doesn’t that work?
I’ve always said, if there’s a god who demands more or other from me than what I can perceive as reality, through the senses and brain that he supposedly gave me, that’s a shit setup. That god lost me around 7th grade, with the doctrine of transubstantiation. I tried for another 20 years or so to find some other, believable religion, but never have and finally gave up. (And my life immediately became simpler and happier.)
And one big reason for my non-faith is, how much time has my FOO devoted to actionless prayer, rather than taking concrete, earthly action? Our mother preferred to pray about her failing marriage: talking not to her husband, but to an invisible man in the sky, asking him to solve all her problems WITHOUT her having to change any of her other behavior or choices, such as the put-downs, the constant blame-shifting, the triangulating between us kids in order to maintain control, or the refusal of the medically-recommended hysterectomy after her fourth pregnancy nearly killed her. Or even the decision to marry our father (which I believe she saw as a way to get away from her FOO, which I believe was also dysfunctional. I mean she had to learn it someplace).
I believe our mother was a deeply unhappy person, but I also believe she never understood how much of that was due to her own destructive choices, and how many of those choices were due to her religion.
There’s probably no lesson to be learned from my cancer Dx, other than to make the most of whatever time I have left. It’s just bad luck, or childhood trauma, neither of which I can change, and little of which I can understand without help from people who are mostly invested in ignoring that whole period of my birth and life, wishing away my very existence.
And I get that delving any more deeply into that would be likely to cause them a lot of pain. OTOH, what pain have I suffered, and will I suffer, in the almost complete lack of knowledge of my early childhood? It will potentially cost me my very life — and with no hope for me of an afterlife, that’s ALL the marbles.
This won’t cut any ice with them, because of its source: but my dad always used to say, “Love is when you care more about the other person than you care about yourself.” It’s one of life’s truisms, as far as I’ve experienced it. And it says quite clearly that they don’t love me, when their potential pain is more important than my actual existence.
You know how most people have cute stories of something they did when they were 2, or 4, or whatever? I don’t have any. The best version of that I have is that when I was 3, my birthday fell on Easter, and I was so excited because I thought all the baskets and everything were for me. But that’s my own memory, not because anyone told me about it.
There could be some lessons to be learned from that, but my siblings don’t want to teach me, or learn about me. Or maybe the cancer is supposed to be a sign from god that’s a message to THEM? hahahahaha of course not, they aren’t the ones who need “fixing” as I was told I was.
But if that flesh and blood thing is so damned important, maybe they should start with their own.