I did naughty things as a child of course.
Most are forgotten in normal ways. I did wrong. Correction happened. They drifted from memory.
The ones that remain as the strongest memories are different. My head threw three at me this morning, all from forty to forty-five years ago. Two arose because my child brain saw the world in an atypical way. Autism I guess. And my way of seeing wasn't going to be understood by anyone else just as I couldn't understand the "normal" way of seeing, only learn to obey and conform and mask. That's just how it was. Neurodiversity wasn't even a word then and Jim Sinclair hadn't written of ways of being.
The other event I realised many years later arose from dissociation and from having no memory whatsoever of doing something because "I" hadn't done it and so naturally assuming someone else must have done it. I got in such trouble on all those occasions and it's only in the last five years that I've truly understood what was going on.
Then there are the memories blocked and maybe lost forever, held by the very survival parts that lead, on occasions, to dissociation that's sometimes helpful and sometimes deeply unhelpful.
Then there are missing times when I've a few times ended up losing friends for things I can't remember or conceive of but which wounded them. Understanding came late and understanding helps immensely. It can't restore a friendship but perhaps it can aid in not destroying others through ignorance of the disconnects and parts that exist within me because of a past I cannot remember and which they don't want me to discover.
I revisit adult wounds too. Those that are my own doing. Those that came from others. Those that come from events when dissociative and not even knowing that dissociation is part of my life. Those that come from everyone having unspoken personal rules and expecting their rules to be obeyed.
We all revisit though. It's the human thing to do.
For all the talk of living in the present moment our heads will keep leading us back to the past.
And so now I meditate. Focus. But at least today lie in the half awake and revisit the scenes of everything I couldn't possibly have understood when I was seven.
Forty years on I know consciously I don't need to live my past.
Our brains don't much care about our knowledge though, do they?
Even in my dreams last night I revisited. In a dream the journey took us past a place and I said I'd used to have lots of dreams in that place. It's a large and strange market with a big meeting hall adjoining. Last night the outside of it was in Chester. Except a part of Chester that's not real because usually those streets are elsewhere. A meta-dream. The recurring dreams begin again but if I don't go to those places where he and she have influence or presence then perhaps we may avoid terror.
May my sleep not revisit those old worlds. Not again. Never again.
May our awake times learn not to revisit old wounds on days filled with promise. May we learn transcendence in presence not in the creaking decay of what is no more except in the half remembered glimpses held by neurons.
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| The poem that led to these small thoughts |
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