While I was out with my boyfriend's sister on a bike ride looking for agates, we got to talking about her childhood — her experience growing up, and how she feels about it today as an adult. Same parents, different kids, completely different experiences. How you view growing up isn't how your sibling did. Maybe someone was favored more. Maybe someone's achievements went unnoticed. Maybe one of you got punished more than the other. All these small things add up to the person we become. Lovely, right?
I remember certain parts of my own childhood, and they're not all pleasant. You could look at it two ways — maybe I was just a naughty kid who needed to be taught a lesson, or maybe something made me feel unsafe as a baby, being adopted and separated from my birth mother at such a young age that it stayed with me as I grew up. I've heard that when a baby cries for their mother and no one comes, it teaches them not to trust — that people will always leave. It leaves an impression on your heart before you even have words for it.
That could explain why I am the way I am — never quite able to fully process things or be completely aware of my own actions the way other people seem to be. We all have different views, different opinions, different everything, shaped minute by minute by what we were taught between the ages of 0 and 7.
If we can find our flaws, expose them, forgive them, and let something more positive take their place, maybe we can actually become happy humans. Maybe life gets easier and kinder. Putting ourselves first, having boundaries, loving ourselves — the good and the bad — never letting someone else's negativity ruin our day, knowing we're a creation of God. If only we could figure it all out after each lifetime, instead of becoming a brand new person over and over again until we finally finish "school."
If you listen to Delorace — she's a medium on YouTube I watch — she says before we come to earth, we already chose our parents, our siblings, our pets, how our whole life goes... and then the second we're born, we forget all of it. What a trip that would be. Getting back to a place where we could actually remember would probably be just as wild.
I guess not knowing, and having to choose each decision as we go, is just the adventure we signed up for. It's scary, lonely, fun, and unexpected — but that's exactly what makes it ours. What a strange, cool feeling, to have been given that at all. We shouldn't take a single day for granted. We should be thanking the universe constantly for the million little blessings we get every day.
I was stoned while writing this — so if it reads a little wild when I go back and reread it later, that's why.
