In your despair, I relate. I don't think we were too far apart. You have the things I did - some education but wanting more. A history of steady employment but recent lost jobs. A vision of a better life but not knowing how to get there. A debt of student loans that seems to mask the greater wealth of being educated in this world. And the tough start so many of us have on a tough journey. You sound like you are at the trailhead where I once was. Let me show you what I found down the trail...
First, it's just the sheer pain of looking in the mirror and seeing it. I think I can speak for most of us here when I cry about about how unfair it was to be picked by someone who mortgaged my future to pay for his fleeting sexual pleasures. Like you, it lasted years - and like you, I was left with a seriously over-drafted bank of trust that should have held an abundance of promises. My childhood should have been the bounty from which I grew into the man I always felt I should be. And that bounty - that childhood - was stolen, raided and spent by someone who just decided to take it. I knew what I wanted to be since I was a small boy. I knew my path, my destiny. I was fully convinced that there was enough magic in my childhood to fuel my dreams. People look at sexual abuse and don't fully understand how incredibly damaging it is. They never the true loss, and they never see the price extorted from the victim. Like you, jboogz, I woke up one day looking for my life and seeing only broken glass, a wasted past and no future. Seeing it - especially for the first time - feels beyond overwhelming...
Maybe this won't help you - but maybe it might. I can't tell you what works and what doesn't - but I can share my own journey. My confrontation with my past came like a tsunami - a wall of secrets I never bothered to look at until they came crashing down on me. I remember crying right there in my therapist's office (I was there for "grief therapy" - or so I thought - until we dug deeper to see why I was really grieving). It was a true moment in my life I'll never, ever forget. It was when I finally opened my eyes to a very broken life - to debt and lost jobs, lost friendships, misplaced trust. My potential was used up and there was no magic left in the bag. I had nothing and found myself one of those people I swore I would never be when I was a kid. And frankly, I hated - hated - my life. But as I traveled down the road to my past, I started to understand myself a bit more. In little pieces. Scraps of memory I never would look at. And the work was so worth it. Ultimately that is what saved me - and here is why...
My life was so broken, I thought nothing could fix it - until I realized that entire premise was wrong. There was nothing to fix - only to see. Opening my eyes was everything. It has helped me to step out of myself and see things differently. I see people who have the perfect life I want. Debt free. European vacations every year. Cruises. Perfect retirements, plush portfolios, nice houses, snazzy cars. They were perhaps never molested - those perfect, untouched, pristine paint-by-number lives. And it's easy to get envious. Until I turn on the TV. And I see children in Aleppo. Beggars in Morocco. War veterans without legs. Children without meals. Elderly without homes. And I think about the crap I had to deal with and wonder if I'd trade my crap for theirs. I think about the people with no money worries, miserable in their wealth who lived for themselves and whose ultimate feat was getting to the grave debt-free. I think how some people waste a lifetime chasing all the ancillary crap as the real miracle slips by - never knowing themselves, never owning the simple miracle of being alive. While I fret about my student loan debt, I think of the guy pumping gas into my car who never had a chance at education and likely never will. I think about the guy with the house payments and understand that I decided to mortgage my life instead of a house, and instead of having something, I became something. I think of boring people in boring lives whose only adventure is what is on TV that night, and realize that I lived an adventure - that I am handling what I've been given to handle because maybe I'm the one strong enough to do it. The flip side of being molested as a child is that it makes some of us have to take a harder look at ourselves than others may have to. And then you are on an adventure you never dreamed of - perhaps even a truer destiny. I used to think my destiny was the stars, and never thought there was an entire universe within me - within each of us - that so few ever get to really know.
We are not here to be sad and angry. We are not here to be rich and wealthy and die with big portfolios. We are not here to realize the blueprints of dreams as if our lives should follow a certain script. We are not here to curse our lot in life because it is not up to the standards of those around us. We are here to simply live our lives fully with all the heart we can muster, to find our missions. We are here not to bemoan our burdens as unfair, but to embrace them with dignity and show others by our own grace the way for them as well. That's how I see it at least.
My journey has told me that I have a choice - I can build something unique on the wreckage of who I was, or I can cry about what I feel should be mine that isn't. I can give what I can to others, or take from them - take what I feel entitled to. The latter is the unhappiest path to hell. If you get to the end of your life having taken more than you've given, you just didn't do it right.
