Having a weepy day (sniff)

Day 32

Nostalgia is an odd word. It pretends to be your friend - "come with me," it beckons, "and I'll take you back to your happy place". Well, mostly it doesn't - it takes you to a rose-tinted, sentimental, heart-string pulling pastiche of what is really stored, in those dark recesses of one's mind.

Today I am all stirred up with memories, and Nostalgia is up to it's tricks. Apparently, it never rained in my childhood, my siblings and I never argued, friends were constantly available, I was never frustrated by my much younger sister, or snubbed by my much older brother. The pain I felt when my parent's fought is now less than a stubbed toe in my memory, and the fear I felt when that wrath was directed towards me - so severe that I spent whole days hiding in the hen house - is but a whisper, a ghost, a nothing.

It is valuable, I suspect, to be able to rose-tint one's past, cauterising old wounds with forgetfulness, and applying the band-aid of diminishing reality to that which was less than perfect. But those old injuries can't heal if left in the dark for too long. Nor do they if one constantly picks at the scabs of them either, so how do we find the 'happy medium' that allows release from the pain, without losing accuracy of recall?

Courage, perhaps, is the first pre-requisite. To take one's past in all it's imperfect detail and declare "this I liked, thank you, this I didn't - but it happened, so be it, and maybe I don't know the whole story". We don't have to condone the injustices in our pasts, but that needn't stop us learning from them and moving on.

Acceptance comes next - to remember that which is painful to remember, the sorrows and losses, the heartbreaks, the things we regret or left unsaid. To take all of the memories of those we may have loved deeply and lost tragically, and say "I wish we'd had longer, but you did your best and I did my best, and all that we shared - good and bad - is of value to me". To hold a space inside us for it to be OK the way that it was.

Forgiveness comes last of all. The ability to forgive those who hurt us or left us, to forgive life for being too hard, too scary, too short, too long, etc., and above all, to forgive ourselves for not being perfect, for not knowing what the future would hold, for being merely human.

I sometimes want to remember only good, gorgeous, lovely things about my sister, but that would just be Nostalgia taking away half of my life with her, half of my memories. So even though it hurts today, I'm going to let it all in, every last bit.

So, come back Caron, in all your glory and humanity, and I will remember and be thankful for all those years we shared. Every row we had, every sulk you prolonged, every bit of temper I lost at you, every laugh we shared, every game we played, every dress of mine you borrowed and cut the sleeves off before giving back, every meal you cooked badly, every day that was made brighter by your presence, every song we sang together (even though you had to stick your fingers in your ears not to sing along with my part), every time you copied me and I got pissed off, every time I missed you and then you'd suddenly call, every time you got absolutely plastered, every time you over-bleached your hair, every time your visits were too short, every time you tidied up and I never found anything again. I choose to welcome it all, to treasure it all, and to censor nothing. That is what you are worth.