I am NOT, repeat, NOT Hibakusha

Day 163

Steve has been hogging the computer again and I have been feeling like shit. I shan't go into details - suffice to say that you know things are crap when you get undressed at night, and are not the least bit surprised to realise that all day you have been wearing a bra stained with guinea-pig pee. (that was Tuesday).

Last night was book group, and we had read Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, which covered pretty much all the tragedies of the last century, from the bombing of Nagasaki to the twin towers on 9/11. Heavy stuff, (but good, good book).

Found myself in the position of telling everybody about how my sister was killed, with the emphasis on how I felt about the people who did it. It seemed very relevant, somehow, though thankfully we didn't dwell on it - that would have ruined the evening and taken away the point of our meeting.

I know some people find it very difficult to hear about these things, unless it is distant, removed, impersonal - an item on the ten o,clock news or in the newspaper. They can discuss murders, rapes, kidnappings, tortures, paedophiles, and terrorist attacks with compassion, intelligence, and a will to make the world a better place.

But when it is close to home, has happened to somebody they know, they go quiet, look away, fumble their words and avoid the subject. Not so my book group. Lovely, kind, intelligent women, all of them so I felt able to say what came up for me, in a safe and empowering environment.

My experience with others has often been that they see me as wrong for telling the truth about it, for bringing it up even if directly asked. I have felt pressured to keep it private, to varnish over the facts or perhaps go so far as to almost deny them, as if somehow, I should be ashamed that this happened to me and my family. I don't understand this at all.

Then there are those at the other end of the spectrum who feel I should wear the tragedy like a badge that defines me, marks me out, describes who I have become. I remember one man, a friend I thought, getting terribly upset that I wasn't distraught and crying when I talked about it, as if "the woman whose sister was murdered" is all the identity I had.

Of course I cried - for years in fact - but not every time I thought about my sister. There was a lot more to her, to her life, to my memories of her, than just that one moment of her death. Her life is what counted ultimately, her life, nothing else.

I feel sorrow and compassion for people who get stuck in a place of trauma and grief, who find themselves unable to move out of that in their own good time, and become again more than just the victim of the circumstance. Those people who carry themselves through life as 'the rape victim' or 'cancer survivor' or the one 'recovering from abuse'.

It's not who they are, it's what was done to them, which will have affected who they are, of course, but doesn't extinguish the rest of their humanity. In the book, Burnt Shadows, the woman from Nagasaki flees to Delhi, unable to bear being someone whose personality has been reduced to a label -'Hibakusha', an explosion-affected person.

For a time other people's clear discomfort made me hold back from talking about it - I have no wish to deliberately cause pain - but eventually my need to be congruent with who I am, to tell my story simply and accurately, to hide nothing that was of importance to me, especially my sister and all that came with that, overtook my hesitancy. I don't know precisely when it happened but it did.

I'm happy with who I have become through all the ups and downs of my life, the big tragedies and the bigger joys. I see no need to hide any of it anymore. I continue to learn every day, becoming more real to myself, more in integrity with my heart. I choose not to apologise if others think I should do it another way, they are entitled to their opinion, it just isn't for me.

For me, today, I just want to keep moving forward, building My New Life. I don't want the labels of 'person with CFS' or anything else restricting what I envision as my future. So what if it doesn't happen over night, that I still have really shitty weeks where I get nothing done in the day and can't sleep at night? It doesn't matter. Right now I have one friend who wants to teach a self-esteem course with me and another who wants to write a book with me, so I must be doing something right.