A self to suit society

Beijing April 1954

I guess we all along our lives have to create a self or many selves to suit circumstances. They could family circumstances or social ones. To survive you need to adapt even of what you are compelled to create us someone you do not like. Survival of the fittest said Darwin, and here the fittest means the one that is the most compliant. But there comes a time when you can, if you so wish, abandon that self and try to go back to the real one. It is not easy believe me and can have calamitous consequences that can hurt you and your loved ones beyond repair.

The little girl in the picture is all dressed up for her second birthday. She feels like a princess thanks to doting parents who love her unconditionally. She will live in the warmth of this love for some time till the first hurt that cannot be wished away by a gentle kiss from her mom or a hug from her pa. Sooner or later she will learn that she has to bear the brunt of blows and work her own solutions, some of which necessitate altering ones self. This is a survival lesson she will need to accept but what she does not know yet is that there may come a time when the multitude of band aids and masks that she has been compelled to place on herself will render her unrecognisable. That is when she will wonder whether there are still some pieces of the little girl left in some crevice of the mind that can help her retrace the journey she had to travel. The catch is that is she decides to do so, she may open old wounds and create new ones that may never be healed.

I would have never thought of all this and gone happily to my grave were it not for the insistence of a loved one to get answers twosome things that I agree look incomprehensible if not placed in a proper context. I have spent some sleepless nights trying to make some forays down memory lane and ask myself what the consequences of airing the past at this moment would be and it did not take me long to realise that no matter how much I am badgered to reveal my reasons, I would not succumb as it will bring more hurt than healing. So I may for my own self unravel the knots but simply to assuage my conscience and see whether I could have done a better job. Life as we know gives us one chance at a time, and a lifetime to regret it.

I have an example that would validate my point of view and it comes from no less than my mother. For the less than 4 decades I spent with my parents, my strength came from the knowledge that my mother and father were happy as that is what they both seemed to be to me in my childhood, teenage and adulthood. I basked in that warm feeling and could live my life with ease and insouciance. Had I tried to delve deeper and found the reality, my life would have been shattered. But my mother must have felt the need to share her pain with her only child as she wrote a rambling diary in the penultimate year of her life, before she lost a part of a memory. In those pages she shared her innermost feelings.

I found that diary more than fifteen years after they both died and by that time I was mellowed and matured and could look at things with a distance and with my heart. Had I read that diary when I was not ripe for it, I could have even hated one of them. But far from that. What I read in those lines was how much my two parents loved each other but how inept and clumsy they were at showing their feelings. I will not say more.

The point I am trying to make is that every action we take has a reason that needs to be respected. When the time is right, in some serendipitous way, truth will be revealed and will be a healing experience.