Further Becoming Radha
There have been times I don’t even know who I am or have been.
Hi, it has taken so very long to come back for me to work on transparency and my entire being - I’ve been almost completely unaware of me.
Three marriages, none lasting and a lot of that happened, I believe, because I was an absolute blank slate to myself.
I’ve never been very confident that people will like and respect me if I live into being me. I’ve always been advised to “overcome my sins” as a means to self knowledge and understanding and compassion, things that promote responsibility and harmony in relationships with others.
But, what to do when between physical abuse as a child/adolescent and a brutal rape at 19, where was my sin? How to work through that and only after 50 years am I beginning to understand that our experiences are us and the ways in which we react, organize and mould our lives in responses to happiness, contentment and violation don’t require cleansing. Instead all of those adjustments that our lives require us to make are constantly becoming “who I am.”
The amalgamation never seems to end, but I would guess that by age 35 I could have known that the things I yearned to be and feel were not “sins,” not “evil.”
They were simply things my first 30 years had required me to adjust myself to. If, for instance, a brutal sexual assault had occurred and was layered over years of angry beltings from my father when I violated HIS norms then what might come from the ways we try to reach balance could result in abuse of one’s own children, or flight “from responsibility” or becoming a submissive or a dominant in bdsm play, or prostitution or fighting on the streets or becoming a cop, priest, doctor, housewife or mountain climber - or any of a vast array of possible likes, loves, dislikes and hatreds.
It seems to me that possibility and recovery are not “sinful.” They are adjustments. Not that any occupation of adjusting to one’s life is useful either to the individual or to the social frame.
Rapists shouldn’t be allowed or be helped to cover up their infliction of fear, pain and degradation on mostly women and children unabated. In that and in murder and torture and the slaughtering of this actual earth there should not be that allowance of “he’s just trying to mould and fit together all the pain and abuse reactions that he’s struggling to incorporate.”Death camps and killing-fields and the prioritizing of fearful and exploitive and deadly methods of readjustment are not to be tolerated.
But, all these “evil” things so many religious persecute: abortions, consensual sexual relations for all and any adults, camping and building a small fire for warmth, legal prostitution, universal free health care and bdsm, lgbt, and actual hereditary across the genome human traits should not be the gnats we strain to swallow while lauding macho displays of cruelty and death we take with our bread and wine at dinner. We must change things.
rad