Neatly perched atop a dusty shelf on my desk in my home office are 6 old cameras. As I sit and stare at them, it's hard to believe anyone ever knew how to properly work them with all their manual dials, knobs, slots, and winders. Today our ability to capture images requires a media card and the ability to push a button. Machines and computer programs that get easier and easier to use allow us to manipulate that moment in life. No longer are we freezing these moments in time. Rather, we are continually re-shaping, re-molding, and re-designing what was supposed to be.
What have these old cameras seen? Have they captured monumental pieces of history? Did they witness new beginnings or endings we can only hope were filled with accomplishment and peace? Have they seen the landscape before it was decimated and forever scarred with highways, industrial sites, and buried toxins that poison the life around it? What truths have these cameras captured?
Truth. The older I get, the more foreign of a concept this seems to be. What is the truth? How do we actually know it's the truth? What was the origination of the meaning of something? How do we ever know that this is truly how it was meant to be or that this is what truly is? Most of the time it seems we course through our lives in such a haphazard way that we have evolved to think is systematic and smooth. My truth is that I am constantly trying to dodge bullets, but sometimes I get shot. I am trying to maneuver through the crowded noise that is the chaos in my head that keeps me up at night when I am beyond the point of exhaustion, but sometimes I am swallowed up. I whip around corners so fast holding the wheel with all my might so as to not fly off the road, but sometimes I lose control and find myself flipping end over end, most of the time landing upside down beaten and bloodied. I get the best running start I can to jump over the holes scattered throughout life or to be able to mount a seemingly insurmountable wall, but sometimes I fall through the holes or I go barreling into those walls at full speed. Yet with each knock down, each scrape, each cut, each bruise, each broken bone or broken heart, I continue to get up and move on. How is this possible? My body hurts, my heart hurts, and my core feels as if it's got nothing left. But, it's as if there is something inside me that I cannot see, touch, or even feel on any recognizable level that fuels my quest for happiness and fulfillment. And for some reason, I need to endure such horrendous battles in hopes...HOPES...of finding that place of peace and fulfillment - even when I just want to lie down and dissolve into the air.
From the day I was born, or at least two days after when I know I arrived at the receiving home in Korea, I have been lied to. I have been lied to about the most important and crucial things that life is built upon - a stable foundation of love, caring, safety, and belonging. I do not know the story of why I was given up, or even taken for that matter. I know that everything that it took to take care of me as a newborn was someone's job and that I just became something to check off on a list. I was a procedure, a schedule, a routine to earn a paycheck and to provide money to my own birth country who allowed for me to be sold. I was set aside or ignored for convenience or lack of ability to pay attention to me.Growing up I was told lies, my whole adoptive family was told these same lies, about who I was and how I came to belong in their home now. This precious little child with no one who wanted her because they loved her and cared for her. This precious little child who didnt have the comfort of a mother's arms for the first part of her life. This precious little child who spent those early months with strangers knowing nothing else but to instinctually trust, but having that trust repeatedly violated or not returned. This precious little child whose life and well-being were thrown up to the Universe to take care of. She had no control and she had no say of her own.
As I moved through my life, this trust issue has always plagued me. The lies continue today as I search for the missing pieces of my life. I am still not given answers by those I have allowed myself to trust and given my whole heart to. I am still lied to and ignored because it's convenient for someone else or they have decided I take up too much space in their lives. I'm still tossed aside and in some cases, given up or thrown away. I continually assess myself and ask, "is it me?" Why do these foundational things in life that create those feelings of healthy dependency, security, trust, honesty, belonging, and love come as such hard painful lessons for me? I have a relationship with someone - any kind of relationship - friendship, familial, romantic - and something always happens as soon as I allow these people to be close to me. There's always some kind of violation of trust through lying and leaving that results in a loss that cuts so deep that the wounds have never healed. I'm 33 years old and still mourning my infancy!
It will take me a long time to open up and let someone in. I spent alot of my life disassociating from my feelings because I didnt like what was in there. I didnt know how to feel them. Instead, I got angry. I'm good at being angry. The primitive part of my brain, that has learned since I was an infant that people will undoubtedly lie to you and leave you, kicks into overdrive and goes into self-protection mode. I get angry and live there for awhile because then I dont have to feel helpless, vulnerable, and insecure. I dont have to feel 33 years worth of pain from the lies and the abandonment. If I do eventually open up, and there have been only a few times where this has actually happened - so few I could count them on less than one hand - without fail it always ends horribly and my heart is crushed. Why I keep putting it out there is beyond me. A person can only have this kind of bad luck so many times. It must be me!
I've never claimed perfection in my life. I am far from it. I am a continually evolving work in progress. I've visited and revisited, for many years, the trauma of my early moments of life and some of the major devastating and tragic experiences I have had. Healing has been a slow painful process and while I am not by any means completely healed, I have opened alot of doors into my own emotional realm and my memory that were so long sealed shut I had forgotten about them. Once opened, literally, it was like the flood gates had collapsed and there was no holding back. Yet still, I am left asking why? Why do I continually get doors slammed in my face and dropped when I have made myself vulnerable and opened my heart and my emotions to trust and love? Is it all connected? If so, how? More importantly, how do I fix it?
So what is really true I ask? Where in my life can I say I have actually had anything built from a place of original honesty and love? With the kind of shaky, inaccurate, and untrustworthy foundation I have been put upon, is there really any hope for me or will I just always crash through my life with tumbles, spills, and wipe outs that will always leave me bruised and bloodied? Will my heart ever find the kind of pure honesty and peace that it deserved when it was just beginning or will my quest always come up short because that's all I have known? If I trust and love, I will be dropped, left, abandoned. If I reinstate the keep-everyone-at-an-arm's-length-away rule I will never feel that biting, stinging, stabbing, relentless pain, but I will also never feel those beautiful moments, however fleeting, of what I think are brief tastes of what that kind of honesty, trust, and love can feel like. It's a hard decision.
As I stare into the lenses of these old cameras collecting more dust while they sit in silence, retired long ago from their functionality and purpose, I wonder what they see when they look at me. If they could snap a picture now, what would my moment in my life right now look like? And how do I move on from this place of doubt and hurt knowing that while I most certainly will, without fail, likely find myself here once again asking the same questions? It's a weird mix of optimism and pessimism that I can't quite make sense of. I think I need to work on adopting the philosophy of these old cameras - capturing the moment for what it is and nothing more - no interpretation, no manipulation - just what it is in that exact moment.
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