How everyone has an opinion

Not in my name

So the Man and the Mother have been fighting. Mum told me she contacted him - after she did it - knowing full well I wouldn't approve. Not because I don't get her maternal desire to protect, but because when Mum gets going her anger doesn’t so much put fuel on the fire as the whole bloody Kauri tree and there is fall out from fires like that. Rather than contacting her directly the Man then voiced strong opinion to me about what she had said (lets just say what she was colourful) and I in turn voiced strong opinion to both of them to just get on with it and leave me out of it. I am not being their intermediary and having anymore stress.

Sometimes the hardest thing to deal with it not the event itself, but other people’s reactions to it.

And by people I mean those friends and family that hail from what I previously called my life and home. There are always going to be reactions unless we take off, telling no one and lick our wounds alone in the wilderness much in the way animals do. Making sense of these reactions and knowing what reactions resonate with us is a different matter. It’s a sieve and discard process.

People are telling me that I should cry more and be less jolly, others say I should cry less and laugh more. Then we have rest more, rest less, get out more, or stay in more and do less. Some say I should feel my emotions more and others say ‘let go’ because wallowing is bad. Then I have been told to garner a bit of hate and that I should have punched him (a lot) and others have told me hate immobilizes and just to embrace the learnings and enjoy the journey. Some hail from the ‘I told you so’ school of wisdom and aren’t backward in sharing and others just want to cry with you and for you because no one saw it coming and it was a great shock (our parents being some of the people in this category). It’s all a minefield of assumptions and personal interpretations where you are not just told how to feel but how to ‘do’ the feelings you should be having. Perhaps this is why NZ’s people and places are beginning to mean so much to me. The hills and people alike are staying quiet and just letting me be so I can work out how I feel and just accept it.

If I follow the tribe and start making assumptions Mum needs me to be angry because she is and the Man needing to get me angry because he needs the emotions he is feeling (guilt I assume being one) to stop turning inward and starts turning outward. It’s an emotional game of pass the parcel with no one wanting to be left holding the wrappings when the music stops.

The only pain we ever have is both derived from how our mind interprets our current situation and then our insistence in holding onto it for dear life. I realised early on if I didn’t like my level of pain to drop my interpretation or better still drop my mind all together and just be for as long as I could (it’s still a work in progress on that one).

We all get to choose again in every moment.