Owning my Story

was key in helping me to heal

I recently encountered the following quote from the book, Power Power Power by Kema Nekvapil:

“Ultimately, if you can have ownership over your story, it can never be used against you. Honor your story and it will honor you.”

This speaks to me, in a deep, deep way. Because I spent many many hours and days post-second-family suicide pondering and stewing, with rage and despair and grief.

I was heavy with the reality that THIS was my family’s story. This was, then, inescapably, also my story. And I didn’t want it to be. It sucked. I wanted to change it. And I could not.

It still sucks. I mean two of my family members ended their own lives. That will never not suck. But—

I truly believe what Kema says. You have to own it all. Both because no one will ever use it against you, but I think, moreover and more importantly, you can never use it against yourself. That is most true for me anyway.

For a long time I wanted to cover it up. To mask my family’s problems. But you can’t. They are still there. Pretending that they aren’t does’t help, it just hurts you.

I had a therapist when I was in my doctoral program who told me, “I learned early on that you wanted to appear that you had it all together.” Why, yes, that’s true.

Partly because I don’t want to emote and wear my heart on my sleeve, but also because I assumed that role from a very young age, to be the bright shining star and the beacon of hope in my family. (I’m not unique in this, many children of dysfunctional families do this, regardless of the particular reason for or pattern of dysfunction.)

I did that. And I did it well.

No wonder theatre always came easy for me, I had been doing it since before I could remember. Pretending it was all okay, to outsiders, teachers, extended family, even to my mom and family members, to myself, that I was okay, everything was fine, when everything was not fine.

I grew up the child of an alcoholic, and adapted the hero role with my father, and later the co-dependent, enabler for my mother, after she passed. I assumed another unhealthy role in the weird tangle of dysfunctional family dynamics.

When “not fine” is your baseline and your home state, you learn from a very young age to adapt. You pretend. What other choice is there? The charade continues…

So much of the last few years has been me owning my story, considering that I have a nuclear family, where all of my immediate family didn’t take care of themselves, didn’t get the proper mental, physical and psychological help that they so desperately needed.

They continued to smoke, to drink, to overspend, to hoard, to take too many pharmaceuticals, expediting their paths to the grave. For two of them, natural causes weren’t quick enough, they took matters, quite literally, into their own hands, ending their lives with guns.

Owning my story for me means longer running from my childhood or these more present events.

I am a delusional fool if I do that or operate from this idea that their choices and deaths don’t affect me. I’m not interested in pretending. In acting. I did that for far too long.

It wouldn’t serve me.

I had to grow up. Their deaths taught me that even though I don’t have any children—ie-the next generation—that the healing is on me now. It is my responsibility. Whatever choices I make now about how to live my life, they are all on me. They are dead now and I am a full-blown adult. I am accountable to myself.

I can’t and I won’t blame them, not because they didn’t do anything wrong, but because what good does that do? It doesn’t help them, it isn’t fair to them, that’s only part of their story and not the overall story. I see them all now as deeply wounded and traumatized people.

But also, it doesn’t help me. The only left. The one still surviving. To blame them would give me a crutch. It would encourage the overuse of the victim card/victim mindset.

Owning my family story is owning mine, because I loved them and I lived with them for years and I was affected by their choices in life. Their deaths impacted me.

I have complex grief. I have PTSD. And I have a predisposition to depression and anxiety. I worry and have sleep disturbances and a hard time shutting my brain off. I’m jumpy. I have had intergenerational trauma, emotional inheritance and epigenetic factors that I have had to face.

That has all been unbelievably difficult.

But it has also been liberatory because it is all part of my story and I finally own it.

And the owning it part of it made it so that I could finally face it head on, to take my path to healing into my own hands.

It has taken me on a wonderful journey and taught me a great deal about myself.

Through exercise and hot yoga, energy healing and biofield tuning, EMDR and gut health, and so many books, podcasts, and TED talks, to online mental health help support groups, so many stories…through the internet, through searching and opening myself up to all that there is out there, that I can access through the internet.

Through friends and support, and a desperate reach of faith, a shift happened in my mindset that healing is possible….that a better quality of life is attainable. That I don’t have to suffer.

I want to heal. I am a survivor, not a victim.

I am not defined by their story, even though it involved me, but I own it now. I’m the author. That was just one part, a few chapters.

This owning of it, as Kema says, is what has helped me to move forward on a healing journey.

As such, my quality of life, my happiness, my mental state, has never been better.

And I am so deeply, deeply, thankful.