AGED FIVE, I GOT FAR ENOUGH
AWAY TO SEE 💎
When I was about five years old, I spent two years in a children’s sanatorium.
At the time, I had no idea what that would mean for the rest of my life. Looking back now, I think it was one of the great turning points of my childhood.
And strangely enough, I am grateful for it.
For two years, I was removed from my family and placed somewhere else entirely. Other adults. Other children. Other routines. Other ways of being. It gave me something I could not possibly have named at five.
DISTANCE.
When I eventually returned home, I had already discovered something enormously important. My family was not the whole world. I could stand outside it and see it.
And what I saw, increasingly, was that there was very little about my family that felt real or loving. In fact, I think I experienced more genuine warmth with some of the nurses and children at the sanatorium than I ever did at home. There was family in the biological sense. But I don’t think there was much family in the deeper sense at all.
Years later, at about fifteen, I told my parents I was homosexual.
That was the end of home.
I didn’t leave after a teenage argument and come back a few weeks later. There was nowhere to come back to. I had left because I had to. And when I left, it was over.
I sometimes watch films about people who grow up in brutal, loveless families and later become terribly damaged adults. Psychopaths. Serial killers. People whose childhoods seem almost designed to produce catastrophe. And occasionally I recognise something.
NOT WHAT THEY BECAME.
The beginning. The absence. The emotional coldness. And the fear. The strange knowledge, very young, that whatever happened next, you were largely on your own.
There was my sister.
For a long time, I think I allowed myself to believe that because she was still there, some part of the family remained. But even that relationship eventually forced me to look again. Sometimes the hardest thing is not losing a family. It is realising that what you thought you had may never really have been there. And yet something else was there.
Some capacity to stand outside it. To see it without having to pretend it was something else. Perhaps that began in the sanatorium. At five years old, without knowing it, I got far enough away to see. I learned that the family I had been born into was not the measure of reality.
And for that, strangely enough, I am truly grateful.
@3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works @startrek
#Childhood #Family #LGBTQ #Survival #Perspective #LifeStory #love #security #grateful #warmth #pride
