the blame game

I believe that subconsciously I have had a difficult time settling myself down, especially at night, as I look inward to blame myself for my disease. It is a form of conditioning that I learned many years ago. I do not remember many circumstances in my childhood where blame was not placed on someone and too often when a question was asked, not me could be heard from all corners of the homes we lived in, the voices not limited to the four children.

As I reside in Texas I have watched as my day to day treatment is similar to the childhood I write about. And like the child of years ago, I remain the one who accepts blame if only for the chaos to subside.

The lack of respect and acknowledgment I have received as an adult living with my adult parents has only contributed to my wanting to blame myself for something I did not do. And no matter how many times I have seen it written in black and white and explained by the doctor authors, it is the inner child that assumes it is my fault.

I do not see me being treated as an adult as I had once hoped for and often talked about in therapy by myself and with my immediate family. And knowing myself as I do, I will continue to seek blame of some sort as anything different is foreign to me and would mean that I have been looked upon and accepted as an adult, not the child that left for college at the age of 17, returning rarely as I did not feel comfortable in my biological family.

Instead, I looked and continue to look at family as an extended circle and whether I see a person frequently or chat on the tele every now and again, I explain my family as extended and over the years have shared who I am with those I hold close.

The rest, I see as critics who I have allowed to shape my thinking without them truly knowing what I am thinking, how I think and why I think the way I do. It is not my mission or even need to change or explain to those who do not know me. I thought they would have taken time to learn through observation and conversation. Instead it remains quiet. For in my world I hope to leave a memory to be cherished by me and those I am sharing with.

However, I see more questions or answers that satisfy the person doing the talking, knowing when I was here, there was more silence and less adventure than I had hoped for. 'They' say that life repeats itself and never did I think I would repeat a childhood that I could not wait to grow out of, only to watch it repeat. And I wonder with sincerity why I am living it all over again only older and wiser enough to know that this is happening here and now.

I changed as have my friends and acquaintances. Others around me and some from afar have changed too. But the contrast is great. I am better for what I have experienced and what I continue to experience. Others are more grey, speak about the weather and refrain from asking questions of substance, convinced they know the truth or see the truth as they determine it to be.

Not what it truly is.

It might be a form of self defense but most likely it is who they really are and thus, I see few if no pictures of my childhood as I am always a child. A child that learned to punish myself at an early age as I never felt worthy or good enough for whom and for what I still do not know.

I only know that I continue to try and blame myself as I have done before, before I experienced and experimented with the world around me and all that I continue to be grateful for.

dawayne

I remember going to see a spiritual healer in the early nineties while I was attending school in Northern California. He was a Nigerian man with a thick dialect, his diction over compensating, often changing the sounds of a word or words to lessen his accent. For example, his name was DaWayne but he pronounced it DA WEIGH HAINE.

One afternoon he brought his table to my flat and worked to clear the chakras, starting at mt head and slowly moving toward my toes.

He paused as he was massaging or 'opening' the abdominal chakra to tell me then that I was going to have serious problems with my intestines and liver. I never thought about it until today, when my doctor was feeling my abdomen, no longer able to push and feel as the pain was shooting from my head to my right foot and everywhere in between.

I never saw DaWayne after that home visit as I could not afford his regiment of vitamins (his own brand) and the food for myself and food he made for the dog, which was chicken and rice that he wrapped in a ball, charging the amount of five chickens and several jumbo bags of rice.


I do not know where DaWayne is or how his life progressed. I would be quite interested to know what became of him just as I believe he might be quite interested to know that I am terminally ill and two of the organs directing impacting my day to day are the intestines and the liver.