Seeking Normal – Day 17

Day 17 prompt:

How has your normal changed or are you living the life you experienced as a child? Re-creation or Recreation?

The prompt is a long-one this morning so I set the question above and offer the entire prompt here.

• Tara Westover said, “There is a way you experience life as a child, and then as an adult you have to look back and decide how you are going to think about it”.

My answer:

This prompt is very similar to Day 16 so rather than go through my own experience of changing my life as an adult as a result of not wanting to emulate the life I experienced as a child I would like to expound on some of the thoughts that Tara Westover shared in her interview on Super Soul Sunday. These are the highlights as I recorded them and how I perceive them.

• There is a way you experience life as a child and then as an adult you have to look back and decide how you are going to think about it.
  • This is all about perspective which is gained when you realize that what you think is “normal” is challenged. For me this occurred as I observed my friends lives and families as a child and teenager.
• It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.
  • Incredible statement. While I did not experience this negatively, I have observed it in others and I think it occurs when you allow other people’s belief’s about you to matter more than your own beliefs of you.
• They have to invade your reality and they have to distort it and they have to change how you see yourself and have mind-control.
  • This is the greatest statement and helps me to understand why I am so resolved to let go of the ways in which “she” attempts to victimize me by making me at fault. I know my reality better than anyone else in the world and if that reality makes YOU uncomfortable; well that is about you. #Word
• That’s my view of it and I am not going to change that to make you more comfortable. 
  • I have fought to get to the place where I am in life, a life that makes sense to me, and I am not willing to compromise those views, perspectives or observations that are most definitive, for me.
• It’s not a question of whether you love them it’s a question as to whether they belong in your life.
  • I will leave this right here. #Word
• You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye.
  • Yet another truth that is so simply and so eloquently stated that it needs no more explanation. Yes, I have made those choices and stand behind them as way to protect myself. 
• I think we do love a great disservice when we make it about control and change.

Tara Westover’s book “Educated” is profound. I highly recommend it as a read that you will have a hard time putting down.

What I know as an adult is that we have all been through the trauma of childhood because regardless of how it is defined it is your normal for the first 18 years and it is only after you are removed that you understand the true meaning and how it has set you up for your future as it will now be defined by you.

Live as I have lived it – L.