It has been so long since I have written that I feel that I owe even myself an explanation. I have none, other than I have been focusing on myself in other ways, in the rehabilitation of myself through learning to care for myself, finally. Once I realised just how little I knew of the tasks involved in the actual, physical, tangible care of myself as a person, as a loved one of mine, it was impossible to ignore those responsibilities anymore. I had to change this above all else. So, since just after I last wrote, I have been focusing on this as a daily practice. I have been working on unearthing the root causes of this negligence, reasons that I have always known, as they influenced the plupart of my actions and decisions, without me even realising the role that they played in determining my life course. Bit by bit, I have been excavating these beliefs and then trying to rehabilitate them into positive versions of their defamatory selves.

Here I am now, still in the middle of the process, or more likely just in the beginning of turning these beliefs upside down. I think it will take some time to condition myself, some time to make these good things automatic, undoing years of conditioning that lay behind me. But alas, I am here, in the process, and committed to it. Along with positive beliefs come real self-care, not spa days and nice coffees but real self-care: eating whole foods, moving my body, and loving myself. It means putting healthy boundaries in place in my dealings with others, not being a part of negative relationships, or accepting unkind or downright meanness towards myself.

I guess I could say that I’ve made a line in the sand to separate the before and after of this profound transition I’ve taken on for myself. This phrase has always puzzled me, as I’ve understood it to mean that it is a creating a firm boundary to something, or moving on from something that is no longer acceptable and yet by its very definition it is lacking in permanence, in stability. It can be moved by the slightest action or by the tide. It easily falls in on itself and becomes invisible, washes away into nothing in a moment, vanishes without a trace. That is the real meaning that I feel now, that temporality, that threat of falling in on myself and left without a trace of the progress I’ve made. It is not yet my habitude to love myself, we are still in the beginning of our new relationship; me, myself, and I. There is just a line in the sand. It is threatened by the tides, by the forces of the everyday, by the unpredictability of the banal yet forceful happenings of the everyday. So, for now, I must continue to focus on this love, this secretive affair that I am having with my own, best self. We have been in an abusive dynamic for so many years while I focused on outside demands and the intrusive needs of a family of my birth that was rotting at its roots as it aged and dispersed, never having been nurtured and cared for either, in all of the years it was supposed to be doing so. It was my duty to take the responsibility for them, or so I thought.

The terrible truth is that I turned out to be the worst of them all. Having caused a trench of a wound in my sister’s heart for not acting as I expected her to do. After years of mothering someone who was not my child, but who had been deserted, even turned on, by her own mother, I was angry that she wouldn’t listen to me, as a child would listen to her mother. But she wasn’t my child, she had never been mothered, so how would she have even had the emotionally vocabulary to know how to interface with such an expectation. En plus, I had decided – without her permission, her understanding, or even her awareness – that we should now act as sisters, more as equals, but with me still in the commanding role. The damage that I caused to my sister through my actions that followed – the emotional betrayal that scarred her deeper than any other – this is a truth that I have not yet fully accepted into my physical understanding. I am afraid that to do so, I must feel the pain that I caused her, in order to understand it. I am afraid not of the pain, but of the spiral that will erupt in me – to know that I hurt the person that I loved the most in this world, my baby sister. To confront this is to feel the full loss of that love, a loss that I avoided then by becoming so angry that I would have done anything to destroy her, just to show her that I had the power to do so. How can I live with myself, knowing this – fully, finally? How can I ever forgive myself for this?

I don’t have this answer. Not yet, not today. Today I am only just beginning to feel this pain. I know that I have to go into it, to feel it, in order to forgive it in myself, and to ask to be forgiven, by her. This is a real test of my own ability to trust and to surrender. I thought that I came here today to draw that line in the sand, to create that divide between the before and after. It turns out, as painful as only a sick, sad irony as this can be, that the line is oh so easily washed away, with no trace that it ever was there.

There is no past, not yet, no packing away or burning down of the old garbage and keeping the valuables without first addressing this one, last, most terrible of sins. How was I ever so bad off that I hurt the one I loved the most? My only family, my only love that was pure and true. How was I ever so broken, so betrayed, so desperate that I chose such a betrayal, to ‘teach a lesson’ to someone, who had lost even more than me? How did I hate myself so much that I would burn everything down and destroy everything in my wake? I am only now able to face the truth of my self – broken, betrayed, destroyed, abandoned, and alone – as I was then. I knew how much it would hurt her and I did it anyway. That is the darkest, starkest truth. I wanted to destroy everything that I had ever loved because at least, then, I was in control and no one else could hurt me.

Now I sit here, able to begin to have compassion for just how much pain I was in. This is the beginning of forgiveness, the first step. Perhaps this pain will someday be washed away just as that line was, today.