Member-only story
Sharing My History
I’ve been through a lot of things in my life. I’ve had successes, and failures. I’ve made friends, and lost them. I have been a carer for somebody who was quite challenging. I’ve had to learn to care for myself. I’ve been bullied, threatened, victimised, but you know what?
Out of all those things, I know that I have come back stronger. There are things that I have had to learn the hard way; things that, when I look back, I can’t believe how naive I was, and the automatic response is to feel stupid, but then I have to take a step back and say to myself, “Hold on, you didn’t know. How were you supposed to know?”
That’s the truth in all of this- Sometimes, you can’t know. Sometimes, you are too far ingrained in a situation, and this almost blinds you to what’s really going on.
AN EXAMPLE
Let’s take my experience at church, for example. Even just two years ago, I would have said that there were no issues in the church, and that we had come out of a very difficult situation very well (note the ‘we’).
When lockdown forced the church to take the services online, I was afforded some much needed distance, and this allowed me to see that I was actually not in a collective of ‘we’. There were people in that place who did not look upon me as one…
