Thought Picnic: On a journey they cannot understand

Understanding my journey

As I was reviewing my Facebook timeline yesterday, I came a across a quote that I could relate to in every way, with respect to being afflicted and maybe not so much as it reflects on others.

I have paraphrased the quote a bit and having done a search, the providence is unknown.

“Not everyone will understand your journey. That's fine. It's not their journey to make sense of. It's yours to live your own life.”

My own journey

My journey as a life has been easy at the start, exciting at other times, interesting and intriguing at certain points and I dare say, difficult and challenging in the recent past.

My journey has literally and exclusively been mine even if I have walked part of the way in company or have been helped along to the way to reach the milestones that dot the road to a destination yet unknown.

Many parts of the journey some fully appreciate and other parts people are literally completely clueless, they are the secrets and recesses in life that have happened and become what I usually refer to as the story.

My hidden journey

Most interestingly, the greater part of my journey is literally unknown to my blood relations. For the affinity we might have, the truth is they cannot even begin to understand the difficult and challenging parts of my journey. Where some might have been interested in my journey, they seem to have a path they expect me to ply to a destination they have chosen and hope that I put my vehicle on that road without quibble – one such journey is the one of marriage.

I put paid to that suggestion in one clear statement in a conversation with my dad a few weeks ago, I categorically stated, it is not my life, the vehemence with which I made that statement seemed to both shocked and have effect, but it might well not be the end of that matter.

There were parts of that conversation that felt like checking if my balls had already descended into my ball sack, the ignorance of three decades of this journey will provide accommodation for disrespect and contempt, it comes with the territory.

My private journey

The truth is, the parts of the journey that they even think they know is hardly the journey that was my reality, there are elements of depression and sexual abuse that I have only better understood long after I was a victim in the care and the protection of people assigned to care for us.

However, one journey that has never been understood at all is the one where my life was almost extinguished by cancer in 2009 and the process of losing everything within three years of that.

They might have an inkling, probably an idea, but hardly the knowledge not the experience. It is not like anyone asked the questions that will elicit the responses that will intimate them of the reality of things. Yet, if this knowledge were shared unprompted, it will almost read like a pity party.

My unknown journey

Then again, in my leaving one of my homes, for my homes are many, I probably abandoned them and conversely, I should feel no hurt even when in my hour of need I felt I was somewhat abandoned. A stoicism and desire to chart my own course has always driven most of what I have sought to do and so in my rise and my fall and my rise again, I am just living my own life.

The truth is, they probably will never understand my journey, I do not expect them to understand any part of my journey, but where conflict does arise is where in their journeys which for each individual is unique and different, they forget that as long as you are not walking in the same shoes, on the same road, with the same mind and in the same person as the other, you might catch a glimpse of that journey, but you may still never make sense of that journey.