Try.... just a little bit harder

I grew up the daughter of an Air Force officer.  Both my parents were immigrants to the United States, so in addition to their respective childhood experience, my siblings and I were raised with the added difficulty of the immigrant mentality.  Don't get me wrong, I associate only pride in my parents and their once-immigrant, earned citizenship status.... but let's face it, it's hard to make a new start, in a foreign place, with no one to depend on but yourself.  And I think that is where the  "me against everyone" mental backdrop took root, at least for myself.

I never knew who I was, or how I was supposed to be.  In addition to the handicaps already presented, I was also raised Catholic, where there seems to be some underlying emphasis, that whatever you are, it is definitely shameful and most probably NOT what you are supposed to be.  My poor parents were just kids, trying to raise five of their own, and moving back and forth across the Atlantic with the scratch of a pen.  Between piles of laundry, dirty dishes, feed bills, and report cards, I don't think my parents ever had a moment to consider, "who are these little monsters we're raising?"  I mean, obviously we were "Sally, Matt, Michael, Sindy, and Ken Jones, born to Mr. and Mrs. Jones"..... but who WERE we?  Who gave us the right to be born with ideas and opionions?  How did we each, individually, and irrespective of the other, feel about the moon, the stars, colors, trees, and what we were learning in Bible school?  Those crazy Mr. and Mrs. didn't have time to slow down and find all that out, and I find it very unlikely that anyone had ever slowed down enough to ask them when they were children either.  Like my siblings and I, they had learned how to survive as a child in a grown up's world.

Since no one at home was asking who I was, "paying attention to my personhood" as my not-so-quack-therapist would say, I set about seeing what other people had to say about who I was, and I learned the skill of the chameleon.  Not knowing who I was, I had no way to define myself.  Not knowing who I was, meant I didn't know who I wasn't, either.  It also meant not knowing where in this big grown up world I was supposed to fit, what role I was meant to play, and whether I had anything of value to share at the table with all these people who seemed to know exactly who they were and where they belonged.

I chameleoned through life, from multi-lingual pubs in downtown Brussels, to impoverished ghettos in the States, to ranches in Arizona, to the streets of Cairo.  Wherever I found myself, I fit.  I could be whatever I saw around me, and I almost drown in that mirror.  Funny thing is, that it was the reflection of alcoholism in the people around me, that consumed me, that defined me, that saturated me to the point where I had lost all touch with whoever I was born to be and all hope that life could ever be okay.... all so that I could finally take a few sober steps in life, and start down the road to finding out what I look like when I'm not trying to look like you.