Going over it again and again

The hope is that at some point we will find the thing that sheds light on it all. Something that will help us make sense of it and finally lift the weight.

The problem is that while we keep the search going, we will never find peace. And even if we do find something, the question remains. What has it written into you, and how are you still carrying it?

I pursued an answer for many, many years.

I was adopted as a baby, and during my teenage years I realised that I didn't have an origin story. I can remember a moment in my friend's house. We were bunking off school, but don't tell anyone. Whilst we were messing around I clocked a photo on the wall. He was there with his dad and his grandfather, and what struck me was the likeness. The same features carried down through all three of them, visible and undeniable.

I didn't have a photograph like that. I love my parents and my family, but underneath it all I had no idea where I had come from, or why any of it had happened.

I would often describe that sense of not knowing as having no words on the opening chapter of your book. The book was full of stories, adventures, connections, all of it. But the first few pages had no words. And so I found myself wondering what those words would be. I fantasised about who my birth mother was, and why. And sometime later I decided I needed to find out more.

Your opening pages might have words on them. Most people's do.

But nearly all of us have a section somewhere in the book that we cannot read properly. A season we never understood. A relationship that ended without explanation. A parent who was there and somehow not there. A version of ourselves we became for a while and cannot account for now.

And what we want, more than anything, is words for it. Something that names it. Because a thing with words on it can be understood, and a thing that is understood can surely be put down.

That is what the searching is really for. Not information. Language. We are looking for the sentence that will finally describe our own situation back to us, clearly enough that we can make sense of it and stop carrying it.

I believed that completely.

And then I got my words.

I sat with a social worker and opened my adoption file.

She warned me before I turned the first page. It was written in 1977, at a time when nobody imagined the child would ever read it. The language would be clinical. Matter of fact. Written for professionals, not for me.

And there it was. Everything I had spent my life wondering about. The circumstances of my birth. A seventeen year old girl in an impossible situation. Three months of her trying, and loving me, and finding that looking at me and surviving what had happened to her were the same unbearable thing. The decision. The first year. The moves between foster families before I arrived with my mum and dad.

The opening pages of my book finally had words on them.

It was one of the most significant days of my life. I am glad I did it and I would do it again.

But it did not lift the weight.

Searching for the facts and answers to questions will give you knowledge. It will help you understand the situation, maybe even where to put the blame. But what it does not do is deal with what that moment wrote into you. How it has affected you, and the way you see life, and relationships, and most importantly how you see yourself.

That is the part nobody hands you in a file.

And here is what I have come to understand since.

There are two ways of going back over your own story, and they look almost identical from the outside. Both of them take real time and real energy. Both of them feel like you are dealing with something. But they are not the same thing at all, and they do not leave you in the same place.

The first one is rumination, the going over it again and again. It is what most of us are doing at two in the morning. Why did I say that. Why did they do that. What if I had handled it differently. What is wrong with me. Round and round, the same ground, the same questions, no further forward at 3 am than you were an hour before.

It feels like accountability. That is what makes it so convincing. It feels like taking your life seriously, and looking at yourself honestly, and doing the hard work of facing up to things.

But notice what it never does. It never asks anything of you. It never arrives anywhere. It never once turns towards tomorrow. It keeps you busy with your own story without ever letting you read it, and you get up in the morning carrying exactly what you went to bed with.

Reflection is a different thing entirely.

It is deliberate, for a start. You go towards it rather than waking up inside it. And it asks a completely different set of questions.

Not why did this happen. But what did this write into me. Not why am I like this. But how am I still carrying it, here, today, in the way I love people and the way I work and the way I see myself when nobody is watching. And then the one that changes everything. What is the one small thing I can do about that.

Those questions have answers. That is the whole difference. The first set of questions can be asked for twenty years without ever producing a single one.

Reflection looks back in order to move forward. Going over it looks back in order to look back again.

Same story. Same events. Same hours spent thinking about it. What decides whether those hours cost you or give you something back is where you are pointing your attention, and what you are asking of it.

The woman I sat with this week is not stuck because she hasn't tried. She is one of the most thoughtful people I have met, and she has more insight than most.

She is going round in circles because the going over has been standing in for the reading.

And I do not say that as a criticism, because I did the same thing for the best part of forty years. I had my file. I had my facts. I had the words on the opening pages of my book at last. And I still went round and round the same ground, asking questions that could never answer me back, right up until somebody helped me ask a different one.

What did this write into me.

That was the question that finally moved. Not because the answer was comfortable, because it wasn't. But because it was an answer. Something I could hold up, and look at properly, and finally begin to put down.