What can I tell you?

I am a woman, now in her seventies, who has struggled her whole life with feeling unloved, unworthy, unacceptable and more. It has taken a long time for me to realise that I am a necessary piece of the jigsaw that makes up life. Everyone of us is part of that jigsaw and who we meet, what we say, how we behave, how we treat others, how we react to things said and done, has a knock on effect, just like the ripples on a still lake when a raindrop hits it. Our lives are full of ripples that we send out into the universe. So perhaps this website is a piece of that jigsaw with ripples that will reach out to many more people than I could possibly reach otherwise.

I do not profess to be anything other than who I am in this website and I hope you enjoy reading about the parts of me that make up the full me. Perhaps you can relate to where I am coming from through your own childhood experiences. Wherever you are and wherever you are coming from know that you are important - and yes I know it is easier said than done to believe that sometimes - every single one of us is here on a journey, a journey that will have an effect on so many others without us really realising this. So just know that you are not alone and that many others struggle but come out smiling in the end. Perseverance and the strength to go on and know you can do whatever you set your mind to do as long as it is with good intent and will hurt no-one is the goal.

Having been though hell and back several times over in this lifetime, let me tell you about one episode which could have been disastrous and was actually caused through the fears held deep inside me from the time I was a child.

I have always had a fear of rejection, due to my childhood experiences, so much so that it almost broke the relationship I had with my children. Having brought my children up alone and having made sure that they knew I loved them unconditionally and I would always be there for them I gave them the confidence in themselves that I was sorely lacking.

They live in a world where it is ok to say I am too busy, or I will call you back, without even thinking about it. In all honesty that is how it should be, however, because of where I was coming from my rejection fears would hit me with such force that I withdrew from everything around me. So when it did happen I was scared to call them in case they said they were busy, or they would call me back and if they did not call back I would fall even deeper into a pit of despair, my fears resurfacing, even though I knew they loved me. I don’t really know how to describe my feelings exactly but it was a bit like being at the bottom of a dark pit with no means to get out with the pit getting darker and darker. As I could feel them slipping away from me I knew I had to do something to try and stop this from happening so I wrote them an email. It was the only way I could tell them what I was going through. If I tried to tell them I knew I would just end in tears and they would be none the wiser, in fact it would upset them but they needed to know and hopefully understand where I was coming from.

Thankfully I have such wonderful children and although I am sure they think I am a little crazy they are helping me get over these fears and I will now call or text to see if they have time for a chat without those fears taking over.

Just remember there will always be hurdles and going around them is not the answer, we need to go over them.

So below is a little more information about who I am!!

I AM AN INTROVERT

To every introvert out there, unless you are fortunate enough to have had parents who understood where you were coming from, life has probably been one battle after another trying to explain why you don’t want to socialise with a large amount of people, why you would rather read a book, why you would hide away in the garden on your own, why you really don’t want a birthday party. Why family get togethers were so hard, why you were continually being told you were moody, unsociable etc.

As you can no doubt see I am not a social animal, I love being on my own, I am exhausted if and when I have to attend social functions with large amounts of people and cannot wait to get home to my solitude. I tend to try and find excuses not to go to such functions if at all possible. Please don’t misunderstand me, I love meeting people and taking time with them but I do prefer to do so on a much smaller scale. Even as a child and young woman I usually had a small circle of friends.

Here I was a bridesmaid at my Aunt’s wedding.

Without this photo I would have no memory of being a bridesmaid and I have no recollection of the day at all.

I also have:

(SDAM) Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory

I have only recently learned about this condition but it does explain the problems I experience with trying to recall things from my past and that includes fairly recent past too.

Below is part of an explanation of what SDAM is - taken from https://sdamstudy.weebly.com/ - if you are interested in finding out more.

"What is SDAM?

Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) refers to a lifelong inability to vividly recollect or re-experience personal past events from a first-person perspective. Our research on this topic emerged from studies of autobiographical episodic memory in healthy adults and individuals with brain disease. We are currently applying these same behavioral and neuroimaging methods to better understand individual differences in autobiographical memory capacities - or why some people remember events better than others.

One approach to this research is to study people with extremely high or low abilities. For instance, people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM, also known as hyperthymnesia) can effortlessly retrieve detailed events from almost any time in their past at will. In SDAM, autobiographical recollection of events is absent, but other forms of learning are intact. Thus the cases of SDAM we have studied have no functional complaints; they are successful healthy people.

In 2014, Greenberg and Knowlton described two healthy individuals with impaired visual imagery who also lacked a sense of reliving past episodic memories. Although these individuals presented with visual imagery impairment, they share many characteristics of SDAM. Zeman and colleagues (2015) report a similar syndrome in a questionnaire study."

Basically for me it is the inability to visualize past memories of any kind. What I mean is, I have memories but they are sporadic and seldom in a visual form. Apparently on reading further about this my memories are more semantics and familiarity. There is so much of my past that I cannot remember and this has been a worry for some time, I felt I was blocking them for some reason or another. When I read books by people who could recall their childhood or their past in great detail I asked myself why I found this impossible. When I see photos taken by someone else from my past I literally have to be convinced that it is me in the photo but have absolutely no idea where or when it was taken. I now have my answer and can at least understand that it is a condition that I am not alone in and it does clarify why I cannot remember so many things that have happened in my life, good or bad.