Time Will Say Nothing but Give You Receipts

W H Auden's Villanelle about time is one of my best poems. The first stanza goes

“Time will say nothing but I told you so,

Time only knows the price we have to pay;

If I could tell you I would let you know.”

Sanity stop has taught me that this one life we have, rolls one on another -I mean the years. It is the compilation of attitudes, behaviours, and experiences that make us the adult we are; broken, happy, independent, confident, fulfilled, or not. It is also why we spend the best aspect of our adult lives seeking counsel, planning to undo our early years’ experience that has become a tremor blocking us from seeing the world as we should. We go to the therapist, the pastor, family, friends, any important support group that can help us see and do better. It is time. Time does not say much except to give us receipts and imply by the situations we find ourselves at the moment, the price we had to pay. Yet if we realise we have been surcharged, that we have spent too much for a way of life that is not healthy enough, or that is complicated enough to ruin our happiness in the here and now, surely we can undo that. We can pay life with the moments we have now, undoing the damage, or stay stuck and miserable for the rest of our beautiful lives.

The question is, what do you make of your experiences?

Boda Gbenga told me a story last week of two men raised in hunger and abject poverty. When, fortunately, the two survived the traumatising experience of childhood and became influential government officials, they both were in charge of the daily supply of bread. One thought to himself that the best thing to do was stockpile bread for himself at the expense of the people. He had experienced hunger before, he knew what it was like to be hungry and not have food, and he must avoid that by all means. The other thought it was best that he shared bread to as many people as possible. He had experienced hunger before; he knew what it was like to be hungry and not have food and wanted to ensure no one went through that. The story is, we know that brokenness can make one become any of this-a bread stockpiler or someone who shares bread.

I started working on self-development intentionally during my national service year. I was already 25, and I had a few behaviours that had served me but were becoming an irritant to people or had always been, but I was in my comfort zone, and people could tolerate me because they had known me for too long. I was bitter, could not communicate interpersonally (a surprise to myself even), and had this self-conceit I find intolerable now in others. Looking back, I really could not believe I was that person. Now, I am faced with the same burden I felt that year. I recently discovered something new. Not new, just something I had not been able to put a name to until now. I had always thought, ‘Oh, maybe it’s a personality thing.’ I had attempted to seek help before but mostly been told that it was not anything serious and would improve. But I stumbled on a book that named it point-blank to me two weeks ago.

The writer, a clinical psychologist, started the first chapter by introducing a character that talks and behaves like me. By the end of that chapter, I thought the book exists to shame me. By the end of the first chapter, the writer, an expert psychotherapist, diagnosed me (the character in his book) with dismissive avoidant attachment. Dismissive Avoidant attachment is an insecure adult attachment style developed from a defensive pattern formed in childhood. It eventually becomes an essential aspect of how one forms relationships as an adult. It is characterised by the avoidance of emotional connections and physical intimacy of any sort with others, a highly independent character with a lot of good self-esteem going on for them. This character apparently believes, for too long, the lies their subconscious told them as a child that they do not need anybody. They like 'Hey come close, but don't come inside.’?Children who are said to be from homes where parents do not tolerate expressing feelings or where the parents or caregivers are absent, and children are taught to rely on themselves early in life have been reported to have this attachment pattern. This is based on an extensively researched Attachment Theory. I felt a surging headache for two days and well, cried through the two days as well. It is one thing to know your problem. It is another to realise it has been going on for you since childhood. But I guess my primary source of worry was hardly any of this.??It is how much effort I now need to change this and become a better person whose childhood experience does not have to determine their entire life course. I started going through the exercises in the book, but I've had to stop for about a week now. It has been traumatising to say the least. I have had time to think about the situation and wrote down a diary entry on how I feel about it;

"It is ok if you do not feel like all your emotions are fully developed. You can learn it. Understanding that first, emotions like love are not necessarily as innate as many would have us believe, and our ability to actually feel vulnerable enough to want to learn how to love, or how to care for others, and show deep feelings at whatever point in our lives we discover these internal struggles -whether it is in our 20's or 50's is a great starting point. We deserve to be at our best selves. Others deserve to know that us, not skewed by terrible early experiences that have curated themselves into defense mechanisms we stand no chance against because we do not know they exist. To be frank, it is hard to learn how to love or accept this love when you have no idea what it looks like or when all you really have experienced is a compilation of opposite emotions. Your brain warns you of danger instead of embrace. It gives you a false alarm and you run away. The first vulnerability I owe myself is realising that I have experiences that have skewed some part of my emotions, so what comes as 'natural' to others might likely not come to me that way. I do not feel bad about this. I do not feel miserable. I do not feel like a terrible latecomer who comes to the great dance of life when everyone has had their fun and left for home. I pat myself on the back and say, 'Ah, good thing you are here now. Dance to your fill and leave whenever you are up to it or until the house owners decide they are done for the night" I need to be as compassionate to myself as possible."

?To be a good person, someone who does not infect the people we interact with daily with our brokenness or sabotage the genuine efforts and energy others put out to be kind to us, takes a lot of work. The pain in an experience like this is that we do not often see except we seek help or become more reflective of our life, how much some of our experiences sabotage our life in the present and how to stop the circle. It is so subtle, so a thing of the subconscious. Like Gbenga told me, what else do we have in the absence of genuine human stories? He introduced me to Kemi Adetiba's King Women, a series of genuine human stories of women who share reflections about their lives. I appreciate these stories and understand that unlike my head would have me believe, I am not alone. People have gone through different shares of their transformation, and I can too.

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. ... You begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently. —Pema Ch?dr?n