I am currently co-leading a team with Steps of Justice. At the beginning of these trips we take everyone to S-21, a school turned into a torture chamber during the mass genocide 40 years ago. I didn't go in, as I have done it before and knew it would destroy me for at least a few days.
As I was sitting in the coffee shop across the street I watched the Khmer people as they lived and worked around this huge historical building. A man near me asked what we were doing there and I said our team was in the museum, when I asked him if he had ever been to the museum he sort of nodded. Something struck me though, he absolutely refused to look at the building. As I looked around, I realized that was everyone. These people worked on the same street as this massive building and yet they refused to actually see it. They averted their eyes, they focussed on something else, they always stopped short of really taking it in.
It made me think about how we as people deal with traumatic experiences. Whether it be a genocide or divorce, abuse or loneliness, we all have our pain. We are all a lot more similar than we realize.
I have my own museum of pain, the memories of trauma and abandonment. I tell myself that because I have wrapped it up nicely and let people in that I have overcome it, that it is in the past and doesn't affect me anymore. But the reality is that I refuse to look at it. Like the Cambodians at S21, my life is run by this thing that I am unwilling to see. Because if I really see it, I know I will live it all again.
I'm sick of living this way, I hate pretending that the past doesn't matter when it is informing all my decisions. I want to learn to see my past for the beautiful parts and the painful parts. Then I want to live my life based on the Ultimate Truth behind it all. I don't know how I'll get there, but I know that is a life worth living.
