Imagine there is no safe space to go, there is always fear that you will be attacked, in some way, or another. Think of how a child feels growing up like that. The horror. It doesn’t feel like horror, its all you know.

Can you imagine that? If you can, you will struggle to find that safe space wherever. You will seek out the comfort that you have never known. If you can’t find it in others, you will fall back on things that promise it. Chemicals, behaviours that take away the need for your place. Where you can drift in a sort of featureless, colourless fluid, where time has stopped.

Its hard work to make a place for yourself when you are 54.  I was told that I need to         re-parent myself. My own didn’t know how. I would prefer not to blame them, but I do. I know that they came from a spot where there was no place for them. I have heard my grandfather described as Hitler by one of his sons. They were torn from their place by circumstance, or people. Adrift in their world, how could they pass on what they knew little of.

I never had to go through the things my parents did, but in a way I did. The way they raised me and my siblings was predicated on those experiences. This was all they could feasibly give to us. They carved out a physical home for us, by hard work and perseverance. I wonder if they ever found their place inside.

I watched my Father die, not so long ago. I wonder what he thought at the end. Did he have a place ? Did he think to himself that he was home and he could brave what came next, or did he think to himself that he had just lost his place again. He was a carpenter. he never stopped building. will he forever be building, or is he finally home, in  his place.

Its hard at 54 to find your place, but at least I have a chance. I come to you, I reach out to you. I make decisions to keep myself safe, and I work with you. In the end I make my place, I re-parent myself. When I die, I will know that I had a place. The place called Love. I will be able to go wherever with that held in my heart.