The Coastal Shelf
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse
Two TV shows that concluded recently resurfaced many of my childhood memories and forced me to ponder over their impact on my persona. The shows in question are Ted Lasso and Succession.
The iconic fictional coach Ted Lasso suffers mental health issues because of his personal life. Despite this, he leads people compassionately and helps them become their best version.
Succession is a show about the broken kids of a millionaire and a terrible father. It is a gripping Shakespearean tragedy that can reinforce your nihilistic worldview (in case you have one).
I won’t share any spoilers or details in case anyone wants to watch them. The artistic brilliance of both these shows shook me, and I was forced to pull out the skeletons I had locked in my closet.
I am a child brought up by a single, separated mother. Despite her faults and refusal to admit them, I consider her an inspiring person. But I do question many of her decisions even today.
I thought I could fix her persona at some point, but now I can only forgive and move on with life. Being a child from a dysfunctional family came with a lot of self-imposed stigma. But there was also a fierce drive to succeed and make something out of myself.
For a long time, I thought none of the problems outside my control were worth pondering. I strongly believed that focusing on things I can influence would yield the best results.
Whatever negative impact I could think of were only minor side effects that were manageable. For example, my emotional intelligence was below average.
However, I have worked on it for the last few months. At a certain point, I thought I had achieved the emotional intelligence to get through the rest of my life. I believed that difficult circumstances had forced me to work hard and achieve whatever little victories in my career.
I was only partly right.
This is not the first time I’ve tried to find closure about my childhood. I did write a very vulnerable piece about my father last year and showed it to the person I was dating at that point in time. Apart from her, everyone who read it was supportive, and I felt that I had some closure.
And when she ditched me, my old wounds ruptured, and I bled quite badly. Even after that episode, I returned to my old stoicism + hustle philosophy with cosmetic changes to my narrative. Simultaneously, I started behaving like an impatient child craving unconditional parental love I had missed throughout my life.
Despite this, I put on a brave face and marched on.
Everything was stable till I watched the Succession finale. In the last episode, I felt the raw emotions of the siblings, and I felt sorry about the destruction of each character. I wondered whether the same could happen to me. I was scared of the vindictiveness humans could carry for a long time and feared being one of the victims of this emotion.
And after some reflection, I concluded that the suppression strategy I was proud of was pulling me down in unimaginable ways. So I decided to take on these emotions head-on.
I tried unpacking these emotions over a couple of sessions hosted by a peer support group (Instagram Page: Through Thick and Thin).
I was partly shocked when I wrote down all thoughts that were in the back of my mind. Initially, I was only tangentially relating to random instances where I thought my abnormal childhood could have negatively impacted me.
But today, the peer support group encouraged everyone to write major milestones they could remember from childhood. For some reason, I wrote down all troublesome events on the paper and then read them one after the other.
I felt so sorry for the younger version of me that I cried. In the past, I had grieved and consoled myself for many of these events individually but never in totality.
I had anticipated this, but I did not expect myself to burst into tears. I intended to read out everything I had written. But it felt quite pointless and farcical.
How could a single person go through all this and still forget everything? Of course, my survival instinct had been extremely strong. My older belief in ignoring troublesome events had worked until it didn’t.
When I finally paid attention to these events chronologically, I felt like a general grieving for dead soldiers after the war had been won. Albeit, I had refused to look at their faces for all these years.
I don’t feel hopeless, though. I am glad I can now acknowledge these events and give them an honourable space in my memory.
The best is yet to come. In fact, it is happening as I write this post.