I am not one for special occasions like
birthdays and anniversaries etc, but for me personally this
day marked a completely different kind of occasion.
For most, the 21st birthday is probably
the most significant of all.
This signals the ‘coming of age’ and the entrance
into the adult world.
The world of taking responsibility for creating your own
life.
By age 21, the parents would have prepared
and equipped their offspring for this responsibility.
Well, they should have.
But not all parents are aware of, or fulfil this duty.
Some of them don’t give two hoots about the future
of their children.
Others try to relive their own lives through their children.
To cut a long story short.
For the first thirteen years of my life, my mother controlled
my life, She dictated what I could or could not do, when
I should do what, and everything else to do with my life.
My father didn’t give a damn.
Just before my thirteenth birthday, I rebelled
against this ‘control’ and ‘ran away from
home.’
Shortly after this I was introduced to drugs.
At the time, I was not at all aware of the fact that I was
in control of my own destiny.
The absence of my mother’s ‘control’ left
a vacuum that I was not even aware of.
Let alone how to fill that vacuum.
But it was easy.
For the next twenty-six years I allowed drugs to fill that
vacuum. I allowed drugs to control my life.
Then, on my thirty-ninth birthday, as a
gift to myself, I booked myself into the drug rehabilitation
program at Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital.
That is the day when the person that I am today was actually
born.
So chronologically I may have turned sixty,
but for me Saturday 4 February 2012 marked twenty-one years
of the process of being prepared and equipped to take the
responsibility of creating a life that would at least give
me a fair chance at attaining happiness.
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Sometime
in 1954 |
4
February 2012 |
I had to do it on my own, and that was a
long and very hard process, but now I have finally ‘come
of age’ I am hopeful that I am finally equipped to
create that happiness.
Like I said, I suspect that I will still
be around for a while.
Quite scary actually.
