Nine Lives Live for Ten

It’s the early hours of the morning as I write this, and I’m fairly sure nothing good can come from a blog post written at that time, so please read on at your peril…

Believe it or not I consider myself to be luckier than most – the cat with nine lives I’ve been called. Death has always been a shadow beside me ever since I was a small child. I should have died at least 8 times by now and always, at the eleventh hour (or rather, with my bad time keeping, the eleventh hour and fifty ninth minute) I was saved in some way. I have been abused, raped, drowned, shot, stabbed, in bad accidents, and declared terminally ill. That’s quite a lot for one little life.

It would be easy to say that the Universe has it in for me. That I am being punished for some unforgiveable sin committed in another life time. And for a long time I did believe that. As a child I was shown no love, no care, just horrific abuse, and as most children in that situation would do, I took the blame as mine. And, as is always the way, those first lessons we learn in life are the hardest to unlearn. And they also create our blueprints for the future. My childhood was filled with pain, fear and the threat of death. So it’s not really that surprising that these have been recurring themes throughout the rest of my life, is it?

Despite this, I do consider myself to be blessed. Surely my ‘luck’ should be defined by the fact that I have survived all these things, and not the fact that they happened at all? The events themselves do not define me, even though it may feel that way at times.

Instead what these events have done is given me an ever present sense of my mortality and that, as the old cliché says, you should live each day as if it were your last. And that has enabled me to do some amazing things and have some truly wonderful memories to look back on and be proud of. But I have also managed to keep my hope of a happy future alive and work towards this at the same time. It’s a delicate balance that I’m not very good at! And yes, I wholly admit that there have been times when giving up seemed like the much easier option. But always, as I am about to surrender, something reminds me of what it is I’ve been fighting for all these years. And that gives me the strength to carry on.  There are things that I want to achieve that will mean that all that I have been through has not been for nothing.

So, I’m sitting here tonight after a very difficult day and I am contemplating my mortality once more. I am thinking of all the things I have done previously and I am wondering where I go from here. How can I use this for the greater good? And all I can really think is…

I’m on my ninth life guys, and I’m approaching the eleventh hour…but I’m not done trying to change the world yet.