{"id":5252,"date":"2026-07-24T00:38:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T00:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/?p=5252"},"modified":"2026-09-05T21:47:35","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T21:47:35","slug":"learning-40-year-old-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/learning-40-year-old-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning 40 year-old lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the time I turned nineteen, my family had broken apart due to mental illness, depression, alcoholism, and abuse.<\/strong> My Dad had gone from his boss and bully persona, to a worn-out, weaker version who was probably lucky to be alive. My Mother had gone from being part of the family in 1976, to giving up on herself and trying to drink herself to death by 1977, and to being permanently institutionalized by 1980. It was a terrible few years of watching her slide into her deep depression. By 1985, when I was on my own at nineteen, my mother had been basically out of our family for about eight years.<\/p>\n

As far as I\u00a0 know, she never told any of us what she was feeling or why she tried to kill herself. Maybe Dad knew why, but nobody really talked about anything. If there were any histories of her condition or any reports about therapies or medications, that information had disappeared when her medical records were destroyed by either Riverview Hospital or the public trustee. My mother’s actual inner life remains a mystery.<\/p>\n

My sister and I lived through all the highs and lows of our family, all the uncertainties and fears of our first sixteen years. Our parents were always the cause, directly and indirectly. I saw it all clearly later, but while you’re steeped inside such a covertly toxic family bubble, you don’t see it objectively – it’s just your daily life, warped but also safely camouflaged inside enough conventional patterns to let you get through your grocery shopping without turning heads in Safeway. Nobody around you really wants to scratch away at the thin, accepted veneer of daily life. That’s kind of self-destructive, given how messed up many of us feel and actually are.<\/p>\n

As a sensitive kid, I was certain that everyone’s eyes were on me. I was sure that everone just knew. My first eighteen years were lived in an almost constant state of paranoid self-consciousness.<\/p>\n

Around nineteen, as I came into my own psychological independence, I learned to take pride in how I’d survived and escaped my broken family. Any life lessons or earned wisdom was a badge of pride; I was living independently, barely getting by, but determined to survive in my new freedom.<\/p>\n

I’d managed to keep contact with my parents, each living in their respective hospitals in their final years. I balanced my desperate sense of responsibility and obligation to them as if it were my birthright. I framed it as “keeping my sense of family going” by keeping my visits up whenever I could. They couldn’t (or wouldn’t) come to me, so I tried to\u00a0 go to them. It was my desperate angle to keep dying parental relationships alive.<\/p>\n

Adult children of alcoholics tend to take responsibility for their parents and to manage situations that other kids wouldn’t know much about. As a kid, when I saw other kids laughing and being happy, I often thought they were silly, immature, and oblivious to life’s realities. I knew how things really were.<\/p>\n

As a kid, I really needed more happiness, humour, and laughter in my life. I was far too serious, deep down. You walk through school carrying an invisible extra weight on your shoulders, and draining a pain deep in your chest. It’s just a constant circumstantial grief that you’re going through. Sometimes it turns into self-pity or self-loathing and you just can’t envision a brighter future. You’re just conditioned by your experiences. Having a sad, bleak present tense can be very effective at muting out brighter dreams of the future. Your material obligations force you to just keep powering through each day, getting things done.<\/p>\n

I used to see healthy-looking families in public, smiling parents with their blissed-out toddlers, and I’d feel joy and compassion for them: those babies would probably never wonder if their parents loved them or noticed them. They would know that they were seen.<\/p>\n

As a young man, I used to wear my emotional scars like a messed up badge of honour. Me and my sister had survived our fucked-up childhood and the chaos and uncertainty of a violent alcoholic household. I’d justifiably hold my head up proudly with an inner toughness that couldn’t be seen on the outside of my five foot seven frame. I didn’t grow up into a big and tall man like my Dad, but I did grow into my own man after all.<\/p>\n

Now at the age of 60, I’m starting to acknowledge that my inner loner – that familiar voice inside that kept me company and consoled me since I was old enough to talk to myself – has recently begun to worry that maybe I’m not social enough anymore. Babies are still beautiful and seeing loving families still warms my heart, but I now think that maybe I need to find a way to reconnect to other people in a more regular way.<\/p>\n

I’ve always had my family, my beloved wife, and a few good friends. Maybe I now regret not having had my own kids. Too late to do anything about that now. I still believe that I made the right life choice for me.<\/p>\n

It’s probably just my old fear of being left alone or being abandoned. It’s taken me forty years to understand how bent I was on the inside. I still kind of am, but it’s okay. Everyone gets bent or bruised by life in some way.<\/p>\n

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By the time I turned nineteen, my family had broken apart due to mental illness, depression, alcoholism, and abuse. My Dad had gone from his boss and bully persona, to a worn-out, weaker version who was probably lucky to be alive. My Mother had gone from being part of the family in 1976, to giving … Continue reading Learning 40 year-old lessons<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[19,11],"class_list":["post-5252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memoirs","tag-family","tag-reflection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5252"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5262,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5252\/revisions\/5262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}