Balancing Act, 8

Some of the journals I am rereading are way too personal to reproduce here, and for the simple reason that those are my things and it would not be appropriate to try to interpret them for public consumption. I think there are still important distinctions to make in this age of social media, when everything seems to go. Privacy, more than ever, has become a major concern, and not just because we want neither government nor corporations meddling in our most personal lives. There is something inherently sacred about our own inner lives. Not for public consumption, especially when only we know the real reasons behind some of our apparently bad choices, and there is no point in displaying those things for the foolish and uninformed to judge us, especially when we can scarcely know, ourselves, what has motivated us. I will say this much about the time that followed my mother`s death. I was coping the best that I could. I was exhausted, and there were others relying on me, so the show must go on. I was living at the time in a rather eccentric intentional Christian community comprising four persons, including me, who likely would not have been seen together under ordinary circumstances. But this also made our community rather special. Who, but God, could bring together such disparate and otherwise incompatible persons? And even though we were in many ways incompatible, we were still able to make it work, if through a lot of effort. As I have mentioned in these journals, I was looked at as a mentor and leader for this community, though they really didn`t want a leader, and I was certainly not usually in the mood to lead nor be mentor to anyone. But I was the one with all the experience and the knowledge and insight, and of course they did hang on me at times for that, but they were in other ways like superannuated teenagers (though our respective ages were, early thirties, mid to late forties, and early to mid sixties). We did somehow manage, despite the conflict and bickering, but we were honest with one another, tried to support one another and we never argued about money or house cleaning. We were all generous to a fault and for the most part, neat freaks, except for one, and she really tried anyway. What is really difficult to communicate to nonbelievers is that we were all called together by God for this kind of work, and this is something I prefer to be silent about, because I would really rather reserve my pearls for worthier swine. In the wake of my mother's death I tried to rest as much as possible, while remaining as present as I could for the two remaining members of the community, as well as for the various street punks and survival sex workers who had enlisted me as a friend and ally. Then I went to Europe for more than two months, at first with the intention of relocating to London and starting my life over. I had a travelling companion, with AIDS and obligations to talk to London police about the brutal murder of his ex-lover in London (a man, married with kids). This person was also a chronic liar and scam artist with addictions I hadn't known about and several thousand dollars of the money from my mother's death ended up in his nose. Fortunately I did get rid of him after a week of this, when we were Edinburgh (no, I didn't kill him), but I saw him only one more time, back in Vancouver, and he was very quick to get away from me. Likely dead by now. I returned to Vancouver in mid-August, realizing that there were things I had started there that I also had to finish. There was of course, more drama to return to while having to turf out of one of our community house an addict with mental health issues, before he had a chance to kill one of our members. I will spare you, the sordid details, Gentle Reader, but such was life for me while coming to terms with my mother's death. There was no one there to support or comfort me, primarily because it seemed that everyone else was in greater need of my support and comfort. I got through it, and even if it exhausted me and left me emotionally incapacitated for a few years, in the long run these experiences have made me wiser, stronger and more compassionate. A worthy trade-off, don't you think?