Who am I?

It was my birthday last week - thanks to Facebook quite a few people knew and obviously my friends and family know. But I tend not to share the date with others or too widely. It feels overly conspicuous and probably reminds me of those feelings of not being worthwhile enough to share my birthday or celebrate it. Even having the cards up for longer than a couple of days feels too much and I'm keen to move on. 

That said I did indeed celebrate and took myself and my wife off to London for a couple of
days. I also saw one of my brothers and my eldest sister (I'm the youngest of five) for lunch and then later cocktails on the eve of the day itself. Midnight passed though with just myself and my wife sitting at my favourite cocktail bar, where they served me a glass of champagne and my long time fav cocktail a French Martini. 

But this post isn't meant to be about cocktails. My birthday and the other event that happened that day have me thinking a lot about identity. Sadly at 6.20pm on my birthday my 97 year old Aunt Molly died. It was to be expected and she died peacefully, but it is a complicated situation. She is my Aunt on my natural fathers side. I say natural father because when I was 26 I discovered the truth about my father actually being my godfather, a man who was a Roman Catholic Priest. My "dad" turned out not to be mine, but he is the father of my 4 siblings. You can only begin to imagine what that does to someone....but as I've had 23 years to get used to it all I'm probably a little bit ahead of you! 

To cut a very long story short there are lots of us who are children of priests (check out this great Australian programme on You Tube I took part in Foreign Correspondent) and yes he did know I was his child and I knew him as Uncle Danny. We met once after I had found out the truth and he died in 2013, with me asked not to attend his funeral. I knew I had cousins and that he had a brother and a sister but I didn't feel it was my place to disrupt their lives. Until 2019 when a friend I was running with shared his story about his own family and prompted me to search on Facebook, where I found my cousins. Which in turn led me to Aunt Molly. 

I'm glad to say I met her in 2019 and despite her age and dementia we had a wonderful short visit where I felt the most connected to my natural father that I ever have and suspect ever will again. 

There will be other blogs to talk more about the feelings finding something like this creates, the issues and the trauma but for me the biggest impact has been on my identity. Who am I? for a long time after the truth I struggled to look in a mirror. Birthdays became a constant battle of wills between celebration and what that day meant and must have looked like in reality for all the parents involved as they all knew the truth. 

Then with Molly passing away I'm once again left wondering what does all this mean for me. Someone I barely knew, but who I definitely had a brief connection with is gone. Opportunities to understand a bit more about my family, what makes me who I am from a nature point of view or insights into my father have been lost. Does that matter? Only when the next day your therapist asks 'who are you?' and I cannot answer. 

The tangled web that makes us us, rarely runs smoothly and sometimes how do we begin to unpick this and should we even try? I know a lot of who I am is based on lies told to me by others who should have known and tried better and by myself; lies well told over a long period can become truth. But I have an opportunity, we all have an opportunity to start telling ourselves the truth.  My journey to Newcastle for Aunt Molly's funeral is a step in that direction. This time I will be there a member of her family. Not hidden away, feeling ashamed. 

Connecting with others and believing what they say to me (when it's a compliment or praise) relies on my rewiring my sense of identity and the stories I tell myself about myself. We can rewire our brains, like training a muscle and in the same way that takes time to impact so will this. In practice this means I'm going to start trying to look into the mirror and to tell myself that I am worthy of love and belonging and who knows maybe one day I will say 'I love you' to myself. 

Oh and I learned today to think of my birthday in a new way, my friend Jules said "why not call it a celebration day instead" and actually, yes - today it was pointed out that it doesn't have to be about commemorating your birth, instead think of it as a new beginning, a new 365 days of opportunity and a chance to celebrate life and love and how others feel about you. Mind blowing.