Magical memory healing

Today, I’m stopping to reflect. That day, nearly a month ago, was always going to be a significant one for me. Over 30 years ago I had left my home and the Polo Club, travelling to the UK to spend a few months getting to know the country before I began university in the October. I knew from my brief and unhappy stint at boarding school that it would be a good idea to acclimatise before becoming part of another community. I was right; I felt more comfortable in my Cambridge college environment than I had at school. It probably also helped that we were all 18 or 19, rather than the 15 and 16 year-olds I had been surrounded by at school.

But when I left Malaysia, I thought – really believed without a reason to doubt it – that I would be ‘home’ within the next year during one of my vacations. I left lots of clothes and other bits and pieces in my room, bottles in my bathroom and no doubt books etc all over the house. It didn’t occur to me that I might not come back. Later that year, however, when I had just started at university, at the same time my beloved grandmother died, my mother, my brother and I found that we would not be going back, and the family would never be together again. I was 18. We were all grieving and afraid. I just focussed on working really hard at my studies and spending my spare time with my boyfriend. The easiest thing was to try and blot it all out.

Over a year later, my mother planned to travel to Malaysia to pack up her personal belongings. To do that splitting up of the household that anyone who has been through a divorce – their own or their parents’ – knows only too well. My brother agreed to go with her but I refused. Looking back, I realise that I had adopted a coping mechanism of ignoring the painful issues. I thought it would be awful to go to the house for a couple of weeks, pack up my stuff and say goodbye. I must have believed it would be easier to put my head in the sand. But what I said was this: ‘I want to stay in London for Easter, see my boyfriend and study every day at the library at UCL.’ So that’s what I did. I imagine my mother tried to persuade me to travel with her, but I was determined and I probably believed that was what I really wanted to do.

So, as a result, I never went back. Never, that is, until last month. My mother packed up my clothes, books and personal belongings as well as her own and the things in the house that had become ‘hers,’ and when she came home, well, now we only had one home. I continued my head-in-the-sand strategy. I refused to speak or even think about Malaysia. I thought, at the time, that this was because I wanted to integrate myself into British society, and avoid being seen as different or weird as I had at boarding school. I think, now, that this was an excuse. It was too painful to think about losing my home, so I refused to think about it or acknowledge the crisis that had happened in our family.

This went on for more than 30 years. I would make friends and know them for years and never mention that I had lived in the Far East as a teenager. If anyone mentioned Malaysia, I would feel wounded and angry and take it personally. I would avoid television programmes about that part of the world. Gradually, as Malaysia became a tourist destination, this became harder and harder. I would switch channels when the ‘Malaysia truly Asia’ ads came on the telly. What a way to live. I find it hard to believe now that I kept it up for so long.

I first suspected that the pain wasn’t so much homesickness but something to do with the family circumstances when I spoke to my friend, the coach Bharti Kerai about these hidden feelings. This was the beginning of the shift, about two years ago. Then, last year, out of the blue, I found out that something amazing was going to happen: I was going home.

My main goal for the entire trip was to find the house and stand outside it, and then to find the Polo Club. I didn’t know what to expect but I knew I needed to be there, and I thought that it might be healing to make the pilgrimage. In my last two days’ blog posts, here and here, I have recounted, almost step by step, finding those two places and how I felt when I got there. Now I feel I can just begin to understand what happened.

Every time, up until last month, that I thought about my house or the Polo Club, I imagined them how they were when I was last there. I knew that there would have been changes but those changes were invisible to me. What I saw in my mind’s eye was painful, because it reminded me, over and over, that I had lost the right to be there and that I had never said goodbye.

As I stood in each of those places, last month, I was able to update my imagination. I saw that someone else was living in my home. I knew this to be the case but seeing it with my own eyes was very different. It allowed me to accept that time had passed, that those painful times were so very long ago. I imagined myself as a teenager and the memories flooded in. I saw – felt – myself going to school, riding, socialising, being a kid. I knew that was me, and that somewhere inside I still hold those experiences and that history, but that now I am so much more than that girl. Older, yes, but wiser, happier and much, much more comfortable with being me. I might have known all these things intellectually, in my head, before making the trip, but standing in those places ensured I understood them with my whole being.

I used to feel I had two homes. The UK, which didn’t always feel like home but was where I had to live, and Malaysia which felt like home but I wasn’t allowed to live there. Of course, over the decades, I have become more comfortable living in the UK and I now feel it is where I choose to be. But I no longer feel the pain of having two homes. It’s inconvenient, even sad, that my ‘other’ home is so far away that I can’t visit often, but I can live with it. I can even talk about it now!

This is part of the reason that I have come back to the UK more fully and deeply myself and more comfortable with myself than I ever remember being. Do you have memories from the past that are painful to contemplate? Would it be possible for you to ‘do over’ like I did, by visiting a house, school or even a grave? If it’s too painful to share, I understand all too well. But please consider my experience and ask yourself if you could make a pilgrimage. And if it really helps, come back and share afterwards!