In October 2013, my life was turned upside down.
I had been living back in my family home for about 3 weeks, a year after graduating. A vague intention to save up and go travelling. An honest one to get to know my Mum and Dad as people, and not just Mum and Dad.
Then one afternoon, as I was returning home from a night out, from up the road I could see that our family bungalow had turned into a crime scene. Two bodies inside, suspected to be Mum and Dad.
My Dad had taken my Mum’s life and then his own. I was 23 with two brothers, one 13 and the other 26. We were all the family we had anywhere nearby.
There was little time to grieve as me and my older brother set about obtaining legal custody of our younger brother and trying to create some semblance of stability for him.
What resulted was a Two and a Half Men situation, with us all living in the family home. This remained until our younger brother went to Uni in 2019 and we finally sold the bungalow in March 2020.
It was a messed up situation.
It was a shitty situation.
It was a messed up shituation.
Yet we got through it.
There’s been tension, fallouts and fights.
Dark moods, disassociation and despair.
But from Day One, we resolved to make the best of it that we could.
For me, that resolve has helped me to heal, learn and grow and become a much wiser person in the process.
It has also helped give birth to Inner Quirk. Diving deep within myself has been difficult, uncomfortable and painful. However, I adopted a more creative approach and found that I could make this process more enjoyable.
Whether it be a personal trauma or a global pandemic, shitty situations happen. But we ALWAYS have the choice of how we respond to them.
We can always choose to make the best of it.