Remember Playdays?
I bloody LOVED The WhyBird stop. Keep your Peggy Patch - turning up on a farm, sitting lifeless and silent. Not interested in Dot with her spotty clothes and dominos trying to sneak some maths into my day. WhyBird was THE ONE!
My love for the sassy squawker was probably inevitable. From the moment I could talk, I said “WHYYYYY?” about as often as a Love Island contestant says “my type on paper”.
I drove my parents crazy asking “WHY?” about pretty much everything.
Why is the sky blue?
Why do I have to go to school?
Why can you drink wine but I can’t?
They would answer, only for me to follow up with another “yeah but WHYYYY?”
I thought I’d grown out of this phase, but when my mum and dad got cancer, I turned back into the actual WhyBird.
Why did we deserve this?
Why does cancer even exist?
Why did both my parents get ill?
Why isn’t it someone else’s turn to have the heartbreak and sadness?
When something big and awful happens, you mind starts racing, looking for reasons why. Is it fate? Punishment? A lesson?
I spent months desperately searching for the slightest hint of a reason, a justification, or an explanation.
I turned to science and religion in equal measure – scouring studies and consulting psychics – reading reports and having readings. But regardless of how many tangents my mind went off on, no matter how many sleepless nights I spent over-thinking, I never came any closer to understanding why I was set to lose my mum and dad by my mid-20s.
People would tell me I had to accept that, perhaps, there is no reason. I had to accept that life is random and unfair and unjust.
Eventually I found little pieces of peace in knowing that I could never know ‘why’ and that, perhaps, there isn’t even ‘a why’ for me to discover.
I’m still none the wiser as to why it happened BUT I now understand why my brain wanted to know. And that’s where I’ve found the most healing. I finally realise that my quest for a ‘WHY?’ was a defence mechanism. Our brains believe that if it can understand why something awful happened, it can take steps to stop it from happening again.
My racing mind was just trying to protect my broken heart from any more pain.
And once I realised that, my heart was soothed more than by any answer I could ever have found.