Ahh humanity
That I am Relieve me That I May be All that I have All that I dream Don’t let me fall Or be deceived Ahh Humanity That I am Deception being What I’m seeing Let me not Fall prey To the lies Or their sway. Long have I strived For differences contrived Eyes seeing Yet denied. Truth is behind Behold you Humanity is in you Disparage not that which is true Ahh Humanity That I am Cloak and dagger Is it a sham? Ahh humanity That I am Worldly, attached Is this the Man? Am I Do you suppose To be the one to uphold The truth of me They do not see? As it bears down Me into the ground? Ahh Humanity That I am Dust and dirt From whence I came Ahh humanity Of power, born of shame Ahh humanity That I am Knowest thou not Humble servents Hast thou begot? Ahh humanity That is me Live life That they may see. Ahh humanity That is me Display your life That the world may see. Not all is for naught Not all is forgot The memory is true It is the memory of you. Ahh humanity That is me Fraught with worry Without dignity. Though I hold my head high. Just look into my eye. There you will find The beauty unkind. For it lives beyond the depths Of those unwilling to take the steps. This may sound a bit strange to some but tonight, for the first time in I don't know how long, I was comfortable with myself and my thoughts. Enough so that I fell asleep on my couch just thinking!
This is like a rebirth for me because for the last several years, my thoughts have held me hostage. Hostage to a past I could not change. Hostage to a pain for which there is no cure. Hostage. Held in place with no answers and no future. But at the same time this unyield9ng hope that somehow I could beak free. I will explore that hope at a later time. Right now I want to talk about thought and thinking. Since 2012, I haven't read a book for pleasure. That's when I started to go to college and I thought that the books I would read would only hinder me and if I was serious about this education, I could at least sacrifice books. One of my first classes was Statistics. An accelerated summer course. I remember thinking that it was a poor choice to start with, something so demanding. I Aced the class and it surprised me. Another class that surprised me was a history course that required heavy reading about things you never heard of in high school (at least not high school in the 80's). I wrote six papers on the books I read and I got five A's and a B. Throughout my college career I have strived to do very well. But in the back of my mind, there was that voice telling me it should have been an A plus; That B should have been an A. There was always that voice saying I should have done better. It wasn't until my Algebra course that I learned to call that voice a liar. Algebra literally had me in tears because I just couldn't' get some of the concepts. The professor was not much help. When I asked why one parenthetical set in an equation should be multiplied but not the others, he said because two times three times four is twenty-four. He gave that same answer five times and I even as I type, I still don't get his answer. I came so close to quitting. But I discovered a thought process in the back of my mind. It always said I can't understand this. Having understood this, I changed that thought to "just because I don't understand it, it does not mean that I can't understand it. I went to the internet and found purplemath.com. I passed Algebra with a B. You may be thinking what all this has to do with me being comfortable with my own thoughts. For all intents and purposes, I have overcome my own thoughts based on the above. However, what is different is that for the first time (probably a first in my 45 years) in my memory, I did NOT HAVE ONE NEGATIVE THOUGHT ABOUT MYSELF! I thought about possibilities, philosophies and Truth. I thought about tomorrow and that old fear didn't creep in. I was comfortable to sleep on my couch alone and I was not afraid. I even smiled when I woke up and saw that I was still on the couch. I can say today that while I may hesitate; while I may still get scared, I will no longer condemn myself with my own thoughts. That small voice in the back of my head that I thought was my conscious is nothing more that the lie created to keep me in a place I never wanted to be. Freedom of the mind. It is liberating! Know the Truth and the Truth will make you Free. It's been a while. Just wrote this one tonight and I learned through writing. I hope and pray that everyone who reads this gains insight and understanding as I did. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for...Hebrews 11:1a An ironic anniversary. December 8th is my wedding anniversary and the anniversary of my husband's funeral. It's been 23 and 1. I get to celebrate, reminisce, mourn and celebrate, reminisce and morn. Twice on the same day. Merry Christmas and Happy motherfucking New Year. Oops. My bad. I haven't yet overcome my language barriers as yet. I forgot to practice. Again. It was the only thing he ever asked of me--not to curse--and I couldn't even do that! SHAME ON ME! Then I left him in the midst of his kidney failure. O...M...M...F...G You insensitive, selfish biatch! How could you?!! Long story. No time for that. This is about hope...for Me. It's not a term I'm familiar with. I never had that. Hope requires a future. I never had that. What is the substance of hope? As I sit and contemplate the irony of my upcoming dual anniversary, I wonder what it was I hoped for the first time. And like most of us, including him, I wanted "Happily ever after." I wanted a fairytale. I just wish someone, anyone, would have told me that life isn't a fairytale. I wish I could have known that the baggage I carried was to be the destruction of my dream. That my dream had nothing to do with reality. What, then, is the substance of hope? The rest of Hebrews 11:1 says "the evidence of things not seen." What am I missing? What is it I don't see? Me. The first title I came up with for my story was "The Girl Without A Face." I can remember all that happened to me and around me. I can remember one of my first dreams. I was about 3 or 4 years old (and at that age it was more like a nightmare). But I remember. In all my memories and all of my dreams, I cannot see my own face. I can see a person being beaten and ridiculed, broken and scarred. I know she's a girl, but for the life of me, In can't see her face. I remember a book I read as a teenager. It was the diary of a slave girl. She learned how to read and became a conductor on the underground railroad. She learned that there were people she could not free. One man asked her, point blank, "What is freedom?" He explained that he didn't know what that was and that he wanted no part of it. But in her heart she knew what it was even though she had never experienced it. At the end of her book she exclaimed "the picture of freedom is me," while seeing her reflection in a pool of water. That was the most profound thing I had ever read or heard. She could look at herself and see freedom. I wondered then, as I do now, What does that feel like? I've been bound by things beyond and within my control for so long. How do I begin to look like freedom? I don't have the answer to that question. What I do have is faith. God reveals those things needed to move us forward in our journey. This is a revelation. I have faith because it is the gift of God Himself. Hope is... (God stopped me there). Hope is. God is. He didn't say I was. He didn't say I will. God says "I AM" Hope. Faith. Wisdom. Love. Righteousness. The Way. The Truth. The Life. God is Hope. Please feel free to share your thoughts. Triumphs, setbacks and opinions welcome!
Just finished Flight by Sherman Alexie and once again that feeling of jealousy has crept up, the same as did when I finished reading Call Me Tuesday by Leigh Byrne. Feeling this same thing for a second time brought me to the revelation of why adults who were abused as children don’t want sympathy from others. We’ve spent most of our lives feeling sorry for ourselves.
We’re sorry for being abused; we’re sorry for the anger; we’re sorry we were (and sometimes still are) unable to fight for ourselves; we’re sorry for hating our abusers; we’re sorry for loving our abusers; we’re sorry for wanting our abusers to love us. We’re just sorry about it all. That’s not the kind of sorry that’s easily overcome. There are so many mixed feelings and the self-hatred associated with it goes directly against our desire to survive. It’s a life of great paradoxes and for most of us, if we’re even able to articulate, it makes no sense. Do we love them or hate them? Yes. Do we love ourselves or hate ourselves? Yes. I have found no satisfactory explanation for this. What I have found is that part of what keeps us going lies somewhere between the paradoxes. It’s a place of survival. It’s called secret. We survive on secrecy because the paradox is too great to explain. As long as we live with the secret, nobody can see the great confusion and diagnose us with bipolar disorder or manic depression or paranoid schizophrenia or whatever other mental disorder they can come up with. But once the secret is revealed, we have no place hide. That’s when sympathy begins pouring in. We understand it, but want to be as far away from it as possible. When knowing eyes look at us, we feel ugly and full of shame. Then there’s the accusing eyes—why do you love them so much when they hurt you so much? What’s wrong with you? Childhood abuse hasn’t made us crazy. We’re not case studies. We’re just people who survived. People who want to be loved and respected like everyone else. The paradox of the abused child is mostly misunderstood by social workers, sociologists and psychologist who assume that living with that kind of paradox is wrong and/or something that needs to be fixed. They seem to be missing the fact that it’s our spirit that’s broken, not our minds. But science cannot fix the spirit. Only God can. Our minds have protected us and will continue to do so as we grow and learn. And as God works on fixing our spirits, our thoughts and thought processes will change, not because they’re broken or wrong, but because we’re learning. Then came Peter to Him and said, Lord how oft shall my brother
sin against me, and I forgive him? Til seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times: but, until seventy times seven. Matthew 18:21-22 So my brother (or neighbor, or friend, father, mother, anybody) can sin against me 490 times before I can stop forgiving? How do I keep a record of this? It would be difficult and time consuming to keep a database of all the wrongs that people have done to me and even if I started now, today, that list would grow to the point of unmanageability. Who has time for that? So what did Jesus mean here? We know that forgiveness is a process. You must acknowledge a wrong, confront the pain, understand yourself and the wrongdoer and the role each play and choose, deliberately so, not to be bitter, not to expect, nor demand, any restitution from the wrongdoer and ultimately change your mind in a way that is contrary to your basic instinct to exact some revenge. So you go through this process and it’s over. You’re free in your forgiveness. Free not to be bitter. Free to no longer be hurt. Free to leave the past in the past. Right? How do you forget, though? You’re human. We don’t oft forget a wrong, even after we’ve processed it and forgiven the wrongdoer. Too often, the memory resurfaces like a submarine crashing through the ocean’s surface in an emergency. It’s there. Big as life, putting on a show like Shamu at Sea World. The memories want your attention, they want to be seen and acknowledged. They will not be suppressed. What is wrong with me? You ask yourself. Why can’t I just get over it and move on like everybody else? Maybe I need to see a therapist, talk it out some more, cause these memories won’t go away and remembering hurts. I’ve forgiven them!!! I’m supposed to be free!!! WTF “Until seventy times seven,” Jesus said. Forgiveness isn’t a single event, it’s ongoing. Jesus knows we are only human and He knows we won’t forget. Seventy times seven isn’t a mathematical equation; it’s a way of life. Jesus didn’t mean for us to keep a record. He said He wouldn’t do that to us. He told us that He would save us and wipe our slate clean. He said we are forgiven of our sins—past, present and future—we are forgiven. Jesus knows each of us intimately enough that He can count the hairs on our head (Matthew 10:30). He knows about our closets. He can unlock them and call our skeletons out by name. He knows our sin, but never once does He say “Remember when you….?”He did say, however, before trying to remove the speck from your brother’s eye, first remove the beam from your own eye (Matthew 7:3-5), so that you might see clearly enough and not poke out your brother’s eye. We all see things with our own eyes, from our own perspective. We see things through our own pain. The pain clouds our sight and reduces our vision so that a given situation has gray areas where we are unsure. We’re unsure of ourselves and because of a lack of confidence we allow ourselves to act on what we know—pain. The memories stay with us. The pain seems to never end. How can we trust anyone—ever? How can we trust ourselves? “Until seventy times seven!” Forgiveness. Over and over and over and over and over and over. Forgiveness. Memories that hurt-forgive the wrongdoer. Forgive yourself. Every day, all day. Forgiveness is not a one-time event for a single wrong. Forgiveness is a way of life. Just ask Jesus! Coworker: You know how your mom always said “eat all your vegetables’?
Me: No, can’t say that I do. Coworker: Come on, your mom had some saying you remember! Me: No. No she didn’t Coworker: She didn’t say ‘don’t talk with your mouth full’ or….? Me: My mom left when I was 5. She didn’t say anything Coworker: Oh. End of conversation and awkward silence. This is just an example of how we really don’t know how to handle these memories. All I did was make my coworker uncomfortable. My coworker sensed my anger. Why am I angry? For having to reveal my childhood pain. Her comments made me feel different, like somehow there was something wrong with me because my mother didn’t give me any of those sayings. Was it my coworker’s fault that I felt this way? Of course not. We had been having a pleasant conversation up to that point. So how do you handle these kinds of situations? I’m not sure, but I intend to find out. And so we begin. Stay tuned for updates as I learn about how to disclose (or not disclose) past hurts without making the situation uncomfortable for others. I’m sure, that like a mental disorder, childhood pains are something we need to be aware of. We need to be aware that while we are living in the present, the memories don’t go away and when someone unintentionally brings those memories to mind it’s not their fault that we must deal with them again. The trick is to deal with them in a way that is healing to us and not offensive to others. |
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