I M Perfect lady

What a slow learner I am, how incredibly naïve and blindly stupid…I am surprised that I am just now catching on. How has it taken me this long, almost six years to figure this out?

The pain I have gone through, the mental anguish and all the soul searching, and still I didn’t know.

My family didn’t break apart, wasn’t destroyed and didn’t crumble under the weight of abuse, it wasn’t shattered, or flung upside right or mentally broken, only I was.

I broke.

In my head I had them all broken up like me, but they remain intact, a full family, minus a few.

No worse for the wear, unscathed and unbroken, they are holding up strong as the same family unit, while I am broken.

My brokenness is sharp, loud, and unwanted, a jagged point that doesn’t fit into the familiar routine.

A routine I can’t remember, forgetting the lines and missing the steps, characters changing before my eyes, my script no longer matches theirs.

When they laugh I cry, what they love I fear, when they gather I flee…I shout at their silences, say wrong words that jumble up the play.

I am the heckler or a bad actor playing on the wrong set and ruining the show.

When I am gone and silent the show returns to its familiar dialogue.

I see the picture clearer now…I see me trying to direct a play in progress, wanting to hand out new scripts, change characters and lines, make it a horror movie instead of a comedy…

What I have been trying so hard to do is change a play in progress.

I have been wanting them to change so the broken me fits in…while they want me to return to the stage unbroken, healed, once again the old me.

The spot is open, the stage is there unchanged all I have to do is not be broken and rejoin the chorus line.

What I know to be true of all people who are abused within the family, it is not so much the first betrayal, but the second one.
The second betrayal is that once you expose yourself and speak your words is that nothing changes, except that you are now alone and exposed.

Kicked off the stage of your childhood home.

I sit here dumbfounded at my naiveté how I foolishly believed that a child, even an adult child that was broke, would break the whole family, but my family marched on, again.

No one stopped to pick up the broken piece.