I M Perfect lady

Category: Examples of an Imperfect woman

  • A Caring Ear.

    “Healing the Wounded Child Within” by Charles L. Whitfield MD.  Story Telling as part of the healing process, he writes.

     

    “Telling our story is a powerful act in discovering and healing our Child Within.  It is a foundation of recovery in self-help groups, group therapy and individual psychotherapy and counseling. 

     

    Each of our stories when complete contains three basic parts: separation, initiation and return (Campbell, 1949).  Twelve-step self-help groups describe their stories as “What we were like,” “What happened,” and “What we are like now.”  People in group therapy may call it risking, sharing, participating, and ‘working’ in group.  In individual counseling or psychotherapy we may describe it by similar names and psychoanalysts may call it “free association, working through transference and through unsolved internal conflict.”  Among close friends, we may call it “baring our souls” or “having a heart-to-heart talk.”

     

    In sharing our story we can be aware that gossip and wallowing in our pain are usually counterproductive to healing.  This is in part because gossip tends to be attacking rather than self-disclosing and it is generally incomplete, following the victim stance or cycle.  Wallowing in our pain is continuing to express our suffering beyond a reasonable duration for healthy grieving.  There is a danger here that maybe observed in some self-help meetings: When a person tries to tell a painful story that has no apparent or immediate resolution, the other members may unknowingly label it as “self-pity” or a “pity party.”  In this case, while self-help meetings are generally safe and supportive, the bereaved may wish to look elsewhere to express their pain.

     

    Simos (1979) said, “Grief work must be shared.  In sharing however, there must be no impatience, censure or boredom with the repetition, because repetition is necessary for catharsis and internalization and eventual unconscious acceptance of the reality of loss.  The bereaved are sensitive to feelings of others and will not only refrain from revealing feelings to those they consider unequal to the burden of sharing the grief but may even try to comfort the helpers.

     

    Our story does not have to be a classical “drunkalog” or long in length.  In telling our story we talk about what is important, meaningful, confusing, conflicting, or painful in our life.  We risk, share, interact, discover and more.  And by doing so we heal ourselves.  While we can listen to stories of others, and they can listen to ours, perhaps the most healing feature is that we, the story teller, get to hear our own story.  While we may have an idea about what our story is whenever we tell it, it usually comes out different from what we initially thought.” 

                    Charles Whitfield

     

    My story telling began in journals to myself, and eventually I was daring enough to have a blog.

     

    I do know the ‘risk’ it takes to stand and speak about your journey, and also the benefits to being heard.

     

    The biggest part of the storytelling is to have compassionate, caring, listeners.

     

    My blog seems to be that.  It is always available for me to place another bout of confusion down, a new wave of understanding, a twisted and unraveled past hurt, a present moment of disbelief, my blog is my group therapy.

     

    I also love that I have some faithful group members that willingly share parts of themselves with me and give me feedback so that I know I am being heard.

     

    All it takes is one ear and you can begin to unload mountains of grief even if the ear is online and it changes from day to day.

     

    I want to thank all the faithful ears out there who read, comment and allow me to share my story as my life continues forward, as I learn about my past and how it still affects my nowadays.

     

    A storyteller with out a listener will not work.  We need the listener, we need to know another soul is hearing us, can see us, and understands.

     

    The healer is a caring ear…

     

     

  • Caught

    One last section from ‘Sickened’…by Julie Gregory.

     

    Spring thaws the farmhouse, and in front of the mirrors, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tigerlike stretch marks on their sides from a burst of growth.  My hipbones expand like a time-lapsed flower in bloom.  I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from the tight shell.  I use my fingertips to tug and pull laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I’ve been kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked atrophied limbs out of its hold.

     

    I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours.  I need to see what my face says.  What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.

     

    Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty.  I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body.  Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself.  My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangled and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.

     

    I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs of my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin.  I study tiny blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on its own; an affirmation that I am living.  I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.

     

    I look at every part of myself through the mirror, wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see.  My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror mesmerized.  I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body lean and lithe.  I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.

     

    My mind is imprinted with images of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: That I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early.  My mind’s eye sees me as a stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse’s long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes.  Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.

     

    So I step back to the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees.  I reach my fingers out to feel her face.  My eyes cannot get over it.  They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back?  Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are completely opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass.  It will take me three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together.

                    Julie Gregory

     

    My mother had a magical mirror and words would allow her world to remain perfect, sins could be erased with the magical phrase, and it would erase all blemishes that may other wise appear, returning him always to be whiter than snow.

     

    It is horrifying and shocking to see the damage he was able to do, while she continued to stare dreamily into her cracked mirror of dreams.

     

    Behind the wall, lay many broken little girls whose wounds could not be erased so easily.

     

    There are no simple phrases that will return your world upright, restore trust and love and give you back faith.

     

    When we are taught that words can erase deeds, we are left in twisted place in our minds.

     

    In our minds a mirror appears that switches things around, but in reality nothing changes.  Nothing.

     

    It feels like the magic mirror was the release hatch my father needed, the escape door…. Her words allowed him to change magically into a kind man, always.

     

    Her catch and release program allowed another little girl to be caught.

     

     

  • Keeper of their Illusions.

    One more part that really stayed with me from Sickened by Julie Gregory.

     

    “I now feel ready to try and talk to a therapist again.  Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP.  I answer her questions?  How did it slip past the doctors?  Why didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t you have neighbors?  Were you really sick?

     

    But still, in our sessions, I cry from the guilt of betraying my mother, for not keeping the shroud on her secrets when I held them locked in such trust.  And I feel terrible about my own secret.  I have been writing, writing about what it feels like to be cut open while your mother’s tight, thin smile mouths, “Doctor’s orders, honey.”  To be emptied and filled by your mother, just like the IV bag she’s arranged for you. And to believe you are genuinely ill because that is what everything in your world mirrors back to you.

     

    My therapist explains that my mother was cannibalistic.  That she wanted to ingest my living flesh, to tear chunks from my body. That the closest she could come to cannibalizing me was to lift me onto the serving platter for the men of the medical community to carve.  The longer I hold guilt for betraying her, the more I will keep climbing on the platter all by myself.

     

    And yet the hand that pushed me down was the hand that helped me up.  The one who beat me was the only one to save me from being beaten. The one who wanted to kill me was the one who would kill her self if I didn’t offer myself under the knife.  I was trained from the womb as an alibi for her innocence.  She would snuff out my life if I went against her, even in thought.  She brushed me this way as casually as you would slide a ling brush down a pair of slacks, to get all the grain running in the same direction.

     

    I still told myself that it was okay, it really wasn’t that bad.  A normal sacrifice for any child to make for her mother.  Words programmed into me as my own. Tangled in her web, if a doctor couldn’t decipher what she did, how could I?

     

    Until I turn thirty.  Then I see her almost as clearly as if I was standing on a windswept sea cliff and she was looking up from the sand below.  There is only one line that connects us, and it is wrapped around my waist; my hunger is tied to the most intimate, emotionally deep contact you can ever get: a mother’s touch.  Anything less that where she took me feels like not enough.

     

    And so it is for the people I bring into my life.  My relationships, like the one I had with my mother, turn immediately intense, sometimes violently invasive.  I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me.  Ah, yes, let me count your cracks.  Let’s see, one hundred, two…yes, you’ll do nicely.  A cracked companion makes me look whole, gives me something outside myself to care for.  When I’m with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks: the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.

     

    So I start over.  When I ruin something or when someone vines around me, I move on.  It is just another opportunity, another chance to interact with the outside world and not have it take me completely, utterly to the bone.”  Julie Gregory

     

    As much as her mother needed her sick, my mother needed me innocent.  We are the exact opposites.

     

    She was well and her mother needed her to be unwell.

    I was molested and not okay, and my mother needed me to be okay to hold her marriage, her life, and her world together.

     

    We both found out that what our mother’s needed had nothing to do with us, but rather we were the vehicles used to get her where she wanted to be.

     

    Perhaps we know what our unveiling will do to our mothers, we are wrecking purposefully her illusion, and we are no longer caring enough to sacrifice ourselves for their insanity.

     

    We know we are shattering their dreams to a million pieces… yet their dreams go on; someone takes our place to be the keeper of their illusions. 

     

     

     

  • Sickened

    Here is another few lines from “Sickened” by Julie Gregory.

     

    “I lived my life in a bubble. First it was her bubble. Then it was of my own making.  And now, freshly stripped of the delusion that had protectively swathed me for years, I was embryonic – too raw to interface directly with the world.  People aren’t just influential to me; a thin layer of them fuses onto me like hot cling wrap.  Their words become my words, their voice inflections merge seamlessly into my own, their opinions form a transparency over the faint etchings of my own developing ones.

     

    I look back through stacks of photographs of me after the fire.  In each picture, I hold the facial tics and expressions of whoever I am involved with at the time. My face adopts the characteristics of the other, their fine lines, the exact way the jaw muscles freeze or the flex within their smile. My face morphs to take on their identity.

     

    Then I look at a baby picture of myself at six months old, lying on my belly, a natural smile lightening up my face.  My own natural smile, unbroken, intact.  This is the only picture I have of my own face, not someone else’s.  I wonder am I destined to drag around the past like a discarded placenta?  I wonder how far do I boil back in order to reclaim my self?  I was how many pieces did I lose along the way?  Where do I find them? Can I put them back? How many times do you glue a broken vase before you toss it?

     

    I had been taken to the bone.  My mother had fingered into me like the hollow of a melon and scooped me out.  And now, years later, you could press belly to backbone.

     

    Books are my friends, where it’s okay to be silent….

     

    All my time is spent slipped silently between their pages, finding some truth to go with the mirrors. They are self-help gurus who parent me positively and show me how to believe in myself.  They suggest underlying spiritual philosophies:  That each soul chooses its parents and all its experiences in order to learn the lessons it needs to develop fully.  That if the soul’s human form knew what it was supposed to learn beforehand, the ego would short-circuit the process of discovery.  They tell me that, because of this double blind experiment, where you find yourself in this painful process is exactly where you need to be.

     

    That if you lived in a dark cave you’d need time to adjust to the light when the rock was rolled away.

     

    That Hawaii had to be a volcanic eruption of toxic goo and ash before it became so lush and beautiful.

     

    That if you watched the clothes in a washer, it would look like they’re getting dirtier as they slosh through filthy water.  But it’s only after this agitation cycle that you can pull out fresh, clean clothes.

     

    I bolster myself with platitudes: “We are who we are not despite adversity, but because of it” and “They say the truth hurts, but the only thing truth hurts, are illusions.” I sink the studs into soft dirt, and bank my new foundation.

     

    My books talk to me like the child I am and coax me into developing autonomously.  They metaphorically hang all the colored pictures I make on the fridge when I race home with them.  They never tell me: Lighten up, you think too much.  If anything, they say, Hey, you, with the frontal lobe, turn off the TV, stop the noise, and consider this deeply.  They never dismiss me with Get over it.  Or if I turn to my father: What are you talking about? My brother: I don’t remember anything. Or my mother when I squeak out that I was too young to be taking the gun out of her mouth: “Jesus Julie, where is a mother supposed to turn to for support if not to her own daughter?  You think the sun rises and sets on you, like you don’t have any problems?  I can think of a hundred times you…”

     

    I pile my books around me before I sleep and they are the psychic guardrails that keep me from falling out of bed at night.”   Julie Gregory

     

     

  • Perfections of Me.

    I think trying to define love is like trying to define our unique personalities; we all have a love definition, which we formed through our experiences in life.

     

    Love for me is on the inside and is more about me, where before it was an outside need and all about you.

     

    There has been a total switch in my definition of love.

     

    Before I felt love by what others brought me, I was empty of love unless and until another showed me some love. 

     

    I was empty and I would do almost anything to get some love.  I was a people pleaser to fill my container called love. 

     

    Now I feel love from the inside out.

    I am full of love inside.

     

    Love of me and all the different layers, stages and ages that make up me.

     

    I sit with great compassion and empathy of my journey to love me.

     

    It has taken many years to look at me, all the nooks and crannies, the dark side and the light, to see all the facets of myself and to become friendly with them or at least meet them with understanding, little by little trusting and loving me.

     

    I am sure there are still parts of myself I haven’t explored, even sections of my past that lay buried, yet with each new lesson returns another aspect of my self that was long ago sacrificed.

     

    Sacrificed for another’s love, another’s happiness, another’s dream.

     

    Each sacrifice took away a part of me.

    Until there was nothing left for me to love.

     

    I will no longer sacrifice my feelings for you, my happiness for yours, or my truths for yours.

     

    Love without sacrifice means loving myself enough to move away…

     

    To steer clear of things that hurt me then and now, to speak my truths, to be honest with my feelings, to protect my happiness and my dreams.

     

    Love is the freedom to be myself.

    Love loves my imperfections until they become my perfections of me.

     

  • Steps towards mine.

    My online conversations with family are so enlightening and disturbing, confusing and clear, and they show me who they are, and how they see me.

     

    What continues to surprise me is that they hold me up to an unattainable standard and then have no standards for themselves or the rest of the folks they spend time with.

     

    Their willingness to hang on to my father and let me go leaves me forever puzzled.

     

    My latest infraction is that I knew my mother wasn’t with my father, but I said it for my benefit, for my stories benefit.

     

    I lie for the benefit of my story?

     

    My story is torrid enough without needing one drop of falseness.  They don’t make Hollywood movies that are as tainted and twisted and long-suffering as mine.

     

    I willingly admitted that I assumed wrong, and that wasn’t believed. 

     

    My mother was in my father’s new town, but refused to see him, she would get dropped off before his house and wait while they delivered ‘stuff’ to him.

     

    She was near, but not with him, sorta like when she is up here.  She is near me, but not with me. 

     

    So what does that mean?

     

    We have not had a reunion any more than they have had a divorce, it seems she lives in between.

     

    Between the ending and a new beginning, a no place.

     

    It seems to me it would be easier to end it once and for all, to complete the relationship to finalize it, like ending a contract, for until then you are nowhere, not married, but not divorced.

     

    Separated with space, living in a hammock between both lands.

     

    Her not being near him hasn’t brought her closer to me, I wonder why? 

     

    Where is she really?

     

    No steps taken to sever or to reunite.

     

    What kind of life is it to live in between, to live in the space that isn’t either side, to be free of making a choice either way?

     

    Isn’t that standing still?

    Undecided?

    Unknowing?

     

    I see her as unchanged, for even if she has left my father’s side, she hasn’t made steps towards mine.

     

     

     

  • Looking at her…

    I went online and did some reading on the statistics and reseach on pedophiles, for some reason I hadn’t done this before.

     

    Pedophile.

    The word comes from the Greek: παιδοφιλία (paidophilia): παῖς (pais), "child" and φιλία (philia), "friendship".

     

    Child friendship, wow, I would have thought the root of the word would be monster, predator, but not child friendship!

     

    Imagine!

     

    Child friendship, which is exactly what I have been trying to warn my sister from allowing to happen, a friendship being formed with her little granddaughter and my father. 

     

    Below are a few paragraphs from another article I found interesting. That being a pedophile is similar to performing magic tricks…

    In 1992 while living in Los Angeles, actor and magician Steve Valentine invited me to be his guest at the world famous Hollywood Magic Castle.  The Castle is a private club dedicated to the promotion of magic as an art form and hobby.  Club members perform their illusions up-close, chair-side, right under your nose.  Afterward, our group ended up at my apartment where Steve was gracious enough to show us more magic.  Amazed at how easy it was to fool us, I asked him point blank, “Why can’t we figure it out?”

    His answer has stuck in my mind for almost 20 years. “Magicians can get away with it,” he said, “because we know how you think.”  Having a degree in communication and psychology, I was riveted by the idea that the majority of humans (myself included) process the world through a homogenous lens that others can easily manipulate to fool us into seeing exactly what they want us to.  And what’s truly discouraging, as anyone who has ever been privy to the workings of a magic trick can attest, is how mindlessly simple the bending of reality needs to be to completely fool everyone.  I had always believed the wonder of magic rested within the skill of the magician.  Come to find out, it’s more accurately rooted in the conformed ignorance of the audience.

    The answer is simple; like a magician, predators get away with it because they know how children think, and as a result they’re able to convince adult eyes to see exactly what they want us to see; an ILLUSION that nothing is wrong.

    The mind control – the trick – the reason victims are not reporting the crime, is simply this: Fear.  Predators use the most powerful human motivator—Fear—to trick our children into silence.

     

    It is not the skilled mastery of the Predator that allows them to molest and rape our children and get away with it; rather it is the conformed ignorance of our children.  We must therefore make every effort to arm our children with pragmatic information to help them to fight back and destroy the monsters who would hurt them.

     

    You can read the full articles at www.ezfame.com

     

    Amazing to read that pedophiles are magicians who befriend our children and then put the seal of fear around the whole incident and call it ‘our secret- our BAD secret’ bringing the child in on the act, owning the shame and blame and fearing exposure to the loss of their innocence.

     

     

    Here are some statistics I read.

     

    1 in 4 girls is sexually abused before the age of 14

     

    1 in 6 boys is sexually abused before the age of 16

     

    Like rape, child molestation is one of the most under-reported crimes: only 1-10% are ever disclosed.

     

    More than 90% of all sexual abuse victims know their perpetrator. Almost 50% of the offenders are household members and 38% are already acquaintances of the victims.

     

    The average serial child molester has between 360-380 victims in his lifetime.

     

    This magic trick and the magicians who perform them on our innocent children will continue to play out as long as we continue to see them as normal fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers.

     

    The Illusion is the perfect environment for my father to perform his tricks.

     

    He is being supervised while he begins his next act, and being hand delivered his next partner to perform with him.

     

    For without a partner his magic dies.

     

    The magic of taking a child’s friendship and tainting it with sexual abuse, of taking our love and trust and using it to entrust us with his secret.

     

    He needs the ignorance of the adults in the room and he needs a child’s friendship, its these two main ingredients that will make the whole act.

     

    The magicians rely upon you looking at one thing while something else is really going on.

     

    As my sister is looking for a pedophile, while a pedophile is looking at her.

     

     

  • My Mother’s eyes.

    Misperception of our environment is the key that turns your body into dis-ease. 

     

    A misperception of the world is the cause and the spread dis-ease.

     

    Again going back to the two different perceptions of our world between my mother and I, between my family members and I, shows how the disease of my father continues to contaminate generation upon generation.

     

    The dance of misperception blows my mind.

     

    He is able to continue spreading his disease because of her misperception of him and his children’s misperception of him. 

     

    Misperceptions lead to wrong action and as Byron Katie says, “confused minds do confusing things”, and Jesus says, ‘forgive them they know not what they do’.

     

    I am expecting the confused mind to see clearly, or I am writing and speaking to confusion hoping for clarity, it has occurred to me lately I am speaking to the wrong crowd.

     

    My intentions and deepest desire is to make them see, and to wake them up.

     

    And what seems to be happening more and more is I am working on me. 

     

    I am learning more and more and seeing more and more and becoming more aware of how this all works.

     

    My long held misperceptions are unraveling bit by bit.

     

    I am the one who has benefited the most by writing, by taking my thoughts and bringing them to paper I get to see what I didn’t see before.

     

    What an incredible journey out of the misperceptions I lived behind.

     

    I had wrote to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, author of the book, “My Stroke Of Insight” and told her that I had a stroke in my reality, a stroke of truth. 

     

    Truth flooded my brain, bursting apart my misperceptions.

     

    The journey in the past five years is the re-wiring, re-labeling, and learning to see reality as it is and living without the lens of my mother’s eyes.

     

     

     

     

  • Being imperfect has set me free….

     

    “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”   

               Martin Luther King

     

    ‘…the silence of our friends’… it’s the silence that keeps gnawing at me.  I will get secret messages from family, but not in public, silence, why?

     

    It just dawned on me; it isn’t the silence that’s the problem it’s ME!

     

    It is Me?

     

    I am shocked and amazed that it is Me that keeps them silent, that I am the problem.

     

    I am the one that silences their voices, they don’t want to join theirs with Me.

     

    Me, it’s me…wow.

     

    In a past blog about silence from family, I discovered then that it was easier to be with my father, most actions and words were in support of him, and it is still the same today.

     

    Although I have a few secret members whispering to me, and I did ask them to join me publicly, and all declined.

     

    Declined in fear or in shame of being with me, being seen like me, being grouped with me???

     

    It did feel like I was being denied a friendship…a space remains between us and silence is the wedge that keeps us apart.

     

    At this point I want to acknowledge those of you who bravely stand with me, who are willing and able to raise your voices with mine, to link your names with mine, to publicly be with me as I speak of sexual abuse.

     

    Me a daughter of a pedophile, a victim of abuse, a confused at times, adult woman of incest; that is me!

     

    That is who I am. 

    I can’t change it.

    I am just being myself.

    I am publicly writing about how it is to be an openly abused woman.

     

    I understand your silence now and I honor it.

     

    I M perfect, and it’s impossible not to be.

     

    Being imperfect has set me free…

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Silent Aunt who disappeared….

    “He couldn’t not know what he knew; he couldn’t not see once he saw.”   Patti Digh

     

    It hit me today in yoga, that what I am witnessing in my great niece is Me.

     

    Me as a newborn baby girl arriving and going with the flow of the family I was born into.

     

    She appears on a stage of an already in motion drama, a play in progress, roles clearly defined, the scenes are set, the dialogue is memorized, and from there her role is carved.

     

    She begins with a supporting role, and will learn that in order to maintain favor, her lines will reflect those of the Main Characters, her parents and grandparents.

     

    It is the expectation of her elders to follow their roles, and someday take over top billing.

     

    I may be her future self and she is my beginning – we are linked with the thread of legacy.

     

    My mother’s sister who was estranged from her family has come into my thoughts yet again.  How nice it would have been to have her view of my mother’s family. 

     

    What made her leave the stage she was born upon?

     

    I feel that I am my Aunt, but a generation behind her.

    I have access to the Internet and have ways to communicate that she wasn’t able to.

     

    My mother is close to her brothers and has always been, while my Aunt chose to stay away, two totally different perspectives of one family.

     

    The last words my mother said to me was, “we have two different perspectives!”  Remarkably wise, she knew we didn’t match.

     

    My mother never spoke of the sister that ran away, never.  She had another one who also was estranged from the family but lived near the family; she, I was told was cold and bitter. My mother had very limited exchanges with this sister. 

     

    She also had a brother who committed suicide.

     

    My Uncle (my mother’s brother) molested my brother and sister, and another Uncle molested my mother when she was a young girl, yet she remains close to her family and holds them in high regard, visiting them regularly.

     

    There are two distinctly different reactions on the stage of abuse; we either keep the normal dialogue going or we get off the stage!

     

    If you stay on the stage, you continue with the same play and drama and accept new characters as they are born upon this stage.

     

    When you get off, you get off alone and you are segregated and an outcast, but the abuse stops.

     

    It stops only along your family branch, but the rest of the tree continues to flourish as long as the other branches go along with the original dialogue of abuse. 

     

    Roles continue unchecked, words flow the same, abuse lays in the wings waiting, forever near, cycles spiral again and again, repeating itself like a broken record.

     

    On my new stage I have to learn or maybe unlearn the first 40 years.

     

    I am no longer a newborn without a voice or a choice.

     

    I now am able to discern what I feel and what I know, what is healthy and what isn’t healthy and I have the right to act freely and use dialogue that goes against the original family play.

     

    It is with the greatest compassion that I look back upon my old stage and see my family still stuck in the roles they were born into.

     

    If I can be a voice that hollers from off the stage, a disgruntled watcher of their play, if my jeers can put a seed of doubt, a drop of fear, a whisper of truth, if I can lure but one player away, I feel my life’s journey will not be for naught.

     

    I will not be the silent Aunt who disappeared….