I M Perfect lady

Category: Examples of an Imperfect woman

  • The Stranger Among them.

    At times it is very interesting to be me, to actually watch reactions to me while being me.  I have changed my ideals and the way I live my life.  I have totally flipped and it shows in the reactions folks give me.

    It is like certain people have an allergic reaction to me.

    I seen a brother I haven’t seen in a year.  The last time, we were on ‘friendly’ terms, but he was a fence walker; he would visit me and then be with my mother. 

    He said he was okay with everyone, to each their own, it mattered not to him.

    Now it seems I matter…something has changed. 

    He and I used to stop by and call etc, but in the last year silence.  I don’t know what I have done, nor did I bring it up when I seen him this evening while out to dinner with my children and husband.

    He chatted with my kids easily, and sent me a glance and quickly looked away…I am used to those kinds.  I didn’t probe either or ask what happened. Didn't make him uncomfortable or put him on the spot, I let it go. 

    He has a new wife now maybe she is the change in us.

    I can’t know, and I don’t want to make him come or call or care.

    His actions are asking for space…I honor that.

    It makes me wonder why he was so free to come before, to fish, to eat, to get mending done, to vent, to rage and for me to hear, and now nothing.

    Perhaps he doesn’t need me anymore.  How odd it is to have these relations fade into nothing, to watch me fade away. 

    The old me would have forced and pushed myself in…maybe even by offering more and more for him and now her.

    The new me watches them with me, how I have nothing that they need anymore.  How I am just a wall flower or just a casual hi and few pleasantries, and the old familiarity has turned to strange.

    I am strange. 

    My actions are strange…I am the stranger among them.

  • Guilt and Judgment

    Yesterday as I rode along my mail route, I listened to The Course of Miracles coming from my Kindle…I have it strapped to the headrest so I can hear it without headphones.

    A jotted down a few things that seared my mind…and then this morning wanted to go back and find the text, but I haven’t been able to find all sections that caught my ear.

    Here is one I found.

    “When you feel guilty, remember that the ego has violated the laws of God, but you have not.  Leave the “sins” of the ego to me. That is what Atonement is for.  But until you change your mind about those whom your ego has hurt, the Atonement cannot release you.  While you feel guilty your ego is in command, because only the ego can experience guilt.” 

    I stopped and wrote that down. “Only the ego can feel guilty” this was an incredible thing to hear for its implications are mountainous.  No one ever has said, “sins of the ego” instead they act like our spirit has sinned and in order to get a clean spirit to heaven you have to get it forgiven. Imagine if you raised a child to understand there is an ego and there is spirit? 

    Imagine learning that there are two ways to view the world, by ego or by spirit…and to know this as a child.

    If only the ego feels guilt, what is religion for?  So when we were made to feel sinful and unworthy who were they talking to??? It has to be the ego, for if the only the ego can experience guilt, they surely were not talking to our spirits.

    I also wrote down, The ego can’t Know, that Knowing is of the Spirit.  The ego can’t know, it perceives and the spirit can’t perceive, it Knows.

    Here is something else I hadn’t considered. 

    “The ego and the spirit do not know each other.  The separated mind cannot maintain the separation except by dissociating. Having done this, it denies all truly natural impulses, not because the ego is a separate thing, but because you want to believe that you are.  The ego is a device for maintaining this belief, but it is still only your decision to use the device that enables and endures ” 

    This makes perfect sense to me, for when I was a fully engaged ego whom I lovingly call “the mental woman” I had zero contact with my Spirit…I love that they don’t know each other. 

    And imagine…the ego is a device use for separation? 

    To me it kept me separated from God and Spirit.

    Then, came a section on Judgment…

    “Have you really considered how many opportunities you have had to gladden yourself, and how many of them you refused?  There is no limit to the power of a Son of God, but he can limit the expression of his power as much as he chooses. Your mind and mine can unite in shining  your ego away, releasing the strength of God into everything you think and do. Do not settle for anything less than this, and refuse to accept anything but this as your goal.  Watch your mind carefully for any beliefs that hinder its accomplishment, and step away from them.  Judge how well you have done this by your own feelings, for this is the one right use of Judgment.  Judgment, like any other defense, can be used to attack or protect; to hurt or heat. The ego should be brought to judgment and found wanting there.  Without your own allegiance, protection and love, the ego cannot exist.  Let it be judged truly and you must withdraw allegiance, protection and love from it.”

    It seems that the church taught us to judge another, but not to judge the ego.  I love that we are to judge how we are doing by how we are feeling.

    Mostly what I listened to yesterday were the differences between the ego and the soul…and it made sense to me. 

    “Any thought system that confuses God and the body must be insane.  Yet this confusion is essential to the ego, which judges only in terms of threat or non-threat to itself.  In one sense the ego’s fear of God is at least logical, since the idea of Him does dispel the ego. But fear of the body, with which the ego identifies so closely, makes no sense at all.  The body is the ego’s home by its own election. It is the only identification with which the ego feels safe, since the body’s vulnerability is its own best argument that you cannot be of God.”

    Imagine, the ego only judges what is a threat or non-threat to itself. It could care less of how this impacts your life or your souls journey.

    It was so beneficial to my peace of mind to listen to the antics of the ego and its needs and how they contrast directly the spirit, and it made perfect sense to me in my experience.

    And when you read this book, depending upon who has a greater control in your world, the spirit or the ego, it will land differently as you read it

    I am not here to try and convince anyone, I am here to share what I heard.  It brought me peace…and it helped me understand the confusion I have with religion, for it seems to me that religion courts the ego with guilt and judgment.

     

      

  • My eyes are on Healing

    Yesterday as I listened to Oprah speak of how her Audience over the years allowed and cheered her to be her authentic self, it also enabled her to inspire us to be more ourselves. As she opened up and shared her life with us, we also opened up and shared ours.

    There is this open swinging space that if you stand in your truth, those around you will do the same…and it works the opposite too, if you hide, they hide.

    She spoke of how she learned from sexual abusers about the grooming process and how they lure you into trusting them…and she realized, “It wasn’t my fault.” 

    This wisdom she passed on.  Her one regret was that she wasn’t able to shine a big enough light upon sexual abuse, but that she did what she could over the years. 

    I am thinking we can each take on this task.

    On a much smaller scale the blogs are doing the same…we are trying to shine a light of truth upon an issue that has affected our lives deeply and we know is still going on. 

    Just like her, we are using our voices the best way we can.

    We are sharing our truths, our pain, our abuse, and we are sharing what we discovered, what we learned and how we see things.  

    As more blogs come forth and more people begin the dialogue, change will happen.  Minds will open; questions will be asked…the tides will turn. 

    We will go from hiding skeletons to displaying our family wounds in order to heal.  Hiding isn’t healing.

    The difference it has made to have one other family come out and share their truths is huge.  Its impact will be felt far and wide…the ripple affects will reach places we can’t even begin to imagine. 

    To not be the only family speaking out…means we are not alone. 

    I know the cost of speaking your truth and I know its rewards…and more importantly, I know the cost of silence.

    Martha Beck writes about Heroes and Fear in Oprah’s Magazine this month.

    “Heroes aren’t free from fear; they’re just so focused on a worthy goal that they feel they can’t turn back.  Most of humankind’s great achievements – the sorts of things that make us say, “Oh, Wow!” – were accomplished by people who were muttering, “OH Shit!”  Heroes don’t feel special, just dogged.  They walk their scary paths with shaky knees and trembling hands. One shaky step at a time.”

    Jim is a Hero!

    Carl is a Hero!

    Judy and Erin…Heroines!

    Here is another part of her fear article that I like.

    “When you shoot,” my friend Jim, a hockey player, once told me, “you never want to look at the goalie. Look at the space around him. Where your eyes go, the puck goes.”  A white water kayaker warned me, “Look at the water, not the rocks. Where your eyes go, the boat goes.”  My riding instructor shouted, “Look where you want to go, not where you don’t.  Where the eyes go, the horse goes.”

    “Got it?  Where your attention goes, our lives go. As you take each step, be peripherally aware of the dangers, but glue your attention to the path between them.”

    I love Martha’s wisdom.

    My eyes are on healing…

  • Outside of Time.

    While listening to Mark Nepo (Author of The Book of Awakening) talking to Oprah on Sirius Radio, he shared a moment in his life where he had lost his job, had an unknown illness and was going to confront his father he had been estranged from.  He was afraid, in fear or in the unknown in the past, present and future, so he went deeper and sat with his soul. 

    I understood completely, for when my life turned upside down and my past seemed to horrifying to look at,  the future a vast landscape of empty and unknown and the present was littered with my father’s rubbish…I too went deeper and found my soul. 

    I didn’t call it my soul, but now I know that is where I went.

    A place that was untouched by time and events, but it was calm and knowing, a Self I had never met.

    I remember feeling this very deep calm knowing and strength, although I had no idea where it came from in the midst of such a churning moment in my life.

    Everything was falling down around me and I was deep beneath it all learning incredible lessons and seeing things that no one else could see. 

    I get this; I had connected with my soul when my life fell apart.  What I now know is that when your past, present and future fall down, you get left standing in the unchanging part of you, the place that survives all life experiences. 

    I went from living in time, to being timeless.  Time was too fearful to be in.

    What I also know is that once you take your self out of time, or are shocked and flung out of your life, you can see things from a deeper and wider view, prior to that I was tangled up in time and had no deeper perspective.

    I dwelled in the land of time without a connection to the deep well of wisdom, my soul.

    I love that I have this explanation.  

    One other thing he mentioned that really connected with me was that “Surrender doesn’t mean giving up, it means going with the Flow.”

    He explained that you have to flow all the way through whatever experience you are in in order to get the full lesson.  That giving up isn’t the answer, but being in it fully… going in all the way.  Accepting what is.

    Mostly I have heard that surrender is giving up or just letting it be, but I hadn’t heard that it means heading in fully.

    That is exactly how I faced my life situations after my father’s arrest.  I didn’t duck, I didn’t hide and I didn’t deny.

    Instead I walked fully into each moment of time, but I had this wonderful deep intimate connection with my soul, I never walked alone; I was connected to a place outside of time. 

    (What a great hour listening to him talk.  I bought his book, but gave it to a friend; I am thinking I need one for me.)

     

  • Beyond what the mind can hold

    I am re-posting an older post…I found it while looking at various posts.

     

    Glancing through the book “Truth vs Falsehood” by David Hawkins, I read this headline, “Cultism”…so here it is.

    “Cults ensnare the unwary by their specialness and false promises.  Members have ‘insider’ status and a special ‘lingo’.  The group leader is charismatic, seductive, and courts the intimate, who is flattered by the attention. The leader is very ‘special’ and treated with adulation, which is quickly turned into control of members, including especially their money and sex lives, as well as lifestyles, diets, clothing, etc.  Members must take allegiance and break off relationships with family or even spouses and often associations or groups.”

    “The group often forms a geographic, restrictive enclave and develops a group paranoia as well as a characteristic “cult glaze” (cal. 120) as though in a hypnotic state (the effect of isolation and brainwashing).  Once detected, that glaze is easily recognized (the “programmed cult look,” as one observer described it.  There is a flatness and automation style to rationalization where content is like a “party line” that is parroted from having been programmed. Cults especially target celebrities and exploit them as showpieces.”

    “The influence of the cult leaders is so strong that large groups of people will willingly kill not only others but also themselves (e.g. Heavens Gate, Jim Jones, Islamic terrorists, suicide bombers, Aum Shinrikyo subway gassers, Bolsheviks, Nazi party, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, White Supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, liberationists etc.”

    “Another characteristic of cultism is proselytizing and insistence of following the party line of a pseudo-religious group belief system by which individuality is scorned or even threatened.  Leaders are very power-oriented, and control plus paranoid egoism are dominant themes.”

    “Sometimes a spiritual leader will calibrate as integrous early in their career but then will fall victim to the seduction of prestige, money, sex, or the adulation of followers.  Then the original spiritual group degenerates into a cult, or a spiritual technique becomes actually trademarked and then commercialized and marketed by hired publicists. In that case, the technique calibrates above 200 but the organization itself falls below 200 and becomes primarily a marketing organization that trades on the original concept or exclusive technique. The technique is thus only taught for a price and ‘trainees’ are forbidden to reveal the secret teachings (which are usually merely a few simple phrases or sentences with a general application to ‘improve health’, “attract abundance”, “increase love life,” “be more popular”, fulfill your potential success”, “attract a mate”, etc) Some of the promoted techniques can be found in any fortune cookie, e.g. “One smile can change your life forever” (cal. 350), or “Success goes to one who is kind.” (cal. 360) 

    “The true value of such workshops is not the magic of the central concept or technique, but the disciplined practice of actually applying it with regularity in the daily life instead of merely quickly dismissing it as “I already know that.” The value of training workshops then lies in the learning of the value of steady application and actually putting a valuable tool into practice and steady focus, e.g., the “faithfulness” of A Course in Miracles workbook.”

    “Another expression of cultism is the cultification of splinter groups from traditional religions, e.g., the far-right “fundamentalism” most prominent and visible in Islam, Christianity and ethnic variations of worldwide religions.”

                         David Hawkins

     

    While I know when you are in the midst of a cult, you can’t see the forest for the trees, but when you step out and find your own freedom to be an individual to feel the open space where the programmed mind used to be, it is mind blowing.

    Most feel and think that a cult is this small hidden special group, but if you look around within many religions, you will see what they are doing to the individual, they are controlling it.

    Any organization that tells you what to wear and what not to wear, what is acceptable and what is not, what you can and cannot do with your own body is a cult.  Albeit a milder level for perhaps your religion hasn’t asked you to kill, yet.

    In my childhood religion, there was a phrase that could erase all sins and we literally believed in its power.  “Your sins are forgiven in Jesus name and blood…”  By believing in this phrase, ‘there was no sin to great to forgive’.  All transgressions against others were deleted. 

    With this phrase, many criminal behaviors are washed away without ever needing the police, the law or the court of the land.

    It is insanity at its best and what happens to the victims of these crimes?  Who is there to protect them, when it is known and approved to have pedophiles preying upon the children, and the only consequences are they have to ‘confess’ and be ‘forgiven’?

    Where are all these sins?  Do they really believe that Jesus is carrying the weight of all the tortured children?  Is he indeed that forgiving, to allow the children to suffer while the adults get a new cloak that is whiter than snow?  Come on people wake up the sins are living in your midst, they are the abused, the confused and the broken. 

    There are no magic words that will take away the physical act of abuse on a child’s body nor erase the terror and the shattered trust and innocence….

    The most evil words that I can now hear are “Your sins are all forgiven…”  For what it means to me, is that the monster has been blessed to abuse again.

    When will the people in the cult wake up and see the bleeding children?  When will they understand that the words spoken are destroying the spirits/souls of the children among them?

    As they sit in the pews singing “Bless be the tie that binds us…” I want them to know, they are the chorus in a ring of child abuse!

    I wanted to believe that my family was an oddity that we were not the popular way within the church, yet I fear that I was the tip of the iceberg and what lies beneath is beyond what my mind can hold.

     

  • Dispute the Group

    I have been trying to find a clear picture in order to illustrate the mindset of group mentality and how it feels when you leave and turn independent…

    I was raised in a family of 14, there was no room for individual requests, needs or special treatment, you got what the rest got and that was that, one size fits all.

    I was also raised in a church that also didn’t cater to individual needs, but rather had a way in which we had to adhere to or conform with, it was best to blend in, to look alike and act alike.

    And within these groups were other smaller groups, but rarely was there individuality or separateness or God forbid special uniqueness, we all marched forward as one.

    The sins grouped together like the congregations…all were equal because they belonged to a group.

    Grouping is the way of Groups.  There is comfort in bunches of things.

    Raised to lump things together leads to never looking closely at what is inside the group, but instead you have intent stares at what sticks out.

    The poking stuff, the non conforming things, the things that don’t match or fit together, the odd pieces that don’t belong…these things are pushed away and are made to feel unwelcome, not part of and may even be seen as threatening to the group…and in defense for the sovereignty of the group will be shunned.

    I had to look up the word Sovereignty to make sure it fit what I was trying to say. 

    independence: the right to self-government without interference from outside 

    Oh, it fits perfectly.

    The shunning feels personal when you are the one who is doing things against the beat of the group drum, but what I can see now, is that the shunning is to preserve the groups rights of self government…THEY truly do NOT want INTERFERENCE from the outside.

    Any thought or idea that interferes with its history or traditions…is an enemy of the group.

    It will be seen as interference against the group, seen as a traitor or family wrecker.

    They are so busy defending their group; they fail to notice what their group is made up of.

    My family defended FAMILY, against all enemies foreign or domestic, truthful or not, what matters most is that damn family must stick together, always.  Anyone, sister or daughter, son or brother who stands against it must be shunned…for family matters.  The group.  The group no matter what it is made up of matters, the lump sticks together as a bunch…Even my father’s molesting ways would not tear the bunch apart…And I was actually seen as worse than him for daring to suggest that the family they were hanging so tightly to, was filled with abuse, not love.  Incredible as it seems, the worst sin of all is to dispute the group.

     

  • More power than the Source

    Today as I rode around, the thoughts kept coming back to me, that what we mostly argue about is not the truth, BUT how we each see it.

    We all are circling around the outer layers of life and dancing on the edges, not wanting to hurt, disrupt or destroy the lives of folks we know…so we don’t look upon the truth.

    All our discussions as far as I can remember are not really even based upon what is fact or what is fiction, but rather what do we do with it?

    Reality lounges around while the majority of people are more worried about HOW the truth will affect another, but pay no never mind about the truth itself. 

    There never was a dispute in my family that my father abused, but the main contention is how we all dealt with it or how we were bound and determined, it would not ruin their lives….

    The abuse got lost in the wake of the potential disruption of their lives.  The topic wasn’t about the abuse, but rather how they could get back to their normal lives.

    It is like keeping the conversation and party going after a bomb went off inside of your home/family.

    Or in the FALC, ‘believing the bomb never went off’ while sitting in the rubble after the explosion.  Trying not to feel and see all the blown out holes…for if you do, you will not make it to Heaven one day.

    To me Hell is living in a blown out family believing in thoughts it is all forgiven and forgotten and it is normal.

    The thoughts are the focus here, and the faith in believing them are much more important than what literally happens when abuse goes off like a bomb in your home.

    My years of writing have been trying to get them to see…oh they see, but they have more faith in their thoughts surrounding the truth than the truth.

    It is like believing in the smoke while not seeing the fire.

    Or maybe believing that the smoke can change the fire…it has more power than the Source.

     "You can't search for truth within a system of beliefs"  (Unknown, but shared with me by Sarah) 

  • Flooded into my Life

    What I find so incredibly amazing is that our thoughts are the main things that separate us.

     

    We all have such similar bodies, which are capable of doing much of the same things, except we are all given unique gifts, talents and individual traits, but the main bone of contention if you will is about thoughts; thoughts that turn into beliefs.

     

    We seldom, if ever, argue about gifted people or talented people, however we do engage in verbal and written disputes about what we each believe.

     

    And these thoughts seem mostly to be owning things a human can’t own or promising things that they have no right to promise, it is seldom about concrete items.

     

    In the past few weeks, the written exchange has been about using words to delete, erase or hide a ‘sin’…

     

    The person doing the ‘forgiving’ has the power to erase it and in doing so promises you entry into heaven when you die.

     

    All this ‘action’ happens in the mind, you could not see this with the naked eye.

     

    Little children have a hard time believing this as well as ‘Mentally challenged’ people, for they need to see an action to believe it or feel it, have a personal in body moment.

    Religion is what we fight about the most and it is something you can’t see, but need to have a strong ‘faith’ in.

    Some may say, you can’t witness God or experience Him, but when I put him up against the rules and ‘beliefs’ of religion he is easily seen and felt.

    It didn’t take faith to see Him… it took awareness.

     

    Religion seems to want blindness, at least in my experience.

     

    The synchronistic events that I have experienced, going deeply into questions probing the answers, to only find them in a book that was set out on a shelf in the library, to having the right person ask to be your friend on facebook, to a perfect comment, a song played on the radio,etc.

    From being still and hear the knowing response from deep within.

    Knowing no one outside of me knew me best.

    To walking in nature… 

    Life is filled with God.

    Religion seems to promise things it can’t deliver.

    God delivers all our intentions.

    It seems when I let go of religion, God flooded into my life.

     

  • I am Lens Free

    When you write your story on a blog you are offering up the opportunity for others to plunge themselves into your story, to come in and walk awhile in your life.

    It is amazing the types of responses you get from others when you display your life on a blog.

    Some come in and bare some of our pain, add bits of wisdom and cheer us on.  These experienced travelers lend us their strength that helps us continue forward.  These cheerleaders are priceless. 

    And the other half or maybe three fourths are out to make our truth into lies by showing us their side.

    What is a lie to one side seems to be the truth to the other.

    That is why there are two sides.

    And the truth stands alone.  However, depending upon which side you are standing on you will look upon it differently.  Very few will face the truth head on.

    What I didn’t know in the beginning is that the reader is made to explore their own lives and feel if what you say is true for them or not.

    That half of writing is reading.

    The reading part I wasn’t paying attention to, for I was the writer part.  I didn’t know how the reader would feel reading what I wrote and I never paid attention to that and still won’t.

    I am not writing for the reader’s ease or comfort or even their understanding.  I am writing for me.  What I am doing is offering a view of my online journal to all who chose to read.

    It validates my life to put it in writing, for I am in a sea of known strangers who can’t seem to understand me, and if I didn’t have this space to connect to, sometimes I would feel like I am disconnected and floating in space.

    I need this connection to anchor me to me.

    You fail to realize how much your life gets anchored by others, until there is no place to hook into. 

    In the beginning it felt like I was the only one who was seeing reality with my view.  I was looking with eyes unshielded and others had these weird lenses that contorted even simple things into complex issues.

    They looked at reality through the lenses of family and religion, and if it didn’t fit that mold, it was reconfigured.

    I took off the glasses of family and religion, setting them aside, and life took on whole different view.

    For the first time I could see life outside of the frames of religion and family.  I could see independently.

    I no longer had to make reality fit into their rules and traditions; instead life got to flow free.

    It didn't have to work for family or for the religion, it just had to be.

    It was amazing and scary and horrific.  To now see what I hadn’t seen with the lenses on.

    I can tell when people read my story with the lenses on or with the lenses off. 

    I am writing without a lens…and can’t help how others see it.

    I just know that you can change my story to say something else if you are wearing the lenses of family or the lenses of the FALC.

    It matters and it will change how you view me.

    But what doesn’t change is how I view myself, for I am lens free! 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Dark Space of Unknowing.

    Deepak Chopra writes in The Book of Secrets about the caterpillar changing into a butterfly.

    “Outside my window in winter I can usually spy at least one chrysalis dangling from a branch.  Inside it a caterpillar has turned into a pupa that will emerge in the spring as a butterfly. We are all familiar with this metamorphosis, having witnessed it as children (or by reading Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar).  But what goes on invisibly inside the chrysalis remains deeply mysterious. The caterpillar’s organs and tissues dissolve into an amorphous, soup like state, only to reconstitute in to a structure of a butterfly’s body that bears no resemblance to a caterpillar at all.”

    “Science has no idea why metamorphosis evolved.  It is almost impossible to imagine that insects hit on it by chance – the chemical complexity of turning into a butterfly is incredible; thousands of steps are minutely interconnected.  (It’s as if you dropped off a bicycle at the shop to be repaired, and when you came back the parts had become a Gulfstream Jet.)”

    “But we do have some idea about how this delicate chain of events is linked. Two hormones, one called juvenile hormone, and the other ecdysone, regulate the process, which looks to the naked eye like the caterpillar is dissolving into soup.  These two hormones make sure the cells moving from the larva to the butterfly know where they are going and how they are to change. Some cells are told to die; others digest themselves, while others turn into eyes, antennae, and wings. This implies a fragile (and miraculous) rhythm that must remain in precise balance between creation and destruction. That rhythm, it turns out, depends on day length, which in turn depends on the earth’s rotation around the sun. Therefore, a cosmic rhythm has been intimately connected to the birth of butterflies for millions of years.”  Deepak

     

    It came to me today, that blogging the way I do with total transparency is not going to need the same things as those who blog from the cocoon.

    Writing from a cocoon hides what is going on and this is not something I am familiar with.  So I can’t be the one to say what is best for anonymous bloggers.

    But I can speak from transparency. 

    When I began writing I did so with full disclosure, it wasn’t to hide stuff, it was to shed light and to enlighten me, to find answers to who I was, as well as to leave a path for anyone who wanted to know about me.

    I wrote about the dark corners within me that I didn’t know. 

    I asked questions of the white paper and it seemed answers came if I wrote long enough.

    I never felt I had the right to have a voice and writing opened up a space for me to let it out.

    Once I got the knack of it, it seemed that the only way for me to know me was to write it out. 

    The more I wrote the more I knew and the more I knew the more I wanted to know. And slowly I began to really really know me and what I began to learn about me, I didn’t want to cover up nor did I feel the need. 

    Whether it be my mixed up mind, my flipped around thoughts and beliefs or the multiple things I did incorrectly with my backwards mind, all of it became extremely exhilarating for it all was growing a new me.  I wasn’t ashamed of who I was nor who I was becoming to be.

    It was like I was the caterpillar and I was changing and I would grieve the caterpillar parts that were dying and had to grow comfortable with the new butterfly pieces that came in their place. 

    I left my old caterpillar ways…and had to learn how to maneuver life as a butterfly. 

    What I know for sure, for me, is that I need to see me in my past, see me in my present, see what inside of me needs transformation and what needs to totally die. 

    I couldn't hide and build a butterfly me.  I had to see. 

    I would have liked there to be an etiquette book on how to navigate the rough waters of exiting a dysfunctional family and knowing how it feels and what would happen as you go from the inside of a family to the outskirts.

    How to leave abuse, is how to leave a family…

    It isn’t comfortable and there is no cocoon.  You are in the open and vulnerable for pot shots that many aim at you trying to shut you up and protect the family’s dark legacy. 

    And even more importantly, I wanted proof or evidence of my sanity.  I wanted there to be a blueprint of undoing the affects of being abused.  With so many turning away or not agreeing with me, it was a place for me to have my say.  I didn’t keep parts hidden away; I shared all of me, for there wasn’t a part of me that was too dirty or shameful for me not to see.

    It is my humble belief, if you can’t bear to see your self, you will want to remain hidden from others. But, if you have the courage to really really look at yourself and all the cracks and crevices you will find a very interesting and intriguing life. 

    You will see how you took that path or formed that opinion or learned to believe this or that.  You will discover a life that you will never ever want to cover up again and go back to live in a small dark space of unknowing.