I M Perfect lady

Tag: changes

  • Felt Its Worth

    Before beginning yoga today, I cleaned the mirror I stand in front of, it was layered with weeks of dust, and I appeared fog like behind it. Today I felt the need to wipe it free, as I did so the line from a song arose in my head, “I can see clearly now the pain is gone…”

    Then into yoga I went.

    I was on the third part of the Awkward pose, where I go from standing up to squatting down, and Bikram asks us to descend slowly, and I lost my control and fell into a squat and smiled as I did so.

    This smile took up my whole face, my cheeks, my eyes and my mouth rose into a delightful bend, and inside I felt its wonderful wave of joy.

    I smiled at my rendition of his yoga; I smiled at me and the transformation of my face and received fully my smile about me.

    A smile about me isn’t something I have any memory of ever receiving.

    I was shocked first at the way this smile changed my look, and even more stunned to receive its full value inside.

    To feel myself worthy of a full-blown smile.

    I froze for a half of second to feel such sheer delight inside myself.

    My smile quickly disappeared and I struggled to smile while tears of sorrow dampened my face.

    Imprinted in my minds eye is my smiling feeling being over swept by sadness as memories flung themselves upon me, one on top of the other.

    A 50 year long life review flashed before my eyes, all the places where I mistook myself for being bad, wrong, and despicable, how I had not seen my own worth or how I had lost sight of myself inside myself.

    The simple fact that I was unworthy of a smile from me about me is so harsh and tragic; yet it was never my smile I sought. I didn’t even know I was missing my smile for me.

    The mouth I tried to change was my mother’s.

    Before putting my words to paper, I spoke to my brother and then did some mindless cleaning, and it came to me what love I had for my mother.

    I literally gave my soul, my insides away in order to bring a smile to her face and to keep it there.

    How tragic that she wanted my smile more than she wanted my tears and my sorrows, and even more dreadful for a little girl to be left with such sorrow inside, such darkness.

    In denying my abuse, she left me in the dark.

    It is funny in a sad way, how I wanted her to have a smile, more than me.

    I could cry a river of tears for the little girl who wasn’t allowed to feel her sorrow out loud, to be heard and valued as abused.

    Valued as abused and not having to hide this fact.

    I can see I took up my mother’s view of me.

    My mouth and facial images reflected hers in my mirror and even more tragically inside.

    Inside I knew my mother blamed me.

    I took away her sunshine, I stole her lovely story, I was darker than the darkness that abused me.

    I changed her smiling face to anger.

    And it was my job now to put her smile back.

    And I tried and danced, and pranced and worked and slaved and toiled to bring it back, and to keep it in place.

    When I was tired of holding up those cheeks, when I simply didn’t have anymore to give, or when I tried to tend to myself, I heard her angry response, “How dare you Beth Ann…” and up I got and began dancing again.

    Six years ago all my dancing for her was over, done, finished, the end.

    I stopped where I stood and in the middle of the darkness began to see what I did for me and what I did for others.

    Life offered up to me a million situations for me to choose again, their pleasure or mine, their smile or mine, their feelings or mine.

    Each and every time I found the strength to disappoint my mother and chose me; I opened up inside, made room for that smile.

    Today, I feel that I have made it to the other side, to the side of worthiness, or at least I have felt the wave of joy lap at my feet, I feel that I am worthy to now frolic in the ocean and swim to its depths.

    I look forward to seeing another one come out of me and shine upon me and for me to welcome it in!

    I have been waiting in vain for her to arrive and tell me that I am a good girl, that I am of value, and that the abuse didn’t change who I am, in her eyes.

    I wanted her to smile that it was okay that I was abused, it didn’t matter to her, and she loved me any way.

    Again, the smile I sought was hers and the one I found was mine.

    What I love is that the first smile I was able to receive was mine!

    A smile in full acceptance of all of me, the darkest dark and the brightest bright.

    I smiled at me and felt Its worth.

  • Who has Control?

    My expectations of the New Year aren’t about the New Year but rather about me.

    The New Year is neutral, a pile of days linked together, and many hours in which we live our lives.

    What we do within those hours is how our year will unfold, or more importantly how we will emerge on the other end.

    I went back on my blog and read some of my entries in January 2010, the beginning of my first 60-day Yoga challenge.

    It was incredible to read about the beginnings of my year doing yoga.

    Below is a section I quoted from Bikram’s book, and it shows the reality of what we are up against when we strive to make changes in our lives, what we are battling is gaining control over the mind.

    “Without control of mind, you can do nothing. You have something, but you don’t know how to use it. The greatest challenge we face as human beings is controlling and properly using our own minds.

    The mind is the communications system between the physical body and the Soul or Spirit; its primary responsibilities are to control the body and supply the Spirit with immediate and exact information. When the mind instead gives distracted and wrong information, the Spirit cannot govern properly – in fact, it cannot assume control at all. The ego-driven mind has had to rule for itself, and now it does not want to give up its ultimate authority over your life. This is a bitter, perverse fact about human beings, but it is the truth.

    Without proper training, the mind will continue to give you the wrong information and divert your focus from your Spiritual goals. The way it does that so successfully is with fear and desire – its primary weapons. Like a drug dealer, the mind gets addicted to these two opposite but conjoined emotions, and when we are constantly reacting to our attractions and aversions to people, things and situations, we can’t see what really is and reopen the channels of our true Self, the Spirit. That’s why I say that the mind has become our worst enemy.

    To overcome this will not be easy. The weak mind is ever growing, constantly feeding on your fears and negative habits. And as my Guru taught me, the natural human attraction to something negative is NINE TIMES more powerful than our gravitational pull to toward the positive- another inconvenient fact.”
    Bikram

    So if you are endeavoring to make changes in your life this upcoming year, please take note, that what you will be going against is a very powerful pull, 9 times stronger than your thought of change.

    Say your desire is to stop eating sweets; you will have the power to eat sweets 9 times stronger.

    And if your desire is to exercise or do yoga each day, you will be fighting a powerful pull 9 times stronger to stay in bed, lay on the couch, and do nothing.

    What I am most impressed with as I look back upon my year of doing yoga (332 out of the 365) is the sheer effort was exerted in getting to the mat.
    Even though the actual 90 minutes of yoga is rough, it is nothing compared to the struggle to begin.

    The real battle is not in the actual doing; it is in the seconds or minutes prior to the event.

    The fight ensues in the actual debate about whether you are going to abstain or succumb.

    To do or not to do is the where the war is fought.

    It isn’t about the sweets, the beer or the exercise; it is about the seconds of power right before, the space before doing or not doing.

    It is on that edge of time, that second where your life is determined, who has control?

  • Resolve who I am.

    It is New Year’s Eve, the day we all sit down and look at the balance sheets of life, pour over our faults and choose one or two that we feel must go, and then declare to everyone we will no longer do those things.

    How many of us take the time to really sit with the affect, the trouble spot and see where it came from, why it was formed?

    What we call bad habits are usually coverings over some pain.

    They are the lids that keep us from feeling the feelings too severe to feel.

    Usually what happens is we just exchange habits, we seldom delve deeply into what lays beneath, to dive below and feel the pain.

    As I approach this New Year, instead of making resolutions to get rid of bad habits, I want to explore beneath the habits.

    The definition of resolution is the process of resolving something.

    The act of answering, solving…

    Perhaps if we looked at the coming year as the year of the answers, we will look at each day differently; we look to be enlightened about our behaviors, instead of running from them.

    Vowing that we will sit down in the middle of our habit and sort through it looking for answers.

    It is my belief that beneath the habit lays our true self.

    My resolution is to resolve who I am.

  • I Can

    As I look backwards on this year I am happy with the way that I stayed the course in yoga, by not succumbing to the voice that wanted me to give it up.

    Between the voice and the lazy feelings that would sometimes overwhelm me, I stayed the course for the greater balance of the year, and I am proud of that.

    What I intended when I began was to take better care of myself, to do something that would begin a change and to do it for 60 days.

    The sixty days turned into 120, than 180 and then 240, it was then I faltered a bit and began missing a few days.

    Yet even in the last month, I have done more yoga than not.

    Tomorrow is the last day of the year, and the tally stands at 331 days of yoga done, (after I do today’s, which I best get going on soon) and 33 days no yoga.

    I am feeling it was a successful yoga year.

    A year of not listening to the voice and feelings that would have me believe, I can’t.

    Learning to overcome the voice by doing, and changing the tone to I can.

  • A Cracked Lady that is Imperfectly Me.

    I am trying to lay on paper the picture I present to the world; how I am learning about a life I lived unknowingly to me, mourning that life, while living this life today.

    The combination is insane at times.

    Finding parts of myself that were missing, living them, and then releasing them and mourning their loss, at the same time I am living in the present building a life and feeling this life, a combination of present and past, mourning and living, dying and being born.

    My broken past revealing itself and its corrections laid back into the foundation, rebuilding me and who I am.

    Like building a new foundation on a fully built house, taking out one brick at a time, without moving the whole structure, yet the whole structure eventually changes.

    Being a caterpillar while making a butterfly without a cocoon.

    Living naked in the midst of change.

    Each broken brick creates a past I tentatively embrace, knowing it changes who I am and how I live today.

    Like picking up pieces of a puzzle wondering what the final picture will reveal.

    Perhaps the whole change is who I am, that I am the combination of a life of denial, a life of destructing that and rebuilding.

    I am the pot, the crack, the broken pot, and the glued backed together one.

    A cracked lady that is imperfectly me.

  • Actions towards Self.

    On facebook as we all add cartoon characters to our profile to stand against child abuse, we are just nudging the tip of the iceberg and the action steps needed are not for the faint of heart.

    I watched my father travel through the system that society has in place to ‘deal’ with the perpetrators, and I watched him exit the other end, a free man.

    After 40 years of abusing little girls, he was ‘tried’ on one reduce criminal offense. That is the court system in action. Believe it or not people were paid to act as a detective, act as a judge, act as defense attorney, and their actions all benefited my criminal dad.

    I watched my mother and her response to all this, how she visited him in jail, how she drove him (after he was set free) to her daughter’s house. Her actions enabled him til the bitter end.

    I watched my siblings, most who had been abused by him, act in accordance to their upbringing, using their definitions of conditional love do what they needed to do.

    Keeping the family together, knitting back after the hole that was ripped in its fabric, holding on tightly unknowing what they are holding on to.

    Actions of dysfunctional love.

    I watched actions and there were plenty of them, all the actions are supporting the pedophile, all.

    Not one supported the child.

    To support the child, the family falls apart.
    To support the child, the love is shown to be abuse.
    To support the child, the court systems not be a tunnel to pass through, but the end of the road.

    The child carries the weight of evidence.

    The child’s actions have to stronger than the judge, the detective, the family, and society at large.

    The abused child has to topple it all.

    The only hero I see is a brave abused child saying who abused her, and after telling nothing was done.

    Everyone failed her… one by one they fall.

    Somehow we feel if we can only get the child to speak of it, if we can teach them what to do.

    Guess what the child is the only one who is doing this right.

    We need to teach the judges, the lawyers, the families, the mothers, wives, daughters, and sons.

    We need to stop focusing on good touch bad touch, and focus on the actions and what they are really really doing.

    I am incensed by all of the folks who knew and did nothing well nothing would be nice.

    Who knew and then made their action step one that was for the good of the man who raped me.

    Like mad puppets, they responded like robots, pulling strings to see him free.

    Actions. Be wary of your actions.
    Who do they serve and what is their message.
    Who are you standing near?
    What chorus are you singing with?

    Actions.

    Actions are what I watched in total disheartening disbelief.

    I watched as once again, just as it was when I was but a little girl, all hands, deeds and actions moved to cover him.

    While I was displayed with my underwear down, my abuse showing, no one tended to my wounds.

    The detective pleaded that I wouldn’t allow this to change my relationship with my dad.

    My mother says, “forgive and forget and move along, we have wasted five years, now six” pull up your underwear and get back to the family tree. She is back where she once began.

    With all the actions, nothing changed.

    At the end of the scene all roles remain firmly in place, all except one.

    Mine. This required me to change me.

    Be the change you want to see in the world, it begins with you.

    I agree with Buddha.

    I couldn’t change the world, so I changed me.

    Actions towards self.

  • Hand and Hand.

    All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ~Anatole France

    Somehow I missed the melancholy of change, the loss, the death of one life, in order to be in a new life.

    And felt that I was doing change wrong, for I was sad as I changed.

    Leaving behind myself I had known for 46 years, I grieved losing that part of me, as I embraced a change that would become the new me.

    In the case of divorcing my parents, I had to the let the daughter in me die. There now stands a hole where daughter use to be.

    My daughter role is no more.

    You forget to remember the old you is gone, like a phantom limb it takes awhile to feel the new normal, and there is a grieving period, where sorrow can arise in odd places, unannounced sadness pours out.

    That view of self is unrecognizable for a while, you feel strange to yourself inside, and your movements are awkward for you don’t really know what it is the new you will do.

    Even when change is for the better, for a healthier you, you still have to let go and let die the old you.
    For some reason I kept forcing my thoughts to look towards the good things, and felt like I was a failure when I looked back and grieved.

    Now I know that grieving is a natural part of change.

    And with the overwhelming amount of change I have experienced in the last 5, well almost 6 years, it is no wonder that there has been lots to grieve.

    Who knew change and grieving go hand and hand…

  • Pick Up the Broken Piece.

    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.

  • Homeless to Harvard.

    “Breaking Night” by Liz Murray, how she went from Homeless to Harvard, shows that you can change the legacy you were born into.

    Her endurance to survive was what she needed to change direction when she could see her course aligning with her parents.

    She is seventeen when she decides to return to high school, a friend suggests an Alternative high school, “It’s a place like a private school, but for anyone who is really motivated to go, even if they don’t have the money. The teachers really care about you.”

    Here is where she sees her past and future collide.

    “I was scheduled to begin high school in September, it was May now. I would use the months ahead to prepare; I had four years to make up. The next thing I had to do, in order to complete my registration to Prep, was return to JFK, my old high school, and get my official transcript.

    Having seen Prep, JFK looked absolutely massive in comparison. I passed through metal detectors to enter the building. No one looked at me. Students were everywhere, thousands of them. It felt like a bus station. Taking the number 1 train back to Prep later that day, I sat down and ripped open the manila envelope. Columns of failing grades- 45, 60, 50- were everywhere. It was unnerving, reading row after row of flunking marks. I felt like a mess, a big walking train wreck. The experience of talking about my grades (having been lectured by adults so many times) versus actually seeing my transcripts was night and day. Transcripts were a real thing, a tangible expression of what I had and had not done with my life, and a road map of what still had to be done. Looking at my academic disaster, I could see that I had a mountain ahead of me to climb.

    Then, very suddenly, sitting on the train gazing at the JFK stationary, it dawned on me – my Prep transcripts were still completely blank. I literally had nothing, no grades, zip on my Prep transcripts yet. I could start fresh.

    The thought of the clean slat was thrilling, especially after looking at the mess I had created. With all the things that had been difficult, it was one blessing to count on, the knowledge that what I did from this moment on didn’t have to depend on what I had done before. Back on Nineteenth street, I asked April to give me a copy of my blank Prep transcripts, which was a simple printout of my name on Prep stationary and rows of blank columns waiting to be filled in by my future grades. The JFK ones I handed to April and never looked at again. The blank ones I kept with me at all times. They were a reminder that I was, day by day, writing my future. Sleeping in a hallway around Bedford Park later that week, I took out my blank transcripts and I filled in the grades I wanted, making neat little columns of A’s. If I could picture it – if I could take out these transcripts and look at them – then it was almost as if the A’s had already happened. Day by day, it was just catching up with what was already real. My future A’s, in my heart, had already occurred. Now I just had to get to them.

    A memory of Ma helped me decide this. The only papers I’d ever seen that were as ‘official’ looking as transcripts were Ma’s short stack of documents to verify qualification for welfare. Ma’s caseworker were always so difficult, so technical with us. And the walls of those depressing welfare offices, for some reason, were always painted puke green, a color made uglier by the harsh fluorescent lights and the iron bars on the large windows. There were so many people waiting in those offices – dozens, hundreds. When the hard little seats filled up, people sat on windowsills or on the floor; they stood or they paced.

    Ma, Lisa and I would wait for hours too, one of the dozen of other families all nervously checking and rechecking their own short stack of vital documents. When it was finally our turn, what I can remember most about being hoisted onto Ma’s lap is the bizarre interaction between Ma and the caseworker. It did not matter what Ma was saying. All that the caseworker focused on were Ma’s documents. Birth certificates, notarized letters, doctor’s notes to verify mental illness, our lease. Ma’s actual words and particularly Ma herself, were invisible to this woman, a woman who had the power to give or take away food, rent and safety. All that boiled down to was this; either we had the exact documents required for approval, or we did not. There was no in between. And even if we were missing only something small, like a second set of copies or one of Ma’s doctors’ notes, a single error could make all our effort- the document gathering, the travel, and the hours of waiting –irrelevant. One missing or invalid document and our file was shut, tossed. They called “next,” and we had to come back another day to start from scratch. All because the documents were either correct or they weren’t, period.

    How was this different from my high school transcripts? It wasn’t. I thought, if one day, maybe just maybe I wanted to go to college, some person in a suit in a very different kind of office would open my file, read my documents, and either I would have the qualifications, or I wouldn’t. Yes or no, nothing in between. And if I didn’t, my file would be shut and they would call “next.” I would be out of luck. Some things in life, I’d learned, were nonnegotiable. Documents as official as these transcripts were big, they were my yes or no, they were my options. They were my ticket. Now I was going to think of everything I did at Prep inside the framework of my transcripts – and that turned out to mean everything.”

    Later, there would be times when I did not want to go to school. I wanted to sleep on Fief’s floor and not get up. Bobby and Jamie were hanging out, walking around the Village. People were cutting school, and I was missing all the fun. There would be times I did not want to sit in a chair all day long while fresh air was outside and I was missing out. But all I had to do was think of my transcripts, and I would go to school, on time, every day, for the first time in my life. Either I would have the qualifications or I wouldn’t, and besides my friends weren’t going to pay my rent.”
    Liz Murray

    Each moment she has to make a choice to either act differently and get a different outcome or fall back on the way of life she was used to.

    Her focus on having a different document to hand out in life, gave her the tool she needed to stay the course.

    Change is not easy, you have to go against all you have ever known, extract stamina in each moment to not waffle and capitulate, you have to be willing to let go of who you are to become who you wan to be…as Wayne Dyer says.

    A great book of how she turned her life around…imagine she did this at seventeen homeless and with a father addicted to drugs who lived in a halfway house.

    Literally, Homeless to Harvard!

  • Originality is the New Norm.

    As I thought about compassionate or empathetic picketers, I wondered what their signs would say, and if I were to join, what message would my sign display.

    I think my sign would be for those who were abused as children, for those who grew to be mental due to the nature of being hurt by those they loved.

    My sign would encourage them speak their truth and walk strong, knowing that you get stronger with each voiced memory and feeling, airing out the long held secrets.

    I would dispel the belief that there is a normal, a perfect way to be, and instead show them my imperfect me.

    I could begin a group of I M Perfect people.

    People who have walked in the darkness, been lost in mental confusion, denial and pain, who are tired of trying to be something they can never be.

    Normal. 

    Trying to be normal is trying to be not you.

    Normal.

    What is Normal?  

    Who is the measure and rule of normal? 

    I have yet to meet one normal person. 

    I think it is a myth.

    Maybe my sign would say, “There is No Normal” or “This is My Normal.”

    I will picket normal. 

    If we get rid of normal, we can get rid of all the prejudices against abnormal people.

    By taking normal out of the picture, we all become abnormal.

    Well, I had to look up ‘Normal’.

    1.                   usual: conforming to the usual standard, type, or custom

    2.                   healthy: physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy

    3.                   occurring naturally: maintained or occurring in a natural state.

    What is the usual standard anymore?  Is there truly one?

    I have to look up ‘abnormal’.

    Not normal; not typical or usual or regular or conforming to a norm.

    What we call abnormal is not conforming to a norm?

    But what if we can’t conform to norm, because we didn’t have a norm to conform to?  Then what?

    Are we abnormal?

    I would hasten to bet that there are more abnormal folks than normal. 

    Did you know that 20% of the homes have a mom and dad?  Yet we still call that ‘typical’ even when 80% of homes are not that.

    I bet reality has changed, but we forgot to change the norms. 

    There are no Norms in reality only originality.

    Originality is the new Norm.