I M Perfect lady

Tag: self

  • Who you are.

    ‎“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou

    What are the untold stories, what is it that we are too afraid to speak of, which part of our lives begs to be hidden, and who is asking this of us?

    Where did the term, “airing your dirty laundry” come from and who finds comfort when we tuck away our imperfections, our unsightly wounds, the places where we lost ourselves… the roads that led to nowhere?

    To whose benefit is it that Reality’s clothesline be free of the so-called dirty stuff?

    What do they consider dirty and what is so unsightly for the line?

    Again I can see the two sides of airing, who is letting it out and who is seeing it.

    Which person is the one stopping this and who decides clean from dirty?

    What is dirty laundry, period?

    Is dirty laundry only the things that go against a previous image? Are they things that will not make you ‘look’ better, but rather be cracks and crevices, lumps and bumps?

    Do people actually make it off the planet without a crack?

    Are there perfectly whole and unbroken people out there?

    I would like to see us celebrate the imperfects in the world, where we are applauded for showing our cracks, and for the greatest person to be the one who has the most.

    To be busted a million times and still want to live and reach for another tomorrow, another hope, another breath, to have the faith to go on…shattered.

    Shattered and soiled were the untold stories of me, their truths lay hidden in the basket of dirty laundry, and it was I who had to rescue them and air them out.

    Unfurling their truths and hang them up for the entire world to see… crumpled unsightly and smeared with my bloody childhood wounds, all unraveled and exposed… my history, my storyline.

    Perhaps I would like to challenge Ms. Maya Angelou and say, there is a greater agony, it is having people turn away from you as you tell your untold story.

    To have it fall on deaf ears, to have it challenged, to stand with all your dirty laundry and have them no longer interested in being with you, to be rejected for who you are, to feel their indifference again, hurt much more than the original wound.

    To me the greater agony was not being believed of them not seeing me in all my broken spots…in being rejected for my truth.

    I can understand why people don’t speak of the untold story and bear the agony of its silence, for it is worse to speak of it and hear only silence and feel the wrath of defense against you.

    As I stood defending my clothesline and all my dirty underwear, I found it wasn’t shameful or something to hide, it didn’t weaken me or break me further, in did the opposite.

    It made me stronger and deeper, more complex and introspective, my views broadened and my heart expanded with awareness and my indifferences melted. I learned how to become caring and loving towards myself.

    I had to love and defend the darkest parts of me in order to know what love was.

    I recall reading that the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference and I now believe that you become indifferent when you hide parts of you away.

    You become careless with parts of yourself, and slowly you lose who you are.

  • I see me

    “Tolerance is another word for indifference.” William Somerset Maugham

    I am not sure you can have tolerance unless you are indifferent.

    Indifferent – without care or interest: showing no care or concern for or interest in somebody or something.

    I am looking at abuse and addictions from the point of the person who is on the receiving end.

    Usually abuse is looked at from the point of the abuser or addictions from the point of the substance.

    We forget to look closely at the person who is getting abused and why they have the tolerance or seem indifferent to the blows and words that are hitting them; it is because they are without care or interest for their self.

    They are indifferent to their own life.

    They show no care or concern for or interest in their own life.

    My question is when did they become so careless?
    When did they let them selves go?
    What happened that they no longer care?

    What I can know in my life is that I don’t even recall a self; I was too little to know I had a self to hang on to, to care about and to care for, and it was gone.

    My self was gone before I even had a chance to know it and know that there was something to protect.

    When a child is raised in an environment where the adults are indifferent to the child’s needs, we then become indifferent to them ourselves.

    Imagine, parents who are indifferent, without care or interest: showing no care or concern for or interest in somebody or something…and that somebody is you.

    We learn indifference.

    How they treat us is how we treat ourselves.

    We learn how to not care or show interest in our selves.

    In fact in order to survive, it is best to not have a self.

    For a self would feel their indifference and we don’t want to feel their indifference.

    It is easier to be without a self, to live in a pretend space, making believe that they care and the only way you can believe that story is to be separated from your self.

    To deny your body, deny your feelings, to not be connected to the self.

    A self who is not there will not feel their indifference…but lke the old saying goes, “If a tree falls and no one is in the forest to hear it, does it still make a noise?”

    In the same manner, if a child isn’t there to feel the indifference, does the indifference still happen?

    If a self is unaware does the indifference still affect them?

    When you are indifferent how can you know indifference?

    I don’t know what was more shocking their indifferences or me not caring for me, for me to see the lack of interest in my own life and wellbeing.

    I was indifferent to my whole life…and had to bring me back to my world, to undo the indifferences and learn how to care.

    In caring I found me.

    I am no longer indifferent… I see me.

  • Discovered the real me.

    I listened once again to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking to Oprah about her stroke and how she lost all contact to the person she was before the stroke and was left as an infant in a woman’s body, unknowing who she was.

    What struck me were the differences between the two Jills and how I can relate having lived as two of me.

    We both like our second self much better than the first and it took her eight years to grow her second self, and then parts of her old self memories filtered in, but by then a whole new her was in its place.

    My experience wasn’t quite so dramatic physically, I didn’t have to re-learn how to walk, talk, read and write, but my self -identity was equally destroyed, my past all a fraud.

    The me I thought I was wasn’t real and the real me was nowhere and I had to get myself away from the false relationships and places that abused me.

    My healing relied on me walking away from family.

    Her mother came and mothered her a second time and fully embraced her where she was, an infant who needed to be taught all over again. They mourned the loss of her first self, but never expected the second one to be like the first, but a new Jill.

    While they had a second mother and daughter relationship…my mother and I went our separate ways.

    In fact my new self and wellness depended upon whether I could separate myself from my family of origin, the family who created the false files.

    My old self drew its energy and life from being in the old relationships and in doing all the old behaviors and my new healthy self emerged from walking away.

    The tricky spot I was left standing in, was that I knew the old self, and yet the old self was built upon lies, and I had no clue of the new self, but the new self depended upon me walking away from all that I knew.

    I had to learn how I grew wrong to then grow correctly the second time.

    My whole world crashed around me, and my left hemisphere (the storyteller of who you are) was all wrong and it led me to cling to the right hemisphere where intuition, nature, being, now, artistic, and pictures lived.

    While she didn’t understand words, I didn’t trust them.

    Dr. Jill spent 8 years connecting back to the Left side and I have spent 6 years disconnecting from files that were all wrong and then filling them with new contents or meanings.

    I find it interesting what I have learned from her stroke experience, how the brain works and where the self lives.

    What I feel makes a great self is when you occupy the right side most of the time and use the left to communicate.
    We both learned that we couldn’t live unattached to the left side, even though the left side was so damaged, we had to bring it back in order to live whole.

    Somehow hearing Dr. Jill speak of never expecting the second self to appear like the first, took away an unconscious fighting that had been going on within me that it was almost adultery to accept the new me, like I was cheating on the old self.

    My love of my old self and my love of the new self were at odds…it has taken me time to get used to loving the new me, while unloving the old me, if that makes sense?

    There is a wistfulness at times when I struggle to do what my new self needs, a wanting the comfort of being used to this new self.

    While I see my husband in new eyes, it isn’t him, but the eyes looking upon him.

    It is strange to have a new me in an old life and to feel the new self being rejected in places the old self was accepted and it is harder to find confidence in the new self’s love.

    This self loves differently, this self sees differently, this self believes differently.

    This self was grown from the wisdom that my first self experienced.

    I would not be the woman I am today, if I hadn’t lived as the first self first.

    As I learned how she grew to be that way, I discovered the real me.

  • Mold in sight.

    What I didn’t know about writing is that you are supposed to have a plan first, a graph, a map, an idea, an outline, something for the words to fall into, that you don’t just stand there empty handed and catching them as they fall.

    I felt like a neglectful writer, unskilled, untaught and uncaring, yet as I step back and see the overview, I am astonished how hard most writers make it.

    It seems they are trying to predict the unpredictable, like trying to control reality, or planning for an unknown future.

    As I look upon my first 46 years of living, I had structure, I had rules of a religion to follow, and I had to fit into that, foregoing all my instincts and passion.

    My natural spiritual self was whittled down to fit into their mold.

    My mother sculpted this mold, and we had to squeeze ourselves into the walls, making sure we didn’t jut out unbecomingly.

    Our goal was to replicate this mold and make our children to conform to look the same, sound the same, and walk the same, little molds of sameness.

    Kept to the outside were words that didn’t match this mind set, this ideology and beyond their very rigid lines danced wonderful words and ideas in a field of pure potential…forbidden to us congregants.

    We had to disregard all things that didn’t match the mold, and by doing so passed up 99.9% of reality…and lived with .1% of our self.

    This .1% of me is where I began writing from, asking how I had sold so much of myself off and what did I truly believe coming from the base of me.

    From the base of me I ask the question and have no rules as to what comes, or where it takes me, what conclusion we draw, what systems we debunk, there is nothing off limits, there are no walls between me and my words.

    In fact I am tearing down the parts of me that have been crammed into the tight space, and giving life again to the long forgotten parts of me.

    There just simply can’t be a grid to follow, for I have no idea who I am, where I am going or what my purpose is…writing is helping me define who I am.

    I am meeting my words with a blank slate and they are coming from the mold of extreme restriction, so they too are excited not having to guard themselves and their truths.

    We are the clay and the sculptor with no pattern or mold in sight…

  • Taking the same steps.

    I backed away from people who hurt me, I retreated from untruths, receded from supporting religions, I moved from co-dependency, I pulled myself back from all the places that seemed to support dysfunction and it seems I landed in a corner with my back pressed against the walls of truth, and I now am standing alone.

    Perhaps this is how we enter into Heaven, we come alone with our suitcases fully packed with our lessons, our truths spilling out, our journey’s pivotal moments all stacked up like final exams waiting to be scored.

    Did I pass? Can I fail? How will I know?

    Sometimes it seems that in separating my truth from fiction, I have backed myself right out of my life.

    It is like I am at the end of my fictional life and a toddler in my new life.

    Simultaneously dying and being born, grieving while celebrating, saying good-bye and saying hello, a stranger and a new friend all living as me.

    It is like doing your own autopsy searching for the cause of death and witnessing your birth while being born, all at once.

    My greatest challenge is to find a new place to stand without the exhaust fumes of lingering fears clouding up my new self.

    To live fearlessly after knowing great fear, and not pack too much of the past into the present, be aware but not wary.

    Just as horses where blinders to shield them from scary things, I wear blinders that seem to shield me from good things. I wear them backwards.

    These blinders of immense fear stop me from seeing other alternatives.

    A wise woman kindly suggested removing the blinders, and letting in a view from the side.

    To see if perhaps there is a way to release the high emotions and find common ground where we are looking in the same direction but with two different sets of eyes.

    Self absorbed and selfish, is wearing blinders. Even if the blinders are made out of fear, they are blinders nonetheless.

    As a horse who has traveled so long relying on just one set of eyes, I am fearful in allowing others to see…with me or maybe for me.

    And to take my eyes off my road seems careless.

    Yet this one eyed view in a relationship, renders the other blind.

    Fearlessly I will have to take my eyes off my journey and look into his.

    And then perhaps when our eyes join together we will see a perfect view.

    Like getting the perfect pair of glasses that correct the distortion in our eyesight.

    I recall reading somewhere, that if two people are exactly alike as a couple, then one of them isn’t necessary. What I need isn’t someone who sees like me, but rather someone who sees what I don’t see.

    It doesn’t mean I give up my view, but I include his, and perhaps then we can find a place where we can walk together seeing differently but taking the same steps.

  • Be you alone.

    Yesterday I was asked if I felt lonely and I felt inside of myself and I didn’t, but I understood lonely and have been there often.

    Yet what I failed to understand until I started writing today was that lonely is seeking that part of ourselves that were wounded in childhood. It isn’t so much someone, but a part of us that is missing. We are lonely for ourselves.

    I was writing along and discovered that my meaning or my view of a childhood wound was neglect, sexual abuse, damage, something awful, but do you know what it really is?

    If you look at this from the point of view of what the child lost instead of what happened to them you would discover that the wound is something missing, not something added to who we were.

    It isn’t that we now carry rape and its disgusting features, especially if you were a child and the man your father, but what happens is that in that instant, we felt that our innocence went missing.

    Most focus on the rape and its ugly addition to us, like it now becomes part of who we are, instead of seeing this as something our innocent self endured.

    What I believe is if we are not treated as innocent, we then believe we are not, and then leave childhood minus our feelings of being precious and innocent.

    Living life without knowing you are innocent and precious will open you up to all kinds of situations where you sell your self short, become a people pleaser, have no sense of your own value and self worth.

    The one two punch that my parents delivered left me feeling that I was no longer innocent, my value had changed, I was no longer precious to him and she was unable to see her precious husband change, so instead I had to be the one.

    How confusing this can all be. You think you have to go back and wrestle with the feelings of being abused, but actually it is feeling the loss of innocence.

    A childhood wound is a hole in our innocence.

    And we are the ones to bring it back.

    We are the ones to strengthen our weakened state.

    In the beginning of healing we find ourselves as leaky as a sieve and we slowly over time, we become a solid bowl.

    My container of self, my wholeness is more solid today than ever before, I had plug the holes by speaking up about my innocence.

    In the past few months, I have been able to witness the loss of innocence, the lure and the grooming and the way others treat my daughter after, myself included, to find the intricacies of abuse and what it actually means to be wounded in childhood without the experience of guarding your self worth and value.

    Sadly, the reason there is so much childhood abuse, is these newly arrived souls on the planet haven’t learned to protect themselves they are easy targets.

    They are loving trusting and kind individuals that get lured and groomed into letting go of their innocence for the pleasure of an abusive person, confused with the attention and courtship, they fail to see the hook, before they swallow the line.

    What makes this so hard to stop, is that the abusers knows how to lure and groom and make comfortable and when they have complete trust and faith, they then ask or move in a direction we did not see coming, and in that instant we are asked to stand by our innocence or please them.

    Comfort them, love them, allow them, do this favor, lend an ear, bring compassion and empathy…letting go of our own innocence we focus on what they are asking, and our innocence fades away.

    We become part of the dance.

    Even though we didn’t start it, we participated and that alone makes us guilty, yet all we did was let our innocence go to please someone one.

    Letting go of our innocence is our crime.

    What I also found is the steep incline it took to get my innocence back, I had to put the ‘blame’ if you will on the one who treated me poorly, they had to own their own actions and I got to own mine.

    While I balanced my self worth sheets inside, I created two columns, what was my responsibility and what was yours.

    Separating who did what to whom, what age, what experience, what was reality in that time frame in my life, and in doing so, was able to see the trend continuing forward, all the places I lost myself.

    What I have found is the characters from way back then to present didn’t change, but rather I was able to see what was actually going on, and how I felt and how they felt about me by our actions.

    I had no one to blame in my adult years but me.

    It is in owning me as an individual and not a public held entity, that I see it all begins and ends with me.

    My business is being me, being whole, and finding myself in the midst of deep lonely feelings, for you can be certain there is another hole to plug.

    Healing is removing the parts of my self that I have given away to others, pieces of my innocence, chunks of my self worth, bits of value. To see all the times I looked at other to carry me, to make me happy, feel loved, feel worthy, all are signs of my weakness…the places I let my self go.

    Each time I am lonely…it is clue, I lost my self there.

    Each time I feel powerless, well you can bet I gave myself up there.
    Each time I am angry at another’s action, I am expecting them to do something for me, carry me, love me, make me feel secure, and so I know I dropped a part of me there.

    It is amazing how fragmented we are, how may folks carry our sense of self.

    It is lonely, if you need others to be you.

    In a co-dependent society, being alone means being lonely for no one is supporting you.

    How awful to stand alone, separated, unattached…

    Being whole means needing no one to be you.

    You just be you alone.

  • Save yourself.

    While thinking back upon my journey out of sexual abuse/incest, I wondered what was the one thing that made a difference, what one major item was my cure?

    Cancer has drug treatments and therapies and it seems the body has lots of help to eradicate the diseased cells and again, I wondered about how abuse is similar but completely different.

    It is like we the abused child are the cancerous cells, and we have to leave the tumor.

    There is no treatment for us; it is up to us to save ourselves.

    What other diseases are healed by the sick cell?

    It seem preposterous to know that we are the ones we are counting on and in order to be healed of incest, you must leave the family where it originated, your family of origin.

    So, in order to heal you must go against and away from your family and most often friends.

    We leave the ones who others use to help in times of sickness, they are no available to use, for it is from them that our healing lies.

    I just found this very odd that we the dysfunctional, the broken down and confused are the ones to lead the charge, the ones put in control of our wellness.

    And we have to go against family and friends to achieve this task, the ones who have used and abused us are now there to holler and insult as we make our way away.

    Heading into an unknown land hoping for a new start a new self, a place where we can undo the dysfunction and make us function.

    We need to function to handle our dysfunction.

    Incredible…this self healing healing stuff!

    Which is why the rate of success is so very small. I wish I had the numbers, but I don’t. In my family of 16, including me, two of us so far have managed to stay away from the tumor.

    Two of us are seen as outcasts…and we are, we had to cast ourselves out of the disease, no one but your self can save your self. It is as if you are on fire and you are the fireman.

    This just boggles my mind and I am in complete awe that one as upside down and twisted was able to get myself free.

    I do recall in the beginning how the pull was to go back, to make the tumor benign to make the family whole so that I could be with them….but it soon shown me I was all I could save, each cell is on its own.

    No one is coming to save you, you have to save yourself.

  • Go with the Flow.

    United we stand united we fall, divided we stand divided we fall…are two phrases that ran around in my head as I laid my weary brain down to sleep.

    There has been a humming of difference going on in our home, a vague and nagging two party rule.

    This split difference seemed to be two strong individuals doing what they felt was right for them and it didn’t affect the atmosphere within our home, for our individual expressions were directed to those who did not live with us.

    Sure we had awkward uncomfortable moments, but they would only arrive when say a party was to be attended and we both didn’t go…yet we both could please ourselves.

    Me by staying home, and them by going, two drastically different responses to one event.

    It seemed to be this great wide-open free space of self-expression and allowing, and it was.

    What happens if our differences fall into our own home, where a person in our relationship changes and our responses are different?

    It became crystal clear to me that we were at a cross roads, both individually and as a team.

    The individual harmony of our home is tipping and sliding and churning over the way we both deal with actions that go against our moral code.

    My daughter’s changing actions have set in motion and are displaying our stark contrasts, where we are both sitting in a very tight spot.

    A spot that we both drew comfort in and it allowed us to be ourselves, we may be asked to leave.

    What we are being asked is to stand with that sentiment or to reverse and head in another direction; it truly is a turning point in our relationship.

    If my daughter continues in the direction she seems to be heading in, she will also change the direction our marriage, it will be the trigger that goes off and we will then be asked to change as well.

    She is the key that will turn this all.

    Our response is the echo and the reply and what I know from past behaviors, we answered differently.

    Can we form as a team and come up with an answering response that will honor both of us?

    I see the looming bends in our river, the rapids that will require each of us to hold to our course and see not one boat called family, but three different canoes.

    I see how the current in each of our lives may lead us down separated journeys, how the potential for parting is strong, how our differences become stronger not weaker, how their forces propel and repel.

    Within each of us lies our sense of self, our value and self worth and that alone is the motor that steers our choices, speaks our voices, and their clamoring for individual power drowns out the unity we once had.

    It isn’t the direction that they are heading in, or the rapids beneath them, but rather the integrity within each boat, the honesty and character that directs these boats in their direction.

    It seems that the Universe pulls them toward like-minded boats; our separation isn’t what the heart wants, but rather what our actions lead.

    The freedom that I lovingly gave that had us all happy in our separate boats, is now coming to bear.

    There is a fork in the river now, a change in the stream, a curve that bends their lives from mine… what I can’t know for sure is will they take the curve or change something inside of them.

    It isn’t me, but the river of life and how you change or it changes you.

    At the end of the day, I am a lady of my own character who has no choice but to follow where it leads…reality wins only but 100% of the time, it is futile for me set my canoe against it.

    This is what happened last time, six years ago, where my canoe didn’t go where the rest all went, where the river bent, and my character simply couldn’t go with the flow against the river of reality.

    I see my daughter’s canoe swirling lost in the struggle against the rivers flow, not wanting what is and lying to make it right, twirling in the swirling waters going against life’s truth, trying to make something right out of what is wrong.

    I have seen this branch of the river before, I have watched as many family members’ canoes got stuck in the madness of seeing an illusion and following.

    My shouts fall short and are lost in the waters of time that race by, telling them it is useless to fight what is.

    Now this time, the illusion has my daughter in its grips, the fantasy that is but a mirage above the river, and I can’t seem to break the spell that will plunge her back into seeing what is.

    And I can’t know the strength and conviction she has with this mirage and how far will she follow it and for how long, and if she does, what will my husband do?

    Will his canoe ride with her?

    Will his words to fall short?

    Will she hear us as we shout; will she trust the mirage or her old reality?

    Where will these three canoes go? Which ones will fight reality and who will go with the flow?

  • You can feel its worth.

    While tossing around in my head conversations about the differences between going into the Light and heading into the Darkness boggle my mind.

    How it is that a person loses direction, how do their maps get turned upside down, how instead of growing brighter they can actually become very dark and NOT even know it or maybe more true, is not know how to stop it.

    That their life blood is drained and they are actively involved in the letting go and letting it drip out, drip by drip, bit by bit.

    Their vital life energy leaves and they don’t even know it.

    The passions die, the love changes, inside of them has been an energy transplant and they are totally unaware.

    This is very scary to me and yet very much understandable.

    For if a perpetrator or abuser does his job well, you will not even feel your self leave, his sweet words and wonderful attention dances before your eyes, and like a magician, he switches your energy to his.

    Once the switch has been made, you have to work like Hell to bring back your bright energy, your innocence, your passions, good energy, self worth, self esteem, love.

    I see my daughter now as one who is lost in the sea of darkness inside of her, and she doesn’t even know who is the bad man who stole this, who came in and courted her while draining all that was good from her.

    If after the first time you do not tell, you believe you are now his equal, and his lure and charm hard to resist, his needing you a drug that keeps you dumping more and more good into.

    I am not certain, but feel that only abuse does this.

    That you come in as Light and can have it stolen away…

    The little boy with Oprah who was overly sensitive to the darkness, knew that Darkness FEEDS off of the Light.

    This sounded weird to me, but it literally swallows whole, kindness, love, compassion, caring, it has a voracious appetite.

    Darkness doesn’t see who you are, just your good energy that it needs to survive.

    I had to stop feeding the monster, to stop giving up my life for its happiness, its peace and its joy.

    The Light energies try feeding the monster to make it brighter, to make it happier; to make it more loving, and all it does is suck you dry.

    That little boy also said that the dark energies can come to you as Father, brother, sister, friend, that it isn’t some monster.

    Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor also suggests that we are responsible for the energies we bring into a room.

    I believe that abused people abuse people, that hurt people hurt people.

    What seems we need is to heal our own pain, to be the one, to be the caretaker of our own energies, to stop blaming others for how we feel, and to harness our own Light.

    As well as being responsible for another’s happiness, peace, love or joy.

    If we can separate ourselves and not be sucking the life blood from each other, and instead be Light keepers within ourselves, the world would be a much brighter place.

    My daughter seems to have allowed another to extinguish her Light and what I want most is for her to be her own Light keeper.

    To hold it dear.

    Yet, maybe you have to lose something before you can feel its worth.

  • Selfishly I Respectfully Do Not Care!

    “I respectfully do not care!” is a new quote I heard from Martha Beck as she spoke today on the Lisa Oz radio show.

    People have told her (Martha) that in order to promote and sell books and to keep her selling herself she needs to be on facebook, twitter and the like, but doing so has made her sick, physically sick with shingles.

    She found that she can talk with her daughter, and if her daughter feels her mom says something profound, her daughter will post it online.

    Martha has total trust in her body and she was getting physically sick doing what others wanted her to do, but what wasn’t natural or feeling right for her.

    When she says, “I respectfully do not care,” it means I respect what you are saying, it’s not for me.

    I love that.

    She is following and listening to her body.

    This may be my second favorite quote from her and it validates that you heard the request, but don’t care.

    Don’t care if all are doing this, me and my body are not okay with it,

    “I respectfully do not care” almost sounds like what I tell my children. I respectfully do not care if all the kids are doing it you are not. (when the other kids parents didn’t care and we had different rules.)

    This phrase actually gives you the freedom to be an individual, to follow the signals of your body, to listen to the inner knowing, to care more about yourself than others.

    Selfishly I respectfully do not care!