I M Perfect lady

Tag: self

  • A new you emerges…

    “When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” ~Tuli Kupferberg

    Somehow this quote paints a scene of great Art, of stepping out of the box and being presented with a wondrous new world.

    In my experience breaking an old pattern requires stamina, fearlessness, standing out and being different, walking away from familiar and entering into the unknown, which I guess is where the new world emerges.

    Even if the new world is much healthier, happier and more peaceful, there is sorrow as the old pattern dies.

    It is a piece of your personality or a fragment of you that is being disposed of.

    If I were to pile up all the old patterns that I broke, you would see a whole person standing there.

    Her pattern had shades and tones of abuse and dysfunction, faint colors of washed out places of low self-esteem, heavy dark corridors of unawareness and brainwashing along with righteously wrong values.

    She was an enigma, a very confusing mystery to unravel, a body of truth and a head of fiction.

    The breaking of the pattern was all headwork, my patterns of thoughts and beliefs that didn’t match reality and I had to work to reconfigure them in my head.

    It was going backwards in time and reworking or removing the patterns I had set in my head.

    Patterns of me that were formed by childhood, patterns that reflect those who raised me, those who cared for me, doing the best they knew how.

    It was their pattern that I was living by, not mine.

    I was a designed for their use not mine.

    When patterns are broken, a new you emerges….

  • Choices we make.

    What I want to know is do we all have the same choices and the same mechanism that selects them?

    Is it possible that some of us have choices while others do not?

    What makes some of us change our choices and others continue selecting the same ones over and over like ordering the same thing from the menu of life?

    Is there a moment in time when all the choices we have been selecting seem distasteful and we then meander to another part of the menu?

    What happens to us inside that creates the desire for something new?

    Something changes inside of us, something happens to the mechanism that chooses.

    Looking back with 20/20 vision, I can see how a new truth landed inside of me, demolishing my old choice maker.

    All my old choices seemed useless, inauthentic and utterly distasteful.

    Those choices created an illusion that deflected reality.
    In order to walk hand in hand with the truth of reality I had to change all my choices.

    So, was it that choices were limited before or was the truth limited?

    Was my mechanism broken or designed to create illusion?

    Is it possible that we choose based upon our level of awareness, that the choices are always there, we just are unaware?

    All I can know is that my choices are just as limited now, for I feel akin to sticking with my truths, to being authentic with my feelings, to aligning myself with reality.

    My old options are still available but I have lost the taste for them.

    Guess at the end of the day we all make choices based upon what we know, what we feel and our own inner truths.

    It isn’t that the choices are limited; it is that we limit our choices.

    And each of our lives is reflected of the choices we make.

  • The Limits of My Self.

    What I am learning as I go along, is that there are people I will agree with, people I will be drawn to, and others that will stir up my strong held beliefs, it seems that the ones that frustrate us the most or put off the highest charge within us, are carrying a part of us that we need to bring back in.

    In my experience those got the highest reaction from carried a message I needed to solve.

    It seems we are on a mystery tour, where we are discovering new exciting things along the way. In the darkest hours wonderful insights arrive, and strange dialogues open us up to a new way of thinking.

    I feel braver now to explore the reaches of humanity instead of sitting frozen in fear that my long held beliefs will be damaged.

    Or maybe that I will be destroyed hearing a thought or idea that is different than me…

    We never know who we will meet, what words will be spoken that is the key to our next phase in life.

    I used to fear living and fear dying, now I am trying to love living and love that I will die, and in between I get to explore the limits of my self.

  • My Ladies come alive!

    Sometimes in life the Universe offers you a glimpse at someone who is a delight to watch and listen to.

    She arrived wearing a black hat, set jauntily on her head and big interesting jewelry all off set on an outfit in black.

    Around the room she went introducing herself, holding your hand, looking you in the eyes and repeating your name.

    She immediately changed the energy of the room, at least for me.

    As she gave her message, she was delighted with herself and her Art, asking for others to join her vision.

    Her Art is a community project; it involves everyone who is open and willing to share.

    She envisions 10,000 individual stories all hung together joining a long line of connections, weaving the past to the present, showing the walks of many who have walked upon the same roads we travel today.

    Her idea is to see whose shoulders you stand upon.

    Written in the first person, a story and a picture, all hanging together in a line of humanity, their lives, their struggles, the journey of their times, told by someone today.

    The Art will be displayed this summer at an opera and a music festival.

    She needed help with panels upon which the story will rest. Some of us will lend a hand in making her vision possible.

    After she involved us in her Art, she then sat back and enjoyed ours.

    It was fun to watch her engage life, how she seemed to hang on each second, paying close attention to what was at hand…astute, curious and involved and very much her own self and very comfortable there.

    I have to admit that I wanted to share my quilts with her, just to watch her reaction.

    I was tickled when she smiled and literally gave me a thumbs up, very pleased.

    She epitomizes my ladies or my ladies are a reflection of her!

    What is the saying life imitating Art…

    It was like seeing one of my Ladies come alive!

  • A whole You.

    I listened yesterday as Dr. William Petit talked to Oprah about the evil that came into his life that destroyed his wife, his two daughters, and his home, that when it left, there was very little of himself standing, he was a man he didn’t even know.

    A few points struck me as he talked, one is how evil feels looking at it from the inside, and how he used to see evil somewhere out there, a distant thing. He was introduced to evil in a very large way, and it totally changed who he is and how he sees the world.

    There is a huge difference between understanding intellectually what evil is, in comparison to living in the throes of what it destroys, what it takes away and what lay in the aftermath and how you will deal when it comes knocking.

    Feeling evil and its energy and knowing how it tromps into life with no regard to life and feelings, is to feel evil’s blindness to another human being.

    Oprah asked him about forgiveness and evil, and I can’t remember his words, but I understand his feelings on this. That forgiveness is no match against evil.

    Forgiveness always seems to take on the image of being able to negate what happened, to find a place of peace in spite of the hole that evil left behind, or perhaps not even acknowledging the hole it left behind.

    Society has this unchallenged ideal that forgiveness trumps evil, that forgiveness can change evil.

    I believe what he is saying is that evil is an actual phenomena that we can’t change by forgiveness and that we are to acknowledge its power.

    The energy of evil is to destroy; to hurt, to deliver pain, it isn’t warm and fuzzy.

    I thought he sat in the middle of what is, in the center of what happened and described what evil feels like and how it changes who you are.

    The challenge left behind is who will you now become?

    I watched a few clips, and you can see he is still freshly wounded, that it pains him to talk and how he is trying to wrap his mind around such sudden drastic changes in his life.

    Holding on trying to focus on the good, bringing more good, trying to not succumb to the negative pull of drowning or giving up.
    He describes closure, as the hole will eventually lose its ragged edges that waves of goodness will wash over those rough spots leaving them smooth, but the hole will always remain open, a hole in his heart and soul.

    I agree.

    It is also an opening to find your authentic self, a you that stands behind the roles and titles, a you that lives beyond the surface of life; the hole drops you into the center of your being.

    Being a whole you.

  • We poured ourselves out for them.

    The two main things I have been striving to achieve are to mend a broken heart and to find my sense of lucidity.

    There are times when the brokenness obscures my vision of sanity.

    Perhaps a broken heart causes insanity.

    It is impossible to discern the cause and affect.
    What came first?

    As I head into each situation, past memory, old relationship, investigating and probing, I usually become more lucid and sane and find no love.

    What is so unsettling is that I can have my sanity back, but can’t find love there.

    It seems the wires of insanity are laced with love, wrapped and wound tightly together, like white on rice, that you can’t separate the two.

    Trying to leave love unaffected while becoming lucid, is to maintain a loving family amidst the evidence of dysfunction.

    I see the love change before my eyes, as my eyes grow clearer and clearer, its to see the secondary picture emerge that has always been there, just obscured by my love.

    My insanity fades into lucidness, my love I see was poured into containers with holes.

    Leaking out not held dear.

    I can see clearly now where I poured all my love, see now where it lay abandoned and betrayed, my efforts long forgotten, my undying faithfulness cheated upon, like a used container tossed aside after its contents enjoyed.

    I see the me that was so faithful to the unfaithful.
    I see the me that was so trusting to the untrusting.
    I see the me that was so giving to the ungiving.

    I see me doing the right thing to the wrong people.
    That no matter how much I gave, I couldn’t change the people in front of me, that it is impossible to add love, trust, faith and a giving spirit to someone else.

    And I also think, I came really close in losing that spirit within me, that when the outside doesn’t change, you believe that your love isn’t good enough.

    Your faith isn’t strong enough.
    Your trust isn’t trusting enough…you are the problem, you didn’t try hard enough.

    Insanity is trying to make a loving person by loving them more.
    Insanity is trying to make a giving person by giving them more.
    Insanity is trying to make a trusting person by trusting them more.

    When, evidence showed the first time you walked up to them and handed them, your love, trust and faith, they tore them up.

    Somehow someway, as a child, we keep bringing them more and more, believing that if only we could be good enough, they could see love and kindness within us.

    We look to them to find the value in us.

    What is so shocking to see is the emptiness there, I see them not seeing me at all, and perhaps it is the empty container in front of them.

    We poured ourselves out for them.

  • 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…

  • In My Mother’s Eyes

    Being in this moment of time and healing my childhood wounds requires me to make changes now what I was incapable of doing back then.

    It is like living in two places at once, or being a grown woman and a little girl at the same time, my past is brought to the present to be healed or the presence goes back to the past to feel, heal and deal.

    What I failed to understand about the term, “healing your childhood wounds”, was that you literally are bringing forward the stuck emotions.

    Meaning you are made to revisit emotions that are stuck on, or places you are stuck and not free.

    Where you carry fear that is unreasonable as a mature woman.

    It is incredible to be a big lady in her own home, feeling feelings of being a ‘bad’ little girl, disappointing or displeasing, hurting her mother.

    How I don’t have this right. This option is not available.

    How the fear of her reaction seems to overshadow my independence and freedom.

    Yet, if I capitulated to the fears, I get stuck in the place emotionally being afraid of my mother’s reaction.

    It is her reaction that I fear.

    This is a very strong iron clad idea that I am not to upset my mother’s world, but what I also didn’t want to see is her reaction.

    It is twofold.

    That there is an unspoken rule, “thou shall not displease thy mother, for there will be a consequence IF you do.”

    It is perhaps the consequence… of what will happen or what do I not want to know?

    There seems to be more than just fear of her reacting badly, but rather seeing what’s beneath.

    In a dysfunctional home, I bet we know that the depth of love for us is very shallow, that we can’t push them very far and we will fall off the ledge of love.

    For in a dysfunctional home, the love of child seems to be last, the very last, in the furthest reaches, out beyond selfish needs, addictions and desires, and what we don’t want to know for sure is that this is true.

    That it is true we are barely seen.

    That we come behind a long list of things that matter more, that even with all the physical evidence to the contrary, we just don’t want to know, our well being comes second, third, or tenth on the list.

    Speaking up, making my wishes known, is to go against our usual dance.

    I am putting down my co-dependent wand.

    My greatest fear is that when I stand and offer to her that my well-being come before hers, that I will be seen as useless to her.

    That my value drops to zero.

    In My Mother’s eyes.

  • I found my soul.

    “Pen to the page to find and create sanctuary and asylum for soul. “ Margot Van Sluytman

    My blog is an asylum for my soul, a sanctuary for a confused mind, a place where I feel free to dialogue and debate the inner turmoil of unraveling a life too confusing to live, let alone understand.

    It is the place I run to when my emotions need a voice, when my feelings need to be heard, when I have discovered another part of me that was missing, it is a place for me to rest and be me.

    I speak in the asylum and I also listen to myself there, it is the oddest of things, and most often I receive newfound wisdom, wisdom I didn’t have when I put pen to paper, yet wisdom flows as I write.

    In my writings I discovered my innocence, explored my beliefs and challenged my thoughts, worked out crossed wires of dysfunction, expressed long pent up emotions, shed tears, and wrote words of comfort, all in the space of neutral white paper, my sanctuary.

    It is a sacred place, a soulful place, a place littered with emotion and tears, sorrow and pain, as well as decorated with wonderful moments of joy and gratitude and wisdom fills the air.

    I arrived to this place a very broken disillusioned girl, who had lost more than her heart could hold, and all I knew is that I seemed to feel better by writing it out.

    And it seemed to hear me, my great confidant.

    The sanctuary is my private space, to let down and let go, to not have to worry who I will offend or disappoint, for there is no one here but me.

    A space where you can go mental, rant and rave, and a place that is set aside to work on solutions, to find the answers you are seeking, to heal so you can once again rejoin your life.

    In this sanctuary and asylum I found my soul.