Marijuana helps Cope with Adversity











Life Rearranged 

 My lines not straight Nor are they clear. 
Trauma affects me more year after year. 

No sight forward, content just for this day, always looking aft.
A broken life, stopped dead in its track, never again to hone my craft, 

Feeling the symptoms of decay, I have cause to weep. My foes are powerless and retiring they invade my sleep 


I am now an old woman and nature is cruel. It is prank to make old age look like a fool.

My hands are shaky and old, for the paint or the brush they can no longer hold.

The body, it crumbles grace and vigor, depart. There is now a stone where I once had a heart.

Inside this old carcass a young woman still dwells, Now and again, my battered heart swells

To dwell on the past I remember the pain. I am still living, no time to start life over again.

I think of the years, too few and gone too fast. Accepting the harsh fact that nothing can last.

Memories are golden because they never change. Only the people change as lives rearrange

So open your eyes, friends open and see. Not just an old woman, A Survivor, Look closer, see ME



Reaching inside of yourself, grasping your own heart, soul and mind, can be empowering. Most people cannot go that deep. I takes a life shattering experience, to even make anyone want to. 

When you began to recover from the devastation of a life tragedy and, you know in your heart, you lost yourself and can never go back you will forever change. 

So if I must continue moving forward, then their is an over whelming need to dig deep, to find who I am going to be next. Many people will just Fake till they make it. Do they need to dazzle me with brilliance or baffle me with bullshit. No matter where we go there we are.

I have had many personality shifts in my life due to extreme childhood abuse. Sometimes I seriously had to fake it, till I make...LIKE uhh make it as far away as I could get... then breathe just breathe again. 

Today I drink in the fresh air basking in the luxury of "Free to Be Me".



Holding Grudges

I have been feeding the Monsters. Holding grudges against my abusers is an activity that most often does much more harm than it does good. The feelings of ill will and resentments have only served to cause me life long problems. Forgiveness is supposed to be the key to successfully living a full life without grudges. 

I have wasted a lot of time on anger, but mostly towards myself for allowing them to consume so much of my life, mostly into adulthood consuming my mind.  I knew that I was the only one who could change the circumstances that existed within my life and so I drastically removed myself from a hopeless situation, again and again. I am optimistic that this will be the last move and I can settle down with peace of mind.

Simply completely removing myself from the life long problems that I was experiencing by never, talking has not yet resulted in a sufficient solution to my mental problems. Those people the ones who caused me so much emotional and physical pain, have made me feel insane. By no longer physically being in their grasp has resulted in holding grudges against them so mentally speaking I feel like I am not free from them yet. 

I believed that I would feel less pain or mental anguish by avoiding those individuals completely. So after 3 years of trying it on my own again, I find myself back in Therapy, mainly because I have learned over and over again that speaking to acquaintances or even those who might grow close to me results in people shying away from me. Even cringing or disbelieving my history of extreme abuse. 

Not long ago I tried dating again, the man I was with listened intently and hugged me often so I was so sure his comfort was going to help me heal my broken heart.

Unfortunately, he repeated some of what I told him to his family, which was not an uncommon reaction to most people who hear my story. I was suppose to meet him at his house one afternoon, but when I got there, his ex-wife opened the door as if she was watching for me to arrive. She kept her distance almost as if she feared me and she told me in no uncertain terms that from what she had heard about my “Bizarre upbringing and abuse” she did not want me around her children. Because no one who survived such traumas could be mentally, stable and she believed I had the potential for harming her children, if I became angry. Here it was again the old apple could not fall too far from the tree theory.

I left there feeling betrayed, humiliated and set up by the boyfriend. After three days I finally took his phone call, as usual I tried to focus on his every word and analyze his excuses. I was already determined to never again tell anyone how I was raised or the nightmarish childhood I endured, or my abusive sadistic first husband. If I had to I would lie, like my sister and invent a normal childhood to tell people. This would not be easy, when the embers of seething anger towards them lingered on my soul.

I left the boyfriend with my analytical view of his situation and the confrontation. First why did the ex-wife have free reign to his residence when he was not home. How could he have hoped to develop an intimate relationship with another woman? Would we have to hang a do not disturb sign on the door? Maybe some divorced people are able to interact that way but this was not going to be a situation that I was comfortable joining. I have yet to be able to make up lies to disguise how I was raised, so I have become isolated in my truths. Many times, I just blurt it all out as to shock people quickly so we do not waste each other’s time trying to form a relationship.

Another reason that holding grudges is a bad idea is that cutting off all communication with those harmful individuals causes them to be unable to seek forgiveness from me. I no longer have hope that they ever would seek me out for that purpose, but I prayed for that a lot when I was younger. God knows I have given them many opportunities. Yet they only responded with excuses why it was the way it was. They always managed to push the blame back onto me, leaving me empty and self-loathing. Could I really have been such an intolerable bad little girl? I think not.

There is no chance that the conflict that I had with them for decades will be resolved now that I have again chosen to avoid them at all cost.  I have been told that by cutting off any and all communication with them, may very well be making the problem worse. Unless those who hope to educate me know the whole story, they will never fully understand the violence that confrontation can cause. Actions will cause reactions; in my experience getting a reaction from these people could actually cause me to lose my life or at the very least cause physical bruises.

I constantly found myself apologizing to them, and then going home only to hide under the covers. I had to be the bigger person and apologize or risk abnormal intensification of the situations. My first suicide attempt was at about 10 years old when I overdosed on about 100-count bottle of aspirin.  It only ended in a lot of vomiting, deemed an accident by both my parents and the quack doctor who examined me and pumped my stomach. Even if some sort of therapy would have been available in the 1960’s my parents would have never allowed it, because there were too many secrets that might be divulged.

I had not realized the reality of the physical trauma that my body had sustained from the abuse until I was injured in an earthquake when I was about 38 years old. I had to have a couple of orthopedic and neurological surgeries to repair what was thought to be caused by this accident. 

The first discovery was an improperly healed greenstick fracture of the collarbone found during exploratory surgery when a camera was inserted into my shoulder in outpatient surgery. When I came out of anesthesia and sat down with the Doctor, he explained what a greenstick break was and that this kind of fracture only occurs in very young children when their bones are soft and pliable. Most normal parents would never ignore this type of injury.

It became humiliating for me to explain my only recollection of dealing with a long-term injury such as he was describing. I had stuffed the memory away in my subconscious. Now I was being forced to recall the memory of the greenstick broken collarbone. I was small and could be thrown around by an adult, like a little rag dog without much effort, but I am not sure about my age. I remember my Mother grabbing me in a fit of anger that day. Most of the time us kids had no idea why she was mad only that her switch had been flipped and we needed to run for our lives, for what ever was going on in her mind made her violent, torturous and evil.

In a chase, she caught me and slung me without any consideration of where my body might land. She sent me sailing straight out the open second story window. I remember hitting a pile of lumber that my father was collecting to build a deck from that window. I felt the pain of my shoulder hitting the pile, but then went unconscious. 

When I woke up I was very dazed and confused, I thought I was going to get in trouble for making a big mess out of Daddy’s lumber pile. We kids were not supposed to play back there. When I tried to push myself into a standing position I could not, the pain in my shoulder caused me to collapse, so I began to crawl towards the back door to the house. I had to stop for a brief moment because there was something wet a gooey getting into my eye. To my horror, it was thick sticky blood running from the back of my head. Blood covered the entire top of my head, because of the position I was, in having to crawl on my knees and one arm.

When I got to the door it had been locked, I knew what that meant. I was locked out again, I am left to die, punished for something I now had no recollection of doing. Are children able to learn a lesson for their misbehavior if the punishments are too extreme? I think not, only the violent punishment remains etched in our brain. It was the 1950’s many secrets went on behind closed doors than anyone is willing to talk about until decades later. We would not even have a television in our home for another 10 years.

Sliding back down from the four or five-step landing, by the back door, enabled me to get myself upright to walk. When I stood up, I saw a neighbor woman hanging wash in her back yard. As I hobbled toward her, and she noticed me, there was a look of utter horror on her face. She scooped up my small body quickly and carried me into her house like a baby.

When she asked me where my mother was, I told her she was not home because I knew mother would not answer the door. Once inside her house, she began to clean up the blood, one clean towel after the other hit the floor as my nausea from the site of my own blood set in. After more questioning, I was able to give this caring, concerned elderly woman my Father’s place of employment and she contacted him to come get me, she said before “I bleed to death”. It was the first time anyone displayed concern over my injuries. However, I was afraid for her. I thought if my mother finds out, I am in the nice woman’s house she would really get mad and take revenge. Mother would punish either me or she may do something wicked to the old woman.

As usual I kept my mouth shut to my father, as it was the law lain down by my Mother, as he drove us frantically to the hospital. He took my hand and told me to put pressure over an area of the towel where blood was seeping through. I could feel the moisture seeping through. The rest was an inconsequential blur but on the road back home Daddy said repeatedly 50 stitches kid, 50 stitches. I was as if I now had some big medal, to proudly display on my head just for surviving that one. 

When we walked through the front door, the table was set; Mom was dressed up all pretty as this was now her high, to disguise her dark low. With great pretense she was inquiring what happened and my father’s reply was “I do not know she won’t talk to Me.” in his usual irritated response to my behavior. I was seated at the table, as dinner was about to begin. My mother knelt down beside me, although her eyes were penetrating, her voice was soft and sweet, an act she always put on when my Daddy was home. 

With one hand, she held my chin to force me to lock eyes with her; with the other, she roughly gripped my arm. She said, “Well we all know how clumsy and stupid Suzie is, she probably fell down the back steps again.” I do not remember his reply I just needed her to let go of my arm because the pain was unbearable, which continued for months. So I agreed and acknowledged her explanation, she was right, she was always right and if you disagreed, you could be thrown out a window in the blink of an eye.

Shortly after that incident, my brother took me back to the woodpile and showed me the dried blood, which we cleaned away. Because the only thing worse in our home, was if Mommy and Daddy fought it would go on for days. As usual, we would hide the truth, so Daddy would not know what Mommy had done. If Daddy would not submit to her way to thinking, she became like a wild animal throwing and breaking everything within her reach. We agreed to let her have her way but my brother vowed to never run faster than me again. Which proved to come in very handy many times, as he rescued me from her?

Now decades later, the neurosurgeon patted me on the back when I showed him my “50 stitches” badge on the back of my head. The physical scar, almost 6 inches long, that I would feel for the rest of my life, every time I brush my hair. He told me that he did not need to hear all that, but that he would get me fixed up. The re-injury at age 38 or so would require four expensive surgeries. An Orthopedic Surgeon had to remove an inch off my collarbone because the bend (greenstick break) had driven it under and into my shoulder blade. It would not have taken much for the bone to slip into a contorted position. 

Once the doctors accomplished trimming the collarbone, it needed to be re-broken surgically so that it might heal in a normal position along side the shoulder blade where it belonged. After that healed, I was sent back to the neurosurgeon who then had to reposition the Ulna nerve (elbow crazy bone nerve) to relieve an unnatural strain caused by the reconstruction of the shoulder and collar bone. On the upside if I bump my elbow I do not get that crazy sensation, that nerve now set on top of my inner arm. Now another ugly scar to remind me of my unusual childhood, and the suffering I have endured.

This is a huge grudge I am holding; the hate that I am experiencing simmers inside of me and some days sucks the joy out of my day. This was the first place that arthritis began to affect me. More bodily injuries began to surface and cause me a multitude of physical ailments that only gets worse with age and now keep me physically disabled. 

At age 38, I was also diagnosed with early onset of degenerative disc disease of the spine, again most likely due to physical trauma and found during diagnostic tests.

Rolling back the mental reel, of my childhood I am forced to face the reality of it all. Without warning as I passed through the kitchen one afternoon, as Mother was cooking, my brother saw her grab the cast iron skillet. He screamed my name so I spun around and fortunately caught the whack in the back and not in the face. 

My brother was getting very big for his age and would grow up to stand 6’5”. He jumped on our Mother and pounded her to the ground. He then quickly scooped up my body and carried me to the third floor attic, which was not more than a crawl space on the side of the roof pitch, where an adult would have to crawl into the tight space. As far back as I can remember we could not stand up in there, so it would have been considered a crawl space. We came to know it as the attic, where we would often spend many hours locked in when our Mother was not home. We never had babysitters; she kept us isolated for the most part, to ensure no secrets were divulged.

It made me laugh, even through the pain, to imagine him jumping on her back and knocking her to the ground, but I also was afraid for him, since I knew she would get her revenge, even if it had to be a little at a time.

My brother kept me hidden away for the most part of the summer; he brought me food and read me stories. A couple of times a day he helped me try to walk again. She allowed him to come and go without question only to ambush him with sarcastic remarks if he had to pass by her. If he got too close, she would stick a foot out for him to trip over, if she had a chance, most often when he had his hands full. Therefore, he would show up empty handed to tell me he was sorry “she caught him”. Therefore, I went without something to eat.

More Doctor’s examinations after the earthquake accident revealed, not only degenerative disc disease, degenerative arthritis in every section of my spine but also Stenosis causing pressure with narrowing of my spinal canal. At 38 years old, I was diagnosed with diseases seen in much older individuals. 

I stopped seeing Doctor’s when they wanted to put a rod into my spine. I did not want to tell another sad sad story of my childhood abuse. I needed to get back on my feet as soon as I could and get back to work. My son was in high school, I had to remain dedicated to him. Keep my focus on him, so I kept it all buried some where deep inside of me.

It is quite hard to be happy when all that is on your mind is the wrong that someone has done to you, and the baggage that a grudge creates can hold you down for years. I used to turn the incidents inwards reminding myself what a stupid clumsy kid I was, which allowed me to stay in an abusive marriage with a pedophile. Trapped in the belief that love meant getting beat on, but I was never a able to physically fight back.

My habit of keeping score with what has been done by them; to me is tough to break. All the while always internally struggling not be like them, which I feel makes me a better person. Even while trying to imitate people who have found peace of mind, I think the odds have been against me. 

Forgiveness of others must be divine and maybe unavailable to me because I flip back & forth believing or not believing in a divine power. Most days, it is all just too ungodly hard. When a vulnerable child experiences physical, emotional, mental and/or sexual abuse the pain and the scars go deep, especially if the physical scars are a constant reminder.  I am thriving one small step at a time.

She was Hitler's child and his personality from what I have researched was as "counteractive narcissism," a type that is stimulated by real or imagined insult or injury. Characteristics of his personality type include holding grudges, low tolerance for criticism, excessive demands for attention, inability to express gratitude, a tendency to belittle subordinates (children), bullying, and blaming others, a desire for revenge, persistence in the face of defeat, extreme self-will, self-trust, inability to take a joke, and compulsive criminality. My mother had all these characteristics (and more) to an extreme degree and lacked the offsetting qualities that round out a balanced personality." 

I struggle myself to be balanced, because so many years were spent in an unbalanced environment. In later years when Mommy's party girl persona resulted in alcoholism, it was easier to manage her violent outbursts. Being intoxicated made her easier to handle, if she threw a punch it was easy to duck. I took care of her for a while through many of her failed marriages until the ultimate betrayal, which I am not ready to expose yet.

When my Father died at age 86, it was a gift to be contacted by my Mother’s sister to inform me of his passing. At first I cringed from her email, the knee jerk reaction was to tell her how much I do not care and pour out exactly why. But I had altercations from her before; to her my parents were lovely polite successful people, who shared cocktails and dinner parties with her. 

She had seven children and our adult lives have parallel consequences, they are drug addicts, suicide victims, and a variety of mental illness and so on. The couple who have survived moved completely out of the country to the mother land of Austria, escaping their mother too.

However, I did take an opportunity to ask some facts about My Aunts upbringing under the realm of Hitler and Russian occupation of their small village. I told her I was writing a book, which was meant to be sarcasm, but ahh she divulged that she had already written her memoirs. 

She expressed how sad none of her children wanted to bother to read them. I placated her into sending me a copy and so now maybe through understanding the horror of that era of domination by total insane Rulers like Hitler and Joseph Stalin of Russia. I can find compassion for my mother and her sister. I am still sifting through her somewhat factually defective claims, (Dates & Times do not match those of Encyclopedia in many cases) for picking up key disturbing events that would have traumatized my mother into being such a wicked human being. 

According to my Aunt, the majority of her memoir is; all was a beautiful life seen through rose-colored glasses, in her homeland. A few events she wrote about would have been traumatizing experiences for them both. I have incorporated (plagiarized) them into my book, adding information I researched about their geographical location and recorded history of that era…

I feel as though I am a granddaughter of Hitler & Stalin’s evil violence, not by blood, by links to them in a war to survive the evilness they caused through generations of people. Will I ever forgive Them? Maybe I one radical Incident at a time. I have experienced every single form of abuse: physical, sexual, verbal, neglectfulness, and emotional at the hands of my mother and others. Nevertheless, they were secrets that needed to be kept or the punishments would surly be more severe. If I spoke or asked about them, I would be shunned for making up lies about good people.

The older I get, the less flashbacks I have, and I feel, even though it is so far removed that I will never ever be able to truly forgive her for all of it. However now, I get mad at myself and get very internally conflicted because she died before I could settle it or get her forgiveness. Now that they have no more influence over me and they cannot tell me how I am suppose to feel, or act, or what to believe, I feel I can tell it all without consequences from them and then put it to rest.

Some days, I just feel so scarred, damaged, and hurt and out of all the people who are supposed to love me no matter what, my parent’s did not. They were who they were and no matter how hard I tried to be who they wanted me to be; it would have never been good enough. It was never about me growing up to be a whole person it was always about his or her own dysfunction and inability to be normally mentally balanced.
Anyway, is it "normal" for me to be getting these flashbacks when the abuse is so far removed? Do I still have a right to be upset and hurt even though it was a very long time ago?  Maybe I have held onto grudges because it has always been a lot easier than trying to make peace. I am convinced more than ever that she was schizophrenic or Bi-Polar. 

It was the 1950’ through the late1960‘s. Child abuse was not reported back then, and mental illness was socially unacceptable.

Sickening sensory images suddenly occur which vividly bring back the sights, sounds, physical and emotional feelings of the abuse. The emotional, psychological and physical stress of abuse often takes its toll on me in physical illness as “my body aches as it remembers” being betrayed.

A survivor’s memories of abuse are often challenged or denied by others which makes healing very difficult. Forgiveness is sold as the ultimate step toward freedom from the effects of the actual abuse. Like many people, I have difficulty with this concept. How can you forgive a father, or a mother for so many indiscretions, especially when neither parent shows any remorse? 

To become whole then, I need to let go of the shame, anger, guilt and the hatred. They are both dead now, so I am left to settle it on my own. I will never condone the betrayal, but I can do research to rise above the harm done to me so I no longer continue the mental anguish and am able cope with the physical suffering

I am so awestruck by people who can forgive the unforgivable. Whether by instinct or through hard work, they know something I have spent a lifetime trying to learn. Then maybe most of those preaching forgiveness are clueless of an unforgivable act. I think Forgiveness is essential, if I want a shot at a successful conclusion. I have to work on forgiving myself not them.

I have been struggling for a little over a year now since my Father died. I would never hear either of them simply say “I love you daughter”. Maybe the key is forgiving myself for wasting a lifetime hoping for that small hopeless gesture.

I have "decided" to move on. I "need to" get over myself. Perhaps the ability to forgive trivial indiscretions is a reflection of ones character, while the ability to forgive major transgressions is a matter of survival. 

Sometimes I have to move into some amateur poetry, which helps me express myself. I wrote this a couple of years ago. I left it here for you.

I have a lot to say, and I need you to hear it 
Your constant abuse has crushed my spirit 

You physically tortured me 'till I wanted to die
You showed me no mercy, Not a tear in your eye.

You abused my mind, You tore it apart.
You almost killed me, with hate in your heart.

As I, crumbled reality slipped to gray
You gave me life, but then took it away.

Your dead and buried, so I can escape your clutch
Trusting you, loving you, has cost me way to much

I am a big girl now; I knew there would come this day
Through constant turmoil, I never learned to play

I can show mercy to forgive you but only for today
Now you can no longer hear me; I have a lot to say



Remorse 

Some people struggle to understand their own remorse; they may be unable to justify the part they played in past events, while others run away from themselves shedding their own conscious, until there is no conscious left at all. They seem to become narcissistic or psychopathic. I tend to run toward my own guilt, I feed off it. Because it is one of the few lamps that light my way forward. Least I forget my past life, surrendering to become like them.

The past is a tricky obsession for me; sometimes it is etched into stone, hard to escape, but other times it is exemplified in soft comforting memories, which are far, and few between. When I mess around too long in the deep dark things of my past I awaken the monsters of malicious intent that haunt me. Although the both of them (parents) are physically dead, they continue to agitate me more than ever. As for the rest of my so-called family, I am learning to break the ties that bind me to my ambivalent bloodline.

Occasionally my father’s persona jumps into my mind echoing 60 years of disapproval, which I can quickly retreat from, convincing myself that his judgments about me do not matter anymore. However, when the pure evilness of my Mother takes a grip on my conscious, she is still able to wreak havoc on my being.

I was once able to ask my Father why he has treated me badly, his answer was that he knew he needed me to survive this life without him and he felt he had provided me with skills to do just that. He told me “never forget there are only two kinds of people in this world; you can be one or the other; a Fucker or the Fuckee”. I had to recoil from him immediately because I had grown up knowing which one of the two he was.  

The skill sets he had intended me to possess included deceitfulness, cheating, manipulation, stealing, conniving, as these traits all described his personality makeup and then some. He was obsessed with chasing young women after he divorced my mother, none of which was old enough to be a stepmother for me. With each new tryst, he would be compelled to describe to me the details of the great sexual encounter he had conquered. 

He was a skilled con man obtaining riches beyond his own upbringing, which empowered him to feel successful without any conscious of who he had to destroy to get where he was. That included me. His Mafia mentality drove him to appear successful at any cost. He had intended to make these qualities my birthright, but at an early age I could no longer follow, directions from him much less trust him.

My mother on the other hand would have never been able to engage herself with confrontation from me or anyone else, her level of violent reactions would have been a fatal mistake on my part. She was a great actor, as I watched her be caught up in confrontations with others, she turned up the charm, speaking softly, sweetly and sexy to defend her own actions. Many were taken by her pretense, especially men; she could bilk anyone out of anything when she turned on her charms. She was a beautiful charismatic woman and she knew exactly how to use her looks to her advantage. However, behind closed doors as a mother she would become a very ugly evil entity.

Once as a child, during a beating with a 3-foot section of garden hose, I stopped in my tracks to face off with her. I locked eyes with her and said, “Why are you doing this? I hate you, some day, I am going to runaway from home, I wish you were dead” For only a split second she contemplated my words, as the pure evilness within her was further awakened. She moved towards me in slow motion, her neck out stretched like a charming snake sneaking in for the kill. Her face slithering towards mine keeping our eyes deadlocked on me, in a poisonous embrace. I felt paralyzed with fear from the stare of those ominous green eyes. I could not run and I could barely breathe. I felt that this would be the moment I die; then the pain would stop. What I saw was not a normal person but an entity from a nightmare, her life form became distorted, I felt I was looking at a contortion of her reflection in a carnival mirror. Embellished childhood imagination, you may think, but then you would have to face off with her to believe it and I would never suggest that unless you are bigger & a lot more powerful in mind, body and spirit than she was.

This was a moment in my life I have never forgotten; as her mouth filled with foam at the corners, she began to speak in a masculine voice, husky sounding words filled with intent to settle this challenge from her daughter. Her eyes became illuminated with wickedness, yet they were glazed over with emptiness. She said slowly and surely, “I want you to hate me as much as I hate you. There will never be a place on earth for you to hide little girl. Someday I will be dead and from my grave, I will be much stronger. No matter where you go I will always be able to find you.” In addition, with that said, the rubber hose struck me along side my head and face, leaving a welt that kept me home from school for over a week. 

During that week, she reviewed our confrontation repeatedly, letting me know in a million different ways that she would continue to beat me, but that she would never beat me to death. It was her duty to educate me properly. There is a proper place for a fork and knife at the dinner table, there was a proper way for a young girl to sit and act. Daily as she relaxed on the sofa, she would force me to sit in front of her, on the floor. Just far enough away, so that she could use my shoulders as her footstool. For good posture she claimed; if I should slouch from the weight of her adult legs, or doze off, she would kick me on the side of the head and scream at me to “Sit up straight.

I avoided crossing her path, with rebellion, the best I could for the rest of my life. I would regret that one brave moment of confrontation, for she hovered over me like a hawk just waiting for an excuse to pounce on me to inflict torture. She used me as an example to my older brother and younger sister by summoning them to witness what she deemed as just punishments for mistakes made large or small. 

No one would ever understand how crushing it could be when someone would say to me; you look like your mother.  I would obsessively scan every fraction of my face looking for signs; it was a huge consolation that I was born with brown eyes. If my eyes resembled hers, I would have never been able to look in the mirror at myself. It was not her facial features it was in her wicked eyes. I can now recognize the glare of someone insane. Probably Schizophrenic or Bipolar, I have heard that it is hereditary. My daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly after her younger brother died.

Many years later when my mother, died at the age of 54, and I heard of her passing, no one around me could understand my severe anxiety regarding her death. I did eventually run away from her and a part of me feared she would now be stronger and able to come after me once more from the grave. 

I spiraled down into a deep dark psychosis to escape the horror, anticipating what was to come now that she was dead. I was sure that she was so strong she could literally keep her promise to haunt me and so I was haunted. The nightmares weather awake or asleep began to destroy my life, as I knew it. As I curled up into the fetal position with my deep dark barrel of despair, I bounced from side to side unable to see a way out, thus my marriage that was not very stable to begin with crumbled. 

My teenage daughters began to run a muck to get way from their crazy mother. The anxiety was so exhausting that I lost my employment. As a chain reaction, unemployment caused me to lose my lifestyle, home, car, etc. I had to file bankruptcy in order to get back on my feet. It took a couple of years for me to breathe again with the realization that Mommy is not coming after me from her grave like a ghost, she was not that powerful and that this would be the last time I will ever allow her to destroy me. The wicked witch was finally dead.

As I was attempting to cope with what I surely believed her death would mean, those around me, berated me for taking an uncaring stance regarding the death of my own Mother. Guilt tripping me about what an ungrateful daughter I was, not acknowledge my mother’s passing into heaven. By showing the respect my Mom deserved, I could again gain favor with the “Family“. They were all so possessed by her charms. My brother was the only one who knew the truth they all denied. I eventually seized the opportunity to escape them all and start fresh in another State over 2000 miles away with my young son in tow. Then they were all surely convinced that I had lost my ever-loving mind. How disrespectful and ungrateful they thought I was.

I believe it was Oscar Wild who said, “We are the sum total of our experiences”. I took that to mean my influential factors should have caused me to be a combination of both my parents. If this were true, their offspring would have become a combination of the Mafioso John Gotti and Hitler.

Influential factors of personal growth can either nurture us into adulthood or damage who we should have been from birth. Conceptually detrimental parents produce children who become a menace to society, but that was the case with only one of my siblings. My brother eventually committed suicide, nine months after the death of my son. He knew how close my son and I were. He once said to me that he fears how I am going to change now that I have lost my son, Michael and he did not want to lose me to depression again. Little did I realize I was losing him, as he was going through some hard times. He too did not possess the coping skills necessary to escape our ambivalent bloodlines.

Through a strong will, to not trust parental influences that would inherently render us like kind, children who spend the majority of their lives being destroyed, more often than not, attract destroyers. I sure have met more than my fair share of them along the way. Through Devine intervention, a strong will to be different has only left me doomed to be destroyed by others. I lost the ability to trust in anything. For the most part in my old age I cannot, will not trust anyone. I trusted in myself to get me where I am without using those birthright characteristics to destroy or use anyone along the way. 

I stand completely alone and measure my personal success in that aloneness. I do not have feelings of loneliness, as that would indicate I miss someone or something from my past.  Therefore, I believe being alone is very different from being lonely. For the most part, I do not like people and I detest congregating. It is psychologically harder to stand in a room filled with people and only feel all alone, than to truly just be alone. 

Throughout the years, I toyed with thoughts of vengeance for my unjust existence. From what I have learned vengeance taken will tear the heart apart and torment the conscious. In that truth I know, I am on the right path now.

In my podium shift, my voice no longer matters in their presence. I no longer feel the need to ask why or how could you? The past was what it was in its entirety, how they could ever find the answers that would justify their behavior. So I have gone silent, none of them will ever darken my door again. Most likely, I will stumble again and have to rely on medications occasionally to calm the anxiety of dark memories. 

I have escaped physically, but escaping mentally will take life long work on myself. However, I shall have my memoirs, as they may also have their own. Upon those, we shall never find a symbiotic place to coexist. By no means will I ever again be trapped at their mercy in a huge maze, feeling like there is no outlet. We all get thirsty once in a while, but I have vowed to myself , that no matter how much I would love to have had a normal family, that I have lost that battle and I will never drink from their whacky Kool-aide pond again.

Thank you for indulging me as I got that off my chest.

I thrive in moving forward because I am willing to do the things most people are not, I will never stop fighting against the odds. I will continue to sacrifice. I am not shackled by fear, insecurities or doubts. I feel all of those emotions, drink them in and then swallow them away into the darkness of the hell I have survived. I am motivated by accomplishment, not pride. Pride consumes the weak, destroys their heart from deep within. If I fall, again I will get up. If I am beaten down, I will return even stronger. I will never stop getting better. I will never give up. When life knocks me down, I just roll over and look at the stars. I will no longer hold their secrets.




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