Your Life Was Not Always This Way...(A Soares Ohana Tribute)

...and as with all else, this too shall change and you will no longer hurt from it...

You have to start somewhere. Today I did just that. Today I went to a domestic violence support organization because the frank truth is that this entire ordeal has rendered me "stuck," sort of, in a place where I am damned if I do, and damned if I don't, and whether I do it now or do it a month from now, it is still going to get done because of this, that and of course, the other...however...

Life was not always this way...


...and Life will not remain this way. No matter how hard it seems for you at this moment to really believe that there is an end to all of this madness that you are currently witnessing as being the thing that is your life, know, believe, and accept, too, that none of it is permanent, that it WILL get better as you get stronger, and as you get stronger, you will find that you can do just about anything you put your mind AND your soul to, and that, really, is the ONLY thing that any one of us HAS TO try to do - accept what  I just wrote up there as a basic Truth which applies to each and every one of us who graces the crust of this planet.

Not one thing that you can look at within your eyes' line of sight will remain just exactly as it is at this moment. Some peoples' lives will change markedly, and other's lives will just be implemented with those things and those people -some who may already be there and in place and waiting...waiting, waiting, waiting...not for the change to happen to or for them, but by them...and very much indeed we find that these changes, they are permanent.

But change and its ever presence is the only thing that does NOT change ... changes, paradoxically, never changes. Change is the thing that makes us fear, and change is the thing that makes us grow, and we humans do not like to change and we do not like to grow. We become comfortable in settling for less than what we see ourselves as, and let me tell you something, folks - if there is one thing that I have learned absolutely in these last two decades, it is that we would rather settle for what we have been told we are able to have and deserve to have, and we allow someone else to tell us what THEY think we are worthy of, and it is not much, guys, not at all. ...

Which is the reason that I contemplated doing what I did today, knowing that I had to do it, that I am the one who is totally responsible for my own healing, that I was not going to the place where I went to today for any other person than myself, because I can no longer deal with the sadness that I have been given and I can no longer carry my burden and someone else's at the same time and that I should never have volunteered to do it for as long as I have.

I learned something about me today, and it is that I really am a soul warrior, that I really am all that I have known that I am, for the entirety of my life and NOT only the last 23 - I was someone prior to the day that I met the person who I married, and here I am, many  years later, almost to the date, 21 years later, and I see in this person the thing that I have always seen, and what I have always seen has been something of a shell of what someone was and that person hanging on to that memory when he'd held all the marbles, had all the control, and little did I realize that I am still afraid, so very, very afraid, that I am still a little rough around the edges, and if you saw me the way that I see me, the rough edges are not unacceptable. I worked hard for them...we all work hard for them...

I have enough rough edges, all on the inside, and it was not until tonight that I began to orate to my oldest about the reason that I have not gone completely off of the deep end, not at all, and why it is that every time hear Hawaiian music, I am brought to tears, but I am smiling, and it is because there is a group of people with whom I share an emotional bond who know me as well as any group would. I love them. They Love me. They are my cousins...my Soares cousins...the ones who are more like my siblings than anything else.

There are only so many times in our lives when we are afforded the opportunity to tell people who mean a whole lot to us that indeed we Love them...that truly, I do Love you, each and every one of you, with every bit of aloha that I can think to even contain within me. Normally, at a time of night when I am sitting in my Sacred Space in prayer with God and asking for the things that my soul so desires, I thought about the many things that I have been privileged to have said that I have owned, places I have visited, people I have met, places I have lived... all of it, I am instead sitting here at my keyboard and listening to Keali'i Reichel, thinking about all those times we were together, even recently, and always at Uncle Reggie's house. Always eating and drinking and sneaking out to have a smoke...and most of all, just being right there, in another space which is considered to me to be Sacred. It is a place where I know we are all of one heart and soul, that we are a family, that we are looking at each other and in that split second we are seeing that missing front tooth, long braided hair, slippahs from Longs Drugstore, the Silver Shave Ice Truck...

And yes...of course we broke each others' hearts, and said things that hurt each other, and even sometimes allowed ourselves to throw blows, all over what?

No, not pride, or greed, or anything stupid and 'adult,' like that...nah, we fought because for a split second we feared that we'd lost the love of a person who was our...sibling...you guys, all of you, are my brothers and sisters, and I am so glad to tell you that for as long as I can remember and think about growing up "Hawaiian," I can see us all...all there at the most important times of each of our lives, and though I may have missed out one some pretty significant times and events, I sit here thinking about it, and knowing that I have the chance every single day of my life to tell someone how much they mean to me. I have done that for years - told the people who mean the most to me that I love them...and I say it to them often, and they know who they are, because when I see them, I tell them. I tell them that I love them, and I mean it, I really, really mean it.

For every time that we fought and said ugly words to one another, know that each time I thought of you afterwards, it was never about the fight that just happened but about the time that we fought when we were kids and then I laughed and suddenly missed you.

For every tear that we shared when one of our hearts got broken, know that when you cried, I cried with you, maybe not where you could see it, but I hurt for you, and I grieved for you, but I always knew you would be okay because that is the way that we were raised.

For every laughter filled room of kids we call our own, and seeing them play together just like we did, in them I see shades of us, and I am taken right back to Booth Park, to Ala Moana Park, to The Bus, The Waikiki Zoo, Makapu'u Beach, Erleene's truck, and finding an EPT test in my mom's carry-on.

I am sure that you can all see all these things in your minds now, right now, and I know that just as I am recalling these good times and these good memories, I am glad to say that I know you, that I have always Loved you, and that forever we will be bound, not by the memories of who we were or where we are going or doing with our lives, but because we are the truest Ohana there is, and I am happy tho know that this is who we will always be. I miss you all, and when I see you I see the real You, the One Who has always honored and Loved the Real Me...all of you...

Thank you all for always being right there for me, right at the right time, and never forgetting to let me know that I am Loved !!

Aloha...

...Mapuana...

What Emotional Abuse Feels Like

We know the symptoms, but...


I used to be very shy about sharing with people the things that I have gone through. No one believes that emotional abuse is real until the person who has gone through it begins to lose the sense of who they are, to lose the thing that they believed they still had - their sanity, begins to not see things as they are but only as they have been told they are. When you are told that you do not know what you are talking about all the time, told that you are stupid for trusting your own senses and your own intuition, expected that you should just "eat" whatever it is that you are being given as your "truth."

Your own truth is never good enough for the person who is emotionally battering you, and it is not because it is stupid, not because it is not the right kind of truth, but that and only that it is what you yourself believe. You are told that what you are going through is normal (but it really isn't) and the shock of it all is that once you tell your abuser that you want out there are two ways that this goes, and right now the way that it is going for me in my own life is that this man is completely clueless as to the damages done to me, cannot fathom why it is that I cannot make it through his garbage yet one more time, and why, more than anything, am I not cowering in his presence as once I had.

Your truth is part of the reason that you have gone through what you have or are going through, and your truth is the thing that threatened your abuser the most, and your truth is that small, still voice within that constantly reminds you that there is something very, very wrong and that no, you are not the cause of it, even though you may be being told that you are, perhaps not directly, but most assuredly the cause. You are not the cause.

Your Own Opinions


Your opinions never matter, making you feel like you do not matter, and once it is that an abuser has it in their heads that you do not matter, or perhaps that you matter less than they do, you begin to feel the chipping away of who you are and you know for sure that you do not like it, you know that you are not crazy, and mostly, you know that there is no way that you deserve or deserved what you are or were going through. Emotional batterers do not realize that the belittlement, the berating, the minimizing of your pain does more damage than you may let on that it does. You feel like what you think is not important, and you begin to behave as would a dog who has been beaten again and again by its master and end up emotionally "hand shy." You become generally mistrusting of everyone whenever you open your mouth to state an opinion, believing that what you have to say is really not that important.

What you have to say IS important, and no one else has the right to tell you or abuse you into believing otherwise.

Your manner of dress


At one point you may have been the unrequited reigning queen of style, carefully dressing in a way which reflects who you are and what you are all about. Then, one day, you began to feel like what you looked like was an issue, and you either were too pretty or not pretty enough, your clothes were too revealing or not revealing enough. Then shortly after that, once it was that all your efforts to getting your mate to pay positive attention to you failed, you went the other way. You began resenting what you looked like and started to allow that to fall apart, too, all so that you would not have to deal with the idea that the person you married or are attached to would never be satisfied and then your looks began to fade, your sense of style corroded into something that was never meant to be, and suddenly, you see in the mirror the very opposite of your Self and the effects of the emotional batterings have begun to show themselves in your manner of dress. I know this monster because I was this monster.

You monitor the snugness of your jeans, how low cut your V-neck tops are, and you even start to scrutinize your underwear so that when the time comes that you will end up doing that marital bed thing, you will not be asked a million questions as to why it is you are wearing that beautifully matched lacy bra and matching panty set, and more, and this is the most damaging accusation- WHO you are wearing it for because an abuser ALWAYS thinks that their victim has someone on the side, which, when you think about it, is ridiculous because an abused person is always looking for a way to make better their "screw ups" when in reality there are none, at least none that would prompt a person to feel like they have to go through a strip search to make someone else feel better. The sickest part of this is that eventually, the abuser believes that it is their right to check your underwear for "evidence" of your carousing around town with the invisible man. Then, when it is that you have gotten to that emotional low point and you no longer even care to have sex with ANYONE, this is when you begin to get asked what is really going on and with whom is it going on, because there is nary and abuser who will think or believe that maybe you are as screwed up as you are and not one of them believes that they had or have anything to do with your emotional and psychological state of being. To them you are not trying hard enough and to them, because you "ate it" all the time in the past, you should be able to push down this anger and this sadness and this torture as well, never realizing that eventually the shit hits the fan and you are suddenly more screwed up than ever before.

...and speaking of sexual encounters...

Your Sex Life


I cannot find a sane person who believes that once another person has battered them so badly emotionally that they would be willing to have sex with the person who was bad to them. This is the thing that really hurts because all along you were told that the reason that the sex was not as great as it could have been, the reason that they could not finish and more, the reason that you were not allowed to finish, is your fault because you didn't do something quite the same way as you were expected to.

Women have to have an emotional connection when sex is involved. Women have to feel safe and secure in the idea that the person with whom they are about to do the deed with to a certain and even limited extent has their well being in mind as well as their very own. In the case of an emotionally abused woman, when you are told for a long time that you are good but that the sex could be better if you added a friend or two to the mix, or that you should dress up and pretend to be a hooker, or that you should watch people in certain sex acts so that you can learn, and when you do not do this suddenly the sex and its crappy and unsatisfying nature become your fault because you didn't bow to their every whim. We need an emotional connection, need to feel like we are the only woman in the world at that time, let alone the room and more importantly, the bed, and when you are already literally naked and vulnerable, the last thing that you want to hear is that you somehow did what comes so naturally wrong.

You didn't do it wrong. You can't do it wrong. It is like giving birth - there is no way to do it wrong, and if you were told that you did, it broke you a little more, shattered you a bit more, and over time you began to feel ashamed of your self and your body. You begin to take an interest in exercise and taking care of you, and once the abuser thinks that it is to make you more appealing to other people, this is when they accusations begin to get uglier and creepier, and you can feel your own soul as it starts to bleed endlessly, dripping slowly like a leaking wound on a animal that just gets bigger and uglier and infected, much like the thing that happens to a woman's soul when it is that she is told that the sex sucks because of her "issues." And ain't it a bitch that you were not the one who instilled the issues in you, but that they were, and again - ain't it a bitch? They expect you to just get over whatever the hell it is that they did to you so that they don't have to do without, and they are fine with you doing without, questioning whether or not you are good enough for anyone, let alone them.

Again, you did not one thing wrong, and this baggage of shitty sex is not yours to carry.

Who You Are


You already have been told all these horrid things about you and now, you are also being told who you are, and this is the biggie, because prior to the abuse you know you are fine and good as you are, but then one day you start to question the validity of that notion, all the way down to the way that you think you deserve to be treated. You believe that what you are being treated like is somehow going to be ok one day, and that one day never comes. Then, after years of this sort of treatment, you find yourself bewildered at the idea that all along you knew you were fine and then one day this spider named abuse entered into your life and stayed and kept on biting on the end of your sanity, making you feel like the torture were somehow yours to deal with and it is not.

You start hearing yourself defend who you are to someone who used to be charmed by the idea that you were unique, that you were strong in your convictions, that you were all good upstairs, and then it happens. You begin to lose who you are, failing to what you are told you are and who you are told you are, and life becomes a big mess with you constantly trying to please someone who just cannot be pleased, at least not by you, and this becomes your reality - your blatant reality.

Then one day your abuser begins to think that it is ok to belittle you in front of people, making it seem like you are somehow psychologically not right enough for society's eyes, and that is when the fun begins because at that point you have become so enmeshed with the idea that you are just supposed to deal with what you have been given and there really is not. Depending upon how long you take to get over things determines how well and for how long you will be able to deal with all that ends up being yours to deal with, and suddenly you start being more sensitive to what other people who are not abusive do or do not do, and then the reality of your being a victim of emotional abuse begins to set in.

Once it sets in, you start to feel like you were never meant for real Love, the kind that is healing instead of the kind that destroys, because we all know that Love is never meant to destroy - it will hurt from time to time, but that pain is related to the growth that you are going through, and it is never a pain that lasts longer than is the lesson that you must learn is, and most of the time the lesson is not about anything other than something within you that needs to be looked at and determined if it is still a thing that you need to have in order to Be.

Once it is that you can no longer see you as the real you, this is when you know for sure that you are the victim of emotional abuse.

Emotional Abuse is no laughing matter


I speak from experience when I tell you that emotional abuse is nothing to laugh at. It is not a woman getting her little feelings hurt, and it is not a man's right to make her hurt just because he has issues with himself that he wrongly believed she would take away just by being there. The truth is the opposite of this, really. The truth is that you have been abused and the person who abused you, unless they are open to change that is not comfortable nor easy, if you stay with that person, you will continue to go through the emotional violence that you go through. It is not something that a whole lot of people can die from, but there are some who end up losing their lives through medicating themselves from the pain with drugs and alcohol, and these days even food. Yet it is something that causes a lot of already fragile women to contemplate taking their own lives. Now, I have never been at that point, and I vehemently refuse to allow someone else's issues make it seem like my involvement in their problems is the reason that they felt they had the right to take me apart and put it in my head that whatever it is that they suffer from happens to be my cause.

Bullshit it is.

No matter what you are told, who you are is special. You deserve to be Loved from a place that is healing and Divine rather than jealous and possessive. You deserve the kind of respect that is demanded out of you. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to have the freedom that is afforded every person. You deserve to feel safe and secure, and there is not one person on this planet who deserves to take these things away from you.

I know that you are afraid, and yes, I even know that there are a few reading this who have reason to be so scared.

Know that how you feel was never your fault, and that yes, you are a worthy person worthy of all that your abuser feels entitled to you giving to them.

Emotional abuse is torture of the worst kind, because no one can see any visible marks.

No, the only one who sees the marks is you...and yes, it sucks. At least now, though, you know you are so not alone.

In fact, you were never alone. You were just told that no one Loved you as much as the abuser in your life did, and then they went and reinforced that lie with "I Love You more than your mother does," and "All you need is me - you don't need that c*nt friend of yours," and "No one will ever have you because you are damaged goods...what man will want you now that you are all f*cked up like you are?"

The only thing that I have to say to such a person in regards to a man wanting you after you have been abused?

You want me, dumb ass, and you are now scrambling to find a way, again, to make me believe that you will never do this to me again, and at the same time, whilst you spew your venomous bitterness and resentment at me through that oh-so-famous growling, you want me to believe that you have changed.

No, you have not changed. If I cannot change from the damage you caused me with a lightning quickness, and because we have been tied to each other for over two decades, and because I know the way that your patterns work, I also know that no, you have not changed because you need help to do that, and by the looks of it, I am the only one who is willing to see just how badly damaged I was, how much more work I need to do on me, and more, the thing that bothers you the most is that where once you had control and power over me you no longer have, and now?

Now you are flailing in the miry ocean of emotional crap that you placed on me with a vengeance, and now you want me to save you...

...sorry, dearest, but this time I have to save me, and this time, you must try to save yourself, as well...

I am no longer available to save you, not when I have so much salvaging of my very tattered Self to rebuild...

To those who see themselves in this writing, know that there is an end to the madness, but that you are the one who MUST exact it. It is not that easy to do, but you can do it...and remember always ...

I Love You All !!
...Rox

Friends make all the difference

I don't know where I would be right now, or what would have happened to me if I did not have my friends...

Every survivor of domestic abuse, whether it is physical, financial, sexual, or in my case, emotional and psychological, needs to maintain their friendships and relationships. I know well how hard this is, namely when it is that you are told all that you are told about how useless your partner thinks you are, namely when you are told (read "forced")to have little, if any, contact with the people who you love the most - your family, and more than that, your friends.

Friends - the people who make up our Soul Families

It is not a secret that I Love all of my friends. It is also not a secret that they all know how much I Love them, and I Love them because when I was squarely in the middle of the drama that unfolded as my life, it was they who I turned to and it was they who always had a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on, for real and proverbially. Were it not for April, Marsha, Dora and Larry, were it not for Waipuna, not for Napua, not for Patrick...were it not for a whole lot of people I might not have been able to come to the absolutely needed conclusion, the decision, really, to end this part of my life as I know it and have known it to be, and I would not have had the courage to make such a decision.

Our friends give us a different perspective of what our lives are all about, and in my case it was my group of friends - my Soul Family - who were all right there to tell me what they thought, not only about what I was going through or what they thought of my soon-to-be-former-spouse, but also of what they thought I would be able to do in my situation, and it all was the same. They wanted me to be safe, wanted me to be OK, wanted me to be able to live my life the way that I thought and still think I should, and most of all, they wanted me to know that above all else, they Loved me.

They Loved me, and that was enough for me to know for sure that I am a worthy person, that I am not screwed up because one person thinks I am or thought I was, that on my own I am fine but that with him I am so not. It took a long for me to accept this, that I am a good enough person to not have to deal with this, that I am not as stuck as I thought I was and that the big bad man is not really a big bad man but more like a paper tiger who is just as scared as I have been all these years, if not more than I am, and that the way that he shows me this fear is through his past acts of violence on my person, and his present words of attrition for me ("I only say those things when I am mad, Roxanne..." ... yeah, and it seems that you are always mad, dude).

Don't get me wrong - I am not saying that he has an excuse or an out. I am saying that this is the way that he was shown, and this is the thing that he saw his mother and father go through, and because this is "normal"to him, he believed for a long time that he would make it normal for me, too, but it is not normal now and will never be normal, ever.

It is never normal that a person should have to live in isolation away from her family and friends because a person who has never been shown that having good relationships with people who we are not married to is a good thing - this will never be normal to a formerly themselves abused person, and certainly not one who believes that there is nothing wrong with them (but I promise you that there is something not quite right with them). It is never normal for us as human creatures to not have contact with other human creatures.

It is not normal for women to not turn the heads of men, namely not beautiful women, but in the eyes of an abusive mate it is not normal that another man would look at the betrothed of said abusive person, because once it is that you marry an abuser, or more than that, once it is that you have become betrothed to them, they believe that they are all you will ever need, and this is a lie.

I need my girlfriends there to tell me that they Love me, to be there when I cry, and to tell me that I am wrong in their ever-so-gently way. I need my cousins there to tell me that I am Loved no matter what, that just because he said that women people cannot be trusted, that they trust me with their very lives. I need my sibling people to tell me that I always have a place to go where it is safe for me to be, just in case, and of course, so that they, too, can tell me and remind me that they Love me, that I alone will be fine in life and that they will never leave my side, regardless if they are really there physically or not.

And I need my "guy"people to be there to tell me that no, I am not so ugly so as to make a man want to hurl, that the way that I look is NOT the reason that I got hit when I did, that I am called the ugly names that I have been (recently as last week even)out of his fear that I actually AM those things but with other men, that I am worthy of the Love of one good man who is NOT the man I married and that yes, there ARE other men on the planet and that of course- when I am through this very emotionally charged time in my life that yes, I can have my pick if I so choose to have said pick (and I already picked so there!)

There is nothing quite more wonderful than knowing that there is a set of people on the planet who loves us each - and there is nothing quite more lovely than knowing that in their eyes I am good enough just as I am...smart mouthed, snarky as hell, full of moxie, but more importantly, full of the Love that was placed there by them  for me that has blossomed into what it was meant to be...

...unconditionally there and always there when I need it to be and vice-versa, and THAT is the reason why all human being type creatures NEED other people in our lives who are NOT only our abusive mates...and the truth is that we really do not need them - we have just been told and forced to believe that we do.

The Love that we receive from our friends is the most healing kind of all, because they see who we really are, and they value us because of all the things that we have been told as abuse survivors, and more, for the things that they know we are so, so not. Our Soul Family was meant to be there for us when we need them and we are meant to be there for them so as to reciprocate when they need us.

I am elated to tell you all that my Soul Family  is, always has been right there for me, and I know for sure that they always will be!

As always...

I Love You All!!
...Rox...

We Can Be Angry About This, or, We Can Be Proactive

They have lost their damned minds in Wisconsin


Today I was linked with an article on the web about a lawmaker in Wisconsin stating that he believes women should stay married, no matter what, even if there is abuse going on. I did not want this blog to be rife with negativity, so instead of going on and on about what a creep I think this guy is, I will instead encourage anyone who reads this blog posting as well as that article to not only get angry, but to get over that anger and then, get on out there, out in the streets, in the malls, wherever the hell you care to be, and be proactive.

If we all banded together in a proactive manner, thought about why this bothers us so much, thought about the point that we would like to get across, and then spoke after thinking about what it is that we really want to say, if there were more than only my voice, even though a lot of us do not live there, it would make an impact. I know this is true because that is something that all people who work in Public Relations knows - we know our public, and we know the pulse of what is good, what is not good, what is going to be right in the eyes of the people, and I know that there are not a whole lot of people who would be ok with this.

At first I was very angry after having read it, but then when I thought about it I also thought about how many more people there are on the planet who are sickened by the idea that anyone - man or woman - who chooses to use force of any kind at all to manipulate people to do what they want them to do is somehow alright in the head. Abusers are never alright in the head. Abusers like to use their "strength" to bully their targets and abusers like to tell their targets all those pretty words and when the target chooses to no longer be a target the abusers go right back into their train of thought that they need absolute control, that they need absolute power over other people. This is something that I know personally, and this moron in Wisconsin wants to make the rest of the country think that this is a good idea!

Folks, I have learned after having been emotionally battered for many years that we actually have a leg up on the abusers, that we are stronger than they are and yes, it is because of what they have done or are still doing, what they have said or are still saying, and no one can tell me that the reason that any victim stays is for any other reason than that they are scared as hell of their abusers making good on their threats. I had this very conversation with the person who victimized me for many years until I recently stood up to him, got in his face and brought my Goliath down. It took me 20-plus years to finally do what I should have done but was too scared to do any sooner.

And just like all of us eventually stand up to those who have taken it upon themselves to make us into their pariah, so, too must we also be willing to stand up as one voice, together in unison against this idiocy. It makes me sick to know that this man, all for the sake of HIS own beliefs, will try to manipulate the rest of the thinking populace to manipulate abuse survivors so as to keep us with people who are bad to us, and this creep makes his case by using THE CHILDREN!!

Let me tell you something about the children who are in the middle of this crap. My kids have seen a whole lot,  and of late I have made it my point and my only mission that when I start hearing those lovely names that abusers like to call their victims, I shuffle my brood outside, sometimes to the neighbor's house, so that I can calmly discuss with my soon-to-be-former-spouse whatever it was that upset him so, and normally it is really not a huge deal. Making a case by stating that it is better for children to live in a house with a man - even an abusive man, physically or otherwise or both - is somehow better than that of one loving woman who will do all she has to in order to bring up good citizens. If you want to know more, click here.

Right now, though, we ALL need BADLY to send this guy our brand of Love, because something tells me that in his life there is a woman who is agreeing with him but only because the severity of what might happen if she disagrees.

I could be wrong, but what man in his right mind would even bother with this sort of thinking if he were not also somehow an abuser himself???

Bastard!

http://shine.yahoo.com/love-sex/wisconsin-lawmaker-says-women-stay-abusive-marriages-232700220.html 

Reflections of Life

Birthdays are meant for reflecting back on what we have been through to see where we have been, what we have seen and have done, what we have learned, and most of all, to know for sure what it is that we want out of life.

Today is March 11th. Today I am 42, and I look back at the year which has passed and I find that there have been a lot of absolutes for me, there have been a lot of finalities, and more than anything else, there has been massive change in my life and all of it good.

No one can tell me that when you think about all you have been through that it seems that no one learns from what they have experienced. I have learned well from the school of life. I have learned that I am not a bad person but that I am a good person who has made a lot of errant decisions about things and people who, for all intents and purposes, have been the greatest teachers that I have had in my life, and yes, the soon-to-be-former-spouse was, is the greatest teacher I have ever had. Thing is, though, that just like a child who graduates out of grade school into middle school, and from middle school into high school, and from high school into adulthood, we, the students, evolve and move on. Sometimes, though, unfortunately, the teachers do not.

I have learned that the entirety of my 41st year of life was sort of like the ending of a very tragic love story, and I have also accepted that what I went through, was, in part, my own doing because I chose to fear instead of choosing to see with the eyes of Love - Self-Love, that is, and now, on this date, the date of the beginning of the second half of my life, I can sit here and tell you all that truly, I have been an astute student of life, of Love, of Knowing what it is that I am made of and more, Knowing that I was worth every minute, every tear that fell from my eyes, every enraged and loaded word breathed from my mouth that had everything to do with my life the way that I want it to be - my year was rife with pain, heartache and loss, but it dawns on me now that without those things happening, I may not be here to tell you that indeed, you can recoup your personal losses and you can even reinvent yourself.

I know this is the truth because this is the activity that I spent my 41st year of life doing the most of - laying the foundation for the next 41 years, and these next 41 years, because I want it this way, will be what the first 41 were spent bringing into fruition.

So, in light of this knowledge, I will tell you all now that I will no longer be telling you about the bad things an abuse survivor has gone through, and I will no longer be giving anyone any further a reason to fear.

Instead, beginning with this post, I will give survivors a reason to cheer.

Instead of telling you all about the horrid things that I have borne witness to, I will simply just tell you that it gets better, but that you have to want it to - you cannot heal and simultaneously still live in what happened to you. Healing does not work that way. I learned this very well. I cannot heal if I am proverbially ripping off the bandages that I myself put there to bring about spiritual and emotional healing. You will never find a physician on the planet who will tell you that it is a good idea to rip the scab off of a wound because not only will the scar be bigger and worse, but it will take longer for the wound to heal.

Instead of telling you how badly my heart ached, how badly it still aches, not for the things that he'd done and said but instead for the things that I chose to accept as mine, I will tell you about what happened to me afterward, tell you how those things helped to reveal the light shining through the cracks of the walls in my memories, tell you how we expect God to give us an open door or window to get through to the next phases in healing but that sometimes we are given a crack in the wall of our minds and shown the chisel, the hammer and the will to break that crack open to find a different perspective about the door opening to new opportunities because sometimes it is not a door. Sometimes it is a tiny crack in the wall of our inner safehouse and sometimes it is with work and care and time and more heart ache that we are able to break through the bullshit and see that what we have accomplished was indeed no small feat.

If we expect ourselves to heal, then it is high time to stop reopening the wounds from the past, time to stop making our abusers the people who control us and how we feel about ourselves, and most of all, it is time to really begin to Love Us, because we are as important to the circle of life and living as anyone else is.

If we expect things to get better, we have to take action for them to. If we expect to be Loved, then we must be willing to give Love. If we expect peace, we must live peacefully.

That which we expect, we must do, give...Be.

Happy Birthday to me...

I Love You All...
...Roxanne...

Cry

Society sees crying and a show of emotions as a sign of weakness. Yet, in the world of the domestically abused, sometimes, tears are all we have.

The fact that my Sun sign is in Pisces makes it so that when I feel something, some sort of energetic or volatile pull on my emotions, if I am presented enough with all the facets and all the stuff that will take prior to said such emotional happening happens, if it is that the thing at hand is emotionally strong, I will likely end up in tears over it. This is not to say that I am not already an incredibly emotional person who feels every little nuance in a situation, but it is to say that personally I know that when we cry we are not only feeling what we have to feel at that given moment, but we are getting rid of toxicity that was not ours to begin with. This is the very reason that I tell anyone with whom I should have contact in regards to the issue of being physically assaulted for the very first time - that they NEED to cry.

Tears are a gift. Even though we end up with puffy eyes and our sinuses end up being very clogged from all the draining of our emotions, when we cry we very literally release the toxins which were built up within us throughout the time that we were only experiencing the emotional part of being abused. And of course the emotional part is way harder to get over than the physical bruises, but what only an actual formerly beaten person will tell you is that the emotions you feel after that initial attack will leave a person feeling an entirely new set of toxicity, and it is this level of toxicity that will compound the idea that you have already gone through all sorts of emotional stuff and now here is  yet one more thing to have to deal with that you know you never cared to deal with but are now very well in the middle of it.

I know this monster well because this monster is the one that lives in the back of the closet of my mind, taunting and haunting me with the mental images, not only of my bruised,  battered and broken self, but also and more importantly, the illuminated and bigger-than-it-really-is image of that angry face, the gritted teeth, the wild look in his eyes, and that illusory background of anger that he said was caused by me.

Let it be well known right at this moment that the first time you were abused, no matter what way it happened, that at that moment you were changed, forever. At that moment you were stripped of trust in others. At that moment your entire world became enmeshed and laced with a fear that is foreign to you, a fear that now lives in you because someone else placed it there and did so with force.

At that very moment in time, you became someone who you no longer knew, at least not the way that you did prior to that one very intense moment. You became the thing that you told yourself that you would never be - your spouse or partner's victim. The very word "victim" makes people think that you are somehow weak, that you should have had more back bone and above all, the thing that a lot of people will tell you but have no clue is NOT the truth is that they would never let it happen to them.

I am so sorry, folks, but abusers are not the type to tell you when they are going to toss you around physically, and abusers are not going to clue you in to when they have totally lost their mind and are now going to go ape shit on you and physically harm you. There is no abusive person on the planet who is also going to tell you what they are up to and there is no mental health expert who will make me believe that they are the very ones who will unwittingly tell you that they are going to physically harm you. It just won't happen that way. The way that physical abuse begins is at that point where the abuser cannot "break" you or your spirit, and if you are one of the luckier ones then you will know that a broken spirit is never up to those trying to break it and it is very much a case of if you will allow them that leeway - I allowed that leeway, but you don't have to.

You never have to let someone else tell you that they are going to physically harm you even though they will say it a whole lot. You never have to believe that you are not worth someone else's good effort at showing you that you are somehow the effort to be with someone who will not treat you like property. You never have to do a whole lot of things, and at the point where fist meets the eye or the jaw or the ribs, the notion that you do not have to do anything that you do not want to do flies out the window along with your sense of normalcy.
And it is your sense of normalcy that gets shaken and your sense of normalcy that becomes diluted with someone else's version of "normal."

Getting hit is not normal. Being told that you are all what someone else tells you that you are is also not normal and what is further not normal is the fact that in a whole lot of cases, many of us will allow this, out of fear or whatever the hell else it is that you can think of, to become the color of "normal" for an abuse victim because this is the "normal" that their own abusers grew up with. It is never normal for anyone to have to fear what another person  might do, because what they "might" do they ultimately and one day end up doing anyway. To tell an abuser that you are leaving them and that they need to deal with it is just inviting them to conjure ways of hurting you further.

In fact, it is evidenced that once a woman reports the abuse to authorities or when she chooses to leave him the abuse victim is neatly placed in a more dangerous position than she already was. Hence, the reason that I am all for provisions made to the abused through nonprofit agencies and government providers. When it comes to abuse and the leaving of our abusive partners it is the paper trail which matters and not only how the abuses made you feel. The reality is that the abuse is not done once you leave and the propensity and possibility of it still happening and more harshly once you are gone is real. More abused women are killed after they have left their abusers and not while they are stuck in the middle of the madness they have been forced to call their lives.

This, folks, is the reality that becomes that of an abused person, and the statistics you read and hear about are real. The textbook descriptions of what we go through are not real because these explanations do not give credence to the idea that bruises and bones take time to heal, that spirits crushed need time to become revitalized, and further, there is no textbook that adequately explains what it is that all abused people go through. And what we go through is quite a lot.

Hence, the reason that it is good to cry, the reason that when it all first starts it is good and needed to feel and explore those emotions and deal with them as best we can at the beginning of things without the benefit of therapy. In fact, to allow the tears to flow is therapy. It helps rid us of our sadness and our grief, helps to ease the bewilderment, and most of all, allows us to feel whatever emotions that we are feeling at the time it all comes to the head that, in most cases, ends up happening and it does not matter how long it took for your attacker to start in on you with the verbal and emotional abuse because at the onset of those things happening it is but a matter of time before the physical abuse begins.

So please, by all means, do yourself a favor and cry.

Sadly, you earned it...

I Love You All
...Roxanne...