Self Hate

There are days that I hate myself so much that I don't think I can bear it.
I loathe my existence. 
I know that if others knew the real me, knew the things I have done, there would not be a single person that would speak to me.
I would like to rip myself to pieces and scatter them into the sea.

Bad Dreams

I had another terrible dream last night. Phil had left me and I couldn't find him. When I did finally get to talk to him he was so cold and distant to me. A typical dream of abandonment. I have these every so often and they leave me feeling miserable and lost all day long. He always reassures me and loves and comforts me, but that bad feeling lasts throughout the day. I am terrified of losing him. Losing the only person who has ever loved me the way that he loves me, losing the only person who has ever made me feel safe.

I know that I will never find anyone like him and that if he is ever gone from me, I know I will spend the rest of my life alone.

I cannot believe how God has blessed me with such a best friend and soul mate. I certainly don't deservbe him, but then God is merciful and usually doesn't give us what we deserve.

I am a terrible person who in my lifetime has done some pretty reprehensible things and should probably die beaten, tortured and alone in an alley somewhere. Instead I live with a man who treats me like a queen. Is it any wonder that I have nightmares of losing him?

Repressed Memories

There are things that supposedly happened to me that I just don't remember. Things that my grandma told me happened when I was a child but that I was still old enough that I should remember.

My grandma was my legal guardian, I'm not sure when that happened,by the time I was two, I think. I only know that she was responsible for me since my mother was incapable of taking care of me.

When I was 6, my first year in school, my mother and stepfather kidnapped me and took me on a cross country trip in the 18 wheeler that he drove for a living. Supposedly, I was playing outside of the bar/restaurant where my grandma worked and my mother drove up in a car and asked me to go with her and I went.  They had me for a month. I remember nothing about any of that trip. I do remember my grandma telling me most of my life that it was my fault that it happened because she had told me over and over again not to get in the car with my mother and not to go anywhere with her.

Supposedly, we traveled all over the country.

You think I would remember something about a month long trip in a tractor and trailer!

What happened during that month? Is it something so horrifying that I just blocked it? It's like chasing shadows.

Tractors were smaller than the ones of  today. There was only a small sleeper in the back. I know that much because I did go with them to the store occasionally when I got older and my stepfather even let me change the gears while he was driving.He drove a truck until I was about 17. My point is...where did we all sleep? Where did we eat. Where did I take a bath? They must have bought me clothes to wear, since all I had was what I was wearing. I even had to repeat the first grade because I missed a month of school.

 So where is the memory?

I was reading a book last night about a man who remembered his father picking him up from his crib! And I can't remember a month long trip with a crazy woman and a drunk? I can't remember being away from my safe home and from the grandmother who loved me and took care of me?

Something so innocent looking

 

 See this bottle of Hydrogen Peroxide? How could this bottle hold so many memories for me??

I bet my mama must have bought gallons of hydrogen peroxide over the years. I can remember her pouring it over the gashes that my mother had slashed into her arms. She would make her hold her arms over the sink while she poured the hydrogen peroxide over her self-inflicted wounds. How that stuff bubbles and hisses! Then she would squeeze the flesh together and then wind the bandages tight around her arms. A lot of time Mother would be screaming and crying and trying to pull away. Thinking back the cuts, even though they bled a lot, couldn't have been too deep because how did she get the bleeding to stop without stitches? Mama knew if she took Mother to the hospital they would put her away in the state mental hospital so she always patched her up herself.

When I was two, so I was told, I fell and split my head open on a sharp edge of a step on my mother's mobile home. Mama doused me with hydrogen peroxide and pinched the flesh together and slapped a bandage on me. I still have a scar across the front of my forehead.

One of the most vivid memories though was when I was much older and my stepfather wanted my mother to ride with him to Statesville, NC. She didn't want to go, so instead of just telling him no, she sliced her butt several times with a razor blade, knowing that there was no way she could sit down for the long drive. Again, out came the hydrogen peroxide to cleanse and disinfect.

Just seeing a bottle of hydrogen peroxide on a shelf makes me feel unconfortable, anxious.

The Return

When I was around 10 years old my mother jumped in front of a truck one night. She was injured but not killed. Mama couldn't hide her injuries this time or keep her condition a secret any longer. She was sent to Petersburg, the state mental hospital.She was there for a few months and when she returned she was a completely different person. The doctors had her on high doses of Mellaril, an antipsychotic drug.
While the change was great as far as stopping her cutting, her promiscuity, her drunken rages, she was like a zombie. She would sit all day saying nothing, doing nothing, staring out the window.
She had no personality anymore. It was incredibly sad.
Occasionally though she would stop taking her meds and predictably she would buy herself a bottle of Vodka, her drink of choice, and the madness would ensue.

Definition of Insanity

 

Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"

I have been around so many crazy people in my life. A psychologist once told me that crazy people are drawn to me and therefore I have to be very careful who I let into my life. So that means....I'm a crazy magnet.

So I am much more careful who I let into my life now.
I can look back over the years and see all the insanity and I'm amazed that at this time in my life there is no chaos, no drama, simply peace and contentment.

Memories

 

I remember when I use to burn myself, my mama would hold my hand over the gas flame on the gas stove in order to "draw the fire out"

I remember sitting outside in the car on a hot summer night while my mother went into the bootleggers to buy liquor.

I remember spending hours walking in my backyard by myself talking to myself while I shook a stick in the air, my mama called it my "talking stick"

I remember the night when I was 6 and mama let me go with some young guy to get candy. The sky was red because the church up the street was burning and smoke and ash filled the air. The place he stopped the car was dark,very dark. He hand was so strong and big when he held onto my tiny hand and made me touch him.
Afterwards, we drove by the church that was on fire and I could see all the policmen and firemen, why didn't any of them help me? Didn't they know what just happened? Didn't they care?
Later that night, when I told mama what happned ,she said it was my fault for begging her to let me go with him.
I remember when I was 9 going to the drive in movie with my mother and watching Macon County Line. The rape scene was so graphic that for years I was afraid to sleep without a light on at night and sex and rape were intricately tied together in my mind. I ask you, who takes a nine year old to see that kind of movie???

I remember my mother being drunk and crazy and beating my mama in the head with one of those old time telephones that were so heavy. Blood streaming down mama's face, mother screaming.

I remember nights where mother would just scream and scream for no reason until she could no longer physically make a sound.

Riding the Crazy Train

 

There have been days I have climbed aboard the good ole crazy train and rode it for all it's worth.

Now granted those were the days before I was given the "good" drugs that keep me under control. Ahhh, better living through chemistry! I look back and I can't believe that it was me acting that way.

Part of it, I believe, is that crazy is contagious. If you are around it day after day it is going to rub off on you.

And I was around a LOT of crazy back then!

The only thing is now I don't feel like myself, I feel "too calm" sometimes. I want to be able to be normal and yet still feel like me.

Broken

A long time ago I was broken. I managed to put myself back together but the pieces are so fragile that the least hard grasp will surely shatter me into pieces that can never be mended again. When I was in my teens I use to write poetry, don't all teenage girls? Anyway, I wrote a poem titled Shattered, I was Emo before people even had a name for it.
You want so badly to be unique, for your pain to be unlike any others. But pain is pain.

There but for the grace of God, go I

This phrase has been going through my head all day since I read it it this morning on another blog. A true crime writer says that as he is interviewing murderers he is thinking " There but for the grace of God, go I "
Why? Does not everyone receive God's grace?

I could have turned out like my mother. There were often times in my past that I must have had His protection, but why? Why was I saved and others not? There were times I put myself into situations where I could have been raped and killed and buried and not found for years if ever. Where I could have killed myself or someone else driving drunk. While high on an assortment of drugs I could have harmed myself. Why was I spared?

Love is a symbol of eternity

"Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end."Unknown

For years fear gripped me in a vice. I was afraid of everything, heights, the dark, spiders,being abandoned,losing control, going crazy, nearly every fear you can imagine.  Some of the fear came from being told that I was incapable of doing things. That I was "too nervous" to work, to have children , to drive, to live my life normally. Some of it came from being told stories of bad things happening to good girls. Or bad things that would happen to good girls who behaved badly.

 

Phil changed all that.  For the first time in my life I feel safe. I can sleep at night without a light on. I can do things like drive 1800 miles without gripping the steering wheel so tight that I can barely unclench my fingers at the end of the day. I still feel queasy when I'm up high but I'm not paralyzed with fear. I still loathe spiders but I can deal with them.

Unless you've been enclosed in a chge of fear for most of your life, filled with anxiety over the most mundane things, you cannot imagine the feeling of freedom when that cage is broken open by love.

Random Thoughts

My mother was a cutter. My grandma told me that my mother started cutting her writs when she was 14 years old. I have often held a razor blade to my wrist and tried to slice into my flesh just so I could feel what she felt, to try and understand why she cut herself, but I could never bring myself to break the skin.

We found in her in the tub once covered in blood both wrists slashed. We found her in an old steamer trunck once, both wrists slashed. My grandma would buy bottles of hydrogen perioxide to pour over the cuts and she would bandage my mother up. Not once did she ever go to the hospital.
Once she cut her throat, three cuts along the front. Not too deep of course.
Blood was the common theme of my childhood.

Darkness nipping at my heels.

Today and yesterday I've been fighting the dark side. Yesterday started out good until my oldest son wouldn't speak to me on my birthday. I could feel the spiral start. I kept telling myself that I can't control how other people act, I can only control how I react to them, but it didn't help all that much. Phil tried so hard to make my birthday special but until Jamey finally talked to me, I was near tears.
Today it's just been the normal stuff, I keep slamming the door on the thoughts that try to pry their way into my mind.

Confessions of a damaged mind.

In honor of my birthday I've decided to start a new blog. This blog won't be happy or upbeat but it will be honest. There are many dark places in my soul that I feel like I want to drag into the light. I want to burn them into dust and ashes like the body of some evil, bloodsucking vampire that has been sucking me dry for years of my life.

I don't think that I'm unique or special in anyway, in fact in my neighborhood there were four other children that were living lives very similar to mine. I was being raised by my grandmother because my mother was crazy and an alcoholic. And yet she still lived in the house with us. There was so much violence and insanity in our lives and yet we survived and at least two of us turned out relavitivity normal. The other two became just like their mothers and self-destructed. And one I lost track of over the years.
I'm not sure if it's better to let memories lie dormat or just confront them. I know several times a day a memory will surface and I'll slam the door on it but this blog is about throwing that door open, for a little while at least, and letting the demons run free.
I'm not sure even which memories are real and which are things that were told to me over and over until I believe I remember them. I don't suppose it makes a difference, the pain is real either way.