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.