an outloud journal entry
I had all these plans and hopes in my head. It was the reason I fought so hard to get healthcare coverage and proper medical care. I was fighting for my life when I was already exhausted from taking care of others.
Adding to my exhaustion was the guilt of needing my children, adults now but always my children, having to help me during those battles. I had no income and without them I wouldn’t have had a roof.
I was in the very position I had helped so many others dig out of while placing a roof over their heads.
It was during the years of being there for strangers I saw how we do not have a safety net in place in this country for people needing a cushion as their life dives down to the depths of hell.
All those pretty and empowering words describing resources and programs on those websites and brochures, were fiction. Truth was cuts had been made and waitlists did not answer immediate needs.
That is why all the programs, including the domestic violence org and jailers at the jail, gave out my home number to potential clients in need. It would be nothing for me to get a call from someone leaving jail with nowhere to go — or from their intimate partner they beat and the shelter in another county was filled.
Then there was the couple who lost everything they had when the husband had a stroke and then the wife developed health needs from trying to tend to his while keeping a roof over their head. Over 8 months of assistance they needed from our tiny program supported solely on individual donations and community support. That is how long it took for other programs to kick-in., what society calls our safety net.
So many stories, so many real life examples, and so many reasons that I pushed on being that last ditch effort of support for a community, and I did it knowing I was getting sicker but I had to, because who was going to be there for me?
You see the other side of the coin was I shared truths in the community and placed their loved ones on the front page for violent crimes. Eager to read and gossip about neighbors, however when it was their front door being opened for all to see, I became the target for their deflections -the guarding of family secrets — secrets that caused harm to the innocent.
The options others had, to call me for help, I didn’t have.
I knew what I was doing all those years, I knew. I understood the situation and I knew I was taking from an empty well and given what few drops there were to everyone else, while starving myself.
One day my youngest and I were at a thrift store and there was a little corner side table, the kind you’d keep your phone (back in the day) on. Etched on the wood in permanent marker was my number and name with the word “resources.”
So, yeah, where does the woman who need the same thing she gave everyone else, where was I supposed to turn?
No one really noticed me reaching out for help.
When my job's demands increased and my health continued to decline I reached out to the community to take over Lend a Hand. I reached out to programs, churches, everywhere. I met with people, I pleaded — they all saw the need but I was told it was too much work. “We’d have to hire someone to do what you did.”
I volunteered. No one else was willing, they weren’t even willing to ask others. Those programs described with pretty and empowering words on those websites and brochures, they said no.
It is a personal hell sometimes when you understand the cycles of trauma and abuse. The wounded judge. The wounded harm. The wounded are ignored. The wounded ignore. The wounded need care. The wounded will not care for their own wounds. Everyone is wounded in one way or another and when there is no intervention available the cycles WILL SPIN OUT OF CONTROL.
That is why I pushed myself. I knew. There were no other options. I needed to walk away to save myself. When I finally did, I collapsed in the arms of those children I raised all those years being there for everyone.
I heard the insults — I knew what I being called. They were arrows to my back. As I said, I understood why.. the wounded, wound.
Some lash out and then the ones like me, secretly hate our existence, and lash in.
Hate is a strong word. But I did, I hated the fact I had 5 different predators claw at my body when I was a little girl. I had a brother that beat me and one who ignored me. I had a sister who was just like my mom, everything given came with a cost. My saving grace was my Father, a truly nurturing heart that gave out to pain and addiction from trying to numb the hurt.
I hated knowing what it was like to grow up in hospital rooms. Scars on my body no one understood. A brain I knew was intelligent and potential but no one fed it when I was a child, when it needed care the most.
I knew what it was like to take my father’s blood pressure three times a day, make his meals, clean and care for other people’s children, all while I was a child still.
So many things I knew and hated knowing them.
Knowing what it was like to have the hands of the man you said Forever to try to squeeze the life out of me while sexually assaulting me in front of our children.
I hated that — and perhaps myself for not loving my reflection enough that I was in that position, that environment.
I felt like a failure.
My heart was cold for myself but warm for everyone else and I didn’t know how to be any other way. I hated that, too.
I hated that I believed survivors, but no one believed me.
I hated that the one time a whisper in my ear, teased me with love, and my insecurities messed that up too — hearing it again.
If people only understood how much I hated myself, even while trying to love everyone else, they’d understand there is no label you could throw, nail to my cross, that I already haven’t.
Even writing this out now, I feel that little girl in me clutching her Teddy Bear, saying “don’t tell them. You’ll get hurt more.”
But there is a glimmer of light still in me and I am not sure why, that tells me I need these truths out of me. It is the same glimmer that landed me in my children’s arms and care, and the same one that kept the fight in me going so I would end up getting healthcare, SSDI and that surgery which discovered so much — including I had been telling the truth.
I don’t know what all this means and why I have this urge to set it to words, sharing with strangers. Maybe it is me trying to say, be aware of the glimmers.
Where they come from — I cannot exactly say. We all have different levels of spiritual understanding and beliefs. I don’t want to insult yours as mine have been. But I do believe those glimmers are the key to understanding life, your life and how it connects to others.
They’re teaching me that I am worthy of love and care — that my existence matters.
Anyway — there’s my Sunday morning unleashing of the old with hopes for the new.
I need coffee….
Be well.
PS — excuse typos, I’m not too worried about mistakes right now.
HEALING HEARTS
https://www.gofundme.com/f/inject-healing-hearts-into-communities
I might be placing my vulnerabilities out there for the world to laugh at and me to be picked apart but we keep getting this wrong, why not try?
At least I want to try to place a bandaid on my branch of the family tree, I am tired of the destruction.
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