The truth of the matter is when we have something that scares the sh*t out of us the best thing to do is face it head on. And usually the thing that scares us the most is the truth, so how do we face that head on?
Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to face the truth. Maybe that's why sometimes, the truth hurts so bad. But the alternative, lying to yourself all the time, what good does that do you? Or worse, lying to others. Let's not kid ourselves our lies are obvious. And our denials may as well be a scarf around our neck because the truth is, they are more obvious than the lies we tell ourselves. We're not fooling anyone, well maybe except ourselves. Ouch.
So the truth can be super scary. It can be embarrassing or uncomfortable. But it can also set you free. The verity of the situation is quite simple really.
Honesty. It has integrity. It is incorruptible and it is trustworthy.
Honesty is unassuming. It knows no moral high ground and it's not judgmental. It's never jealous and certainly not accusatory. Honesty just is.
Being honest with yourself is reliable and this path of least resistance is far from ephemeral. Once you befriend it, honesty will stay with you forever. It will help you find courage you didn't know you had. It will assist you in your decision making when you hit a crossroad, it will wipe the tears from your eyes when you have worked through your fears.
These days, I am digging really deep. I am pulling out all my fears one by one and I am getting to the bottom of it all once and for all!
I did a meditation exercise yesterday morning that might very well have changed my life as I know it. I pictured myself as a little girl sitting alone and scared and unloved. I sat down next to her and I comforted her. I told her how beautiful she was and how talented and smart. I told her she had so much to look forward to in life and that I would be there for her. That I would love her and cherish her and make sure she was always safe. I told her to walk with me on the beach. So hand in hand we walked and we laughed and we talked about how amazing she was. I stopped us as we hit the waters edge and I looked down into her sad little eyes and I said, "I love you. You are special and you are so very loved!" and then I hugged her. When I opened my eyes my cheeks were tear stained but my heart felt full and my burdens seemed lighter and I even mentioned to a friend yesterday that I feel like I have come out some other side again. I feel whole. Like I can face anything that comes my way. I'm ready.
Let's check in.
~ I have now had 4 query rejections and 1 positive pursuit that turned out to be a scam. But I am not bothered and it gave me a new idea of how I am going to approach this. Today I am half way through my 3rd draft.
~ The new website is gorgeous and we should be up and running this week. We are all really excited about it.
~ I am on hold to start a prepping a commercial this week so I am going to be crazy busy. I love it!
~ I've gone through the business plan from my financial planner and we are now on our 2nd draft. The BP will go out this week to investors/loaners.
~ Working on my 3rd draft has me excited so I thought I would share an excerpt. My first 2 chapters.... Let me know what you think.
Not Just An Observer
My life as I knew it was not doing me any great benefit nor was I doing any great benefit to it. The salty air was clogging my brain and I couldn’t live in this cocoon any longer. I had to move inland. Move inland to the trees and be a Thoreau or stay at the beach and be a Dennis Hopper. I chose Thoreau.
Time to look within and learn something. I’m not talking about just sitting and pondering or hiding behind the dense brush of trees and foliage while I count my breathing. I am proposing a journey. A first hand written account of the significant occurrences that would shape me, test me, and finally change me.
Instinctually I knew that somehow the answers were hidden in my past. If I could recapture the memories I would have a reference point for the patterns I repeated and I could break the lineage. Somewhere along the way I learned that life is made up of moments. For me, the beginning was made up of moments that would break me, test me, and threaten to ruin me. As I got older the moments hurt me, reminded me, and kept me trapped in someone else’s fear. But I learned that it is these moments that can change us, strengthen us, and define us.
It is time to stop fearing the change and to change the fears that stop me. So here I am and this is what brought me here.
I got involved in a relationship that would teach me lessons of my past, awaken me to my present and give me new needs for my future. This would be the relationship that would save me from my own worst fate. Repeating my parent’s relationship.
Upon second glance I found that throughout my life I have come to find a place for myself in quantitative social statistics. My life’s fight against nurture vs. nature has resulted in my empirical data being outlined here in these stories. These stories are narrated by my poetry. Poetry that scribbled it’s way out of me at the ripe young age of eleven.
Throughout the years my poetry spoke of the possibilities of rising above it all but I didn’t know enough. I was young and naïve and lost in the self-pity of the process not the lessons my own words were trying to teach me. I have intertwined them into my story. The words of a teenager fighting for the freedom from herself and I think I am starting to get it now.
“What does one do when they wake from a dream and they’re crying? The tears of a life unattended. A missed encore. A curtain bow. The orchestra. Sight for sore eyes and a mystery wink. An orange jubilees and won’t take your abuse anymore. I shall not look back in sorrow or in pain I shall look into my future and how bright it is. I shall not settle. I will not compromise my dignity, my self-respect, and my-self any longer. I am beautiful and worthy and I shall take one step at a time. I will spend my time in love and prosper. I will share and I will enlighten. I will hold myself dear to my heart and I will live in the glory that God intended for me. To shine in the light and be accountable. To get up every day and seize the moment. To make my choices and follow through with them. To be wise in my decisions and to count my blessings. Thank you to my guardian angels that have picked me up once again and have shown me how to walk. I shall be peaceful and without drama. I shall divert any such behavior away from my soul for there is no integrity in it. I will greet everyday with love in my heart and I shall be impeccable with my word. I shall listen to my life and heed its suggestions, prompts, and warnings. I shall listen well to my heart, my body and my soul. I will take time for me and I will smell the flowers. I will trust the flow of life and I will welcome change. I shall dream of beauty and love and passion... I shall set out to break the lineage of my past”. not dated
I was what you would call really bad timing. I was to be the almost wasn’t, and believe you me, sometimes I wish that I wasn’t.... But so it was to be.
I was the second born to a very young girl who was born to a Puerto Rican navel officer and a debutant southern belle from North Carolina. She was a cute chubby girl who was daddy’s favorite little girl. A child genius, she skipped grades in school, tested off the charts, and was misunderstood by her parents who had no schooling. Her mother would ridicule her for being overweight and her father would beat her with a belt. She was rebellious, bored and wise beyond her years.
At thirteen she met a boy. A sixteen-year-old street kid from an affluent Cuban family who had nothing better to do. On Sundays, instead of going to church, she went to the corner of 185th and Amsterdam to fall in love. It gave her hope. It gave her the drive to start working at the local hospital the day she turned sixteen. What she hid under her pillow from cleaning dirty bed sheets gave her enough money to move into her first apartment the day she turned eighteen. A year later the street kid moved in and they had their first girl at twenty and me at twenty-one.
There was a lot of confusion surrounding the knowledge of my attendance. By the time I was making my presence known their future together had grown very bleak. The girl, young, scared and with one child already, had no intention of bringing another one into the world. Not when her world was crumbling down around her. When the abortion attempts were unsuccessful and she resigned herself to her new fate, the hatred for what grew inside her grew faster and larger than her belly. She was consumed by resentment, fear and horror. She wouldn’t turn to the parents who would help her when she couldn’t wait to get away from them in the first place. She wouldn’t turn to the sister that was out singing and traveling the world. She would turn inward to herself and her fears. And what she dwelled on would become her life… and mine...
The street kid, now twenty-four had more on his mind than a wife, a kid and one on the way. He found solace in some street punks and at the end of many whiskey bottles. Drunk and slurring they discovered cocaine and a need for the money to pay for more. This they could find in people’s homes they did not have the key to. Things could only get worse.
By the time I was two I had taken up permanent residence in my playpen and the street kid had taken up temporary residence in county jail. As the story goes, I slept a lot. I slept through the nights that the young girl cried herself to sleep. I slept through the visits to see the street kid. I slept through the day he returned to the apartment on the third floor. I slept through the yelling. The screaming. The crying.
Yet through closed eyes I remember. I remember what I heard, what I saw, and where I was. I remember who I was. But I remember more who I wasn’t. There was so much yelling and the relentless accusations from the street kid. He believed that I wasn’t his daughter. His best friend was told to look in on us.
Supposedly I was conceived during one of these visits.
I find it very hard to believe that the young girl would have fallen into the arms of another man. The love for the street kid was all she knew and she was blinded by it. The street kid was blinded by the paranoia of the drugs and couldn’t see through glassy eyes how much her heart beat only for him.
The hatred in their voices was like breaking every bone in your body. I could not dispel the sounds of sorrow and despair that had become the young girls voice. She had become a wilted flower with weeds growing around her like a veil. She could no longer defend herself. She stopped fighting back. The venomous stare was all she could give and this seemed to infuriate the street kid more than her words ever could.
I remember wincing at the sound of the first slap. And the scream that followed. I can hear the furniture breaking and the sounds of fresh wounds. I hear the hair pulled from her head and the blood come gushing out of her eye.
I can hear his fist come down on her with that one last blow right before I hear her limp body fall to the floor.
I lay there shivering with fear as the door slammed behind the boy’s exit. The first silence I had ever known woke me from my sleep and into a nightmare. Lying next to me was the young girl, motionless, still, and barely breathing. She lay in her own pool of blood like a blanket.
While I waited in my crib for what had become watered down milk, this nightmare became my recurring dream. Sometimes the beatings were worse then others. Sometimes I thought she would never get up. Sometimes I was happy to have her lying next to me because it was the closest we ever got.
Time passed and the boy had been kicked out and new locks put on the door of the apartment on the third floor. But the street kid knew how to get into apartments that he didn’t have the key too. So he would climb up the fire escape and in through the window to rob her of whatever she had left.
He would push her to the ground, empty her wallet and give her a swift kick in the ribs before departing. Desperation made the boy more violent. These visits left the young girl broken like the shattered glass that surrounded her.
By the time I was four I knew nothing of being held or coddled. I knew a lot about yelling, fights, crying and silence. The street kid and the young girl were getting older and the boy had spent many more nights in jail. It was time for the street kid to get his shit together or he would find himself taking his last breath from behind bars. Supposedly his family made arrangements with the D.A. He was to join the Military or spend the rest of his years behind bars.
There were some civil exchanges between the street kid and the young girl in the short time to follow. A lot of apologies were given and a lot of promises were made. And somewhere in the interim the street kid met someone else. I remember standing in my Sunday best waiting for the street kid to open his new apartment door. A pregnant girl answered the door and invited us in. They talked and talked and she gave us cookies.
Shortly after the visit the street kid took the first-born and I to the circus. I was four. When we got back from the circus the young girl was waiting for us across the street in front of our building. We went running to her to tell her of what we had seen. The First Born and I were both talking at the same time. Both of us trying to show her the souvenirs our dad had bought us. I saw her look above us and into the distance with the smallest nod of her head.
All of a sudden I had the strangest feeling inside and my heart sink. A feeling in my gut like when I had left my favorite teddy bear on the A train. An impending feeling of doom.
I turned slowly on the heels of my navy blue Mary-Janes and looked up into the street light where my dad should have been standing. He was gone. They had arranged it all. Been planning it for weeks. It was over. The street kid had gone and the young girl was left to her wounds and to raise the two girls on her own.
All I could think was, “He left me. He left me behind to this woman who resented the very air I breathe”. Uh oh.
“Farewell to arms for forever and a day. A pairing of the heart and things are cold. A mistaken identity and a demolition. The blood runs hot and the tingling is unbearable. Time to leave. To turn our heads on what will never be. A memory under lock and key. You lose people along the way. You lose yourself if only for a day. The hills of distant lands are longing and my heart beats fast. Times change momentarily and you never get it back. Words ringing in your ears and never sorry for it. Time heals all wounds and is unlikely. Sobriety of the eyes and you fight for your composure for where you were before this started. Where you went you stayed but you forgot to lock the door. So naïve. Learn to walk again. To say goodbye could be a hello later but for now it is only this. There are no hellos in sight. Only shadows from the trees. You’re at a loss for words. It’s all very clear. Our eyes see what they want to see and our hearts play their own music. A quiet tempo in D. So deep rooted and raspy so guttural and withdrawn. So lonely and so far away. So there can be no violins. Enjoy your dark blue trident and try to forget. Things are finally so clear. You’re taking leave. Farewell now. Farewell to arms for forever and a day. Farewell for now.” Age 12
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