The Surprise (or Learning How to Be a Friend)

Aleathia says:

     A few weeks ago I was asked by one of the people in my writer’s group to go to a concert. No big deal, right?

     Wrong.

     Let me lay the groundwork for you. I’m nice, but awkward. I have a hard time making friends because trust is a hurdle for me. I am nice to everyone and I can carry a conversation if you start it. I understand the basics of friendship, but in my life I have had about 5 true friends. These are people that get me. They put up with my social ineptitude time and again. They make me feel worth it.

     Anyway, the concert. So on the outside this woman and I don’t appear like we should be friends. Read that sentence again, it’s petty, I know. As you may have seen from other blogs, I am working on shedding a life based on body image. I’m not there yet. I have spent a life handing out forgiveness for being too awkward or too fat or insert-something-that-annoys-another here. You can teach an old dog new tricks, but it takes time. I’m middle aged and overweight. She is younger and a Cross Fit body builder. I’ll give you a moment to make the image.

     The take away from this concert for me was huge. We could’ve seen an orchestra or Liberace. It wouldn’t have mattered. It was the time in between the music that held the most meaning. On the hour drive there, we talked about our lives in trauma and with writing. Underneath our exteriors, under the skin, we slowly found that we were of the same tribe. Over the years, I medicated with food and she medicated with lifting. I didn’t ask her outright if that was the reason for the intense workouts, but from either point of view--food or weightlifting--it’s about control. People of trauma crave control, and as she put it, certainty.

     We shared our recent journeys in love and how we arrived at the present moment sitting in my car, splitting the countryside with our collective pain. Many times she apologized for speaking of her traumas on our first outing as friends. I didn’t acknowledge the apology because it wasn’t necessary. Car rides are the best place for people of trauma to spill demons, because the other person can only listen. There is no fixing, only understanding and clarification.

     Once at the venue, we went to buy water. She was going to buy mine because I drove. I refused and grabbed my wallet to pay for my own because it is what I do. Owe no one anything. I have lived that motto for my lifetime. She looked at me and said, “Let me buy this. This is what friends do.”

     Imagine standing in a lobby of humans and being invisibly struck by lightning.

     We talked some more as the first band came on, sitting while everyone else was standing. This was less trauma and more writing. When the band she wanted to see took the stage we stood, side by side, and something happened to me for the first time. Amongst a sea of young college students, next to this woman who is physically one of the strongest people I know, who is beautiful, and I found myself not caring about my body. I stood surrounded by beauty not worrying about how old I was, how fat I was, or whether or not I deserved to be there. I simply, was.

     The music was good. The light show amazing. The life lesson, priceless.

     In the land of healing a lifetime of traumas, these small wins feel like gold medal performances. This connected me to another human who has run a similar path, who is still working on healing and trusting and moving forward. I thank her for reaching out to ask me to do something, for noticing me, for making me feel like a valid individual. Score one for the home team.

     Thanks for reading. Be kind to each other. Write. Read books. Share your world.

Aleathia

The Lock on the Inside of My Door

Aleathia says:

      Often in life we require the unabashed courage of others to be on display before we can look inward to find our own. This happened to me this week.

      Yesterday, I finished the audio book of "Hunger" by Roxane Gay. This was a raw book about sexual assault and its lasting effects on the body and mind of a woman. Telling this story to the world had to be an excruciating, difficult task. The general public doesn't want to read about the ugliness that has happened to women, men and children. It makes them uncomfortable, and maybe, it should.

      Gay's story was preceded by the fact it was story about her body which she has struggled with since her sexual assault. She spends a lot of time drawing attention to her body and how others have treated it and still continue to treat it as a woman of size. But as I listened, I spent most of the six hours nodding my head. The trajectory of her life was oddly familiar to me.

     I have been suspicious all my life that my step-father (now deceased) sexually abused me, but I have no distinct memory I can reference. There were outward things he said like "you'd be really hot if you lost 20 pounds" or how he'd stare at me from across the room like I was a trapped gazelle he was going to rip apart with his teeth. There was his making a point to be naked around me in the common areas of our house or trying to get me to go to the nudist camp as a teenager with "the family." I did go, but I kept my clothes on in defiance. There was the eating disorder I developed and the hatred of my body that grew each year as it got bigger and bigger. There were later thoughts of suicide, body dysmorphia, and a distinct dissociation with society on a human level. There was the time he threatened the life of my brother and mother if I left the state. These were some of the things that shaped my life.

     I wanted to fit in at school. I wanted boys to like me, but in order for that to happen, I would also have to be simultaneously attractive to my step-father.  When I did bring boys home to meet my parents, my step-father would come down from his bedroom, dressed as Rambo, complete with a Bowie knife between his teeth as if he were marking territory. When I was fifteen, my own mother placed a lock on the inside of my door. This action, though a safety measure, crushed me more than anything because she knew what her husband was capable of and would rather risk my safety than be alone. I buried myself in food, books, writing and work. I joined every club I could so as to not be home because it wasn't safe for me.

     When I left home I became reckless with my body sexually and physically. There were several times I risked being raped or killed because I didn't care. I couldn't see any worth in myself beyond being a sexual object. I learned quickly that how I looked mattered to men. If I were willing to give up some of my morals, then I was worthy of their time. Except for the man I married and later divorced, I chose men who were not always kind. If they were kind, they were alcoholics and so severely depressed that they took up all my time. If I cared for others, it followed that I didn't have time to care for myself. Self care? What's that?

     I never spoke up because like all children, I didn't think any adults would believe me. When your own mother turns her head to look away then you figure the options to share your truth are very small. I wish I would have had someone to tell me it wasn't my fault, someone to save me.

     My last long term relationship devastated me. Living with a narcissist is not recommended. He still haunts me around unexpected corners, but over the last two years I have nearly exorcised him from my life. He took away my trust of men, but what he gave me was an unexpected openness to my own self. Surviving a man like that woke me up to learning how to find my voice and stand up. Through all of the personal traumas in my life I have always tried to find the lesson or the silver lining. If I had to suffer through something so scarring then I better damn well learn something.

     Several times during Roxane Gay's "Hunger" I found myself in tears. I was empathetic to her story though I feel my trauma was so much less than hers. I know trauma isn't comparative because they are personal events, but I still feel mine is less. Her story lead me to look at how much a person can achieve after such a damaging event. She says she is still healing herself in her 40's. I'm still healing myself as well. She is helping us all heal. She is making us visible. She is standing at the front of the line giving a voice to those of us who have been quiet too long.

     If you need help, someone is there at the National Sexual Assault Hotline

     Thank you for reading. Be kind to each other. Write. Read books. Share your story.

Aleathia

Into the Abyss and Back: Let's talk about Suicide

Aleathia says:

The last month or so has been a whirlwind journey with every possible emotion felt at one time or another. My entire world was turned upside down in the end of February. I got a call from my child as she sat in the guidance office sobbing and telling me she needed me to come to school immediately.

Panic. Shut up mom heart, this is a job for ER nurse. Okay….but it’s my baby. Don’t worry, we got this.

I arrive and sit in a really welcoming office where my child proceeds to tell me that over the last few months, she has overdosed on her Prozac at least 7 times. Every day spent pretending to take this medication, to act like everything is okay while in her room she is trying to find ways to die. I was blindsided. She had seem more sullen, but it was the dead of winter in New York. Everything was grey and cold and unforgiving. Looking back there were neon signs that I didn’t see. She had told no one, not even her best friend and in my healthcare experience it is the ones who have action without words that eventually succeed.

I asked my daughter if I could write about this because struggling with mental health carries a stigma in this world, one that makes it really hard for people to get help. I wanted her permission to share her story because it is personal. I didn’t want whomever might read this to think she was in the dark about it.

The process of getting help for mental health issues is arduous. You go to the ER and very few ER’s are equipped with behavioral health units and the options in New York state are so far and few between anymore with the state cutting back funding many years ago. The mental health problem is a real one. 1 in 5 adults in the US have mental illness...that is over 43 million people with nearly 10 million of them having mental illness so bad that they cannot function properly in everyday living. These are the numbers of the diagnosed. This says nothing for the people who never seek help, yet the services and care for individuals with mental illness dwindles every year.

In New York state between 2009 and 2011 they cut $132 million dollars from the mental health budget, closed major inpatient behavioral hospitals, and local behavioral units in hospitals. In our local area we had to fight to keep our long term center open which housed people who had not been out in the world in years due to the severity of their mental health, because we would have been putting them out in the community to fail with no supportive mental health care.

Numbers aside, as a nurse in my local ER I know all too well the process. The patient comes in with great distress, we strip them of everything that makes them an individual, we take everything out of the room, and they get a sitter at arms length for their entire stay. We have had patients sit over a week in our ER waiting for a mental health bed to open up. In our case, we waited almost three days for a bed. When they finally found one it was over 2 hours away in central Pennsylvania which meant I couldn’t visit every day. We were lucky if we had 5 minutes on the phone each day. It was a nightmare, but I had to hope that I had done the right thing; that we would come out on the other side.

My daughter did not like the place, but it isn’t supposed to be a place you want to return. She and I both feel that if she had stayed there any longer there would have been a serious resentment towards me and her father. But I think she needed the reset. She needed to have someone insist she communicate her feelings. She had therapy everyday so when she came back to us she wasn’t afraid of therapy like she was before.

The discharge process at this facility was poor and no one sat down with us to explain her diagnosis and what we were supposed to do. We signed papers, collected her things, and were out the door. The whole process in general was disheartening and that is coming from very involved parents who care and were there every step of the way. My daughter said there were many kids in there whose parents dumped them off at places like this because they don’t want to deal with them. It was heartbreaking.

This event was one more thing to grieve on top of all the deaths I had not allowed myself to grieve, the failed relationship, and feeling of being utterly alone. It is amazing the strength you find when the thought of losing your only child is dangled in front of your face. Here are all the things I learned:

There is no greater pain in the world than the thought of losing a child. Hands down: worse feeling ever.


This event made me speak to her father...to him, not at him about not only our daughter, but why our marriage failed. It failed because we didn’t talk to each other honestly and openly. There were things that each of us didn’t know about the other that would have changed our actions.


You have to ask the hard questions without fear. Ask them again and again until you understand what the other person is saying. Be honest with your answers. Communicate!


Healing is a journey that has both forward steps and backward steps. It is akin to ugly crying and laughing so hard your stomach hurts.


My daughter doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Her pain is my pain and in all honesty we are going through the same motions at the same time. We are learning to communicate, to open up, to let free the demons that bind us. We are helping each other.


Art is part of the master plan. Art is the only thing that lets me empty my mind. Art is what my daughter is good at and she needs more of it in her life.


Despite all the hard work and effort by her father and I, we could not shield our child from the genetic strains of mental illness in our families. It is long on both sides and even though we gave her the best divorced parents lifestyle we could, she still fell prey to her genetics.


I have undiagnosed mental illness. I’m sure of it.


No one has to do it alone.


Being a teenager in this time is more brutal than my time. The internet and social media make it a tough world to live in where kids can taunt each other without repercussion and without being brave enough to do it to their face and risk their own ridicule for being mean. Even good students and good kids suffer things parents can’t imagine. This suffering is what hurts me the most. It pains me to think my girl suffered like this since the 6th grade until she couldn’t take it anymore. All the while putting on a good face to keep everyone else’s feelings intact. She suffered alone.

Be responsible. Talk to your kids even if they roll their eyes or say they don’t want to talk. They need someone they can trust, someone that loves them. Don’t give up on them. Don’t write their behavior off as teenage angst. Sometimes, it is deeper than you think.


Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-8255


Thank you for reading.
Aleathia

Healing Anger (one minute at a time)

Aleathia says:

Today I had intentions of writing about the race, but something more important showed its face.  I was vacuuming the upstairs after bringing up the empty containers from Christmas decorating.  I vacuumed in front of my shrine and wondered why I haven't been sitting more.  The holidays are always hard.  They bring up so many good and bad memories.  They bring up anger when they shouldn't.

Michael told me the other day that he feels like sometimes I need to meditate more, that sometimes he notices things get away from me emotionally and I am all over the place.  These times shift the mood of the house.  I am well aware of my skill to diffuse the house with whatever problem I am holding inside.  It seeps through everything subversively.  At the time I might think I am doing a good job of hiding it, but in truth my family just steers clear of me.  Hell, sometimes, I want to steer clear of me.

So after I put the vacuum away, I stood there looking at the shrine again.  The house was empty and silent except for the noise I was making to keep myself distracted.  I pulled my cushion out and sat down.  I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to sit for long (hip is bad from running and attention span of a gnat).  I said my dedication prayer and one of my texts caught my eye...."Healing Anger" by The Dalai Lama.  There was one dog-eared page in the book so I flipped to it and started to read.

What I read smacked me in the face and made me tear up, because the truth often does that to you.  Here is what I read:

"Genuine peace of mind is rooted in affection and compassion.  There is a very high level of sensitivity and feeling involved.  So long as we lack inner discipline, an inner calmness of mind, then no matter what external facilities or conditions we may have, they will never give us the feeling of joy and happiness that we seek.  On the other hand, if we possess this inner quality, that is calmness of mind, a degree of stability within, then even if we lack various external facilities that are normally considered necessary for a happy and joyful life, it is still possible to live a happy and joyful life."--The Dalai Lama

Now this portion did not make me tear up.  This part was affirming to say the least.  Sometimes I forget the most basic principles of living a good life clouded by distractions, failed expectations, anger, and jealousy.  These are the things that make me human, but do not make me happy.  This next part is what slayed me:

"If we examine how anger or hateful thoughts arise in us, we will find that, generally speaking, they arise when we feel hurt, when we feel that we have been unfairly treated by someone against our expectations.  If in that instant we examine carefully the way anger arises, there is a sense that it comes as a protector, comes as a friend that would help our battle or in taking revenge against the person who has inflicted harm on us.  So the anger or hateful thought that arises appears to come as a shield or a protector.  But in reality that is an illusion.  It is a very delusory state of mind."--The Dalai Lama

I realized at that moment that I have been in a state of anger for several years.  It hasn't been harsh enough until recently for me to see it in myself, but it is there.  My mother died a few years ago and part of me is not sad that she is gone because she micro-managed me all the time.  She constantly made me feel like I wasn't doing good enough or being a good mom.  It was a horrible feeling and when she passed, I knew I would never have to feel like that again at her hand.  But I was angry too. She died suddenly, most likely of an accidental overdose combined with sleep apnea, and she had denied us all a funeral.  Mourning was solitary and painful and full of so many questions.  Sometimes I am angry at myself for not letting her come to visit that Christmas before she died when we first bought the house.  It would have been the last time I got to see her, instead the last time was at a funeral.

I have leaned very little on my faith over the last few years.  In part, I think I have wanted to punish myself...to not allow myself a way of understanding and healing for everything in my life.  I am not sure I can carry those burdens anymore.  My anger is evident to me.  My lack of compassion for the world is painful and unbecoming.

My anger has also come at work.  I have to say that I have felt betrayed in some way.  This could be real or imagined, but my state of mind at the time didn't help but to further the anger along.  Deep down I have been hurting and hiding.  This is something I learned long ago when no one was ever there for me when I had times of pain, sorrow, and disappointment.  I knew that I could count on myself...that I always had my own back.

But now I have people that love me.  Michael always has my back...and my heart in mind.  He is a strength that I rarely tap into, because I am afraid of how ugly my insides are sometimes.  It isn't fair to him or to my darling child to hide inside myself.  It isn't fair to my co-workers who have had to put up with my very disconnected attitude.  Healing always starts from within.  A person has to be willing to heal, willing to let people in, and decide to see the light in the world. I think this is my time.  I hope this is my time.

Thank you for listening.

OM-2/1/2015 Perspective

Aleathia says:

The other day I called my grandmother on the anniversary of my mom's death.  I didn't expect her to answer the phone....she never answers the phone, but that day she answered it on the second ring as if she were waiting for me.  It was good to hear the sound of her voice despite the hint of sadness and mortality that hung out around the corners of her words.

We talked for over two hours and made plans for the summer when me and Chloe will go out and stay with her for awhile.  We talked about how the year took its toll on us; how we missed her with a grain of salt.  We loved my mom for sure, but she had done some nasty things to us in our lives and they linger just as heavy as the good times.

I realized in that phone call how much I am like my grandmother.  We are patient, waiting women. We know in the end things will be ok if we keep our heads level and ride out the storm.  She told me she was just coming out of the woods.  She had been sleeping a lot to keep from the strange feelings that the ghost of my mother was following her around.

Grief is such a strange and wonderful experience.  We learn to see and believe things we would not in a state of rational mind.  I had the opposite problem as my grandmother.  I felt like my mother was not around at all.  In essence, I felt abandoned.  I know this is simply a projection from my own grief that I had been carrying around while she was alive and then amplified when she died.

I spent a life time feeling alone in the presence of my mother because, as my grandmother said, we were completely opposite people.  My mother was always moving.  We decided it was because if she kept moving she would not have to stop to look at herself in the mirror and believe the truths that the rest of us already knew.

It was healing to share this perspective with my 82 year old grandmother.  She is my favorite lady in the world.  She has been my solitary comfort in the world as a child. She has always been where my heart considers home.

Today I move forward.  Today I take my life back from the grips of grief.  There is so much living to do...so much laughing to get at.

I want to thank all 30 of you that read this blog for putting up with my roller coaster of emotions over the last year.  Thank you for suffering my posts about my dead mother and still coming back for the regularly scheduled programming.  You have all allowed me to heal.  You have made my journey a good one.

OM-10/12/2014 Taking Life for Granted

Aleathia says:

Over the last three years I was lucky enough to have the love of my life home with me all the time.  I was lucky enough to have a wage that could afford to make this happen.  It gave us time to grow our new relationship.  It gave him time to heal from the death of his mother and his best friend.  It allowed him to be there through the deaths of my mother, cousin, aunt, and several friends/co-workers.  I am not particularly sure where I would be emotionally without his great big heart next to mine.

Recently he decided he wanted to go back to work.  He wanted to contribute and get back out into the world.  This is a great thing.  We could always use the money these days with a house and the bills that go with it.  It would be nice to take a real vacation in the future instead of state side camping.  So out he went looking.  He was hoping for something part time and thought that was all he might get in today's tight economy.  It was less about the money and more about being a productive human being.

Michael found a job at Walgreen's....full time straight out the gate.  He went from being here all the time to hardly being here.  I have to say the whole household went into a sort of withdrawal.  The dog went on a hunger strike and I suddenly had no idea what the hell to do with myself.  All my days were filled with conversations between the two of us and now the house was silent leaving me to converse with the dog.  This is a particularly quiet, one-sided monologue at times.

What I realized is that I had taken for granted that he would always be there when my heart and mind needed him.  I took for granted all the things he did around the house that I had stopped noticing until I now had to pick some of them back up.  I was having a hard go of  "enjoy the time we have" because I was feeling very abandoned.  I know, grow up lady, you're 41 years old.

Michael is happier working and he smiles more and who can argue with that?  It all works out in the end.  It has been a rough few weeks adjusting.  I had always thought I was a bit more open and flexible than this.  Some lessons are learned the hard way.

Today's message is to remember not to take all those precious people in your life for granted.  Don't take the time you have with them as something that will always be there.  Love the time you have. Gather up the small moments.  Use the time apart to build your own life up and enjoy those things you do solo.  Love your life.