On this first day of a brand new year, I am gazing back at my childhood. While there are, indeed, some happy memories to be found there, for me, growing up felt mostly like constantly falling out of a bloodied and blackened sky as a million tiny shards of glass. My parents had all of my pieces in their hands, but courtesy of their own toxic childhoods, were unable to see or catch my scattered pieces, much less put them back together. Lol. “Generational trauma” … the gift that just keeps on giving. As a result, I was given no choice but to find a way to pick up, make sense of, and mend my shards alone.

Although I’ve forgiven and continue to have to forgive the countless things they’ve done, said, and failed to acknowledge about our reality, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever let one of them back into my fortress of a world. It would be like giving him a hammer to go back and smash that little girl it took so long to find in the mirror into smithereens all over again. FUCK THAT! After all I’ve suffered through and the HELL I’ve clawed my way out of, the “me” who stands before the masses now is precious, beautiful, strong and resilient, filled with love and Light, power and grace, and infinite possibilities, but also kind of angry!

Yes, I’ve healed my own broken heart way too many times to count, but I’m still just a woman who was painstakingly pieced back together with an adhesive whose sole compound is the love I finally found for myself despite the many circumstances that otherwise tried to refuse me this gift of self-artistry. Even so, I will never have that once flawless interior that I arrived here with on the day that I was born and there will always be little gaps between my pieces. Thus, the current decline in my mental health. Does the Light still shine through me like a mosaic? Of course! But does the darkness still creep through me as well? YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT! My job now is to make sure I don’t allow the latter to happen more often than the former such that the black hole my husband slipped to inks the final page of my story.

At the end of the day, I’ve had quite enough of all this hunting, gathering, and gluing myself back together like the master “Shardsman” I’ve become, and I didn’t come this far to keep having to fucking be one. Meanwhile, as an adult survivor of a fucked up beyond reality “childhood”, I guess what’s tearing me apart the most these days isn’t what was done to me, but rather, the shocking and sobering fact that after a lifetime of ducking and dodging the bullets of textbook malignant narcissism, no one will apologize, no one will intervene, and no one will stand up, say “ENOUGH!”, and help me protect the kids I brought into this tragedy we call a “family”. Instead, they just stand there and watch the shit show of arrows flying right past their faces and hearts and often straight into their backs. At this point in the game, my heart, mind, and soul are sick and tired of having to work so hard to keep all this shit together. My hands are bloodied and torn from the serrated edges of myself I’ve had to handle over the years. I just want to exist in peace now, not in “pieces”.

But you see, the flip side of this bittersweet, double-edged sword of a living love story I’ve become is that I’ve gotten to learn the very hard way that my heart is love and my hands can rest because my soul has learned to happily exist in the blissful peace of my own solitude unless and until I decide to let anyone near me with a hammer again, much less be forced to just stand there and watch some mother fucker with a hammer continually annihilate my children. The best that I can do now is the best that I can do while at least trying to embody and teach my babies, grown as they may be, the art of becoming their own Shardsmen. God, Himself knows that I, too, in all of my failings as a mortal parent have dropped a hammer or two onto their once perfect and whole glass hearts. Now? I can’t and won’t leave here until I’ve taught them the secret of “the glue”:

THEMSELVES!

One year ago this month, yet another brave daughter sent up a requiem about the lingering effects of her childhood trauma. I borrow her words to send out to not just my parents, but any other parent who’s ever emotionally crippled their child:

I thought it was normal to watch your parents fight. It taught me dysfunction was just part of life … that love’s just a word that we use to excuse our mistakes. Now, I can’t tell if I’m afraid or just jaded. I guess I’m just scared to end up the way they did. How do I unlearn the ways I deal with pain when that was all they taught me? To everyone I’ve loved who’s let me down, let this letter hold what I can’t say out loud. What do I owe you for who I became? Should I say thank you or curse your name? Do I give you credit or all of the blame, ’cause growth and pain always feel the same. I try to avoid it when I meet somebody new. I fall for the same shit that I did with you, ’cause there’s comfort in chaos, and that’s why I kept you around. It’s insane to me that this could be the medicine and the disease – the cigarette that’s killin’ me – yet, I still wanna breathe in. I keep tryin’ to wash off the smell, but it’s stuck on my skin. I wanted to fix this – I thought we could change – but when will I learn that’s a damn mistake? I’ll keep on givin’ ’til my body breaks, ’cause growth and pain always feel the same? I know it’s not your fault, but I don’t know who to blame, oh-oh. Growth and pain, growth and pain, growth and pain. They feel the same, feel the same, feel the same.

Look, I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but please don’t be that parent whose adult children struggle with the lifelong fear that your grandchildren are gonna spend their entire lives looking in all the wrong places for the glue to put themselves back together after being imprisoned by the endless childhood trauma recovery YOU sentenced their parent to. Remember, some of us eventually realize that the families we create and the safe and healthy places we want to take them are much more important than the abusive and unacceptable bullshit YOU served us, so we burn it all down to the ground then walk away from you for good!

It’s hard to tell these days and which way that I am falling. I’m not sure anymore what’s right or what is wrong. It hurts to feel, to think, to know I may be nothing. But then again, I’ve been wrong before. I’ve opened up my eyes just to wish that I’d stayed blind. Blacken out the sky and let the arrows fly. It’s never over, not ’til it’s over. Outside looking in, when do the nightmares end? Over and over, until it’s over. The end!

{“The End“}

As for me? I can honestly say that the last few months of 2023 all but took me to my knees and sent me into another mental health tailspin. The woman I’ve worked so hard to become and seemed shatterproof has been fractured once again and will be leaving social media and life as I’d been enjoying it for a while to calm the fire and put myself back together. I’ll be back and Imma be alright, and no, this isn’t “the end” for me. I did NOT survive all that I’ve survived just to go back to where I came from!

~ REAL Cat ~