Trauma doesn’t always look like “the Big T” catastrophes we tend to picture when we hear the word. Experiences that seem small to others, such as being dismissed, unheard, or unseen, can quietly shape us and leave unprocessed emotional pain. The anger, frustration, and sadness we show over things that seem uneventful to others may be the hurt little kid inside us still trying to feel safe and “seen.” Sometimes those reactions are rooted in experiences we don’t consciously recall. Research has linked trauma with emotional and physical stress reactions; for some people, that can include anxiety, tension, or ongoing health problems. What comes out may be what’s still hurting inside, and that pain can affect our relationships, decisions, and behaviors.
Well, I’ll tell you! You start by standing in front of a mirror and having the most important conversation of your life with YOU … “What’s underneath all my reactions?” By the way, remember that you’ll HAVE to feel it before you can fix it. Journal or talk to someone safe about what hurt you.
“Is this the place that we called home to find what we’ve become? Walking along the path unknown … we’ve lived, we’ve loved, we’ve LIED! Deep in the dark … we didn’t think we “needed” The Light … or that the ghost inside us belonged to the other side.”
(Words adapted from Bad Omens’ “Specter”)
Looking back, it literally blows my FUCKING mind how many heaping piles of toxic, twisted, and dysfunctional behavior I was surrounded by—ironically, most often in the very places I was forced not just to believe, but to tell other people were “safe and loving homes.” I was expected to perpetuate those disgusting “FAUXrytales” because the powers that were my life demanded it under the threat of: “What would people think if they knew the truth?” For years, I choked on silence and secrets amid the ABUSE, CHAOS and VIOLENCE that wasmy childhood—and that still reaches into my adulthood—all to protect the image of the PERFECT family “behind the gates”!
And so, with that … YES! Yes, I AM the angry daughter … ever the work in progress … and I’ll STAY this angry until MY daughter has finally moved THROUGH all the anger she inherited from both me and the generations before. She’s wielding it like a torch through her own haunted spaces … just like her momma … so that someday HER daughter (who I carried within MY womb, by the way) won’t ever have to stay angry for longer than is necessary to keep the specter of herself at bay … unless, of course, like me, she decides to pull out its little diamond-studded leash and walk proudly with it like a wild and beautiful BEAST with MY fire in her eyes and resilience coursing through her veins!
Long story short? I don’t think anyone really knows how fucking CRUEL the world can be until you’ve had to grow up and protect your children from your own “family”.
If YOU are one of us who is fighting desperately to change your family’s legacy, I’m truly sorry that you’re having to spend your adulthood fixing things you didn’t break so that your children can have a better future. “The battle that lies within you” is not for the faint of heart, and I FEEL YOU! Stay strong. Keep the faith. RISE ABOVE! Oh, and by the way, “malignant parent” who is reading this right now, always remember that how your kids treat you when they no longer need you is a direct reflection of how you treated them when they needed you to survive.
I have long believed that the truth of just about anything can be found in all the questions you aren’t allowed to ask. A more sobering truth, however, is that often the person refusing to allow “the questions” we so desperately need answers to is the one we face in the mirror. With that being said, I cannot encourage anyone who’s searching for the reasons they’re sinking to the abyss strongly enough to do that most important work of all, which is to sit with yourself in solitude and have what just may be the most important conversation of your life.
‘Who, what, when, and where do I need to let go of so that I can finally learn to breathe again?’
A line often attributed to the Sufi poet and mystic Rumi says, “The cure for the pain is in the pain.” I couldn’t agree more. Like the most beautiful, albeit bittersweet, dances with love, that wisdom has transcended time and space.
As for me, I believe pain and suffering have also transcended time and space through the root systems of our family trees. The agony lives on until someone finally says, “No more!” and decides to calm the fire of that generationally gifted pain within themselves. That’s how we begin to stop the toxins that poisoned our roots from bleeding through the hearts of the generations that follow.
… the Monday after he shot himself, someone hauled my ass to the doctor. They wanted to make sure I was medicated so that I could function. So, they put me on a prescription of something for 30 days. Umm, I don’t even know what it was. I just remember I was numb. My mom came to move in to the house with me for a while. Of course, I didn’t leave my room unless I had to … to handle, like, the business of it all … go the funeral home, make the arrangements … but I didn’t leave my room that much. Plus, they were shoving drugs down my throat to help me cope with everything. And, umm, I had a 30-day prescription of whatever it was. Honestly? I couldn’t tell you what they had me on. I wanna say it was Klonapin. Whatever it was, it was pretty effective. I was numb … I couldn’t feel anything … but after my prescription was over on the 30th day … 35 days later I guess we’ll just call it … I had no more medication. I had no more … nothing to numb the pain or the reality or to change anything, and it was time for me to wake up and smell the coffee.
And you know what? I remember that I have these blinds in my room. Well, it was our room. We kept the blinds down all the time to black out all the Sun. We would do that at night, so … we liked to sleep in the total darkness. And they had those blinds down. For 30 days in a row, I never opened them throughout the whole medication process after the 22nd. But, on the day that my medicine ran out, there was nobody there, my mom had already gone home. It was just me and the dog and my new reality … my new life … and I got up and I put my feet on the ground and I just … I remember going to the window, and I opened up my blinds, and I looked out into the backyard. I looked at the Sun. I look at the sky. It was a blue sky. It was really pretty outside. It was September. It was the end of September when that day happened, and I just made a decision. I said to myself, “I can either let this define me or I can not. I can either be a victim or not. I can either crumble or not. I can either get up or stay down.” And I made the decision to get up and that was then.
I’m so glad. I’m so thankful. I’m so thankful for everything I’ve been through in the last … not just the last 283 days or whatever … I’m so thankful for everything that I’ve been through in the last 50 years. I’m gonna cry. I wouldn’t change a thing! Everything. Every moment. Every time I’ve fallen. Every time I’ve risen. In the darkest hours of my life, that’s where I found the richest blessings. That’s where I found myself. I found myself in all my broken pieces. All of that pain … the pain that I have experienced has been my greatest gift … my greatest blessing.
I wish so much that I had a way to “ozmose” what I know and how I feel and what I’ve learned on my journey to as many of you as I can, because I know there are people in my atmosphere right now as I’m sitting here waiting for my girls. I call them “my girls”. (My daughter’s friends are my daughters, too. That’s how it’s always been in my house. She’s got a knack for picking amazing girls to surround herself … now, put it this way. She hasn’t always been so good at that, but she’s got a really good tribe now, and these are her tribe for the long haul. I’m thinking that the people that she has in her life right now are gonna be her people 40 years from now. I can tell! But anyway, I’ve digressed.)
I know that there are people in this world at this very minute that are crumbling. They’re questioning … they’re hurting … they’re aching … they’re dying … they’re hiding … they’re fighting for their moment … and I wish that I could just give you what I have and just “poof” it into you, but all I can tell you is just hang on. It’s “Chin Up! Knuckles Out!” You know that’s what I like to say. I’m telling you guys … everything that you need to survive and overcome? It’s inside of you. If I can do this, YOU can do this! I am the happiest fucking bitch I’ve ever met. I really am. I have joy in my heart. I have peace in my heart. I hope I don’t have to leave tomorrow, but if I do, I’m happy. I have lived and I have loved. I’ve had the most amazing pain and the most amazing loves of two men in my life that … three, if you count Christian … my son, Christian … I have been lucky enough to have had the sweetest, most truest love that any woman could have ever had. I’ve had that twice now, and how lucky am I, because there are women in this world that haven’t had that once.
And when I think about all of the things … all of the gifts that those two men left for me, I’m so thankful, because … I wouldn’t change it even if I had known the way the stories were gonna end. As painful as it was to watch the one guy hit the … I watched someone dying on … I’ve watched THREE people die. I watched a daughter die in my arms. I saw a man dying in the street. The man … the first man that I ever loved in my life … I watched him laid out in the middle of the road after he hit a brick wall going 90 miles an hour. I had to see that with my own eyes.
And then I watched my husband “dying out loud“. I watched him. I didn’t … I wasn’t with him when he shot himself, but I watched him dying. I watched it day by day. It was the worst thing. I mean, I can’t even tell you. It was so hard to do. It was unbearable to see a human being dying in front of me. But I did it. But I wouldn’t … and had I … even had I known the way it was gonna end, I wouldn’t trade it. I wouldn’t trade it for the world, because I figured out the secret. I figured out … I figured everything out and I’m so thankful for that.
Please, God, let it be me! Let me be the one to have absorbed the very last drops of poison that bled out and suffocated the rotting roots of our sick and dying tree so that the branches of my children and theirs will reach up and touch the Sun instead of digging back down into hell. I am humbled and honored to have been chosen for such a sacred calling and for getting to know “the secret”.
Happy Birthday to this song I’ve been listening to faithfully for going on thirty-one years now. It, too, has transcended the time, space, and beautiful changing seasons of my life.
Listen, I dunno who needs to hear this right now, but pain really does demand to be felt, and dare I say that internalized pain that doesn’t hurt you anymore is actually dangerous. So, if you’re that child in a long line of family people who either refused to feel a thing and chose to avoid dealing with that gift that just kept on fucking giving, KNOW THIS:
But none of them were ever gonna heal from it unless someone finally faced and ROSE from it, and that, my fellow black sheep, was YOU validating the realities that no one wanted to talk about. You CANNOT move on from all that generationally gifted pain until you face, FEEL, and overcome the gauntlet of emotions and friction you WILL endure as you go through this journey to freedom.
PAIN
I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all. (Three Days Grace)
Nine years ago today, the Dallas County Bureau of Vital Records finally issued my husband’s court-ordered delayed certificate of birth because his “parents” couldn’t be bothered to memorialize his birthday legally:
In case you didn’t know by now, my husband’s childhood was less than optimal. His mother all but threw him away beginning the day he was born, then left him for good 18 months later, because, I suppose, he wasn’t as “stellar” as his older three siblings who were good enough for her to stick around for. It was only ever him she didn’t want, and trust me when I tell you, it’s been a sobering reality for him to wake up to every day. Keep in mind also that almost from the onset of meeting him, and especially once we got married, I’d been asking (if not begging) for the “family” he was left with after “the thing that gave birth to him” kicked him to the curb to please find some pictures of him as a child. Even one. JUST ONE? Does anyone have even ONE picture of this man from his childhood? But I’ve digressed.
With that in mind, here are a few things for all you parents out there to think about, and even all you hands-on aunts, uncles, and primary caregivers. Remember, it’s not just those of us who have procreated who can have seriously positive and life-changing impacts on the little people standing in our halo (or toxic and malignant ones).
Are you painting your self-portrait small with just a tiny “here and now” brush, or are you creating an EPIC masterpiece with MUCH broader strokes that even your grandkids’ grandkids will treasure? Are you living out loud with power, grace, passion, and purpose? Your children and THEIR children will reap EXACTLY what you sow, so, SHOW THEM everything you TELL THEM! And (ps), don’t forget to keep a journal or keepsake memorializing all the memories and highlights so you don’t leave your “here and now” as a mystery or a subject for debate. Leave your fingerprints on everything (but hopefully not bloody ones like the ones my husband’s “parents” left all over him and my “father” is leaving all over us.
But more so than anything …
Be honest with your kids. Talk to them. Spend time with them. Share what’s in your heart, what you stand for, and what you believe in (but don’t shove it down their throats). Let them know it’s okay, if not encouraged, to take a different path than you. Let them know that you DON’T want them to be your “mini-me”, but rather, “the first of THEM“.
In the meantime …
To My Kids:
Please know how hard I’m really trying to change the crooked trajectory of this family tree. Yes, I very much do want you to find new and different paths of your own and not be “mini-mes”. I want you to be the first and the last of both of you and brave enough to CHOOSE happiness. More so than anything, I hope someday when the time has come, you’ll listen to this song and think of me, but know also that when I hear it now, I think of both of you. You’re not just my legacy … you’re the LIVING love letters I never want to stop reading while I’m still here with you. Remember that …
LEGACY
Won’t you walk with me ’til both of our feet bleed? Won’t you walk with me through the blindness we can see? If I set you free, will you promise me I will see you again? I will walk with you ’til both of our feet bleed. ‘Cause we are one … we run free … I am you and you are me. You sacrificed everything. I am and will always be your legacy. I will dance with you ’til the shadows slip away. I will lay my hands on you to ease your pain. I will sing to you, I will guide you for everything. Won’t you dance with me till the shadows slip away? We are one … we run free … I am you and you are me. You sacrificed everything. I am and will always be your legacy. I promise I will see you again. I will find you on the other side. {In This Moment}
Spider-Man’s black alien costume debuted in 1984, with the story of how Peter Parker acquired it told in Secret Wars #8. The costume was later revealed to be a living symbiote. After Peter rejected it, the symbiote bonded with Eddie Brock, a reporter with a serious grudge against Spider-Man. Together, Eddie and the symbiote became Venom, whose first full appearance came in The Amazing Spider-Man #300 in 1988. So then, no, Venom is not Spider-Man.
Long story short? I don’t think you really know how fucking CRUEL the world can be until you’ve had to grow up and protect your children from your own “family.” If you are one of us fighting desperately to change your family’s legacy, I’m truly sorry that you’re having to spend your adulthood fixing things you didn’t break so that your children can have a better future. “The battle that lies within you” is not for the faint of heart, and I FEEL YOU! Stay strong. Keep the faith. RISE ABOVE! Oh, and by the way, to the “malignant parent” reading this right now: always remember that how your kids treat you when they no longer need you is a direct reflection of how you treated them when they needed you to survive.
As for me? I’ve since learned that the best way to end an infectious relationship “disease” is to just let it fuckin’ STARVE! No contact! No responses! No reactions! No NOTHING! Just stop feeding the slimy thing, ’cause the energy you put into it is where its power lies. K, bye!
Why are you doing this? What’s your reason? Who’s your audience? Will you ever actually take the stage? Guess what, people? The day will surely come when I’ll finally reach for a microphone and hit an actual stage with the unfiltered roar of all the truth bombs and hard-earned wisdom I’ve gotten to earn on a road that’s been laden with broken glass, bloodied hands, and tired feet. But for now?
One of the speakers I was privileged to sit before this weekend, Tu “Ronin” Lam, said:
One moment can change the day. One day can change a life. One life can change the world.
Well, if this exchange between me and my son isn’t proof positive that I’m exactly where I need to be doing exactly what I was meant to do, then … well … never mind that. IT IS! You see, these weren’t just simple texts between a mother and her son. They were “a moment” … a moment for me to take the most important stage of all before the “kid” who is still very much watching me.
After reading the letter my father had taped to my steering wheel during dinner, the dam that had been protecting what was left of my psyche finally broke. I was having a nervous breakdown, and by the wee hours of the next morning, I was medically assisted to The Meadows in Wickenburg, Arizona, where I received the inpatient treatment I’d been avoiding for at least a decade for the Molotov cocktail of psychological anguishes that had been simmering in my mind since the day I was born.
As I write this, I can still “see” that moment playing in my mind as though it were happening right this minute and can “feel” the visceral reaction I was having that day as my nervous system was being flooded with unfathomable, raw emotion and rendering me insane. I literally couldn’t breathe, but could feel the adrenaline slowly leaving my body as it bled out through my fingertips. I was crumbling! Then, when I looked up and saw my babies standing in that doorway, I was absolutely fucking DONE!
It would be years before I truly understood that my burgeoning decline in mental health was the catalyst for some of the best days of my life that were yet to come, and that I was temporarily sacrificing my psyche for the betterment and bulletproofing of my future and my children’s futures.
Even so, it was they who ultimately made the biggest sacrifices of all. In so many ways, I was their Thanos, and they were my Gamora. Like Thanos, the seemingly “selfish” behaviors and choices I’d been making that had led to my madness were, in truth, for selfless reasons. I didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Hey, I think I’ll just destroy everyone’s lives.” I woke up one day and said, “Hey, none of this is working. None of this is right. I have to do something once and for all to try and make their world better.” Even still, the fallout and collateral damage were the same. I hadn’t just blown up my own life; I’d blown up my babies’ lives as well.
I know for a fact there were angels present with all of us as that tragic scene played out, and if it is true that angels cry, they had to be crying their eyes out as they witnessed what was happening on that driveway. They literally had to peel my 17-year-old son from my body as I was being taken away. He, too, was crumbling, and I can’t recall another time I’d ever seen him cry so much. And Gia? My precious daughter who just needed her mommy to pick her up and hold her? She looked so lost and confused, and I can still see that look of fear in her eyes.
