Soul Mosaic

Today’s Gift Quote:

“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

Rumi

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My “gift posts”

While I am away from my desk, I will leave “daily gift posts” for all.

When I return, I will resume my memoir posts.

In the meantime, a reminder of the purpose of this blog:

This blog is my way of honoring what I lived through and had to do to reach “today” in as healthy a way as possible.

The posts here tell the story of the pain I’ve carried because my life was not whole.

It wasn’t whole because I’ve had so many questions and no answers. All I’ve had was the confusion of a lifetime, because so much of my life was in broken fragments I could not make sense of.

So this blog, which I hope to form into a memoir for publication, is my journey to find answers. It is my way to piece the fragments back together, see the whole picture, and find the understanding that brings healing.

While I write for myself, I am also writing to give to anyone else who wants it, an example of this kind of journey. It is not the only way, but it is my way.

And I write to bear witness to the pain of so many others harmed by abuse of any kind, especially for those who can’t tell their story…or those who didn’t live to tell their story.

Lastly, I offer it all here in the hope that it helps another not to feel alone as they do their own life’s work.

With love

Deb

A Moment of Reflection, Fatigue, and Gratitude

It is the season for a “time-out” moment to catch my breath over the next week. I have been hard at work on this project since June and have a ways to go. I am relieved and satisfied for the work I’ve been able to do so far, and am focused on continuing this path soon. But I will also admit to being somewhat drained. So a week to regroup is in order.

Even so, I will still be putting in “writing time” each day, just not things ready to post yet. This next phase I will be writing about was a time of descent into despair, then working my way back, all while spinning in a vortex of messy changes that came fast and furious. So, before I will be ready to post those pieces, I need some time to reflect and plan out those drafts.

For this moment, I want to say I feel deep gratitude for the work. It has brought me back to parts of myself I had rejected and hated for a lifetime. It has altered my perspective about who I was as that younger person, and restored my love for my younger self, something that had been impossible my whole life.

I am also grateful to those who follow my process. I thank you for sharing the path with me and appreciate your company and support.

Gift Posts

As I did at Thanksgiving, I will be providing daily “Gift posts” over the next week. Quotes I have found soothing, honest, comforting. But I have tried to choose carefully as well.

The holidays can be a difficult time for people, even when surrounded by joy, loved ones, and good moments.

I have lived through years where I reveled in the spirit of the season, and other years where I couldn’t wait to be on the other side of the holidays. The songs, the frenzied activities, all of it was sometimes too much, especially in painful years.

So I have tried to pick the quotes carefully. Hopefully, I have avoided anything trite and instead shared ones with a sense of peace, no matter what the year is like. They are my gift to all of you.

I will resume the regular posts after Christmas. By then, I know the Universe will have given me a clear idea of how to navigate those pieces. And I will be somewhat restored.

In the meantime, much love and peace to you all, no matter what holiday you celebrate, or don’t.

Deb

Piecing a household together

I don’t remember a lot of the next month or so. Much of it was a blur of working, unpacking the few boxes (mostly books) of my belongings, and securing the many things I was going to need to exist in my condo.

Yes, I had dishes. And my dog — a new young dog from a friend who bred miniature poodles. Charlie…Charlemagne. My companion. He was an incredibly smart dog — the only one of my books he chewed up, no lie, was: “How to Train Your Poodle.” Uncanny.

Also, my boss from work had kindly thrown me a housewarming party that brought me a lot of really useful things I did not have — kitchen and cooking tools, towels, and all the basics I had not yet acquired.

Then there was furniture. My mother and I visited the local discount store – “Railroad Salvage” — where I managed to pick up a bed, sofa, a couple of lamps, and a few other items – my sparse furniture for the condo.

I had taken along my sofa bed and bookcases from home. A friend of my mother’s gave me her old table set and a very old washer and dryer that still worked. And I went to the local department store to pick up those pressboard kits for a TV stand and microwave stand.

Somewhere in there, I had a laparoscopic surgery, a procedure where they make a tiny cut in your navel and insert a tube with a camera and pump you full of gas to expand the area for clear visibility. I’d been having more abdominal pain, so the doctor decided to check it out. He found some ovarian cysts but nothing else, and at least those were benign. So the pain was shrugged off as the cysts. And while that procedure leaves you feeling a bit like a shaken-up soda bottle – every time you sat up or lay down, the gas bubbles fizzed in your gut until they were eventually absorbed — it was a lot better than the gallbladder surgery I’d had a few years earlier. As to the abdominal pain, it would still be years before I, or medical science, would understand the connection between abdominal upset, ovarian cysts, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, abuse, and stress.

Overall, I was settling into a peace and quiet I hadn’t known my whole life. And loving that. At least until I came home one day and discovered my father had gone into my condo, unannounced.

The hemorrhage

The posts of the last several days have been heavy to write.

I dreaded facing this part of my life. For almost 50 years, I refused to look back there. I was always compassionate toward my younger, child self. But I judged my young adult self hatefully.

When I found the journals I’d written then, I was first grateful for a record of exactly what I thought and felt and lived through because I’d forgotten so much. But I was also scared to death of what I’d find. Had I been even more shameful and stupid than I thought?

My “self-rescue”

“The trick to navigating the Descent is not to despair, and not to push too hard — but to let the new story emerge in its own time. So our sad princess becomes mired in the dank marshes of simple survival…the system…that keeps so many of us trapped in a life we hadn’t entirely planned to be living…..Hers isn’t a happy life, but it is a life — and in all the best fairy tales, where there’s life, there is hope. Through all the long years, this princess refuses to give up. She endures the stasis and apprentices herself to the hard lessons…playing the long game — until one day, finally, she is ready to act, to move on. She seizes her opportunity to escape.

*One of the finest things about this story is that no one rescues this princess. After she’s suffered her time in the Underworld and grown old enough and wise, she discovers that now she has the resources, finally, to rescue herself.”*

From Sharon Blackie’s book, Wise Women: Myths and Stories for Midlife and Beyond

It was November. And the condo was ready. It was time for my escape, time to finally rescue myself.

Hunted down

The fire of the previous fall carried me forward with increasing intensity into early 1983. I continued adding to my professional skills by taking a course at a local university with a friend from work, in the Art of Supervising Others. Again, I still wasn’t sure where my career path would eventually lead me, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to add this to my resume.

I’d also met a man at one of the Cenacle retreats who was from my town and very pleasant to spend time with. While it was a sometimes thing and not serious, we both enjoyed going out to fine restaurants, so we got to explore a number of them over the coming months.

And I continued to spend some time camping with my friend’s family, enjoying the solitude of the woods. At least, until I was hunted down…

About the only thing I can say for 1981 was that, with few exceptions, it was “dormant.”

I gardened. And continued to wrestle with where and how to live.

I survived home.

I went to work. Did my job. And seemed to grow more confident in my skills.

The exceptions

The lifelong scar

“Why won’t you fight?!!!!!”

He leaned his face right into mine, and I could feel the heat of his breath. His eyes were molten blue-green fury, and I struggled to swallow as his fist, shoved up in my throat, twisted the neck of my shirt tighter. It was that years-long familiar choking move that I was never sure he was totally in control of. Through gritted teeth, he kept goading me to react, taunting me because I wouldn’t fight him.

But I had already assessed that flushed face and those hateful eyes, and knew that the stupidest thing I could do was shove him or hit back. I was scared and angry, but no idiot. While I hated the sense of being at his mercy, of feeling like I was a coward, I knew the only REAL way to fight him was to choose NOT to react. That absolutely enraged him.