Believing the Self

I grew up in a very dysfunctional family and was taught to disregard what was happening around me. Unfortunately, I learned too well and took those lessons with me into adulthood so that when I met adults I was involved in other people's sick games. I was astonished that I would be involved with the same things that I had tried so hard to escape. Again, what was happening me during those times as an adult I disregarded it especially when people told me that it was not happening. I believed them.

Things have changed. I write the things that are in my head now and I don't care what others say. I report it and take it as the truth. When I first found out that my house was stripped of its contents, I told my adult child that I was thinking of getting rid of some stuff when I got back. I did not want him to feel bad about what he did. When I got back to my house and saw the empty rooms where bookcases and books filled were I was heartsick. I saw the missing paintings, jewelry, television sets, furniture and sat in my room and became depressed and gained 20 lbs. Then I heard my ex-husband was coming back. I moved to Portland, Oregon.

I started to write in my journal and finally get mad. I began to see the enormity of what had happened to me. Then I had to get over the pain and detach and get on with my life. I did it with writing. There is still so much more to do. This morning, I started to edit some of my short stories. I got ready to take some art and exercise classes next month.

The family of my origin was such a dysfunctional family that my oldest sibling became a psychopath, my brother was a drug and alcohol addict who had issues with women and killed himself after a lifetime of unhappiness and depression. My parents are deceased now and although I ended up getting along with my mother during the last few years of her life, I never got along with my father and was glad when he died at 70 years or so. I was always afraid he would be a ghost and haunt me and I am glad to say he didn't. I had nightmares about him for years after his death. I never had nightmares about my mother after her death. I really believe she was a demon. I have nothing to do with my sister for she not only steals but does far worst and is better I stay away from her. All this I carefully note in my journals.

I am being more honest in this writing blog than I have been in the past. When I was a child, my father beat us all up with impunity. No one cared about this in those days of the early 1950,s and I still have the scars to prove it. My mother in her unhappiness beat us as well. Both of them were twisted sexually and abuse all of us from an early age. I worked hard to find help and did in Redding from providers that I paid myself. I could never get help from the Veterans Administration because there were so little help in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for women although this has changed somewhat in recent years. I also found that meditation especially writing meditation was a god-sent for me.

Now, when relatives tell me I said this or that, I tell them I am not in the same situation and tell them I never said that. I no longer let them tell me what is real and what is not. I tell myself what is in reality and what is not. I wish I could have learned this earlier, but it is good that I learned it now than never.

Writing has and is saving my life. Writing dangerously is writing honestly. It is being honest with not only the self but the public. It is putting things down in one's own voice. I have a friend who is gay and was told all of his life that there was something wrong with him because he did not want to find a woman and settle down and have children. He would rather have found a man and had a good time because he does not want to settle down with anyone because like me he finds trusting someone enough to live with is very difficult. Also he finds that he is a very happy man enjoying his life and not beating himself up because he lets others judge him. It took so long for me to stop doing that too. He helped me stop that by reading his memoirs along with my own writing. His family is angry at him for writing about his past with them and uncovering all of their ugly secrets. The last lawsuit was recently thrown out of court. They always are.

Not all of us have such ugly pasts but we all have pasts. We also have presents and it is good to record them because the minute we shut our eyes at night the present becomes the past. I watched an old movie, "The Mating Game", on Netflix last night. Everyone in the movie are no longer alive. I could look up all of the stars such as John Lund and Gene Tierney and see what happened to them after the movie was filmed and where they are buried.

We all end up in the cemetery at one point and it would be nice to record the past so we can read it and learn where we were last year, five or ten years before. It was too bad none of those people in that movie recorded their lives for all of them had interesting ones. Those are the ones who have entries in Wikipedia. Many of us won't. We should be the stars in our own lives. We would be if we are recording our lives and if necessary writing dangerously those things that happened to us to not only release the anger but to help others in similar places as my friend did in his memoirs.