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Hard is Hard

A post about some of the difficult things going on in life…

Why is it that writing about shitty things in your life is so much more difficult than writing about positive things? I can think of a million reasons why I shouldn’t write about them, and 999,999 of them are bullshit anxiety reasons about how my problems aren’t important enough to voice.

Someone you write about will see it and recognize themselves and be upset with you or be hurt.

Someone you wish would see it never will and it won’t help to say it if they don’t.

The worst offender for me is the idea that my problems are insignificant and I’m not important enough for anyone to truly care about how I feel. I am lucky enough to have family that loves me, even if they’re the cause of a lot of strife in my life. And most of them would be surprised if they knew how often I fantasize about suicide and how I could do it. How I’ve thought of driving to a field in the country and swallowing a bottle of pills in my car.

How I thought about how I should bring the lawn and leaf trash bags to sit in so that when my bodily functions cease, I don’t permanently fuck up the car seats when I piss and shit myself.

Even worse would be the fact that I most often think about these things when my kid is going off on me. My own kid. I love him and I would die for him, and he’s had a really rough shake in life.

And right now, I am all that he has. Family is an entire state away, he’s had shitty luck making friends in a new(ish) town, his dad and stepmom have abused him, he was raped by a cousin before he hit double digits, he’s been bullied in school. So I am his rock. I am the bucket into which he dumps his overflow of feelings, and often those feelings are full of sharp, painful words.

All the ways in which he feels I’ve failed him, my own insecurities, all thrown in my bucket. And these days, my bucket is often almost at capacity.

My bucket has always been the reliable one into which others could dump their excess and lighten their own load. I always found ways to lighten my own bucket, and now I realize it was probably a convenient slow leak – things just tended to cool down with time for me, I could sleep on things for a night or two and generally the bothersome feeling ebbed on its own.

As I’ve grown older, it’s like the wood has expanded and the slow leak has resolved itself.

Or perhaps it’s that feelings filled my bucket that were too big to drain through that small leak. Feelings that I had when I found out my boyfriend was sexting four of his exes, telling them he loved them, telling them terrible things about me. Feelings I had when I found out that while I was at my grandmother’s funeral, he was at home saving pictures of one of his exes to his Google Drive. Feelings about how he would gaslight me when I confronted him. Feelings about how shitty he was with my kid.

Feelings about how I shouldn’t have let it happen, how I should have ended things the first time I found evidence of his infidelity and read the saved texts to one ex saying he had a dream that he asked her to marry him and she said yes.

On top of those feelings are all the feelings that settled in that bucket surrounding the deaths of my grandparents. They raised me from birth and were parents to me, more so than my birth parents were while I was growing up. I was the only person with my grandpa when he went to the ER with severe abdominal pain. I asked the doctor if it was an ulcer, and I’ll never forget the feelings that crashed in the bucket when he said, “Oh no, we’re pretty sure it’s cancer.”

The feelings started feeling like rocks when I got a call from my aunt in the middle of the night telling me that my grandpa had died, just one week before my birthday. I always joke, even though it’s not a joke, that I must be the Angel of Death because so many people in my life have died the same month I was born. I will never forget walking into that room and seeing his waxy pallor, his eyes closed, and his mouth open, slack-jawed. He was bony and thin, because the cancer had eaten him away – literally. It ate a hole in his colon, and it was inoperable because his type of cancer could be transmitted through the air if they had tried to operate.

When we told my grandma, she closed her eyes and moaned, “noooo” over and over again. One week later, the night of my grandpa’s funeral, she was brought to the ER and it was discovered that one of her diabetic ulcers developed gangrene. If they amputated the leg, she likely never would have recovered. She opted for hospice instead. My bucket could barely hold the feelings I had when I had to work instead of being with my family at her bedside because just a few months prior, my old job had to lay me off due to miscalculations by the CFO. So I got a day of bereavement leave for each of their deaths, and any other time off was unpaid.  As a mother who barely made enough, I couldn’t afford not to work. So my anxiety swam through that full bucket every day, waiting for a call that I had missed it. Missed saying goodbye. Thankfully it happened while  almost all her family was by her side, myself included. And I had the good fortune to sing to her to try and help her relax so she could let go. And I held her hand while I watched her face, wide-eyed and mouth gasping, take her last breath and finally release into peace and stillness, three weeks to the day after my grandpa.

My grief was handled alone as I became the rock to everyone else. Handled isn’t even the right word for it. It went ignored as I let everyone else pour their excess into my bucket. And then all the terrible things began to happen. As it often does, death brought out the worst in some family members. Money became a motivator, and they acted as though each red cent of their painstakingly maintained insurance policies was a gasp of oxygen and they needed it to live. I wanted to strangle the breath from them and give it back to my grandparents. I wanted to punch them and scream that I’d give every dollar to have them back. More big feelings as I watched the ugly sides of my parents, the people I was supposed to lean on, show themselves. I cannot forget it, and I cannot let myself fully trust them ever again.

Then the blow that no parent is prepared for – finding out their child was abused. I can’t describe the feelings I had when my son told me, but I remember it like it was yesterday. And he asked me not to tell anyone who didn’t need to know. He was already afraid to tell me, because his abuser threatened to kill him if he ever told anyone else. And so beyond people who were necessary, no one knew what had happened. I respected his wish for silence, and I wouldn’t take it back for anything. But the weight of what happened to my bright, lovely, sunshine child was heavy. And fighting for justice within the legal system, alone, was hard as fuck. The justice system doesn’t do much when the perpetrator is a juvenile, and my son ended up having to jump through more hoops than anyone which led him to develop the feeling that he was being punished for what happened to him. He’s never truly recovered from that, and it infuriates me whenever I think about it.

He was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and talk therapy wasn’t working. I decided to try medication to help him cope better with daily life while we continued talk therapy. Eight months later, he was on Prozac and his doctor doubled the dosage because he thought he was metabolizing it too quickly. He was wrong.

One night it was like a switch flipped in my son, he went off and was threatening to stab us, laughing in my face as I cried, and  more. I told him I was going to have to have him committed to a treatment facility, and the switch flipped back. He broke down in tears, and begged me to get him help because he couldn’t control what was happening. I brought him to the ER to be admitted to inpatient treatment and the doctor said it was from too many video games and treated me like an idiot when I explained it was from an increased dosage of medication.

We spent three days and two nights in the ER waiting for a bed, and were finally discharged with a referral for outpatient treatment.

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A Figure Appeared In The Darkness

A figure appeared in the darkness. In the gleam of the moonlight, I knew it was her, the woman who gave me life. She was small but managed to overwhelm the room with her haughty pride. Her words always cut. They were sharp. The wounds were deep.

They pour out of me and saturate my speech, my art, my work, my relationships.

“What the fuck do you want!?” I demand.

She stands still, as if waiting to pounce. Even silence is a weapon.

“You don’t belong here.” I explain.

She’s dead.

Why is she still here? Why can’t I be rid of her?

She never wanted me. I didn’t belong to her.

I was in her way.

She was compelled by her narcissism, there was no room for anyone or anything else. She hated me for being born, for taking up time and resources. She would have easily sold me if it meant she would now be supreme, the fairest of all. She was the monster in my closet.

She had compassion and love for a few. She left none for me. She made me feel undeserving.

Every time my mother saw me, she realized her mortality, her own demise. She hated me for my youth. She couldn’t stand that I was a specimen of beauty and each day it grew; it was going to outshine her.

She knew that. She couldn’t control it.

So she controlled how I felt about myself. She made sure I knew I was ugly.

She told me every day, “You’re so ugly!” She wished I was a boy. Boys were better.

She didn’t have to compete with boys; she could manipulate them more easily.

She didn’t place value on my academic achievements; to her, I was worthless and stupid.

She didn’t graduate high school. She hated me for having opportunities she never did. She tried desperately to hold me back from being successful at anything.

I was the Repunzel in this warped retelling of the story.

The mother (the witch) had fallen from the high tower and was blinded by the thorn brush she herself harvested. Now she’s an aimless spirit, wandering the halls of my home. She wrestles with an unknown assailant as Jacob wrestled with the angel. She’s asking me for something, but she can’t speak.

Is it forgiveness?

Is she asking me for my blessing?

If I do forgive her and let her go, does this mean I’m free?

Will I ever be free?

 

My Person

Recently, someone came back into my life.

This person was my whole entire world for three years. This was My Person, the love of my life.

They loved me.

Completely.

All my flaws.

My Person made me feel whole.

my person

My Person calmed the negativity I had in my life.

My Person held me when I needed to cry. They listened when I needed to yell. This person sat behind me and picked head lice out of my hair for 8 hours when I cried because no one else in my life would help me. My Person was so beyond good for me.

Then, slowly I started letting the negative creep back in, I let the people that were supposed to care talk me into believing them instead of this amazing person I had in my life.   

You see, I always knew I was a failure. 

I always knew I would never amount to anything.

My Person believed in me and my worth and well… I really don’t know.

I have no excuses except I was young and dumb and influenced easily by people that should have been supporting me.  I longed for THEIR approval and love and if I didn’t have that, why should I deserve anything else.

I left this amazing person with a heavy heart but headed in a direction I was being basically shoved into for many years.

I married, had kids, was verbally and emotionally abused before I finally left.

Even after I left I tried to make it work. I mean, no one else would ever want me.

During this time I searched out My Person.

They’d moved far away to another land.

They seemed happy and from what I could see from my computer screen didn’t want me anymore.

I did reach out, I called, I emailed, I basically stalked this person.

But they had moved on. I was just a memory to them; that was okay. After all, I didn’t deserve them.

Fast forward a few more years.

I still watched My Person from afar. I was friends with their family but still had not contact with My Person.

That was okay. I was happy knowing they were happy.

I met someone, dated for a few years, got married again. And I am finally HAPPY!  Well, at least most of the time. My old negative thoughts are all still there but I’m mildly successful at pushing them down.

A couple weeks ago, My Person showed up in my life again like a whirlwind.

They have never been far from my thoughts; I still watched.

But here they were in my inbox and we’ve been talking and it’s like the last twenty years disappeared and I am right back where I was, where we were; My Person and I.

And I am so so so in love. I always was.

And I’m torn: how can I love two people this much?  What do I do?

I need this person in my life, they are a part of me has been missing for so long.

It’s like I got my right hand back.  I need them to know I love them. Because I do…

…but we can’t be together.

I love where I am now, I love the person I’ve married. I love my home and my job. Right now? There’s half a century and twenty years between us, but I still need them in my life.

I find my mind wandering a lot lately.

The what if’s. 

I find myself wanting to wake up in one of those stupid romcoms where everything is different but it just seems right and you don’t want to wake up.

I want to find a damn DeLorean and make different choices.

I’m Tired

I’m Tired
I’m tired of acquiring but never keeping nice things; possessions I work arduously for that are torn up, soiled or otherwise destroyed.
I’m tired of endless piles of laundry, clothes strewn across the floor, indistinguishable as clean or dirty, but washed again nonetheless.
I’m tired of chaos, of the arguing, of the drama and constant conflict that ages my soul.
I’m tired of being shown how for granted I’m being taken.
I’m tired of never knowing if I’m coming or going.
I’m tired of feeling responsible for the complete care of everyone else and sacrificing my own care of self.
I’m tired of feeling chronically exhausted.
I’m tired of my complaints and concerns being pushed aside, minimalized and marginalized.
I’m tiring of knowing “things could always be worse” as a means to not being able to be entitled to my emotional journey.
I’m tired of listening to others during their times of deepest sorrow, frustration or fear and being a pillar of strength for them but rarely being given my own time to grieve.
I’m tired of being told I’m hormonal.
I’m tired of having my emotions rationalized for me.
I’m tired of being expected to “deal with it” and accept that “it’s just part of being a parent” or “being an adult”.
I’m tired of feeling like I cannot still express my inner child, have big dreams and be encouraged to chase them.
I’m tired of adults bullying other adults.
I’m tired of divisiveness and actions that only perpetuate further trauma and abuse.
I’m tired of being an angry white female.
I’m tired of feeling threatened by PRIVILEGED WHITE MEN
I’m tired of fearing for my own safety, bodily autonomy and well-being EVERY DAY.
I’m tired of, when expressing my concerns and frustrations, being called names like snowflake, FEMINAZI, bitch and CUNT.
I’m tired of working myself until I’m literally ill and yet still feeling immense guilt for purchasing that $19 shirt at Target.
I’m tired of the pressure to be the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter/sister/nurse.
I’m tired of attachment titles.
I’m tired of being expected to take a side when my beliefs lie somewhere in the middle.
I’m tired of women having no safe place to candidly talk and share without fear of persecution, name calling or mean-spiritedness.
I’m tired of male violence against women.
I’m tired of watching so many of my fellow brothers and sisters continue to live lives full of anger, resentment and self-entitlement, oblivious to their own inner demons.
I’m tired of Dr. Google. I will always side with evidence backed scientific studies.
I’m tired of watching parents put their children at risk for a lifetime of illness because of a handful of conspiracy theorists.
I’m tired of trying to explain facts to those same people and them finding a means to justify EVERY SINGLE TIME.
So, I’m tired of selective ignorance where there is a literal WORLD of information at mere fingertips.
I’m tired of reckless, self-serving decisions of others that may adversely affect countless people.
I’m tired of online battles, egocentric conversations and people’s inability to say “I’m sorry” or “I was mistaken”.
I’m tired of being oppressed because of my gender.
I’m tired of being objectified because of my outward appearance.
I’m tired of consistently having to maintain a stern exterior to protect my children and myself from pervasive predators.
I’m tired of mean, bitter people.
I’m tired of always being strong.
I’m tired of being responsible for everyone’s emotions, blatantly disregarding my own.
I’m tired of letting things roll off my back all the while knowing they will  puncture me on the way down.
I’m tired of pretending I’m always unbreakable.
I’m tired of violence, both via the media and in the world.
I’m tired of endless wars, of which neither party will ultimately win.
I’m tired of our elected officials, having taken oaths to serve citizens and country, acting like nothing more than selfish, insecure middle school children.
I’m tired of relentless mind games, fear mongering and empty threats.
I’m tired of being tired.
I’m tired of taking on all of this weight.
I’m tired of being accused of attacking others when I can no longer keep it all in and finally break down and speak my mind.
I’m tired of the fragile male ego and the need of constant reassurance.
I’m tired of watching women lessen themselves to help a man feel significant.
I’m tired of toxic masculinity.
I’m tired of men trying to justify their bad behavior as “urges” or “needs” or the old adage “boys will be boys”.
I’m tired of watching the world in its current state; its destroyers in utter denial.
I’m tired of ALL THE GREED- It has caused abuse, war, human mutilation and countless children’s deaths.
I’m tired of society’s RIDICULOUS expectations of the ideal female form.
I’m tired of fake tits, tight asses and flat tummies.
I’m tired of men expecting “perfection” in a woman while they fill their ever expanding waistlines with chicken wings and beer.
I’m tired of the ass-patters, the at-a-boy-ers.
I’m tired of seeing blame shifting, scapegoating and flat out lying all in pathetic attempts to save face and avoid accountability.
I’m tired of feeling stretched far too thin, always dancing on the edge, but never actually jumping.
I’m tired of cooking countless dinners, only to have them picked at by children.
I’m tired of washing dishes with tears of frustration in my weary eyes because the dinner I made and threw out was the last of the food budget.
I’m tired of pretending to be OKAY.
I’m tired of never being allowed to own my feelings.
I’m tired of sharing and being condemned for doing so.
I’m tired of hard swallows and “I’m fines” through gritted teeth and clenched fists; anxiety attacks in the bathroom between motherly duties.
I’m tired of pushing through my own emotions inappropriately in order to quickly address the needs of others.
I’m tired of finger pointing; defensive, argumentative conversations.
I’m tired of waiting for inevitable civil war, feeling riddled with anxious anticipation EVERY DAY.
I’m tired of the pandemic that is disrespect, both for others and self.
I’m tired of trying to fix everything.
I’m tired, I’m tired. I’m tired…
I think it’s time I rest.

I originally wrote this for my blog this past September and it remains one of my favorite writings to date. Thanks for reading!

#feminist #metoo #womensrights #angryfeminist #female #motherhood #powertothefeminist

I Forgive

Forgiveness is an interesting concept.

In order to fully live my life in the ways I’d like, I must forgive myself and others. I must be grateful for being forgiven.

Thank you for forgiving me for:

Being mean to you.

Taking our friendship for granted.

My snot-nosed-brat behavior.

My poor choice in friends at the time.

When I used you.

Leading you on.

I forgive you for:

Telling me that I wasn’t cool enough to be your friend, but only at school.

Bullying me.

Treating me as an inferior being.

Slamming my hand in my eighth grade locker.

Not keeping your word.

Not being there when I needed you most.

Giving up on our friendship.

Emotionally and verbally abusing me.

Cheating on me, and continually lying to my face.

Coming way too close to hitting me.

Using me and leeching off of me.

Making me let myself feel like a crazy, clingy girlfriend.

But. Most of all, I forgive myself.

In my lifetime, I’ve been far worse to myself than anyone else has been to me. I’ve bullied and hated myself. I’ve clung to anger. I’ve ignored my instincts. I’ve verbally and emotionally assaulted myself.

No more.

I forgive myself. It’s time to heal and let go. It’s time to be kinder and gentler with myself and others.

And so, I forgive and let go. I float on, always remembering to be grateful, to forgive, and to love.

The Taming and Naming and Possible Maiming of Your Demons

My name is Roxanne.…and I have many demons.

Yet, all of them have always been under my control. I just didnʻt know it.

All this time, I thought they had complete control of me, but the truth is, and has always been, that my demons for me, like yours for you, are ours to tame, name and obliterate (maim). Once they are tamed and named, they can no longer control you.

They can only be your bitches.

While this might seem very simple, I know it is anything but. I know that it is a demon son of a bitch to deal with the thoughts we think, and it is worse when the PTSD kicks in. I know, too, that people think you are pretending, but, I know that you cannot possibly pretend to be the thing that you have been fighting your whole life long – that thing that other people think and believe is your identity, or, sometimes, they think it is your mask.

Itʻs not.

It is PTSD.

It is the monster that no one thinks about becoming real in the lives of domestic violence survivors, and the irritating little mother fucker of a demon that likes to rear its head just when you thought you had the shitty little thing tamed. You find out quickly that these demons donʻt want to be tamed.  They want to be what you want to be, which is free and wild. They want to be free to run wildly amok in the hallways of your memory, fucking with you until tears fall, and not only do others stop seeing the real you, even you stop seeing the person you always knew yourself to be.

My own demons like to play with me, they like to knock the fuck out of reality and truth, and they like to tell me that I’m not at all what others think me to be.  My demons tell me all the time that I am not capable of doing things the right way, because I do things my way, and my demons like to remind me that I am not the prettiest, or the smartest, they tell me I am the most irritating person and that even the people who love me the most also and equally loathe me.

My own demons fight with me, argue the truth until there is nothing left of it, the proverbial pile of mindfuck particles left scattered around my psyche like some sort of diabolical confetti comprised of the memories that made me feel better, or made me feel awful, or made me think things that were not the truth, or made me believe that I was not ever in control of who I am…but that they were.

Then one day I figured out that those demons were askinʻ for it.  They were literally, by right of their continuing to pop up in my life at the most inconvenient times, asking to be seen to, to be heard, to be told what to do and how to behave. They needed me to see to them, to stop feeding them the bullshit that, for so long, had made them sick and ugly and loathsome, and just completely miserable, and that kept me under their control.

Lots of times we do not see that we might be dealing with someone elseʻs demons, and ones that they show to us, and only us, for the purposes of healing them, through the power of love and truth all at one time.

Sometimes, the demons respond favorably, and other times, they fight back, wanting to live and be heard until they no longer have voice to scream at us with, or anger to flail through us with, or any other way of being or thinking that lives within us, because instead of letting them become like flying monkeys, we make them into the little fuckers who, no matter what, we have control of.

We canʻt see ourselves as anything but works in progress, and as such, sometimes we need to help those parts of who we are that are not that great. We need them to compare them to what we want to see, what is already there, and what just requires a little coaxing….

All our lives, we were told who we were.

Then one day, someone broke us.

Then one day the demons who wore their faces showed us who we were not, but we only believed what the vile little bastards told us COULD happen.

We chose not to believe it.

We chose to no longer believe the lies, or the pain, or anything else that was not the truth.

This is what the demons gave me…

The Truth.

Donʻt kill your demons.

Tame them.

Name them.

Make them your bitches.

Theyʻre way more fun than flying monkeys.

And they shit less, too…

Just sayinʻ.