On the Altar of My Parents Righteousness

I’m lying on my back, I’ve spent most of my life here, years I lived here, but things were always unpredictable and sometimes, randomly, I’d be untied. That was rare. There’s something different this time, a desperation in their eyes I’ve never seen before, I don’t understand it, but I don’t care, it won’t change what will happen. My heart will be cut out. There is never another ending, my heart is always cut out. My heart stopped growing back years, ago, but they don’t know that, they’re too busy to notice. For years now I’ve replaced the cut out heart with a fake.

The first time it was cut out they told me it was because I was strong willed, they said it would break my will and I’d be a better child, and god would love me more. I was so young I barely remember it. I wanted god to love me. I didn’t want to lose my heart. I lost it, they cut it out. The pain was searing, my chest felt like a fire had been built there. My will was broken. Like a trained monkey I now did everything without a murmur. I was a better child, god must love me more.

          

      The second time it was cut out it was to tame my rebellious spirit. I didn’t know I was rebellious, but my will was broken so I knew it should happen. After all, god would love me more. So my heart was cut out to break my will, to tame my rebellious spirit, to remove my lustful thoughts, to take away my disrespectful spirit, on and on and on. Eventually, the cutting stopped hurting, and eventually my heart stopped growing back, so I replaced it with a fake, after all a person without a heart cannot follow god with their whole being. It was a horrible secret I kept, I was without a heart. The secret ate at my soul and tore at my mind, in penance I began to point out reasons to cut it out hoping that in the cutting a new heart would form. Eventually, I lost all hope. I existed. I had no heart, existing was all I was capable of. I was lauded as the perfect child, the one all should be like, but they didn’t know my secret. I was without a heart.

                For your own good we do this, they said. Because we love you. Because we want you to be more like god. You’ll thank us when you’re an adult. All you do will be a testament to what we did for you. I believed them, after all they were my parents. So here I was again, tied down to the altar that was where I lived, blood pooled beneath my body, beneath the stones that made the altar. The grass was long dead, choked out by the blood. Sometimes I wondered how I was capable of still bleeding, after all, I had bled so much. They’re hands were covered in the blood. They had cut out my heart again. But they were not satisfied. I couldn’t remember why it was being dispatched with this time. I didn’t care. On their knees they were screaming. This was new, I idly wondered if they had finally killed me. I could hear the screaming, I was alive. That was disappointing.

                I started to listen to their words, they were yelling at me, possibly at god, I couldn’t tell, the words were incomprehensible. I noticed that they were washing something in the blood, they always did, I never noticed what is was. This time I realized it was their souls. Like an insane person with the worse kind of OCD they washed and rewashed their souls in my blood. Their words turned into a repeated wail. “Why is it not clean, why am I not righteous?” They looked in my chest to see if a heart had grown back so they could try again. Of course there wasn’t one. Their faces bowed in their bloody hands they wept. Their souls were tattered from the repeated washing. Convinced of their unrighteous they had washed their souls until they were stained in blood and torn by the sheer amount of washing. Finally, I realized this sacrifice was not for my good, this sacrifice was so they might call themselves righteous. If I had a heart I would have been angry, but I did not so I felt nothing.

                Like Isaac I had been sacrificed so that it might have been accounted to my parents as righteous. For some reason this time was different this time they realized that their sacrifice was not working. Instead of giving up in desperation they redoubled their efforts, and sacrificed more often. Their souls became more stained, more tattered, so they sacrificed even more.

                I heard rumors that once I reached a certain age the binds would loose of their own accord, and I’d be free to go. I did not believe the rumors, hope was something I had long learned to stamp out. Hope was dangerous, hope turned an ember into a raging wild fire, hope did nothing but cause more pain. Then something happened, my sister left. She was gone. Released from her bondage. I did not know what to think, but trained into my bondage I hated her, she had abandoned us. A year passed and my second sister left. Hope crept in without my knowing it had, one day I vowed I would follow them.

                Years passed, my parents had long since stopped coming to my altar, after all they had two new children to try to become righteous with again. But then one day my father was gone, he was done he said, he would never be righteous, and I knew that this was my fault, I suspected it was because I was without a heart. He left.

                My mother continued in vain to find righteousness hidden in the hearts and blood of the four children she had left. With her husband gone, she was that much more unclean. One day the bindings that held me to the stone fell away, I slid off onto the bloodied ground. My muscles were unused, I was terrified of this newness, so I slowly crawled back to the stone. Every night, I would get off, I would walk, my muscles became stronger with each passing day, and my hope grew. Then with screams ringing in my ears it was shattered. I saw for the first time what she was doing to my siblings, in anger I ran to them, I pushed her away, her surprise at my movement was palpable, she had not realized how strong I had become.

                At first she was angry, but then she was desperate, begging me she said she had to do it, it was for our good, if she was not righteous then how could we ever hope to be seen in the courts of god. For the first time I pitied her, she was after all blindly following what she had been taught. She was as desperate for our blood as a starved wolf is for meat. She was no human she was rabid. She had no choice.

                Night after night I stood guard over my brothers, I cut their bindings, I taught them how to use their minds, when numbed by the pain of losing their hearts. Something was happening inside of me, it was a slow painful progression. It was strange, and it was wild. Finally, I realized, my heart was growing back, but it was a different heart, it was a wild, dangerous heart. A heart that would murder to protect, a heart that could not and would not be cut out, a heart that was overpowering. A heart that could not stay in this wasteland, a heart that needed air to breathe.

                I knew that I had to leave. I fought against it, I tried to stay and protect my brothers, but I could not. I had to leave. So I left, weeping over my brothers altars, explaining that I could not stay knowing that they would feel abandoned. I walked away, a new metal armored plated affixed over my heart. I left. I walked into a new world, and I learned I that my new heart was not in need of taming, and righteous was something we were born with not something that required blood. 

Because Children Deserve Better

World Vision, a massive organization that is based on Christian values first announced that they would be allowing people who identify as LGBTQ to work for their ministry, 48hrs later after the loss of over 10,000 sponsorships they reversed this decision.

10,000 children lost the access to clothes, food, and educations because of a political stance. People this is not love.

I really have nothing more to say, what I have to say comes from a deep well of anger, and I am not interested in spewing any of this at you.

I will say this, if you support gay marriage, or if you are gay would you consider sponsoring a child or two that was dropped due to this controversy?

Let’s flood World Vision with requests for sponsorship from people who support gay marriage and are gay, because no matter their political stance people these children matter, so let’s support the children because that is love.

Let’s fight for our right to love freely by loving these kids freely.

If you know of any groups who could make this bigger than I ever could please do, children do not deserve to be the casualties of this issue. 

A Small Protest Against Hate and A Push for Love Instead

Chick-Fil-A has become my new favorite hangout. Not too far from school, not too far from my counselor, not too far from anything in this little town which is 45 min away from my home. The coffee is decent, (although my standards have plummeted since drinking Folgers on a daily basis in EMS) and the food is lovely. If I'm honest though, I come here because I am gay, and they disagree with me.

 Call me what you will, but I love this country I really, really love it, and what I love the most about it is that I am free to be gay, and Chick-Fil-A is free to disagree with me. I know that the Chick-Fil-A controversy is long dead, the reporters are done hashing it out, people, as people will, have long forgotten it. I have not though; I have not because I am slightly ashamed of the way it was handled. As a lesbian follower of Christ, I am ashamed of both sides. We say we are fighting for the same thing—the Love of Christ, and we show our love by picketing, shouting, and calling each other dirty names. Really? Could we not have left this behavior in grade school where it belongs? Although when I hear the way grade school children speak at times I think they have more pride than to stoop to what we have stooped to.

I wish that instead of picketing the LGBTQ community had massed at Chick-Fil-A all wearing shirts that said, I’m gay and I support Chick-Fil-A #freedomofspeech. Now that would have made a statement this country would never have forgotten. We want the right to publicly and legally marry, but we do not want the right for a CEO to say whatever the heck strikes his fancy? Am I the only one who sees the flaw in this logic? Whether we like it or not, we are a community, the internet has made distance in this country negotiable at best, and as a community we have to learn to get along. We cannot pick and choose our freedoms, either we are a free country, or we are not. Either we are free to choose our spouse, and free to say whatever we want to say or we have neither.

I support the LGBTQ community, obviously, I am part of it. I support freedom of speech, I exercise this right every day, and this is why I will continue my silent protest against the way people treat one another in the name of freedom, and eat at Chick-Fil-A. I might even order my t-shirt and wear it here one day.

I also support loving those who hate you. Recently, the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church died, and although I do not know any of the details that surrounded his death, I heard one of his last requests was that no one would protest at his funeral. I assume that request was not honored, although later I heard that there would be no funeral at all. I wonder though what would happen if instead of picketing a dead man’s funeral if LGBTQ community, and frankly the Christian community who was horrified by the choices of this Church, flooded the church with condolences.

A man who was loved died. No matter what he did in his life, and what hate he perpetuated, there are people who deeply grieve his loss. I know what it feels like to lose someone who is loved; I also know what it feels like to be hated for loving someone, has not every gay person felt this at some point in their lives? Instead of returning hate with hate, perhaps we should return hate with love. Love always makes a more powerful statement than hate. We want our love to be accepted, whether gay, or Christian, perhaps it is time we start being known for our love rather than our hate.

Although I have stayed out of these controversies and avoided social media when they happen, I will not be doing this in the future. I will be seeking out ways to show love in these situations. I eat at Chick-Fil-A, not because I agree with what they believe, I do not have to, I agree with their rights to freedom of speech. I will be sending a card to the Westboro Church family, not because I agree with anything their leader did, but because I am truly sorry for their loss, death is hard no matter how old the person, or who they are death is death, and death hurts, these are small protests against hate, but I hear every great movement starts with a small protest. 

My Story 1

This post contains abuse, if abuse stories trigger you, this one might. This story is to encourage myself that what is past, happened, is past, and no longer has to affect me, and to encourage others that perhaps they are not as alone as they think. This is the first story in a series.

Fear. So tangible, so constant, the taste on my tongue, the feeling in my gut, the panic in my mind.

I watched as it happened again, I was running in circles, circles, circles, trying to get away, I couldn’t because someone was holding my hair while everything that could be hit was being hit with a dowel rod.  I was running because I was panicked I was running because I could not stop. Eventually, I collapsed onto the floor and I was thrown up onto the bed, and I was spanked, until I guess mom just couldn’t hit me anymore. I had to lay there and catch my breath before I could move, and even then I was limping. For once mom did not give me a lecture, I just limped out of the room. I told myself I wouldn’t cry ever again. I tried to fathom what I had done wrong, what had caused this spanking and I just couldn’t. I simply did not know what I had even done.

Spanking involved being repeatedly hit with a dowel rod or a paint stick or a carbon arrow, when mom was in control it involved being hit anywhere from 3 to 20 times, with slight pauses in between each blow. When she wasn’t in control, when she was just infuriated she would hit until she was tired. Most of the times when she was in control was when I was in trouble in a group context like, when my sister closest to me and I both did something wrong. Somehow I, above all the other kids could make her infuriated with me.  

I was walking through the house the hangers clanking on my arm, trying to get some fun out of the house work, when she yells at me, “Stop making so much unnecessary noise!” Quickly, quickly for a five year-old I stopped the hangers. She turned towards me infuriated, “I TOLD YOU TO STOP.  I GUESS YOU HAD TO JUST DO IT ONE MORE TIME.” Then more quietly, “Come on you’re getting a spanking.” It was the first spanking of the day, and for some reason that day sticks in my mind because I literally think I got spanked about every five minutes, and not once was I even aware I was doing something wrong, or I was actually trying to be helpful, like when I spilt the food on the floor because I was trying to move it for my oldest sister who was cooking.

I tried to figure out how to be a better child, and realized I was simply doomed to be a horrible person, no matter what I did, I was wrong and in trouble. I decided then to try to be invisible.

When I was 10, during George W. Bush’s first election counting I got caught for not doing math. I stopped doing math for at least a solid year. I hated math, I hated school for that matter. I’m not the type of child who can just learn from a book and teach themselves, I don’t learn that way, I need to be taught. My mother gave us our books, gave us our schedule, gave us our chores, and expected us to complete them. She spent her time either on the computer, or in her room on the phone. When she got a laptop she was pretty much inseparable from it. When she came to “check” our work, either our chores, or our school work she was always random, and we never knew when it would happen.

I got called into her room and asked to bring her my math book that hadn’t been checked in a year. I frantically tried to cover it up by changing the dates in my previous math book, but that didn’t work, I was in trouble and I knew it. I know that I got spanked by mom and I don’t remember it, at this point in my life anything that was traumatic to me seems to have been simply edited out. I have a vague knowledge that she was intensely angry, that she called me lazy, and that I was told I would never finish school, I don’t remember the spanking. Which means it wasn’t three swats on the backside, it was brutal enough to be removed from my memory. When my father got home he was told what happened and that I hadn’t been punished for it. So he spanked me too, I don’t remember that either, and it had dawned on me recently that I do not remember a single spanking my father gave me, not one, and I know he gave me quite a few.

From then on I was supposed to do twice the amount of math work every day so I could catch up, and I was supposed to do it in my mother’s room, and I got spanked for two weeks every time I was supposed to do math. Each time I was hit 20 times. To this day doing math causes me to feel panicky, and I have to talk myself through the entire process.

I don’t remember not being bruised, or having a hard time sitting for long periods of time because it just hurt, the entire time I was growing up. I once thought I wasn't afraid of anything, but now I realize, that I was always afraid, and fear just became a normal part of my life, and when something is normal enough you forget that it's even there.

Memory loss is something that became common after about five, I remember being three, and four pretty vividly, my mom taught first grade at a Christian school and I was kept by someone else most of the time I was four. From then on anything that was traumatic was simply just edited out. Now I know that I disassociate when I feel like I’m in a traumatic situation. So in essence these things did not happen to me, they happened to that little girl over there who is an idiot and who also happens to look a lot like me. To this day when I remember something happening, I don’t remember it from my perspective; I remember it as if I watched the entire thing, including me from the opposite corner of the room. In other words when I picture a memory I picture myself along with everyone else.

I just now am coming to the realization that to remember things like this is not normal.

Now that I’m an adult I’m trying to re-connect with the parts of me that hold the edited out memories. Now I have a confusing pile of cut out pictures, like someone cut a picture out of a book, and without the context of the page they don’t make any sense. In the telling of these stories, I am trying to put the cut outs back into the pages they came from in my story, the problem is some of them are simply so brutal and disturbing I’m not sure how they could have really happened, and some of them involve people in my life that everyone else, including my siblings still hold in high regard. So the question I am constantly faced with is Real, or not real? And the answer is becoming more and more often, real. I’m just desperately trying to remember that not only is it real, but also far in my past. 

An Old Story Never Told

I have spent countless hours reading a new website that I have found—Homeschoolers anonymous.

After reading their stories and being broken hearted over their lives I know it is time to tell my own story. I begin to realize that I am not alone that what I experienced was not a one-time experience, there are a lot of other people who experienced the same thing.

See I grew up in this great community of homeschoolers where everyone had great experiences and they all planned on homeschooling their own children one day. I just thought there was something wrong with me, I was flawed. Now I know that my experience was not the only one, and that even if for them homeschooling was a great experience and not a suffocating trap at home, for me it was never great.

Right after I wrote the last post on this blog promising to write more often, my life was bombarded with thoughts images and struggle. You see my memories are a stained glass, fragmented thoughts, if you’ve read the Hunger Games I feel a lot like Peeta unsure what is real and what is not real. I couldn’t write for fear of slandering someone in a way that wasn’t true.

I can’t not write anymore.

I’m going to write what I remember, leaving the fear of “disrespecting” and “not honoring my parents” out, I’m not sure how long it will take me to post the story or if anyone will read it, it will be what I remember, and it will be for me. I think it is high time I allowed myself to accept the memories and accept that they are all in the past. I’m writing not to hurt anyone, I am writing so that I might move on.

Here's to writing the past out so I can recognize that it has passed and move on.

No Longer Strangers

I have finally settled into my job, and I think into my life. Please refrain from laughing, I plan to write here again once a week, whatever God makes heavy on my heart at the moment, or whatever He causes my heart to sing over.

Today it's about healing.

"One day you will be healed." They said, and I laughed, "Yeah when I'm dead."

I'm warning you that this post will not end with, and today I look back as healed. Nope. Hasn't happened. I'm still pretty broken, and I still laugh bitterly sometimes at those who say I will heal. I have spent hours curled into a little ball and told myself to breathe because the pain of all this will pass, it will pass, it will pass. Then I have woken up days later and found that I haven't a clue what I did in the time that is now just marked with blackness.

I have DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder, when I was young and my brain could no longer handle the trauma it was undergoing the coping mechanism it chose to use was to create personalities inside myself that could handle them. Literally, new people in my brain with names, developing histories of their own that I am not privy to.

This is Wikipedia's article on the topic, and what it has to say, is that no one really knows, and once you become like this you will most likely stay like this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder

I have done things that fill me with shame, I only know I've done them because others have told me, and I trust them. Or in once case I guy asked me if I was coming home to sleep with him again, I was a little baffled I barely knew him, and then it dawned on me, perhaps I had slept with him, perhaps I just didn't remember. Then I realized that I didn't take birth control because I wasn't actually in the habit of sleeping with random people, and there were several weeks of gut wrenching fear, pain, anticipation, and wondering until my cycle came again. The consequences of this disorder reach far and wide.

It makes for a lot of loneliness, it makes for a lot of people who want to love you, but aren't sure if they can stay for the pain you continue to fling at them yet can't even remember. I'm not sure how my brain thought this was supposed to be helpful, but it did, and it's not backing down.

I'm seeing a therapist now and mostly she frustrates me and makes the people in my head angry, at least that's what she tells me. She also tells me that I can heal, that I can learn how to break down the walls and communicate with my alters, and perhaps we can work on this life together. The only problem is I believe in God and they don't. I think that healing comes from communion with people and accepting love from them, they believe in damage control which means isolation and staying away from people. I think they might kill to protect me, and this terrifies me.

However, yesterday, I had a very long talk with God, and then I curled up on my couch closed my eyes and started walking the halls of my brain. There is a great hall with lines of doors, and behind each door lives a personality, until now I didn't know how to open the doors. In fact I wasn't even sure if I could get into them, or if they could open from the outside. Yesterday I tried, and yesterday, I finally figured it out, I can communicate with my people, I can ask them why, and I can tell them what I want, and I can ask them for memories. It made my brain feel chaotic, it made me feel weird, because when I opened those doors I opened myself to their emotions, emotions they have carefully sheltered me from, but I spoke to them.

I am not healed, but the strangers in my own brain are no longer strangers. We are on first name basis and this is something. There is one room in my brain that has no doors, and I have yet to figure out how to get into it, but I feel that eventually I will, and I think whoever is in that room can tell me the most about what happened when I was a kid, and holds the keys to my healing.

I'm not healed but I am healing, and this is something, and if I can, you can too, even if that statement makes you laugh bitterly at me. 

To Life

Today I sit at work and I look at the people around me and I am happy. They are far from perfect, I am far from perfect and we are perfectly okay with that. I like them they seem to like me, and so we get along. It is so much easier, peaceful, and more joyful to live this way. I don’t have anyone telling me I’m doing it wrong, they don’t have anyone telling them they are doing it wrong. We just are who we are. Why can’t Christianity be this simple?

Yes we cuss; no we do not offend each other. We are professional around clients. We do our jobs, we work ethically. When we go home we have a beer. Yes we have problems. We have pasts, not all of us are on our first marriage, but we have accepted that life has its ups and downs, and sometimes a bottle of Jack Daniel’s can help you up from the down or make the up better. We realize that it isn’t wise, but we also realize that it isn’t a complete catastrophe to be stupid.

For the most part we accept our flaws attempt to make them better, or tell the other people they’re just going to have to live with it. The other people grumble, and guess what; they learn to live with it. Being flawed does not mean that you aren’t perfect. You can be perfectly flawed. People who think they aren’t flawed are just plain crazy. Why have Christians decided that they need to be like Christ? Christ was perfect; we will never be perfect, so why are we aspiring to something we can never reach? That has only proven to make people miserable.

Mat 5:48 “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Is the only time Jesus commanded us to be like Him, all the other times, He simply said “Follow me.” When Christ commanded people to be as perfect as God He was adding guilt onto an already guilty nation to show them that to be perfect was impossible. This was so that they would accept His sacrifice without question, His fulfillment of the law with celebration. They would be a tired nation, a nation who needed a savior. Christ fulfilled the law. We are no longer to be perfect; by His grace we are perfect.

STOP trying to be perfect. Live life, have fun. Love people. You will fail. This does not mean that you have failed God, He expected you to fail, He expects you to dust yourself off and keep going. He sees you as perfect, Christ did that for you. Why does it seem so impossible for most Christian’s to enjoy their life?

Enjoy yours, yes we were promised that we would be persecuted, we were promised that life would be rough, we were also promised that His yoke would be easy and His burden would be light. Enjoy being made pure, enjoy His love, enjoy His grace, enjoy life, enjoy the gifts He’s given.