i have been spending alot of time in life duct taping myself back together...come on colleen keep it together for the day and then you can fall apart tonight...come on colleen and get thru this week and you can sit down and have the crying jag on sunday morning...come on colleen ignore the unhappiness and fake it...fake it til you make it...push yourself harder colleen...come on and be grateful dang it!...other folks have it much harder!...why arent you fixed yet?!...you know all the stuff you are suppose to heal...why arent you healed?!!!...
so you get the chatter in my head?...for years...i am going to say nearly 20 years of self work...exploring my inner "stuff" when i could...gleaning universal truth...opening up...piecing things together...figuring out what has kept breaking me...depressing me...derailing my life...
breaking and repairing became the cycle...always seeing myself as this work in progress...yet all i was doing was trying to maintain a facade...trying to get love and keep it...trying to be good...trying...which when you try you never succeed...another morsel of wisdom i "learned" but never embraced...
in me was a critical mass building and i never knew it...words, images, memories moving me towards understanding...people have come into my life to chip away at my resistance...to unveil my own healing...so many moments racked up to lead to the full understanding of myself and the why...finally!...why do i do the things i do...why cant i fix my life...why do i get discouraged...why do i give up...and wow weeeee...i am so understanding of it and so forgiving of it and so grateful to understand...now i can change my negative behaviors from such a place of strength...i can accept with ease the things i needed to accept about my life...and oh my gosh i can forgive and love my parents finally...and when it is not too late to show them...with an open heart and the deepest compassion possible...what a gift...i go down south to see them soon and am actually looking forward to it...to the level of loving them i have reached is amazing..the forgiveness...it is so grace filled to forgive...and i have...i dont have to seek approval by self sacrifice and servitude...i can simply be a daughter and not anything else...
so lately with the depression and suicidal feelings i had to look at all the dark parts of myself...the anger...the hurt...the fears...i had to keep peeling and peeling away...i had to isolate memories and put them in a timeline to see what was happening then...it was hard at first to place myself in a certain year or environment...there for many years i was at my mamaws, my aunts land and then at my parents...so i had a hard time assigning an age to myself and what was happening to my parents and why they directed such anger towards me...such incredible dislike...
and yet i did just that...it was around 6 grade and some of 7th...i had to wear dresses every day was a rule that popped up and my dad or mom would check to see if i was wearing them....i would sneak pants to school and at least wear them with a dress...which was not odd at the time because some girls did this for gym class...i just did it all day...tucking a dress in my pants at times...or peeling it off if it was a jumper dress with a blouse underneath to keep on...this was one huge friction that had my mom telling me she loved me but didnt like me...she wanted a girl and not another boy she would say...no one was ever going to love me she would say often...yet she would never say why...i never knew why...i just thought it meant she wouldnt and others wouldnt love me period....
this timeline alone began to make the light bulb come on...i did not understood her rejection of me so often...even before when i was younger she didnt like that i would squat like my dad when he was doing work...or how i stood with my fingers hooked in my belt loops...little things always...but then around 6 grade my dad started joining in...button your jacket...part your hair in the middle more...so many little things...always trying to correct my looks and my body movements..."sit like a lady"...
being around them was stressful...they had alot going on in their relationship...alot of fighting and unhappy times...but then it would get focused on me and they had something to come together over...
the preacher came and did a laying on of hands to heal me but i didnt know from what...dad told me more than once i was unloveable as well as mom who often said it...and then there was the threats of sending me away...to "prunty town" or "weston"...an orphanage and the other a mental institution...but why? was i such a bad girl i would think and try harder...do more...for everyone...friends, family, relatives, volunteer work...i was one tired kid so often...
every time with these threats i thought it was because i was a bad daughter...i did fight to not wear dresses and i did want boys tennis shoes to play basketball in...i wanted these things for myself but to them it was no no no....so i would sneak and wear a neighbor boys hand me down converses...i would go off for days and play ball...finally a cool woman doctor in town told them to let me play b-ball and wear pants...she was a lesbian and had a huge understanding of my suffering...she told them it would help strengthen my bones...made it all out to be a medical thing...way cool...
so long long story winding around to this...
the root of my self hate was the hate they placed in me...and their hatred of me stemmed from....drum roll please...the fear i might be gay...
wow huh?...i honestly never deeply let that register...i mean i have figured out what the preacher was trying to heal me of...but i never thought the hatred was so mean...i thought it was just...you know i dont know what i was thinking all these years...maybe i have never felt this dislike of being gay...no internalized homophobia...i love who i am...have never felt ashamed or bad about it...i feel like i was created with perfection and who i am is great...honestly i love being gay...it is normal to me...a perfect fit...i dont dislike men and boys...i do enjoy them...but i enjoy women and i especially enjoy being around bi-sexual women and lesbians...i also have a great fondness for transgender folks...i love their energy...i love everyone...lol...but see i was born a lesbian and it has never felt evil, sinful, wrong...i truly have never felt one moment of shame...i know i am loved by the unseen....i have always felt this profound embrace and love from the god i know to be pure and loving...and i know i will go completely home to that perfection some day...
but i never truly let myself understand just how much my parents didnt like me...and even earlier than 6th grade...when i was very young and already "different"....
and so after this big light bulb moment a couple of days ago i was able to sit with it and let it blossom in my mind...this new knowing...
my parents rejected me not because i was a bad person or unlovable...but because i was gay and they couldnt handle it...it was their stuff and not mine all along...all the hate my mother has directed towards me...all my dad's weird stuff towards me...they havent liked me because i am gay...
seems so obvious but i never thought about it because it is so very foreign to even consider a parent rejecting a child on such a basic thing and letting it come out in all these different ways...of seeing me as less than, as seeing me without family and not attached to a place, to see me as a servant, to see me as not well...all of it...
these are the roots i am now pulling up...this is my depression...my self sabotage...my low esteem...my enslavement to ego...my exile from my own life...
and for the past couple of days i am beginning to accept or re-accept my body and be comfortable with it...to accept my aloneness and am beginning to love my apartment...i am enjoying a level of peace i cant even understand yet...
i see my young life and all the strength i had then and the woman i am now and i am integrating the two...i have been strong all along but not able to cope at times...i felt disliked and unloved so often...
but wow if i thought i had an open heart before it is nothing compared to what is now happening...and my trust in people who say they love me or care about me is finding an acceptance within me...i am beginning to trust love from others for the first time since i was rejected by my parents...
last night on the phone with my mom i told her i have always been in love with cloris leachman...she is just one of those women who are smart, seems independent and strong and has a wicked good sense of humor i relate to...and so i made my mother laugh describing how i would have proposed to cloris and how we would have run off to las vegas to get married...i would have dressed as liberace and cloris as elvis...just for the whacky visual of it...and my mom laughed and laughed...
and in that moment i whole heartedly loved my mom again...forgiveness came...for everything...for it all...not one thing to hold onto...i can feel for her again and love her...i tell her i love her at the end of phone calls and yet it is just a level of love...now i get to love this woman who gave birth to me...just as she is...where she is at in her life...as a daughter...
and?
and i can love and accept myself as the good daughter, kind person, loving friend, spritual being, creative bohemian, big hearted tree hugging lesbian i am...i really like myself...i would marry me...lol...i am a cool person and it is great to know that....and feel it...and believe it at last...i am likeable and i am lovable...
ta-dah...
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