This process, and the past few months, have brought me to a place (not the kind with a mailing address -- the place inside, I guess) where I feel alone and frightened, dismayed and discouraged. I guess it is a physical place, after all: I am renting a room in the home of a man who was the only friend I made in this area. It seemed he was kind enough to invite me to live here, with my dog, after she was attacked at the former place I called...well, I never called it home, but I did call it "the place where I live." I had no control over what happened there, and the owner of the place brought in a Pit Bull with no training other than Fight Ring training. That dog attacked my dog, and the landlady would not remove the dog or even temporarily move it so that I would have time to find a new place to live. So my "friend" persuaded me to stay with him, at his house.
It turns out the only reason he was kind this way was that he believed that at some point I would provided him with sex acts. I had told him that there would not be any sex taking place between him and me. It seems that men often do not operate on the basis of Words, or Truth, or "What I say is true, and what you say is true." I am aware that it is not only men that lie; lots of people lie.
So I have indeed been brought to a place where I am fighting this battle all alone. I am in the battle of "Where can I go, How can I know it's safe, how can I protect myself and my dog, how can I be well enough to find that place, get there, and find some job to do that will bring in more income." I am also in the battle of "How can I find the help I need, or make it if I can't find it, so that I might know if it's possible to change from the being I am that lacks the protective device that non-parent-sex-abused-as-small-child people have? How can I effect a change in my brain, huge enough to re-route and re-program the brain I have? Can I use my own brain to fix my brain? How can I take this life, from this point until the end of it, and actually HAVE the life which I say I will not be denied?"
So there are two battlefronts: Find a Safe Place and Live a Right Life. One is the immediate; but the other is not far behind, if it's behind at all. In fact, it seems to me that I need to be winning the long-range one in order to win the short-range one. Very scary. This is not a happy point in this life of mine.
I would end with, "Wish me luck," except I don't really believe in luck, and if I win this, it certainly won't be because of luck. Also, I have no reason to believe that anyone will read this. I don;t know how to hook it up to anything, and I don't have time to learn how. Or maybe I do. I can try. I will try. I don't know why I think it matters; but I do think it matters. All of it matters: me sharing my story (my Truth!) with the world, me putting the truth into words, to share and strengthen our connection to it; me putting into words the fears and impossible Escher-type circular prioritizing I do, to weaken any hold on me that falseness now has.
And to offer the possibility that someone, somewhere may be strengthened by what I share, or may strengthen me by what they share.
I don't wish, I work. I don't wait for luck; I wait for results. I hope; that's not wishing, that's hoping, and I do hope and pray that I do the work and receive the results sooner rather than later....this home-less place-less dangling is taking a toll on me. Thank God I have the dog. She compels me to keep seeking safety.
One woman I spoke to tonight said, "Renters should not have animals." I had never heard it put that way before. I can't deny the logic of her remark, of her thinking: if a person is too poor to buy and own a home, that person is too poor to own an animal. But the words hurt me deeply. I then thought, "Poor people should not go out to a movie. Or join Blockbuster. They should not see movies. They should not have cable TV. They should not have an internet connection. They should not eat organic food. They should not have phones. They should never eat out, they certainly should not have children, they should not have expensive medical treatment, they should not buy and wear make-up or get their haircut by a professional hair cutter, they should not bury their dead, they should not have weddings other than going in front of a judge at the City Hall."
Actually, I didn't think all that then; I just thought most of that now. I confess that I myself have often thought "poor people should not have large families; people should never have children unless the already have enough money, and have their lives such that they know money will come in, in sufficient amount to be able to pay for that child. If they think of having a second child, they must have double whatever the amount was to ensure their payment for the first child.
That thought, I believe, falls into the category of "Thoughts I think with my Mother's mind," or "Thoughts I think with my Father's mind." This one, the thought that Renters should not have animals, could fall into the category of either my mother's or my father's mind's thinking. Somehow, when I follow it to its logical ends, it is the same thought that says I should not exist.
My mother made clear to me the one most important thing, the driving, burning, thought of her entire existence: "Don't have children unless you can afford to leave the man." "Have abortions." "I didn't know good girls could get abortions." "I couldn't get abortions." "Your father didn't protect me." "I didn't want a child so soon after I got married." "I didn't want a second child so soon after the first." "I tried to abort Judy every way I knew how, I hung myself by my chin on a bar in the basement and dropped repeatedly to the cement floor, but it didn't get rid of her." "You were an accident. A Happy Accident." "He said he didn't do it." "What do you want, for your father to go to jail? Do you want me to divorce him? We would be penniless, we would be scandalized. Is that what you want?"
But just yesterday, my sister said, "You know I love you, right?" She had never said that before. And today, my father asked me how I was, and really seemed to care. I don't understand these people, why don't they help me? Losing them, as I thought I had a few weeks back when they wouldn't answer my phone calls, was horrible. How could I care so much, how could I feel that "having" them is actually having something, or someone? I can't answer that question.
And when I found out that I lost the friend I thought I had here, it was also horrible. Losing the friends I thought I had in Chicago was horrible. How can I keep not-knowing whether people are friends or not, at this late stage, being so knowledgeable about my condition? This is precisely what makes me think I can't get better without the help of a trained specialist, which makes me ...or made me, rather...afraid to move away from this man I thought was my friend here in this house.
OK, darn it, just wish me luck, then. Whatever luck is, it certainly wouldn't hurt me to have it.
No, don't wish me luck:wish me power. Wish me hope. Wish me strength. Wish me safety. Wish me a home. Don't wish it:will it.
That's what I'm going to do.
God bless us all!
Nan and Layla -- my "family unit," me and my BooBoo Dog, as we are now-- Nannaboo2010
