<-insert Xena's warrior cry here->

I need to talk about just how messed up I was up until not even a year ago.

It amazes me that I could be an inspiration to other people, such a help to other people, while simultaneously hating myself.  It amazes me that I was so out of it, so off-balance, that the only self-worth I could garner came from trying to please everyone else.

This face about sums it up.

For context, in case you haven't read my earlier blog posts, let's summarize my childhood with a single word: abuse.  Let's summarize my young adulthood with another word: rape.  Okay, I can summarize my life up until November 2010 with one word: victim.  Or, survivor.  Depending on how you look at it.

Becoming a mother was the beginning of healing for me, though things got a lot worse before they got better.  In June 2008, at the age of 27, I found out I was pregnant.  At the time, I was in a co-dependent "friendship" with a woman who conned me out of $14k over the course of six or seven years, who was also mooching off of me, living in my apartment with her then-boyfriend. 

I discovered my unplanned pregnancy the same week that I was laid off from my job, high school teacher, the thing I had always wanted to be when I grew up.  I had just started a new relationship, but was impregnated by a different man, the only "friend-with-benefits" I'd ever had. 

The moocher "friend," a woman I trusted and loved with all my heart, took off a few months into my pregnancy, leaving me a 10 page letter about what a horrible person I was and how sorry she was for my child because she was sure I'd be a horrible mother.  My baby's sperm donor had no interest in our child.  My boyfriend started treating me like crap early on, but I had already broken the lease on my apartment and moved in with him.  I felt helpless.  I felt trapped.

Don't we all look so happy together?

I tried to focus on the positive.  I had my heart set on a happy ever after...with a misogynistic deadbeat who sexually assaulted me every single night for two years - and I didn't recognize it as sexual assault until last month, when a friend who had read my memoir called it what it was!  I kept making excuses for my ex, to myself as well as to my friends, until the night he left me and my one year old son penniless and homeless, in November 2010.

Hello, rock bottom.

I was an exceedingly lucky homeless person.  I didn't have a home for a few months, but I always had a bed to sleep in, people to help me search for work and to watch my son while I searched, people giving me whatever they could spare, even if it was just love and support over the internet.  My son and I never had to sleep on the street, never went hungry, and never went without knowing that we were loved.

It still amazes me how empowering an experience it was for me.  There were dozens of people helping however they could, many of whom I barely knew, all cheering me on, encouraging me, telling me I could do it, pushing me to prove to myself that I could.  I couldn't let myself fall to pieces or give up, because I had a precious toddler depending on me.

It probably goes without saying that I was depressed as all hell during all that.  I was so scared, and so angry, but I suppressed all my negative feelings as well as I could.

Holding it all in was killing me.  The optimistic, light-hearted, playful, affectionate, nurturing woman I had been locked herself away in some hidden corner of my heart.  I felt like a hollow automaton, just going through the motions, doing whatever I had to do.

My love for my son, and my determination to give him the best possible start in life, kept me from killing myself.  My beliefs about positive, conscious parenting drove me to seek out methods of self-healing so I could be the best mother I could be.  My spiritual path and experiences provided the tools I needed to put myself back together, piece by piece, and pure Divine Love provided me with a home in the last place I ever would have thought to look.

In this home, I am loved, supported, valued, and given the space I need to heal.  Gratitude really isn't strong enough a word to express how I feel.  I truly am blessed beyond my fondest dreams.

Now, having finally learned to love myself, having finally healed to a point that I feel like a whole new person, no longer either a victim or a survivor...now I have too many friends suffering the same kinds of crap I suffered.

My inner warrior princess is shrieking her battle cry, ready to throw her chakrum and cut through all their chains, if they would just hold up their wrists at the right angle.

I want to help.  I want all that I suffered and all that I've learned from that suffering to help others, to empower them.  I wish I could just hold them in my arms and overwhelm them with self-worth, confidence, and determination to make their lives even better than they can imagine.

But I can't.  I can't make anyone feel, think, or believe anything.

All I can do is offer my unconditional love and support, guidance when they ask, and keep praying that one day soon when they look in the mirror they will see themselves as the beautiful, loved, powerful beings that they are.

But...dammit, people!  Life is too short to waste on misery!

Confession time...

I've been feeling pretty ashamed of myself since last night.

Ten years ago, while I worked on my MFA but before I started my eight years of thesis hours (no joke,) I had a couple of classes, one fiction, one poetry, in which we volunteered at the local homeless shelter and taught some of the "residents" creative writing techniques.

We learned a lot about life that semester, about pedagogy, and about human nature.  The couple of months I spent homeless, I got to hop from a bed in one friend's house, to a bed in another, while people I knew and trusted watched my son and other friends drove me around town helping me search for jobs, aid, and more permanent shelter.  I had a whole posse of mamas watching my back, all peers, most of whom I barely knew before all this happened, and thanks to them, my son and I never had to sleep in a shelter, or beneath the open sky.

The people we taught that semester were not so fortunate.  They had no real friends or generous acquaintances to help them.  They had no family, or their families turned their backs on them.

That semester, listening to these amazing people tell their stories using the techniques of storytelling and poetry that we taught them, changed me forever.  Perhaps someday I'll be able to better describe it.

The thing that stayed with me most after that class was my professor, Terry Thaxton's, lecture about how many homeless people are treated as if they are invisible.  All they want is for someone to SEE them, to recognize them as human, as beings deserving of acknowledgement, respect, and compassion.

And then, last night, I was busy trying to write and organize at Starbucks, getting the Moody Mamas Support Network going on Facebook...totally ignoring the homeless man who came in and sat on the couch across from me.

When he was walking past me, his hand hit one of the chairs and my table and he said, "ow!" then, "Sorry!"

I threw a half-assed smile at him without taking my eyes off my computer screen as I typed, and muttered, "No problem..."

He stopped and stared at me for a long moment.  At the time, I thought he was trying to see what I was typing, and I turned my back to him ever so subtly more.

After that long moment, he sat down, commenting loudly to himself about the food he had in a bowl smelling bad, he definitely needed to throw it out, good GOD that stank, definitely bad, stinks stinks stinks...

I was getting irritated because he was distracting me, so I picked up and went home to finish writing in the car.

It wasn't until after I went to bed that I realized what happened, and what I'd done.

That man so desperately wanted someone to see him, to look him in the eye, to recognize that he was there.  I'm actually crying right now because I feel so bad that I was so absorbed in my own world that I couldn't even spare him a full-on smile.

This isn't him, but he looks similar.  I think.  *hangs head

Next time I see him, I'll make sure to look him in the eyes and ask him how he's doing.

Even if it means giving up some of my writing time so he can talk.

I owe the world that much.