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Nova Terra

~ Just another way of stalling on my other writing

Nova Terra

Tag Archives: memories

Stuffing

01 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

abuse, crying, emotions, mean people suck, memories, mental health, trauma, triggers, webmonkey

I was eleven or so. One afternoon my parents called me into the living room for some minor task, and inquired almost angrily what my deal was.

My face working, I stammered out that I was trying not to cry.

Well, what did I have to cry about?

I had cut my finger just moments earlier, while peeling an apple in the kitchen.

So why didn’t I cry?

“B-bec-cause y-you told m-me n-not to,” I wailed.

Oh, well then, cry away! I was told, with the largesse of a Victorian philanthropist, and I burst into tears.

I don’t recall being told not to cry, but I’m sure that I was. My mother was sexually abusing me nightly, although my conscious recollection boiled down to an eternal blazing fury: I hated my mother, but didn’t know why. My dad, on the other hand, as ignorant of the abuse as I, merely beat me a lot with his belt, mainly for not cleaning my room. To this day, when I hear somebody sweeping, there is a flashknot in my stomach.

But despite the abuse and neglect, I was not allowed to cry. What to do? I stuffed it, of course, and those tears waited with corrosive patience until an excellent therapist coaxed them out in my 40s. It took a lot of therapy, and to this day I am what’s called a “stress crier.” It’s a pain in the butt, if only because my sinuses swell from all the mucus and I can get a migraine from the pressure unless I hit myself with four sprays of fluticasone, which tastes unpleasantly of an incongruous lilac but works well.

I still stuff emotions, primarily anger, but I’m working hard on that. I write the feeling words large and circle them in my journal. The result is something that looks a lot like cantankerousness: I suffer fools badly, and have started to show up for myself.

I am trying to turn into a cranky old lady; to further this end, I have stopped dying my hair now that I’ve buzzed most of it off. My face still looks ten years younger, due mainly to genetics, not smoking, and sleep and hydration, but the crop of silver on top is like a snake rattle: Step over my log with caution, because I’ve been here for a few many turns around the sun now, and I have learned how to bite.

I nipped somebody this morning over something small, and was amazed at the level of satisfaction it afforded. (There is somebody who has taken it upon themselves to walk the website I manage, and if they find a 404 link, they email all of upper management. It’s been annoying for eight years, and I finally had enough. I told him that this tactic just made me look bad, and I would appreciate being given a private heads-up, being the webmaster and all.)

I’ve been chanting to change my karma, and (coincidentally I’m sure) had the most stressful month since I was homeless. I thought meditation was supposed to mellow you out, but maybe the mellow has to clear away a whole lot of muck before it rests easy in your soul. What do you think?

Like Me! Please Like Me!

16 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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Tags

cleavage, humor, memories, smart mouth, waiting, Whole Health Action Management, writing, writing groups

I’m hunting for a writing group. I’ve been advised to do this by many people, and now I’ve been semi-forced into it by WHAM (Whole Health Action Management). For those who didn’t click the link, this is a group I help run which meets for two months and has you choose a goal in the middle which you then pursue with peer support. It works pretty well–you’d be surprised what having to report on your new good habit will do for keeping it going. In the past, I joined a gym, made some progress on the meditation issue (which we’ll address here some other time), and now it’s time to enlarge my social circle. Aieeee!

So I went to Meetup, found a likely group that didn’t sound too scary, admitted my desire to commune with other sufferers and confessed my fetish for Victorian and genre novels. And now the moderator has to see. Oh dear. As if sending out query letters wasn’t bad enough.

That’s not going too well, either. One of the few people decent enough to get back to me at least cared enough to have his form letter say that he found my query interesting, but was overwhelmed with work at the time. SO much nicer than the standard refusal, which intimates that surely somebody somewhere will like your piece of dreck, but not them, no sirree Bob!

Well, we shall see on both counts. Meanwhile, I have been triggered into the dilemma of Wanting People to Like Me. I thought I was over that. In my salad days, I was a sex & drugs bimbo, seeking approval through suitable application of my ample cleavage. Bless the few people who saw past my people-pleasing facade and realized I was smart and funny too. Nowadays the whole mechanics have changed, and smart and funny’s all I’ve got: My cleavage is still ample, but even if I could tuck in selfies with my QLs, it would rather count against me.

“Smart and funny” is an almost infinitely harder job than “high and easy.” Smart requires treating my brain well, and being careful what I program it with. Funny chiefly requires NOT saying half the stuff that comes into my head, and this I owe to the beautiful Angie M. back in high school.

She was a senior, I was a freshman, and I had a massive schoolgirl crush on her, which she was kind about. And one day in Drama Club, after I’d called out something that the recipient took in the wrong way (which, hindsight admits, was the only way possible), Angie hauled me aside, sat me at her feet and said, “Look, Honey.” (I was in my mid-twenties before ditching this nickname, although some of my best friends are grandfathered in.) “You and I are Scorpios, and a lot of the time we think something is funny–but it’s not funny at all to other people.” Ah, puppy love. If only this 17-year-old mentress could have kept re-programming my brain for years: I heard her, and I never forgot it. I apologized to the girl I offended (who got over it in, oh, about two years) and have tried to watch my mouth ever since.

I can’t tell you how much of Max I’ve deleted because my beta reader pointed out that I would possibly offend somebody. Sigh. And this is important, because I want people to like my book. To like . . . me.

Part of me sheeping HATES THAT, but it is how it is.

 

And the Snow Came Over My Knees

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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Tags

childhood, memories, snow

Old House

When I was small, my parents both worked in New York City–my father was an early systems analyst, and my mother was a proofreader. To tell the truth, my mother wasn't cut out for the job of full-time mommy, so they made a radical decision for the mid-60s, and shipped me upstate to my grandmother, who lived in Walden, NY.

Her house was on Main Street, which really was a Main Street–a long hill with our neighbor the Presbyterian church at the top and the bank at the bottom. Along the way was the Woolworth's, which was still a 5 & 10 cent store. The local beauty parlor was at the foot of the hill around the corner from the bank, and so my Gaga and I made the trip about once a week. I would run or skip ahead of her as fast as I could down the hill, and turn around at the telephone pole at the bottom, to wait for her more stately progress with her cane.

Walden was like most little upstate towns: almost all white; and I am not. So it wasn't too surprising that one afternoon this outing turned sour. A bunch of older kids started to follow me down the hill. (I was three or four; they were about eight.) I could hear their whispering and giggles; I could feel their hostility burning through my back. I was terrified.

But I instinctively refused to give them the satisfaction of my panic. I didn't look behind me, but continued down to the telephone pole, my heart hammering. There, I turned around as usual and faced them–with my eyes shut–to wait for some piece of future that was a blank grey of anticipated horror. But I was stoic Tiger Lily. No blood in the water for those nasty little sharks.

Then there came a wonderful screaming. My 75-year-old Gaga came thundering down the hill, brandishing her cane. I wanted that cane to break their bones; they sensed doom too, and slunk off. She gathered me up and I began to cry hysterically. It took a long time for me to be brave enough to leave Gaga's side when we went downtown after that.

But when I was alone in what to me was a huge backyard, it was heaven: Rosebushes and beds of tulip and hyacinth; my tricycle and the jungle gym my dad put up for me. (My favorite part was the post-hole digger and pouring the magical cement.)

And when it snowed, it covered the quiet streets as snow should always do; I would look out at it through the dusty-smelling lace curtains and watch the whiteness turning everything into a something else from a tale of wonder. And when bundled into the inevitable snowsuit and boots, even with less movement than an astronaut, the snow came over my knees. It didn't do that again until I moved to Wisconsin as an adult; I spent the rest of my childhood thinking about Walden as a Golden Age.

Fifteen or sixteen years later, I was on a trip with some friends, and we passed the sign on the New York Thruway. So I coaxed, and there we went. Main Street was, of course, easy to find. The bank was still there, and so was the church. (I think Woolworth's might have been gone.) And there was my grandmother's house.

It was a big staggering eyesore, with clapboards held together with chunks of peeling paint–just another rental house in just another small town in upstate New York. And when I went around back to the backyard, I was stunned at how tiny it was. I was in tears; partly from missing my Gaga, and partly from how shoddy the reality behind the magic was.

Thirty years later, heaven alone knows what it's like–and I refuse to Google to find out. Maybe it's gone the way of the kids around the telephone pole. But I prefer to think that the snow still makes a Christmas card that a toddler can take for granted, because that's what a small safe world is. That's what we need our small towns to be, peeling paint notwithstanding.

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just another way of stalling on my other writing

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