Yesterday, I got sick. Stinging sinus pain was my first clue. By midnight, I felt like a truck was parked on my chest. I'm always remembering my childhood, and this physical illness got me thinking of how my dad would alter his whole demeanor when I was sick, taking on the role of loving caregiver. He would set me up on the couch, get me a pillow, find out what I wanted to watch on TV, and then make me a nice meal. It felt so uncomfortable. Guilt washed over me in those times, like it had been unfair of me to ever despise his presence in my life. Then, my religious training kicked in, prompting me to thank God for my father, condemn myself for ever feeling anything but gratitude for him. Tears poured down my cheeks. Looking back now, the whole thing makes me sick the other way.
It's not like I've had the worst kind of suffering in life. I've taken hot showers. Most humans have never had the experience. I only have to go without a toilet when I choose to, for fun. That idea would be absurd to most of the world. I've never gone hungry for very long. The only times I've gone without food for a whole day were self-imposed for so-called spiritual purposes. My suffering doesn't stack up as extreme outside of the first world.
I suppose the worst part of my childhood was the mind fuck. Dad professed a love for me that was more dramatic than anything I've ever been offered. I grew up miserable but just knowing for sure that he was the one person I could always trust to be there for me. Sure, he would humiliate me in front of his friends, but, if someone tried to hurt me, I knew he would step in. I sucked in my fat lips and made up excuses for black eyes. Of course I wished he would stop hitting me, but, for the most part, I believed him when he explained how it was my fault. It was bad enough that my own foolish behavior was getting me beaten. The worst part was listening to how it hurt him. I was forcing him to whip and beat me by my constant betrayal of his deep love for me, a love that was almost dead because I bought the wrong thing at the store.
I don't want to say he wasn't being genuine, but he was totally fucked up. Getting free of the guilt of not behaving well enough to compensate for his issues has required separating myself from him in my own mind. I had to give up bowing to my father before I could stand up as my own man and take care of myself. Looking back, I see that playing along with him never quite worked out.
Does all of this sound a little like Christianity to you? It does to me. They say we have a Father who loves us but just can't stand the fact that we're not all about Him. So, He has to kill us. He doesn't want to though, so He made a way for us. All we have to do is admit that we have failed Him, admit that we deserve death and Hell, agree to worship Him forever, and try to live our lives exactly like He wants. If we do those things, then He will love us and make everything better someday, you know, after we die.
My dad ran this same game on me. There was always the promise of a happy life, the life I wanted, just around the corner. I'm working hard to let go. God and my dad are still sitting on my chest like a dump truck, but I'm wiggling more. Someday, I'll feel free, long before I die. Or maybe I've just been trained to create the promise of a happy life, just around the corner, for myself. Maybe the suffering I place upon myself is the worst. Black eyes and fat lips never last. Lies are forever.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
The 12 Steps of Christmas
Jesus, Dad, Santa, Self, Recovery
1. We admitted we were powerless over seasonal affect disorder - that our winter moods had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that believing in something unbelievable could restore our happiness.
3. Conscious of the lie, we turned our lives and finances over to Santa and Christmas Spirit
4. Used Santa mythology to give ourselves and each other covert attitude guilt trips...
5. There was no need to admit anything, because Santa watches us, even while we're sleeping.
OK, this is getting creepy.
After several years of toying with the idea of writing my life story, I have to admit that such introspection feels completely unmanageable to me. My memories have been untapped, running and ruining my life, shrouded in mental confusion, and hidden from view by my instinctive urges to find distracting relief from the distress of peering into their darkness. I've known I needed help, perhaps a framework or philosophy, something. I used to think that Jesus would keep me straight. In a way, he did, but facing the visions of my traumatic childhood has proven to be too much for me without a more tangible, effective helper.
Three months ago, I decided to try the 12 steps of recovery as a way of gaining that feeling of sanity, something I've never really had except in periods of complete denial. Jesus was good for that. I knew I needed something more. Will the steps work for me? I don't know. I don't really believe any power outside of myself is going to do this work on my behalf. So, in my step work, I'm mainly trying to rewrite the 12 steps in a way that makes some kind of sense to me. Here's what I've got so far:
Step #1 We admitted that our lives had become unmanageable
I had this one down already. Hiding in my closet as a toddler, listening to my dad beating my mom half to death in the next room, I was deeply aware that serenity was out of my hands. As an adult, trying to write this story, I recycle that same feeling of powerlessness. I'll write a nice blog entry, feel the burn, and then I'll pay for it in deep mental strife for days afterward. This is when I feel driven to salve my mind with romantic preoccupation and sex. Is it healthy? Am I an addict? I don't know, but I do wish my life was operating in a more manageable range. Fair enough Step #1, fair enough.
Step #2 We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
Studying this one, I realize it's a well-worn step for me. As a child, I truly was and felt as though I was at the mercy of my mother and father. Looking to adults for salvation was reasonable and natural. "Mom, do you see me over here? Make him take the knife out of my mouth. Don't let him cook me in the oven. Please stand up with me so he stops knocking the wind out of me."
"Dad, now that you've killed my mom, please have mercy on me and stop threatening to kill me. Dad, please stop spending so many hours tearing me down verbally and physically. Dad, please stop fondling me and threatening to rape me again."
And later, "Hey pretty girl, please keep making me feel lovable. Hey pretty girl, please keep responding with love when I push you away. Hey, pretty girl, why won't you just be everything I think I need and make my life all better?"
"Hey God, how come you can't help either?" Why do I think I can't be sane without outside help? And, if I accept that, doesn't it mean that I've surrendered to the belief that I'll always be crazy? No thanks. I know I came to believe, over the course of my life, that feeling sane in my own head was outside of the grasp of my own self. I'm just not so convinced anymore that anything or anyone outside of my head has any clue how to fix me, much less the ability or willingness.
Step #3 Made a conscious decision to turn our lives and wills over to God as we understood God
Holy Fuck!!! What am I supposed to do with that? I will not turn my life and will over to someone else's ideas of the ideal for human life. Don't tell me, member of some popular religion, that turning my life and will over to the God of your understanding will help me in some way. That god hasn't healed me yet. The healing I've gotten has been the healing I pursued. It's been hard work. Honestly, if continuing with the 12 steps required standard acceptance of the Christian god, I would just hang it up right now.
So, if I won't turn my life and will over to Yahweh, how will I utilize Step #3?. If we can imagine the world of the mind as a huge thought-producing machine, my conscious awareness is a light shining on part of it. Sometimes I'm aware of the bigger picture, to varying degrees. Sometimes, the light of my consciousness is focused rather sharply on the needs or worries of the moment. Sometimes, I have little awareness outside of my anger at the driver who just cut me off. With that kind of transient awareness, it's easy, in the absence of a set structure like a god, to find myself drifting through a random sea of mental and emotional priorities in life. If I can have an idea in mind of another mind, a mind that does not shift from it's highest ideals, then that mind within my mind can be my guide into Step #4. Ok, I'll do it.
Step #4 Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
I know I'm fighting the wording of the steps all along here, but this one presents some serious problems for me. The designers of the steps want me to look at myself, take inventory, inventory of my moral self. "Moral" implies judgment. Am I to look at myself from a place of judgment? "Fearless" is there because they knew that this step would take people like me into what is normally very frightening mental territory. No one has to be told to be fearless regarding any particular pending adventure unless fear is going to be a factor.
So, first I will acknowledge that, in looking within, fear is a factor for me. How can I fearlessly search through the feelings and coping mechanisms I carry from watching motionlessly while my dad murdered his girlfriend? How can discovering why I waited 23 years to come forward not lead me into places in my heart and soul which will be frightening? I've been feeling and facing those fears for many years now. The stories connected to them are extreme, but fear of looking within is the same for all of us.
Fear of shame keeps us from looking, keeps us making up stories about who we are, keeps us acting out coping behaviors, and keeps us from facing and accepting ourselves in a way that allows us to be transformed and truly happier. Here, a friend like Jesus can be helpful, especially if the Jesus we imagine loves and accepts us along the way. I don't like the 12-step language that makes this step into an inventory of "defects." It's important to identify shame that we have, but even more important to keep from feeling extra shame about having it. This is where a non-judgmental "higher power" to keep me company and help me remember the bigger picture can be very helpful.
I'm not going to share my 4th step work here. It's for me. For now, I just wanted to share my process in struggling with the steps themselves. This blog entry is feeling convoluted and complicated to me, but, then again, that complication accurately portrays my mental experience in regards to God and Step work. When I share my thoughts on God with people, I often illicit responses obviously designed to educate me about the nature of God which people think I have missed. The responses are canned. I've heard them before, many times over the years, repeated in sermons, songs, and shared first-hand from fellow churchgoers. Be sure of this, if you learned it in church, I've already learned it, taught it, rethought it, stopped repeating it, and, in some cases, thought out a better way to express the idea. In church, they often told me "don't put God in a box." Years of Bible reading while being beaten by an adamant believer in the angry, judgmental, murderous, insecure God in its pages will apparently cause a person to think outside of the box.
I don't believe in a god or gods actually existing as beings. I believe religious concepts are the concepts of human beings. Religions reflect us more than they reflect the mythological beings represented. Take the 12-steps for instance. They work if we work them. No matter what we think of God or his/her role in our recovery, nothing happens until we do it. Why do I bother with discussion of God when I don't even believe in one? I think the construct is useful. To understand my religious approach, consider adults who promote Santa Claus mythology even though they haven't really believed in Santa since they were kids. Christmas spirit is still considered worthwhile. That's how I am about God in my step work. I've got to keep my head when I plunge into the depths of horror in my mind. I've had to reject long-held ideas about God and myself in favor of keeping what works. That's been hard, but I believe it's what's meant by Jesus' parables about the judgment.
As far as corporate application of my personal theories of God:
People who think things will work out tend to be happier.
They also ignore that most of us are suffering.
Which is horribly invalidating to those of us who suffer.
So many things aren't working out for so many people,
and it's considered healthy for individuals to imagine
that things will work out for them even while they
participate in perpetuating the system that
produces the suffering? Is it ok that children starve as long
as you get to go to heaven when you die?
No, that's not the right
approach to happiness.
Collectively, things could work out for us. That's a better
approach. Think how much happiness is multiplied in the
face of selfless kindness. Even in our flawed social systems,
people rise to the challenges and manage to pay it forward.
I want to help move us all forward with my story. I'm just seeing
that our ideas about God, money, family, civic responsibility,
and personal happiness are all standing in the way of that movement.
So understanding God and the human condition is my chosen work.
Keep reading my blog to see if my system of thought works for me.
Take what works for you.
And, if I'm ever in a position to start the revolution, think about
following fearlessly. A worldwide, collectively approached searching
and fearless moral inventory of humanity as it is could be the thing
that saves kids like me from being tragically abused in the first place.
May it be so.
© Ernest Samuel Christie III 2013
1. We admitted we were powerless over seasonal affect disorder - that our winter moods had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that believing in something unbelievable could restore our happiness.
3. Conscious of the lie, we turned our lives and finances over to Santa and Christmas Spirit
4. Used Santa mythology to give ourselves and each other covert attitude guilt trips...
5. There was no need to admit anything, because Santa watches us, even while we're sleeping.
OK, this is getting creepy.
After several years of toying with the idea of writing my life story, I have to admit that such introspection feels completely unmanageable to me. My memories have been untapped, running and ruining my life, shrouded in mental confusion, and hidden from view by my instinctive urges to find distracting relief from the distress of peering into their darkness. I've known I needed help, perhaps a framework or philosophy, something. I used to think that Jesus would keep me straight. In a way, he did, but facing the visions of my traumatic childhood has proven to be too much for me without a more tangible, effective helper.
Three months ago, I decided to try the 12 steps of recovery as a way of gaining that feeling of sanity, something I've never really had except in periods of complete denial. Jesus was good for that. I knew I needed something more. Will the steps work for me? I don't know. I don't really believe any power outside of myself is going to do this work on my behalf. So, in my step work, I'm mainly trying to rewrite the 12 steps in a way that makes some kind of sense to me. Here's what I've got so far:
Step #1 We admitted that our lives had become unmanageable
I had this one down already. Hiding in my closet as a toddler, listening to my dad beating my mom half to death in the next room, I was deeply aware that serenity was out of my hands. As an adult, trying to write this story, I recycle that same feeling of powerlessness. I'll write a nice blog entry, feel the burn, and then I'll pay for it in deep mental strife for days afterward. This is when I feel driven to salve my mind with romantic preoccupation and sex. Is it healthy? Am I an addict? I don't know, but I do wish my life was operating in a more manageable range. Fair enough Step #1, fair enough.
Step #2 We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
Studying this one, I realize it's a well-worn step for me. As a child, I truly was and felt as though I was at the mercy of my mother and father. Looking to adults for salvation was reasonable and natural. "Mom, do you see me over here? Make him take the knife out of my mouth. Don't let him cook me in the oven. Please stand up with me so he stops knocking the wind out of me."
"Dad, now that you've killed my mom, please have mercy on me and stop threatening to kill me. Dad, please stop spending so many hours tearing me down verbally and physically. Dad, please stop fondling me and threatening to rape me again."
And later, "Hey pretty girl, please keep making me feel lovable. Hey pretty girl, please keep responding with love when I push you away. Hey, pretty girl, why won't you just be everything I think I need and make my life all better?"
"Hey God, how come you can't help either?" Why do I think I can't be sane without outside help? And, if I accept that, doesn't it mean that I've surrendered to the belief that I'll always be crazy? No thanks. I know I came to believe, over the course of my life, that feeling sane in my own head was outside of the grasp of my own self. I'm just not so convinced anymore that anything or anyone outside of my head has any clue how to fix me, much less the ability or willingness.
Step #3 Made a conscious decision to turn our lives and wills over to God as we understood God
Holy Fuck!!! What am I supposed to do with that? I will not turn my life and will over to someone else's ideas of the ideal for human life. Don't tell me, member of some popular religion, that turning my life and will over to the God of your understanding will help me in some way. That god hasn't healed me yet. The healing I've gotten has been the healing I pursued. It's been hard work. Honestly, if continuing with the 12 steps required standard acceptance of the Christian god, I would just hang it up right now.
So, if I won't turn my life and will over to Yahweh, how will I utilize Step #3?. If we can imagine the world of the mind as a huge thought-producing machine, my conscious awareness is a light shining on part of it. Sometimes I'm aware of the bigger picture, to varying degrees. Sometimes, the light of my consciousness is focused rather sharply on the needs or worries of the moment. Sometimes, I have little awareness outside of my anger at the driver who just cut me off. With that kind of transient awareness, it's easy, in the absence of a set structure like a god, to find myself drifting through a random sea of mental and emotional priorities in life. If I can have an idea in mind of another mind, a mind that does not shift from it's highest ideals, then that mind within my mind can be my guide into Step #4. Ok, I'll do it.
Step #4 Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
I know I'm fighting the wording of the steps all along here, but this one presents some serious problems for me. The designers of the steps want me to look at myself, take inventory, inventory of my moral self. "Moral" implies judgment. Am I to look at myself from a place of judgment? "Fearless" is there because they knew that this step would take people like me into what is normally very frightening mental territory. No one has to be told to be fearless regarding any particular pending adventure unless fear is going to be a factor.
So, first I will acknowledge that, in looking within, fear is a factor for me. How can I fearlessly search through the feelings and coping mechanisms I carry from watching motionlessly while my dad murdered his girlfriend? How can discovering why I waited 23 years to come forward not lead me into places in my heart and soul which will be frightening? I've been feeling and facing those fears for many years now. The stories connected to them are extreme, but fear of looking within is the same for all of us.
Fear of shame keeps us from looking, keeps us making up stories about who we are, keeps us acting out coping behaviors, and keeps us from facing and accepting ourselves in a way that allows us to be transformed and truly happier. Here, a friend like Jesus can be helpful, especially if the Jesus we imagine loves and accepts us along the way. I don't like the 12-step language that makes this step into an inventory of "defects." It's important to identify shame that we have, but even more important to keep from feeling extra shame about having it. This is where a non-judgmental "higher power" to keep me company and help me remember the bigger picture can be very helpful.
I'm not going to share my 4th step work here. It's for me. For now, I just wanted to share my process in struggling with the steps themselves. This blog entry is feeling convoluted and complicated to me, but, then again, that complication accurately portrays my mental experience in regards to God and Step work. When I share my thoughts on God with people, I often illicit responses obviously designed to educate me about the nature of God which people think I have missed. The responses are canned. I've heard them before, many times over the years, repeated in sermons, songs, and shared first-hand from fellow churchgoers. Be sure of this, if you learned it in church, I've already learned it, taught it, rethought it, stopped repeating it, and, in some cases, thought out a better way to express the idea. In church, they often told me "don't put God in a box." Years of Bible reading while being beaten by an adamant believer in the angry, judgmental, murderous, insecure God in its pages will apparently cause a person to think outside of the box.
I don't believe in a god or gods actually existing as beings. I believe religious concepts are the concepts of human beings. Religions reflect us more than they reflect the mythological beings represented. Take the 12-steps for instance. They work if we work them. No matter what we think of God or his/her role in our recovery, nothing happens until we do it. Why do I bother with discussion of God when I don't even believe in one? I think the construct is useful. To understand my religious approach, consider adults who promote Santa Claus mythology even though they haven't really believed in Santa since they were kids. Christmas spirit is still considered worthwhile. That's how I am about God in my step work. I've got to keep my head when I plunge into the depths of horror in my mind. I've had to reject long-held ideas about God and myself in favor of keeping what works. That's been hard, but I believe it's what's meant by Jesus' parables about the judgment.
As far as corporate application of my personal theories of God:
People who think things will work out tend to be happier.
They also ignore that most of us are suffering.
Which is horribly invalidating to those of us who suffer.
So many things aren't working out for so many people,
and it's considered healthy for individuals to imagine
that things will work out for them even while they
participate in perpetuating the system that
produces the suffering? Is it ok that children starve as long
as you get to go to heaven when you die?
No, that's not the right
approach to happiness.
Collectively, things could work out for us. That's a better
approach. Think how much happiness is multiplied in the
face of selfless kindness. Even in our flawed social systems,
people rise to the challenges and manage to pay it forward.
I want to help move us all forward with my story. I'm just seeing
that our ideas about God, money, family, civic responsibility,
and personal happiness are all standing in the way of that movement.
So understanding God and the human condition is my chosen work.
Keep reading my blog to see if my system of thought works for me.
Take what works for you.
And, if I'm ever in a position to start the revolution, think about
following fearlessly. A worldwide, collectively approached searching
and fearless moral inventory of humanity as it is could be the thing
that saves kids like me from being tragically abused in the first place.
May it be so.
© Ernest Samuel Christie III 2013
Friday, December 6, 2013
Shame-fueled Reinactment
A few years ago, my son was doing some introspection and came to me, worried about what kind of evil might be lurking within, afraid of who he might become. In an inspired parenting moment, without hesitation, I said, "Oh, Son, there's nothing inside of you that you need to fear." That declaration has come back to me over and over since then. I think my pre-emptive acceptance has been pivotal for his happiness and self-love. I know the concept has changed my whole life.
If what I was saying was true, if there really was nothing inside of me to fear, then I should be able to look within. My son had been facing shame and found courage in my words. I had uttered the words, and had to test it. If there was something too dark and shameful to be acceptable, then I needed to find out. By my own mouth, I had chosen a course, accept myself or give up on myself, once and for all.
Life is complicated as it is. My story is not easy to tell. At 16, I thought of little else besides survival. When my dad killed Sandy, I remember feeling like my life was over, like, even if I survived, I would never really be an acceptable member of the human race. How could anyone helplessly watch while a helpless woman is murdered? I heard the black and white thinking and harsh judgments of the people in this world. We humans are quick to judge and can quite easily dismiss others as evil. I assumed I would be dismissed or dispatched by the whole world if these secrets were ever exposed. Life went on. I "put it behind me." That toxic shame slowly faded into the background, or so I thought.
At 30, I moved across the country and began to have nightmares which forced me to think about Sandy for the first time in years. Maybe the distance away from my dad allowed me to start opening up to myself. Not surprisingly, this didn't happen with happy self-awareness and joyful discoveries of my survival strength. She would be sitting in the living room, staring at me, and then gone as soon as I took a second look. I would go to work and get on with my day like nothing had ever happened. Unable to consciously face these memories, I started acting out my feelings in self-destructive ways, picking up hookers and having emotional and sexual affairs with women I knew from church. If not for that whole mess, I might never have sought this kind of self-awareness. Because of my denial, the flashbacks were always a complete surprise. It's no wonder I can barely write about her today.
After Dad died in 2006, my world began to unravel. Suddenly, I was alone with my thoughts and feelings. The shame reared its ugly head. For a couple of years I went to therapy and wavered between trying to figure out how to interact with people (a seemingly brand new task) and hiding in my closet, plotting my own end. I cried, I shook, I sat with my anger, pain, and shame.
By 2009, I was well past that dark place and beginning to have hope for the future. I had spoken to several therapists and a couple of attorneys about Sandy's death and my long held secrecy. Everyone said to forget it and move on. My own war on shame finally drove me to go forward, despite any potential consequences. I'm thankful I was not tried as an accessory to murder, but I had no assurances going in. Ultimately, going forward did for me what I had expected. Breaking my silence allowed me to see myself as a member of the human race. The secret no longer held sway over my sense of self.
I'm still battling my own demons. The consensus among my mental health professionals seems to be that, given my history, I ought to be in a padded cell, wearing a strait jacket, heavily medicated, and that 24/7.
Eh, I guess there's something to that, but life is complicated. My life included some horrific stuff, but there was more to it than that. How did I survive? I just kept moving forward, day by day, yes, but how?
I'm glad I've come forward. I try to understand the questions I've received about my years of silence. At first, I was angry and defensive. Today, I can talk about any of it, I think. My childhood almost destroyed me, but, as an adult, facing myself in the mirror and doing the hard emotional work of healing have taught me that I'm stronger than I thought.
Today, I have come to accept myself more than ever before. From not being able to identify myself to seeing and feeling good about who I am, telling my story to the world has set me free. I may still be in what feels like mental prison, a haunted, surreal prison, but we the inmates of Sam's head have more light, better communication skills, and even a developing sense of purpose for a better life and world. Prisoners need hope. Shame keeps us stuck in hopelessness. If I could pass on one message in life, this would be it: There's nothing inside of us that we need to fear.
Opening up has been hard, really hard. If I could just take a few years of beatings instead, that would be easier, but the failure-tested confidence that I'm a perfectly good me has been worth the price. I've done more than find out if people would understand and accept me. I've discovered how much we're all alike, to a degree that I never imagined. I belong, here, with all of you. If everyone knew everything about you, what's happened, what you've done, and what's been done to you, wouldn't we all understand and view you with compassion and love? Of course, we can't easily understand everything, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Please give it to me, and please give it to yourself. Thanks for keeping me writing.
If what I was saying was true, if there really was nothing inside of me to fear, then I should be able to look within. My son had been facing shame and found courage in my words. I had uttered the words, and had to test it. If there was something too dark and shameful to be acceptable, then I needed to find out. By my own mouth, I had chosen a course, accept myself or give up on myself, once and for all.
Life is complicated as it is. My story is not easy to tell. At 16, I thought of little else besides survival. When my dad killed Sandy, I remember feeling like my life was over, like, even if I survived, I would never really be an acceptable member of the human race. How could anyone helplessly watch while a helpless woman is murdered? I heard the black and white thinking and harsh judgments of the people in this world. We humans are quick to judge and can quite easily dismiss others as evil. I assumed I would be dismissed or dispatched by the whole world if these secrets were ever exposed. Life went on. I "put it behind me." That toxic shame slowly faded into the background, or so I thought.
At 30, I moved across the country and began to have nightmares which forced me to think about Sandy for the first time in years. Maybe the distance away from my dad allowed me to start opening up to myself. Not surprisingly, this didn't happen with happy self-awareness and joyful discoveries of my survival strength. She would be sitting in the living room, staring at me, and then gone as soon as I took a second look. I would go to work and get on with my day like nothing had ever happened. Unable to consciously face these memories, I started acting out my feelings in self-destructive ways, picking up hookers and having emotional and sexual affairs with women I knew from church. If not for that whole mess, I might never have sought this kind of self-awareness. Because of my denial, the flashbacks were always a complete surprise. It's no wonder I can barely write about her today.
After Dad died in 2006, my world began to unravel. Suddenly, I was alone with my thoughts and feelings. The shame reared its ugly head. For a couple of years I went to therapy and wavered between trying to figure out how to interact with people (a seemingly brand new task) and hiding in my closet, plotting my own end. I cried, I shook, I sat with my anger, pain, and shame.
By 2009, I was well past that dark place and beginning to have hope for the future. I had spoken to several therapists and a couple of attorneys about Sandy's death and my long held secrecy. Everyone said to forget it and move on. My own war on shame finally drove me to go forward, despite any potential consequences. I'm thankful I was not tried as an accessory to murder, but I had no assurances going in. Ultimately, going forward did for me what I had expected. Breaking my silence allowed me to see myself as a member of the human race. The secret no longer held sway over my sense of self.
I'm still battling my own demons. The consensus among my mental health professionals seems to be that, given my history, I ought to be in a padded cell, wearing a strait jacket, heavily medicated, and that 24/7.
Eh, I guess there's something to that, but life is complicated. My life included some horrific stuff, but there was more to it than that. How did I survive? I just kept moving forward, day by day, yes, but how?
I'm glad I've come forward. I try to understand the questions I've received about my years of silence. At first, I was angry and defensive. Today, I can talk about any of it, I think. My childhood almost destroyed me, but, as an adult, facing myself in the mirror and doing the hard emotional work of healing have taught me that I'm stronger than I thought.
Today, I have come to accept myself more than ever before. From not being able to identify myself to seeing and feeling good about who I am, telling my story to the world has set me free. I may still be in what feels like mental prison, a haunted, surreal prison, but we the inmates of Sam's head have more light, better communication skills, and even a developing sense of purpose for a better life and world. Prisoners need hope. Shame keeps us stuck in hopelessness. If I could pass on one message in life, this would be it: There's nothing inside of us that we need to fear.
Opening up has been hard, really hard. If I could just take a few years of beatings instead, that would be easier, but the failure-tested confidence that I'm a perfectly good me has been worth the price. I've done more than find out if people would understand and accept me. I've discovered how much we're all alike, to a degree that I never imagined. I belong, here, with all of you. If everyone knew everything about you, what's happened, what you've done, and what's been done to you, wouldn't we all understand and view you with compassion and love? Of course, we can't easily understand everything, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Please give it to me, and please give it to yourself. Thanks for keeping me writing.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Breaking the Cycle?
My dad killed his girlfriend in front of me when I was 16. Nineteen years later, shortly after his death, it started dawning on me that he probably killed my mom too.
Boyfriends kill their girlfriends. Husbands kill their wives. It happens every day. I would insert some statistics in here, but I got stuck on this one:
I spanked my children when they were younger. I had broken the cycle of abuse with baseball bats, rope, hammers to the skull, and death threats. It's taken me years to learn what cycles I was riding, much less how to break them. Obviously, I wasn't going to kill anyone in front of them, but I was eight years into parenting before I decided it could be done without physical punishment, 15 years in before I started seriously letting go of the idea that I knew what was best for them. Parents have a hard time letting go in general. In previous generations, beating a child was the best way to keep them from foolishly straying from the Lord. Was it not that way in your family? Oh, ok, maybe it's just me.
I realized years ago, that my children will love me, no matter what. They will want my love. They want it so badly that they find ways to be loving to me, to make me feel special and seen. Now, it's widely accepted that children are out for themselves, but, even if they are loving toward me because of love they want returned I am free to love them in return. In this world, there are people who will love me. I don't have to chase them. I'm free to trust them and just focus on being loving. Don't praise me too quickly. This is just my mindset. It's an improvement. I still fail miserably as a dad.
The only reason I'm doing this, digging into the darkness of my past, is for love. Love is hard. To love at a distinguishable level requires giving more than we get. So, to love is to feel less loved in return. If you're in it for yourself, you can't love. I think we all want to be loved, and we know it when we feel it. We all know the desire to be loved, but we also all know what it feels like when someone is kind and loving toward us. To me, it feels suspect, but I'm trying to adjust.
If watching a child watching his father beat his mother is the strongest risk factor for transmitting violent behavior from one generation to the next, what is the strongest factor for transmitting love and kindness? Do we even know? Ironically, my intention with this blog post was to focus on love and a positive approach to life. It's hard for me to do that, especially in a blog devoted to the abuse I suffered as a child.
Oh, now I remember what prompted all this. People want me to tell my stories. I suppose I want to tell them too, but I don't want to simply dump my dirty laundry on the world for entertainment purposes. I want to pull some meaning out of my experience. I want to have something meaningful to offer. It's not enough for me that I don't beat my children and kill women. That I don't is certainly a breaking of the cycle, but it's not enough for me. Love that doesn't go beyond what's fair is not the kind of love I was raised to appreciate. Jesus preached love for enemies, a transformative love. My dad certainly pulled the moral landscape down a few notches with his behavior. I was there watching it, and I feel some obligation to make up for my inaction. I feel an obligation to advance love. I don't know exactly how to do it, but I'm here, trying to figure it out. Thanks for reading.
Boyfriends kill their girlfriends. Husbands kill their wives. It happens every day. I would insert some statistics in here, but I got stuck on this one:
A child's exposure to the father abusing the mother is the strongest risk factor for transmitting violent behavior from one generation to the next. -American Psychological Association, Report of the American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Violence and the Family, 1996
I realized years ago, that my children will love me, no matter what. They will want my love. They want it so badly that they find ways to be loving to me, to make me feel special and seen. Now, it's widely accepted that children are out for themselves, but, even if they are loving toward me because of love they want returned I am free to love them in return. In this world, there are people who will love me. I don't have to chase them. I'm free to trust them and just focus on being loving. Don't praise me too quickly. This is just my mindset. It's an improvement. I still fail miserably as a dad.
The only reason I'm doing this, digging into the darkness of my past, is for love. Love is hard. To love at a distinguishable level requires giving more than we get. So, to love is to feel less loved in return. If you're in it for yourself, you can't love. I think we all want to be loved, and we know it when we feel it. We all know the desire to be loved, but we also all know what it feels like when someone is kind and loving toward us. To me, it feels suspect, but I'm trying to adjust.
If watching a child watching his father beat his mother is the strongest risk factor for transmitting violent behavior from one generation to the next, what is the strongest factor for transmitting love and kindness? Do we even know? Ironically, my intention with this blog post was to focus on love and a positive approach to life. It's hard for me to do that, especially in a blog devoted to the abuse I suffered as a child.
Oh, now I remember what prompted all this. People want me to tell my stories. I suppose I want to tell them too, but I don't want to simply dump my dirty laundry on the world for entertainment purposes. I want to pull some meaning out of my experience. I want to have something meaningful to offer. It's not enough for me that I don't beat my children and kill women. That I don't is certainly a breaking of the cycle, but it's not enough for me. Love that doesn't go beyond what's fair is not the kind of love I was raised to appreciate. Jesus preached love for enemies, a transformative love. My dad certainly pulled the moral landscape down a few notches with his behavior. I was there watching it, and I feel some obligation to make up for my inaction. I feel an obligation to advance love. I don't know exactly how to do it, but I'm here, trying to figure it out. Thanks for reading.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Beatings Overview
All children go through the process of individuating from their parents, more or less, and becoming their own persons in adulthood. I am no different in that regard. Admittedly, I got a little stuck along the way; there were some speed bumps and derailments along the path of my psychological development. I think it’s that way for all of us.
We become physically separate before we are physically independent. Toddlers have strong desires for autonomy. I used to set traps for my dad. I used to plot and threaten. I don’t know what he thought. I thought I was going to kill him. After he killed my mom, I stopped fighting him, and, for many other reasons as well, he and I were stuck in a long-lasting pattern of violent, one-way engagement.
At 12, I mostly shut down while he was hitting me. I would cry about it later, sometimes, if I was alone, if it hit me.
At 14, I was making peace with a world in which each day, at some point, he was going to end up punching me in the face.
By 15, I was used to being beaten regularly, just looking, each moment, for a way to avoid it.
After he killed Sandy, everything got more serious. Each angry punishment/interrogation turned to him standing over me, debating the prudence of mercifully letting me live when I carried a secret that could send him to prison. That’s right; he was being merciful. Killing me was the only path that made sense. If he had been a monster, any less loving and human, I would have burned in that ditch, right on top of her. Well, that’s how he would present the situation. See? Things got serious.
I began to study the beatings. I was waking up, at least to my physical reality. Dissociating for the relief of pain and fear was no longer my automatic response. I could feel every blow, hear every word, and just stand there, taking it. After one three-hour evening beating with a baseball bat, Dad was surprised that I could still walk. I was starting to take pride in my strength. Yeah, I knew that was a little bit sick at the time, but I didn’t feel guilty. I wasn’t the one running the show.
Still, it was miserable to live that way. I wanted a change so desperately! I wanted to take charge of my life, but I didn’t know how to do that without his permission. I didn’t know how to do anything without his permission. He had told me, although indirectly, that he wanted me to hit him back, to stand up for myself. So, I knew that was an option. I just couldn’t do it. Whenever he was hitting me, we were already too far into my failure as a human being for me to find the will to fight back. I would just stand there, feeling completely hopeless, worthless, and ashamed of the miserable excuse for a human being that I had become.
Interestingly enough, my dad had already explained this process to me. It would take me years to connect his stories with our everyday experience. Back then, I just went through the motions of school, family gatherings, and secret abuse helplessly, hopelessly, day after day, watching the years peel away with no conceivable end in sight.
Dad had a lot of stories. One of his favorites was about an unnamed hit man who didn’t have the courage to kill. This man would befriend a target and take them for a ride in his car. He would just drive, waiting for his passenger to express curiosity about their destination. When this would-be killer started to see his victim getting nervous, fueling his courage, he would pull out a gun and gesture with it, still smiling and pretending this was only a ride. Then, as fear mounted in the car, he would set the gun on the seat between them. Once both men knew that both men knew that the passenger was too frightened to reach for the gun, our killer would have the nerve to pull over and complete his task. Dad spoke of the victim’s fear and lack of action with disdain.
I knew he was disgusted with me for standing there, arms at my side, receiving his blows defenselessly. That disgust would ramp up his intensity, often spiraling a simple grocery store mistake into a near-death experience for me, full of righteous judgment and total disregard for any human value I might have held in his eyes previously. Fear and shame angered him. He would take me to that place and then take it all out on me. I would have continued to just accept my fate, but he was making me nervous. How far would he go? Would he kill me like he killed Sandy? He might, and it might be that any one of these violent interactions would be my last. I started thinking more about hitting him back. That’s what he wanted; right? I couldn’t do it unless I could stay convinced that he wanted it.
In my senior year of high school, I went through this whole cycle with him several times. He wasn't punching me in the face every day. A totally different routine had set in, periods of calm punctuated by irregular, shameful beatings, my dad saying his worst while back-handing me repeatedly, me bleeding and crying, standing still and taking it, beating myself up inside for being unable to hit him back. I was holding onto hope that I could muster my courage while I felt the cement of his judgment curing irreparably. Would I stand up and fight back in time or become the "worthless cocksucker" he insisted I had been all along?
We become physically separate before we are physically independent. Toddlers have strong desires for autonomy. I used to set traps for my dad. I used to plot and threaten. I don’t know what he thought. I thought I was going to kill him. After he killed my mom, I stopped fighting him, and, for many other reasons as well, he and I were stuck in a long-lasting pattern of violent, one-way engagement.
At 12, I mostly shut down while he was hitting me. I would cry about it later, sometimes, if I was alone, if it hit me.
At 14, I was making peace with a world in which each day, at some point, he was going to end up punching me in the face.
By 15, I was used to being beaten regularly, just looking, each moment, for a way to avoid it.
After he killed Sandy, everything got more serious. Each angry punishment/interrogation turned to him standing over me, debating the prudence of mercifully letting me live when I carried a secret that could send him to prison. That’s right; he was being merciful. Killing me was the only path that made sense. If he had been a monster, any less loving and human, I would have burned in that ditch, right on top of her. Well, that’s how he would present the situation. See? Things got serious.
I began to study the beatings. I was waking up, at least to my physical reality. Dissociating for the relief of pain and fear was no longer my automatic response. I could feel every blow, hear every word, and just stand there, taking it. After one three-hour evening beating with a baseball bat, Dad was surprised that I could still walk. I was starting to take pride in my strength. Yeah, I knew that was a little bit sick at the time, but I didn’t feel guilty. I wasn’t the one running the show.
Still, it was miserable to live that way. I wanted a change so desperately! I wanted to take charge of my life, but I didn’t know how to do that without his permission. I didn’t know how to do anything without his permission. He had told me, although indirectly, that he wanted me to hit him back, to stand up for myself. So, I knew that was an option. I just couldn’t do it. Whenever he was hitting me, we were already too far into my failure as a human being for me to find the will to fight back. I would just stand there, feeling completely hopeless, worthless, and ashamed of the miserable excuse for a human being that I had become.
Interestingly enough, my dad had already explained this process to me. It would take me years to connect his stories with our everyday experience. Back then, I just went through the motions of school, family gatherings, and secret abuse helplessly, hopelessly, day after day, watching the years peel away with no conceivable end in sight.
Dad had a lot of stories. One of his favorites was about an unnamed hit man who didn’t have the courage to kill. This man would befriend a target and take them for a ride in his car. He would just drive, waiting for his passenger to express curiosity about their destination. When this would-be killer started to see his victim getting nervous, fueling his courage, he would pull out a gun and gesture with it, still smiling and pretending this was only a ride. Then, as fear mounted in the car, he would set the gun on the seat between them. Once both men knew that both men knew that the passenger was too frightened to reach for the gun, our killer would have the nerve to pull over and complete his task. Dad spoke of the victim’s fear and lack of action with disdain.
I knew he was disgusted with me for standing there, arms at my side, receiving his blows defenselessly. That disgust would ramp up his intensity, often spiraling a simple grocery store mistake into a near-death experience for me, full of righteous judgment and total disregard for any human value I might have held in his eyes previously. Fear and shame angered him. He would take me to that place and then take it all out on me. I would have continued to just accept my fate, but he was making me nervous. How far would he go? Would he kill me like he killed Sandy? He might, and it might be that any one of these violent interactions would be my last. I started thinking more about hitting him back. That’s what he wanted; right? I couldn’t do it unless I could stay convinced that he wanted it.
In my senior year of high school, I went through this whole cycle with him several times. He wasn't punching me in the face every day. A totally different routine had set in, periods of calm punctuated by irregular, shameful beatings, my dad saying his worst while back-handing me repeatedly, me bleeding and crying, standing still and taking it, beating myself up inside for being unable to hit him back. I was holding onto hope that I could muster my courage while I felt the cement of his judgment curing irreparably. Would I stand up and fight back in time or become the "worthless cocksucker" he insisted I had been all along?
Stand for Jesus, Part 2
But then, the LORD provided for me...
A little Baptist church, two weeks before voting day, had posted on their front yard bulletin "This house is against the amendment." I saw it and planned to attend.
Just like my dad, years before, I liked to preach Jesus to the people who would listen, people in my everyday circles, people who didn't intimidate me, but, in the months leading up to voting day, I was becoming more angry and vocal. I figured if someone was going to use a passing greeting as a window for their parroted politics of hatred, that I would feel free to detain them for a speech about hypocrisy. Usually, I still strive to be the polite boy that my church had trained me to be, but, if someone was going to present to me that they loved Jesus and also felt compelled to support laws which judged others, then I was going to tell them they were out of touch with Jesus, love, people, and common sense. I was getting some strange looks, just like my dad, years before.
So, with an amendment to our state constitution in the balance, mere weeks before the vote that everyone was talking about, my friend and I joined a small Southern Baptist congregation for their morning worship service. We were greeted warmly and took our seats in an orderly fashion, just like everyone else. True to their signage out front, these nice Christian folks seemed to be on board with making sure that no two people of the same gender ever offend their god by entering into a legal contract of marriage. The senior pastor played a video about the threat posed to that holy institution of one man and one woman by anyone who might dare to live differently. Then he drove his point home with a short speech about the "homosexual agenda."
I was boiling inside, angry, antsy, ready to scream. Still I sat, perhaps like my dad, in church, years before.
My mind was racing. Should I speak? What would I say? The questions, thoughts, and feelings were flooding my brain, making it hard for me to even think which lead me to familiar feelings of worthlessness. Of course I would just sit there, timid, ashamed, quiet. Would I always feel like a sheep?
While I was wrestling with my own self-doubts and confusion, the senior pastor introduced a guest speaker who took the podium and announced the title of his sermon with a power-point slide, something about the Hebrew meaning of the phrase translated as "Thou shalt not.."
And I was mad again, over my self-consciousness, back to caring about right, wrong, and a whole world full of people who had no interest in following these people or their god, much less in having it forced upon them by the laws of North Carolina. Away from "should I speak?" I was looking for when I would speak.
And then he handed it to me.
"We can't just sit quietly. We have to have the courage to stand and speak for Jesus!"
I stood. My hands clapped loudly down on the pew back in front of me, hushing the guest speaker mid-sentence and drawing all eyes to my conspicuous non-conformity. "I'm sorry for interrupting," I began, "but I have to stand and speak for Jesus."
"Amen!" a parishioner shouted.
I had the floor.
"We've heard, this morning, some discussion of the upcoming vote to amend North Carolina's constitution to limit marriage in this state to one man and one woman. This is an important topic. Tens of thousands of real people will be directly affected, and, obviously, this issue is important to all of you. Your sign out front declares this import. I feel like the subject warrants our attention and further discussion, and I believe God is directing me to speak today."
Whispered from the other side of the room "I think he's one of them."
"I'd like to tell you a story." I continued. "There was a man who had two sons. One son believed in following the father's rules and was sorely vexed by his brother who had chosen to live his own life by his own rules. The obedient son, so sure that he knew the father's will for himself and his brother, decided that he would travel to the disobedient son's home and physically force him to obey a particular rule, a rule which the father had not bothered to enforce. Now, when the father finds out what has happened, will he be proud of the obedient son for forcing his unwilling brother? Or, will the willfully disobedient son's forced obedience be of any value to the father? Or, could it be that the father weighs the heart and desires love and mercy over self-righteousness and judgment?" That's pretty much what I said, and then I sat down.
That little church was very quiet as eyes turned from me toward the senior pastor who was making his way to the stage. He began scolding me for rudely interrupting their service, telling me that if I had had an issue, this was not the time or the place to bring it up. I would have taken it politely, but he was pointing his finger at me and lecturing way too long. So, I stood up again and began to answer him. A woman two rows in front of me raised her hand, shouting "I move that the speaker be silenced!" I continued talking but noticed that I was being surrounded by strong men in suits and ties. None of them were as big as me, and, since I've faced much more menacing foes, I simply continued to argue with the pastor, sometimes ignoring him to speak directly to the congregation.
When I moved into the center aisle and began gesturing and speaking freely, I realized that lots of people were talking, including my friend who was very busy getting in between me and the men in suits, reassuring them that I was not a threat and that physical force was not necessary. Funny. I felt more that, if anyone was in danger of receiving physical abuse, it was me.
At this point, I must have completely dissociated. I have no memory of what happened next. My friend says that I was shouting over the congregation "You're ruining people's lives!!" while the men in suits were crowding me out the door. I only remember suddenly being on the front steps of the church, looking at the senior pastor as he leered at me with what my father would have called a "shit-eating grin."
"I see you, Mother Fucker. I see you." Those were my last words to him as he closed the door in my face.
My friend and I went and had a nice lunch and lamented that we may only have cemented that congregations bigotry and blindness to others. I don't know. My dad would have been hugely impressed with me. I felt proud, but, then, the whole experience, combined with a victory at the polls for Hate, just weeks later, left me feeling like there's something really wrong with this world we've inherited and co-created, especially among the people who think they're on the so-called "right track."
May God have mercy on us all. I don't give a shit about God or church anymore, but I'm proud I stood up for Jesus, love, and mercy. What is mercy anyway? Have homosexuals committed some sin that requires anyone's forgiveness, or should rule-oriented folks just shut up, mind their own business, and spend a little quiet time in front of their mirrors?
A little Baptist church, two weeks before voting day, had posted on their front yard bulletin "This house is against the amendment." I saw it and planned to attend.
Just like my dad, years before, I liked to preach Jesus to the people who would listen, people in my everyday circles, people who didn't intimidate me, but, in the months leading up to voting day, I was becoming more angry and vocal. I figured if someone was going to use a passing greeting as a window for their parroted politics of hatred, that I would feel free to detain them for a speech about hypocrisy. Usually, I still strive to be the polite boy that my church had trained me to be, but, if someone was going to present to me that they loved Jesus and also felt compelled to support laws which judged others, then I was going to tell them they were out of touch with Jesus, love, people, and common sense. I was getting some strange looks, just like my dad, years before.
So, with an amendment to our state constitution in the balance, mere weeks before the vote that everyone was talking about, my friend and I joined a small Southern Baptist congregation for their morning worship service. We were greeted warmly and took our seats in an orderly fashion, just like everyone else. True to their signage out front, these nice Christian folks seemed to be on board with making sure that no two people of the same gender ever offend their god by entering into a legal contract of marriage. The senior pastor played a video about the threat posed to that holy institution of one man and one woman by anyone who might dare to live differently. Then he drove his point home with a short speech about the "homosexual agenda."
I was boiling inside, angry, antsy, ready to scream. Still I sat, perhaps like my dad, in church, years before.
My mind was racing. Should I speak? What would I say? The questions, thoughts, and feelings were flooding my brain, making it hard for me to even think which lead me to familiar feelings of worthlessness. Of course I would just sit there, timid, ashamed, quiet. Would I always feel like a sheep?
While I was wrestling with my own self-doubts and confusion, the senior pastor introduced a guest speaker who took the podium and announced the title of his sermon with a power-point slide, something about the Hebrew meaning of the phrase translated as "Thou shalt not.."
And I was mad again, over my self-consciousness, back to caring about right, wrong, and a whole world full of people who had no interest in following these people or their god, much less in having it forced upon them by the laws of North Carolina. Away from "should I speak?" I was looking for when I would speak.
And then he handed it to me.
"We can't just sit quietly. We have to have the courage to stand and speak for Jesus!"
I stood. My hands clapped loudly down on the pew back in front of me, hushing the guest speaker mid-sentence and drawing all eyes to my conspicuous non-conformity. "I'm sorry for interrupting," I began, "but I have to stand and speak for Jesus."
"Amen!" a parishioner shouted.
I had the floor.
"We've heard, this morning, some discussion of the upcoming vote to amend North Carolina's constitution to limit marriage in this state to one man and one woman. This is an important topic. Tens of thousands of real people will be directly affected, and, obviously, this issue is important to all of you. Your sign out front declares this import. I feel like the subject warrants our attention and further discussion, and I believe God is directing me to speak today."
Whispered from the other side of the room "I think he's one of them."
"I'd like to tell you a story." I continued. "There was a man who had two sons. One son believed in following the father's rules and was sorely vexed by his brother who had chosen to live his own life by his own rules. The obedient son, so sure that he knew the father's will for himself and his brother, decided that he would travel to the disobedient son's home and physically force him to obey a particular rule, a rule which the father had not bothered to enforce. Now, when the father finds out what has happened, will he be proud of the obedient son for forcing his unwilling brother? Or, will the willfully disobedient son's forced obedience be of any value to the father? Or, could it be that the father weighs the heart and desires love and mercy over self-righteousness and judgment?" That's pretty much what I said, and then I sat down.
That little church was very quiet as eyes turned from me toward the senior pastor who was making his way to the stage. He began scolding me for rudely interrupting their service, telling me that if I had had an issue, this was not the time or the place to bring it up. I would have taken it politely, but he was pointing his finger at me and lecturing way too long. So, I stood up again and began to answer him. A woman two rows in front of me raised her hand, shouting "I move that the speaker be silenced!" I continued talking but noticed that I was being surrounded by strong men in suits and ties. None of them were as big as me, and, since I've faced much more menacing foes, I simply continued to argue with the pastor, sometimes ignoring him to speak directly to the congregation.
When I moved into the center aisle and began gesturing and speaking freely, I realized that lots of people were talking, including my friend who was very busy getting in between me and the men in suits, reassuring them that I was not a threat and that physical force was not necessary. Funny. I felt more that, if anyone was in danger of receiving physical abuse, it was me.
At this point, I must have completely dissociated. I have no memory of what happened next. My friend says that I was shouting over the congregation "You're ruining people's lives!!" while the men in suits were crowding me out the door. I only remember suddenly being on the front steps of the church, looking at the senior pastor as he leered at me with what my father would have called a "shit-eating grin."
"I see you, Mother Fucker. I see you." Those were my last words to him as he closed the door in my face.
My friend and I went and had a nice lunch and lamented that we may only have cemented that congregations bigotry and blindness to others. I don't know. My dad would have been hugely impressed with me. I felt proud, but, then, the whole experience, combined with a victory at the polls for Hate, just weeks later, left me feeling like there's something really wrong with this world we've inherited and co-created, especially among the people who think they're on the so-called "right track."
May God have mercy on us all. I don't give a shit about God or church anymore, but I'm proud I stood up for Jesus, love, and mercy. What is mercy anyway? Have homosexuals committed some sin that requires anyone's forgiveness, or should rule-oriented folks just shut up, mind their own business, and spend a little quiet time in front of their mirrors?
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Stand for Jesus, part 1
There's something wrong with the world today
I don't know what it is
There's something wrong with our eyes
We're seeing things in a different way
and God knows it ain't His
It sure ain't no surprise. -Aerosmith
My dad, Ernie Christie Jr, loved Jesus. You know how people say they love Jesus, but then they're afraid to stand up for their faith? Yeah, my dad wasn't like that, not like other people. Ernie was quick to let his emotions out. He would stand up for his faith. He would fight for his faith. Well, he would start swinging his fists over a joke. He would kill my pets for eating his food off the counter. But, when it came to talking about Jesus, Ernie Christie relied on his words. I watched him deliver many a sermon to many a fisherman, many a homeless drunk, and many a prostitute. He didn't seem concerned with their approval or disapproval, just the message in his heart. Some of it was a little crazy, but some of it was really insightful, forging perspectives on God that neither the church nor my rabid atheism have been able to dismantle, at least for me. How's that for a teaser? Ah, but I'm digressing. I want to highlight his impulsivity relative to his internal prohibitions and his internal prohibitions relative to his social surroundings.
Ernie was pretty bold about the teachings of Jesus with people who didn't frighten him, but I remember feeling awkward for him as I watched him ingloriously suppress himself to seem "well-behaved" in church. After he got out of prison, Grandma would encourage him to dress up and go. It only happened a few times. I remember observing him in that environment. He looked stifled and neutered, afraid to misstep. I'm sure now that he was sitting in those pews, boiling inside, yearning to regain his strength, stand tall, and turn over their idols and sacraments, all of which he considered an affront to the Jesus he loved. Dad was vocal with me about his opinions after the services. "Those people wouldn't have known Jesus if they ran over him on the way to Sunday School this morning. Damn homeless bums!"
Who doesn't stifle themselves in church? The devout may become completely out of touch with the feeling, having traded their right to fight for personal authenticity in exchange for a simple, settled false confidence or, rather, a denial of their abject submission. At 12 years of age, I had happily accepted the religious role which had been proscribed for me, already beginning to shame myself for any internal discomfort. Did I feel stifled? It must have been a weakness of my flesh. Obviously, conformity to Baptist propriety was God's will for me and everyone.
One time, Jesus drove people out of the temple, and it's still remembered. Maybe that kind of rebellion is not too common. I'll go easy on my dad for being shy. I went to church every week while my dad was in prison. At the time, I didn't understand his appreciation for the angry side of my happy, smiling savior.
I felt comfortable in church during that time in my life. It was my most comfortable social circle. Everyone loved Sammy. I could be flamboyant and speak freely. Of course, I was just really good at giving the crowd what they wanted. At age 12, I wasn't thinking for myself, so speaking freely was little more than clever parroting of what I had heard before. Dad's silent discomfort in church and angry vocal apologetics on the boat docks or at the bar were confusing for me. We just didn't feel the same way about Christianity. I loved Jesus. He loved the character in the gospels. All that whipping of people and turning over of tables in the temple made me uncomfortable.
When I was eighteen, I got him to let me attend a wednesday night Bible-study group for people my age. We met in the home of a very wonderful family. They showed me lots of love. Dad seemed suspicious, but talking about girls there that I liked seemed to ease him into reluctant acceptance.
After a few years, the group moved, trading welcoming home for cold church basement, loving family for organized leadership. When the new leader asked me to consider becoming a lay ( non-paid) leader in the group, Dad broke his silence. He thought it was wrong. The true follower of Christ wouldn't accept. "The greatest among you will be the servant of all." I argued that I would be serving.
"Then why be called a leader?" he asked.
I married a girl in that group, had children, and generally gravitated toward church service and leadership. Over the years, Dad became more supportive and less judgmental about my mainstream approach to following Jesus.
I cheated on that girl, repeatedly, and ended up leaving family and church altogether.
Years later, as a pot-smoking atheist with a girlfriend 20 years my junior, I felt the call to attend a church.
North Carolina voters were being dragged to the polls over some perceived need among believers to make sure gay people couldn't marry in North Carolina. It was already illegal, but, I guess the church needed to make it extra super bad. They were talking about it like they needed to stand up for Jesus by limiting the lives of those they judged. I had been hearing the two-faced rationale for months. It's hard to fight with folks who talk about how much they don't judge gay people when justifying their support of one man one woman marriage.
But then, the LORD provided for me...
A little Baptist church, two weeks before voting day, had posted on their front yard bulletin "This house is against the amendment." I saw it and planned to attend.
To be continued....
I don't know what it is
There's something wrong with our eyes
We're seeing things in a different way
and God knows it ain't His
It sure ain't no surprise. -Aerosmith
My dad, Ernie Christie Jr, loved Jesus. You know how people say they love Jesus, but then they're afraid to stand up for their faith? Yeah, my dad wasn't like that, not like other people. Ernie was quick to let his emotions out. He would stand up for his faith. He would fight for his faith. Well, he would start swinging his fists over a joke. He would kill my pets for eating his food off the counter. But, when it came to talking about Jesus, Ernie Christie relied on his words. I watched him deliver many a sermon to many a fisherman, many a homeless drunk, and many a prostitute. He didn't seem concerned with their approval or disapproval, just the message in his heart. Some of it was a little crazy, but some of it was really insightful, forging perspectives on God that neither the church nor my rabid atheism have been able to dismantle, at least for me. How's that for a teaser? Ah, but I'm digressing. I want to highlight his impulsivity relative to his internal prohibitions and his internal prohibitions relative to his social surroundings.
Ernie was pretty bold about the teachings of Jesus with people who didn't frighten him, but I remember feeling awkward for him as I watched him ingloriously suppress himself to seem "well-behaved" in church. After he got out of prison, Grandma would encourage him to dress up and go. It only happened a few times. I remember observing him in that environment. He looked stifled and neutered, afraid to misstep. I'm sure now that he was sitting in those pews, boiling inside, yearning to regain his strength, stand tall, and turn over their idols and sacraments, all of which he considered an affront to the Jesus he loved. Dad was vocal with me about his opinions after the services. "Those people wouldn't have known Jesus if they ran over him on the way to Sunday School this morning. Damn homeless bums!"
Who doesn't stifle themselves in church? The devout may become completely out of touch with the feeling, having traded their right to fight for personal authenticity in exchange for a simple, settled false confidence or, rather, a denial of their abject submission. At 12 years of age, I had happily accepted the religious role which had been proscribed for me, already beginning to shame myself for any internal discomfort. Did I feel stifled? It must have been a weakness of my flesh. Obviously, conformity to Baptist propriety was God's will for me and everyone.
One time, Jesus drove people out of the temple, and it's still remembered. Maybe that kind of rebellion is not too common. I'll go easy on my dad for being shy. I went to church every week while my dad was in prison. At the time, I didn't understand his appreciation for the angry side of my happy, smiling savior.
I felt comfortable in church during that time in my life. It was my most comfortable social circle. Everyone loved Sammy. I could be flamboyant and speak freely. Of course, I was just really good at giving the crowd what they wanted. At age 12, I wasn't thinking for myself, so speaking freely was little more than clever parroting of what I had heard before. Dad's silent discomfort in church and angry vocal apologetics on the boat docks or at the bar were confusing for me. We just didn't feel the same way about Christianity. I loved Jesus. He loved the character in the gospels. All that whipping of people and turning over of tables in the temple made me uncomfortable.
When I was eighteen, I got him to let me attend a wednesday night Bible-study group for people my age. We met in the home of a very wonderful family. They showed me lots of love. Dad seemed suspicious, but talking about girls there that I liked seemed to ease him into reluctant acceptance.
After a few years, the group moved, trading welcoming home for cold church basement, loving family for organized leadership. When the new leader asked me to consider becoming a lay ( non-paid) leader in the group, Dad broke his silence. He thought it was wrong. The true follower of Christ wouldn't accept. "The greatest among you will be the servant of all." I argued that I would be serving.
"Then why be called a leader?" he asked.
I married a girl in that group, had children, and generally gravitated toward church service and leadership. Over the years, Dad became more supportive and less judgmental about my mainstream approach to following Jesus.
I cheated on that girl, repeatedly, and ended up leaving family and church altogether.
Years later, as a pot-smoking atheist with a girlfriend 20 years my junior, I felt the call to attend a church.
North Carolina voters were being dragged to the polls over some perceived need among believers to make sure gay people couldn't marry in North Carolina. It was already illegal, but, I guess the church needed to make it extra super bad. They were talking about it like they needed to stand up for Jesus by limiting the lives of those they judged. I had been hearing the two-faced rationale for months. It's hard to fight with folks who talk about how much they don't judge gay people when justifying their support of one man one woman marriage.
But then, the LORD provided for me...
A little Baptist church, two weeks before voting day, had posted on their front yard bulletin "This house is against the amendment." I saw it and planned to attend.
To be continued....
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Choose My Dad So I Know It Was Real
They say I'm an inspiration.
"After all you've been through, it's amazing that you turned out so well." they say.
Things like that....
They ask what happened to my dad to make him the way he was.
It's like people think our childhood experiences have something to do with our adulthood results. I certainly do. In the nature vs. nurture debate, I'm mainly concerned with nurture. It's what we can adjust, assuming nature doesn't overpower its influence. My own childhood has certainly had lasting impact on my adult life, and I can see why observers would marvel that I am not burning down houses and beating up women.
Dysfunctional parenting seems to repeat itself through the generations. Breaking cycles and chains of abuse is tricky work and, according to "people" requires bravery. Am I brave? Have I broken some cycles? I'll certainly take some credit, but the proof is in the parenting. Neither my father nor I can be judged only in the context of our relationship. We may blame him for how he raised me but not without knowledge of how he grew up. I could be blamed for my own parenting mistakes, but most of my readers would be quick to excuse me based on my origins. We are fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.
On the other hand, what is the source of positive change in parenting styles? Can parents be blamed but not credited? If I'm some kind of inspiration, some strong survivor, how did I get that way? I think it would be a mistake to scrap nurture theory simply because my dad killed people. His total influence on the man I have become cannot be limited to the horrific abuse that somehow didn't turn me into a monster. The miracle of my normalcy is simpler than that and may be hard to swallow.
My dad raised me to be the man that I am. He forced me to question myself and my actions. He gave me a moral code to live by. I never experimented with drugs or sex when I was a teenager. I didn't go to parties. Instead, whenever I wasn't in school, I was my dad's constant companion. He not only monitored my time but held sway over my words and thoughts. He was always setting the emotional tone, always teaching a lesson, always imparting some bit of wisdom. Any time we weren't working, he was talking. They say parents should listen to their kids, but he judged every word so harshly that I barely spoke at all. I still remember the stories. They're coming to this blog soon. My apologies. After countless hours of stories from his life, I have a hard time processing it all. Maybe he fucked up my head. But hey, he raised me to be praise-worthy, apparently.
My own thought is that he so violently ran over my mental landscape, that other people now find it quite easy to navigate through my space and get what they want from me. So, they like me. They say I'm a survivor. They say I'm brave. They rightly perceive that something could be boiling inside of me, miraculously contained. Me? I'm locked inside, revealing layers of myself in riddles, still feeling absolutely trapped. Dad (and a whole lot of others) said "children should be seen and not heard." I still haven't overcome that one.
Any surprise that telling my life story is hard? I feel alone and unable to connect with anyone. It's ok. It only hurts when I've made the "mistake" of letting myself love someone. That's where my frustration surfaced this year. I'm sorry this post is so complicated or maybe just badly written.
My dad taught me to act right. The world pats me on the back for his handiwork while condemning him and praising the facade I still maintain for my own protection. Inside, I just wish the whole world would burn. Don't praise me. Thank the monster you've already condemned. He gave me a full dose of dysfunction and then forced me to contain it. He passed on all the generational pain he could. He didn't break the chains. He tied up my soul with every link. Someday I'll explode, probably privately, unnoticed. That's how I was trained. I'm not happy with my life, but it seems like everyone around me is happy about the cage he built for my mind. When they say I'm great, I feel like they're praising him. When they say he was a monster, I shrink inside, convinced that it's only a matter of time before that judgment falls on me.
My own thought is that he so violently ran over my mental landscape, that other people now find it quite easy to navigate through my space and get what they want from me. So, they like me. They say I'm a survivor. They say I'm brave. They rightly perceive that something could be boiling inside of me, miraculously contained. Me? I'm locked inside, revealing layers of myself in riddles, still feeling absolutely trapped. Dad (and a whole lot of others) said "children should be seen and not heard." I still haven't overcome that one.
Any surprise that telling my life story is hard? I feel alone and unable to connect with anyone. It's ok. It only hurts when I've made the "mistake" of letting myself love someone. That's where my frustration surfaced this year. I'm sorry this post is so complicated or maybe just badly written.
My dad taught me to act right. The world pats me on the back for his handiwork while condemning him and praising the facade I still maintain for my own protection. Inside, I just wish the whole world would burn. Don't praise me. Thank the monster you've already condemned. He gave me a full dose of dysfunction and then forced me to contain it. He passed on all the generational pain he could. He didn't break the chains. He tied up my soul with every link. Someday I'll explode, probably privately, unnoticed. That's how I was trained. I'm not happy with my life, but it seems like everyone around me is happy about the cage he built for my mind. When they say I'm great, I feel like they're praising him. When they say he was a monster, I shrink inside, convinced that it's only a matter of time before that judgment falls on me.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Shared Burden
When my dad died, I flew out to California to make funeral arrangements. I was going through the motions, doing what needed to be done next, picking a headstone, writing a check, having a nice lunch, making sure my suit was clean and pressed. My grandmother was my constant companion, holding me together. Then the casket salesman asked me if I would like to see his body.
He was lying still on a plain metal table, dressed and prepared. We were alone in an empty room. There was one chair. I sat. He looked different, bloated, unnatural. Suddenly something broke inside of me. I cried "I'm so sorry!" and then I fell across him and cried uncontrollably, blubbering, sobbing. I wanted his forgiveness. I wanted his love and approval, and it was too late to get it. Our relationship was seemingly over, and I was left with nothing but my own self-doubt and insecurity.
Reader forgive me. It has been six days since my last blog entry.
When I sit down to write a new blog entry, one of two things happens. Either my mind is as blank as the page, or, when I'm able to feel and remember, the flood of thought and emotion is completely overwhelming. I start new each day but often get lost in my words. The list of unpublished entries grows. I wish there was a way for me to tell the whole story in a single word, a way to be done, but I don't know what that word would be. Death? Sex? I can feel it all at once, sometimes, and in those times, my body convulses and contorts. I can't find words, but I can scream like a wounded animal, fighting for its life. The scream expresses everything, but I'm the only one who hears it. And so, it stays within me.
In my 20's, I told Sandy's story by doing good deeds and apologizing all the time. Hell, I still apologize. In my 30's I told the story in dreams and flashbacks. I told my wife what I remembered. I sought to recreate and re-experience by picking up hookers on my way home from work. I "told" my story to everyone though I'm sure no one could make sense of it. The people around me could only watch my anger, shame, and misdeeds with shocked confusion. When my dad died, I began telling bits and pieces to counselors. I'm 42 now, and, honestly, the more this story becomes clear in my mind, the more I wish I could just die in a horrible accident and be done. The telling doesn't make it go away.
Can I just write it out and put it all behind me? Is that what you imagine? I'm not convinced. I'm doing it, because I feel like I have no other choice, but I can't help feeling like I'll finish feeling more undone and broken than ever. You'll have a book to read for a week or so, and I'll have the rest of my days alone. Whatever story I write will not be a full expression of my experience. I carry that alone. I can write a book. Then, my experience will include that I wrote a book. Even if I could take all of you along for the whole experience of my life and show you all of it, would that heal me? Look what it's done to me already. Why would I want to "share" that experience with anyone.
Lying over my dad's body, I was filled with the deepest sense of lost opportunity. I hadn't reached him. I hadn't said what I should have said. I felt profoundly alone. Today, eight years after his death, I can't help but feel all alone.
Dear Reader, I know I am not alone. Thank you for joining me here. Thank you for carrying these small pieces WITH me. Once you know what happened, you will always know what happened. That part never goes. Maybe, just maybe, if I tell you enough, if we share enough common understanding here, then, when you put my book down and move on to other things, I might be able to follow your lead. I can't undo what's happened, but I have a little sliver of hope that I might be able to move on to other things too, someday. Maybe if we all learn to share our pain, we can all move forward together. I hope so.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Writing for Myself.
Having endured fairly severe abuse during childhood, I grew up feeling rather alone. That I'm not alone, that so many of us have horrific stories to tell has slowly dawned on me in adulthood. Honestly, I've had to heal quite a bit to even realize i was only seeing my own pain. Escaping the gravitational pull of denial and memory repression has been no easy task. For most of my life, I haven't wanted to hear about others' pain; I viewed their expressions as competition for limited possible attention and care in this world. If my pain was not the worst, then no one would ever care. Today, I still feel like people don't really care, but I understand why. No one could ever share their love with me in a convincing way, not enough to convince me. I felt alone, and I kept myself there. I knew no other way to think or feel.
November is National Novel Writing Month, apparently. I've signed up. I'm writing a novel. I've set aside the retelling of my life story to discipline myself with this new project. The idea is to just get words down every day for a month, no editing, no revision. By November 30th, I should have a 50,000 word rough draft. That's the idea. Friends have told me to just free-write, just let the words out, just get them down on paper. What's coming out so far is extremely dark. I think I'm writing a horror story.
My sophomore English teacher had us keep a journal. I would just put down words without editing or revising, without worrying about where it was going. That's what she told us to do. I still remember the day my dad came into my room while I was doing homework. He picked up that red spiral notebook and began reading. I had three entries at that point.
Later that evening, sitting crouched over my bible, watching drops of blood hit the pages, I tried to focus on my reading while I waited for the next blow to come. I had to balance paying attention to his ranting about the dangers of free-writing with my conscious connection to God. I heard him telling me how a teacher could turn my work over to a police detective or psychologist who might then realize I was the weak link. I heard him explain how they would pump me for information and ultimately prosecute him for his crimes. I heard him tell me how stupid I was to carry out such a writing assignment.
"Don't write about this house or the boat or anything to do with me! Write about yourself, you stupid fuck!"
he said stuff like that. It went on for hours.
There are all kinds of ways that my dad's abuse hamper and constrict me in my adult life. My relationships are tragic shit. My car and house are a mess. My possessions are scattered. My finances and career are completely ruined. My mind is sometimes a torture chamber from which escape seems impossible.
But I want to be a writer! It's so fucking hard! I'm behind on NaNoWriMo, but I got down 1,500 words today. Fuck you Dad!!!
Monday, October 28, 2013
My Brain Today
She keeps my notes. They aren’t special, only quickly scribbled thoughts on torn pieces of paper. She hangs onto them as if looking for a place to put them. I wonder if her internal placement of these notes is similarly carried out. Is the note in the dish a symbol for the fact that I wrote such a note in the first place? Is the message important to her? Is it confusing? Is it just more noise in her already cacophonous mental territory?
I’ve often thought that the state of my car and house is a metaphor for the organizational structure of my mind. Perhaps it’s a puzzle to be solved, a puzzle of my own making. My world has been crafted by my hands, under the direction of my brain and to the consternation of my conscious self. What else resides in my mind?
I’ve been running for so long, because I feared the answer to that question. To see the truth of who I might be or what I might have done, to be surprised by the upsetting of my cherished apple cart of reality, seemed too unsettling. My mind chose to know less rather than to face the frightening possibility of something lurking in the darkness. I don’t so much fear that I’ll be alone. I fear that my own thoughts might be too much for me to bear. Running from conversation to conversation, distraction to distraction, has kept me from facing my unknown fears.
Life and love lost finally forced me to look. Something deep within me would not let me ignore it any longer. I call it my self-saboteur. The Wrecker. Mainly through public social “failure,” I have forced myself to consider myself. Maybe at just the right time, when I was finally strong enough, I was able to let myself act the pain out. All of my life tells the story. Even though I’ve resisted self-discovery, hoping to get by with an acceptable self-presentation, the unfolding has continued. And now, after years of struggle, I’m actually starting to embrace the process.
I don‘t know how to solve my romantic issues or clean my car, so I‘m using this blog as a stepping-stone to cleaning, organizing, or at least doing a fearless moral inventory of my mental mess. Thank you for reading.
Up until now, I’ve been posting in a way that feels random to me. I’ve just been getting out what I feel. Convinced that everything is allegorical, that the metaphors of my everyday life are a window of sorts through which I can understand past events too tragically dramatic to be processed and held in clear memory form.
Here’s another example: At 42, I’m starting to lose my close-range vision. A lifetime at 20/10 had me thinking I was seeing clearly. My ego has always been tied to having an eagle eye. Now, holding my phone at just the right distance from my face is becoming unnerving. Today though, I stepped outside, coffee and cigarette in hand, and gazed upon the skies. It’s a cloudy day, like the beginning of so many stormy days on the sea with my dad. And, well, I noticed something about the clouds. I noticed everything about the clouds. Their detail is exquisite! Really, I’m only noticing what I’m noticing. What’s right in front of me has always been wrapped in fantasy and dissociative denial. Now that I’m writing, I am seeing my own way of looking. What’s in front of me, my car, my career, my love life, and the conversation in front of me are all blurry. The possible contents of other people’s heads are fuzzy, hazy, and undecipherable to me. But, from a distance, I’m seeing the whole picture much more clearly.
This blog is raw. I don’t edit much. I just throw out my thoughts, and what ends up posted is constantly changing. If you’re enjoying the process, thank you for coming along. I’m sorting. The themes and direction may seem to shift in the coming months, but what you’ll get is going to be me, more and more clearly. That’s what I’m hoping to get from all of this.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
I’ve often thought that the state of my car and house is a metaphor for the organizational structure of my mind. Perhaps it’s a puzzle to be solved, a puzzle of my own making. My world has been crafted by my hands, under the direction of my brain and to the consternation of my conscious self. What else resides in my mind?
I’ve been running for so long, because I feared the answer to that question. To see the truth of who I might be or what I might have done, to be surprised by the upsetting of my cherished apple cart of reality, seemed too unsettling. My mind chose to know less rather than to face the frightening possibility of something lurking in the darkness. I don’t so much fear that I’ll be alone. I fear that my own thoughts might be too much for me to bear. Running from conversation to conversation, distraction to distraction, has kept me from facing my unknown fears.
Life and love lost finally forced me to look. Something deep within me would not let me ignore it any longer. I call it my self-saboteur. The Wrecker. Mainly through public social “failure,” I have forced myself to consider myself. Maybe at just the right time, when I was finally strong enough, I was able to let myself act the pain out. All of my life tells the story. Even though I’ve resisted self-discovery, hoping to get by with an acceptable self-presentation, the unfolding has continued. And now, after years of struggle, I’m actually starting to embrace the process.
I don‘t know how to solve my romantic issues or clean my car, so I‘m using this blog as a stepping-stone to cleaning, organizing, or at least doing a fearless moral inventory of my mental mess. Thank you for reading.
Up until now, I’ve been posting in a way that feels random to me. I’ve just been getting out what I feel. Convinced that everything is allegorical, that the metaphors of my everyday life are a window of sorts through which I can understand past events too tragically dramatic to be processed and held in clear memory form.
Here’s another example: At 42, I’m starting to lose my close-range vision. A lifetime at 20/10 had me thinking I was seeing clearly. My ego has always been tied to having an eagle eye. Now, holding my phone at just the right distance from my face is becoming unnerving. Today though, I stepped outside, coffee and cigarette in hand, and gazed upon the skies. It’s a cloudy day, like the beginning of so many stormy days on the sea with my dad. And, well, I noticed something about the clouds. I noticed everything about the clouds. Their detail is exquisite! Really, I’m only noticing what I’m noticing. What’s right in front of me has always been wrapped in fantasy and dissociative denial. Now that I’m writing, I am seeing my own way of looking. What’s in front of me, my car, my career, my love life, and the conversation in front of me are all blurry. The possible contents of other people’s heads are fuzzy, hazy, and undecipherable to me. But, from a distance, I’m seeing the whole picture much more clearly.
This blog is raw. I don’t edit much. I just throw out my thoughts, and what ends up posted is constantly changing. If you’re enjoying the process, thank you for coming along. I’m sorting. The themes and direction may seem to shift in the coming months, but what you’ll get is going to be me, more and more clearly. That’s what I’m hoping to get from all of this.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Fear of Fighting Back
All children go through the process of individuating from their parents, more or less, and becoming their own persons in adulthood. I am no different in that regard. Admittedly, I got a little stuck along the way; there were some speed bumps and derailments along the path of my psychological development. I think it’s that way for all of us.
We become physically separate before we are physically independent. Toddlers have strong desires for autonomy. I used to set traps for my dad. I used to plot and threaten. I don’t know what he thought. I thought I was going to kill him. After he killed my mom, I stopped fighting him, and, for many other reasons as well, he and I were stuck in a long-lasting pattern of violent, one-way engagement.
At 12, I mostly shut down while he was hitting me. I would cry about it later, sometimes, if I was alone, if it hit me.
At 14, I was making peace with a world in which each day, at some point, he was going to end up punching me in the face.
By 15, I was used to being beaten regularly, just looking, each moment, for a way to avoid it.
After he killed Sandy, everything got more serious. Each angry punishment/interrogation turned to him standing over me, debating the prudence of mercifully letting me live when I carried a secret that could send him to prison. That’s right; he was being merciful. Killing me was the only path that made sense. If he had been a monster, any less loving and human, I would have burned in that ditch, right on top of her. Well, that’s how he would present the situation. See? Things got serious.
I began to study the beatings. I was waking up, at least to my physical reality. Dissociating for the relief of pain and fear was no longer my automatic response. I could feel every blow, hear every word, and just stand there, taking it. After one three-hour evening beating with a baseball bat, Dad was surprised that I could still walk. I was starting to take pride in my strength. Yeah, I knew that was a little bit sick at the time, but I didn’t feel guilty. I wasn’t the one running the show.
Still, it was miserable to live that way. I wanted a change so desperately! I wanted to take charge of my life, but I didn’t know how to do that without his permission. I didn’t know how to do anything without his permission. He had told me, although indirectly, that he wanted me to hit him back, to stand up for myself. So, I knew that was an option. I just couldn’t do it. Whenever he was hitting me, we were already too far into my failure as a human being for me to find the will to fight back. I would just stand there, feeling completely hopeless, worthless, and ashamed of the miserable excuse for a human being that I had become.
Interestingly enough, my dad had already explained this process to me. It would take me years to connect his stories with our everyday experience. Back then, I just went through the motions of school, family gatherings, and secret abuse helplessly, hopelessly, day after day, watching the years peel away with no conceivable end in sight.
Dad had a lot of stories. One of his favorites was about an unnamed hit man who didn’t have the courage to kill. This man would befriend a target and take them for a ride in his car. He would just drive, waiting for his passenger to express curiosity about their destination. When this would-be killer started to see his victim getting nervous, fueling his courage, he would pull out a gun and gesture with it, still smiling and pretending this was only a ride. Then, as fear mounted in the car, he would set the gun on the seat between them. Once both men knew that both men knew that the passenger was too frightened to reach for the gun, our killer would have the nerve to pull over and complete his task. Dad spoke of the victim’s fear and lack of action with disdain.
I knew he was disgusted with me for standing there, arms at my side, receiving his blows defenselessly. That disgust would ramp up his intensity, often spiraling a simple grocery store mistake into a near-death experience for me, full of righteous judgment and total disregard for any human value I might have held in his eyes previously. Fear and shame angered him. He would take me to that place and then take it all out on me. I would have continued to just accept my fate, but he was making me nervous. How far would he go? Would he kill me like he killed Sandy? He might, and it might be that any one of these violent interactions would be my last. I started thinking more about hitting him back. That’s what he wanted; right? I couldn’t do it unless I could stay convinced that he wanted it. Previous fatherly encouragements are hard to hang onto when your father is in the middle of stripping away your dignity.
In my senior year of high school, I went through this whole cycle with him several times, often prompted by some simple mistake I had made at the grocery store. He would begin to threaten me. Once he saw my fear mounting, he would become more aggressive and more violent. After a certain point, fighting back no longer felt like an option. I would stand there helplessly, hopelessly, waiting for him to get tired. Then, carrying pride for being so strong with shame for being so cowardly, I would sleep soundly and wake to try and please him again the next day. But the beatings were getting worse. His words of hatred and disdain were getting darker....
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
We become physically separate before we are physically independent. Toddlers have strong desires for autonomy. I used to set traps for my dad. I used to plot and threaten. I don’t know what he thought. I thought I was going to kill him. After he killed my mom, I stopped fighting him, and, for many other reasons as well, he and I were stuck in a long-lasting pattern of violent, one-way engagement.
At 12, I mostly shut down while he was hitting me. I would cry about it later, sometimes, if I was alone, if it hit me.
At 14, I was making peace with a world in which each day, at some point, he was going to end up punching me in the face.
By 15, I was used to being beaten regularly, just looking, each moment, for a way to avoid it.
After he killed Sandy, everything got more serious. Each angry punishment/interrogation turned to him standing over me, debating the prudence of mercifully letting me live when I carried a secret that could send him to prison. That’s right; he was being merciful. Killing me was the only path that made sense. If he had been a monster, any less loving and human, I would have burned in that ditch, right on top of her. Well, that’s how he would present the situation. See? Things got serious.
I began to study the beatings. I was waking up, at least to my physical reality. Dissociating for the relief of pain and fear was no longer my automatic response. I could feel every blow, hear every word, and just stand there, taking it. After one three-hour evening beating with a baseball bat, Dad was surprised that I could still walk. I was starting to take pride in my strength. Yeah, I knew that was a little bit sick at the time, but I didn’t feel guilty. I wasn’t the one running the show.
Still, it was miserable to live that way. I wanted a change so desperately! I wanted to take charge of my life, but I didn’t know how to do that without his permission. I didn’t know how to do anything without his permission. He had told me, although indirectly, that he wanted me to hit him back, to stand up for myself. So, I knew that was an option. I just couldn’t do it. Whenever he was hitting me, we were already too far into my failure as a human being for me to find the will to fight back. I would just stand there, feeling completely hopeless, worthless, and ashamed of the miserable excuse for a human being that I had become.
Interestingly enough, my dad had already explained this process to me. It would take me years to connect his stories with our everyday experience. Back then, I just went through the motions of school, family gatherings, and secret abuse helplessly, hopelessly, day after day, watching the years peel away with no conceivable end in sight.
Dad had a lot of stories. One of his favorites was about an unnamed hit man who didn’t have the courage to kill. This man would befriend a target and take them for a ride in his car. He would just drive, waiting for his passenger to express curiosity about their destination. When this would-be killer started to see his victim getting nervous, fueling his courage, he would pull out a gun and gesture with it, still smiling and pretending this was only a ride. Then, as fear mounted in the car, he would set the gun on the seat between them. Once both men knew that both men knew that the passenger was too frightened to reach for the gun, our killer would have the nerve to pull over and complete his task. Dad spoke of the victim’s fear and lack of action with disdain.
I knew he was disgusted with me for standing there, arms at my side, receiving his blows defenselessly. That disgust would ramp up his intensity, often spiraling a simple grocery store mistake into a near-death experience for me, full of righteous judgment and total disregard for any human value I might have held in his eyes previously. Fear and shame angered him. He would take me to that place and then take it all out on me. I would have continued to just accept my fate, but he was making me nervous. How far would he go? Would he kill me like he killed Sandy? He might, and it might be that any one of these violent interactions would be my last. I started thinking more about hitting him back. That’s what he wanted; right? I couldn’t do it unless I could stay convinced that he wanted it. Previous fatherly encouragements are hard to hang onto when your father is in the middle of stripping away your dignity.
In my senior year of high school, I went through this whole cycle with him several times, often prompted by some simple mistake I had made at the grocery store. He would begin to threaten me. Once he saw my fear mounting, he would become more aggressive and more violent. After a certain point, fighting back no longer felt like an option. I would stand there helplessly, hopelessly, waiting for him to get tired. Then, carrying pride for being so strong with shame for being so cowardly, I would sleep soundly and wake to try and please him again the next day. But the beatings were getting worse. His words of hatred and disdain were getting darker....
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
Saturday, October 19, 2013
We're Strangers
A couple of years after my father's death, I was flying back to Humboldt next to a gentleman who inquired about my business. He was a little older than me, a kindly, smaller man with a narrow face and a straggly goatee. I told him everything I knew. I was going back home to spend some time trying to find myself. "Don't take too long," he said. Then his face retreated to a shruggish smile and our conversation was over. He read his book. I thought of something else.
I live in a strange world. School children of the 70's heard about the Great American Melting Pot. We were fed dreams about cooperation, potential, and a better tomorrow. At least, I was. Teachers told me I might become the President. Everyone praised me for being smart, tall, athletic, artistically talented. I just wanted to be loved, to not feel so alone. The story adults told me about the world I lived in didn't exactly fit with what I wanted, but I was good at adjusting myself to imagine happiness in it. Of course, times alone with my dad were a complete nightmare, but I had accepted that as a temporary component of my life, a soon-to-be-overcome hindrance to my full connection with the rest of humanity, a humanity that had something figured out, something I had never quite fleshed out in my own mind.
I live in a strange world. Teenagers in the 80's sang along to "We Are The World". We were scared by threats of nuclear war in a climate of adults who acted like the crises would be resolved soon, leaving room for something. Peace? No one fed me big dreams anymore. I was hoping to land somewhere in between my grandmother insisting I could be a doctor and my dad's "you could be a good cocksucker in prison" mantras. As my dad got more and more violent with me, I felt more and more alienated from the possibility of ever figuring out how to be like the other kids. By my senior year, I was happy with keeping a calm look on my face, hoping for no more than an invisibility of sorts. Can no one see how devastatingly out-of-place and disconnected I feel? Good. If no one saw it, maybe I didn't need to feel it.
False confidence is a machine of inertia. Through strength of will or fear of complete rejection and destruction, I learned to keep acting as if everything was ok. A day at school might be followed by a night waiting in the car for my dad to be kicked out of this bar so I could drive him to the next one. Getting up and doing it all over again with a straight face took a lot of self-control, especially when I didn't know what insanity might be unfolding at home while I struggled to focus on my physics test. The difference between refracted and reflected light got all mixed up in recalling last night's speed purchase and the general mood of my father while his female companion for the evening asked if he would buy heroin for her. What was this one's name? He didn't like buying heroin for women. That look in his eye was often a precursor to murderous violence. Coming back to the classroom, I would look around to see if anyone had noticed me, the one in the class who didn't fit. Then I would turn back to my test paper quickly, gripped with fear that my thoughts had been on display. What question was I working on? Wishing I had had time to study, I felt my self-confidence falling. Smart was all I felt like I had. This would surely be another mediocre performance, another failure. I always got the third highest score on these exams, always third. What if I had the chance to really try. At least I still had my potential.
I live in a strange world. It's strange to me. When dad killed Sandy in front of me, I felt like the stranger. I hadn't let go yet of my idea that I would someday assimilate and belong, not until that moment. Before that day, before those magnificent, gasoline and tire-fueled flames engulfing her body, mocking the light drizzle through the trees, I had had a chance to make it. Before that grey day, before that very second, I could have fooled everyone, passed for normal, acceptable. I watched him staring into the fire. A single drop of rain struck my brow and dropped from the tip of my nose. The cold mist in the air was my messenger from God. This was the end of my hopes. I was too dirty to ever be clean again.
I gave up on my life when I was 16, and I've been beating myself into faking it ever since. Every morning the sun has risen and forced me to keep up the charade. At times, like everyone else, I've felt happy and hopeful, forgetting my childhood trauma for years at a time. It's always been there, along with the nagging reality that I just don't belong here, driving me to recreate and also retreat from the patterns of my youth, sabotaging my happiness and wreaking havoc on the people around me. At 42, I can honestly say, this is as much as I've been able to figure out. My life is still a train wreck. The cars stopped moving years ago, but the parts of me that still see it happening are still impacting the parts of me that tried to forget and pass for normal in this world that still seems so strange to me.
In finding myself, how long is too long? If I don't take my whole life to do it, won't I just be accepting a false construct? Could I be satisfied to live out the rest of my life based upon a version of me that I made up for the sake of peace? Should I shorten the search for self to lessen the difficulty of life; move forward in false happiness with my fingers in my ears, blind to the nightmare swirling at my deepest core? No thanks, man on a plane who has no fucking idea what it's like to be me. I get that people just want me to be happy, but I'm not. Would you be? Are you? Would it be the end of the world if we all admitted how we really feel about this life, this strange world? Maybe it would only be the end of feeling like strangers.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
I live in a strange world. School children of the 70's heard about the Great American Melting Pot. We were fed dreams about cooperation, potential, and a better tomorrow. At least, I was. Teachers told me I might become the President. Everyone praised me for being smart, tall, athletic, artistically talented. I just wanted to be loved, to not feel so alone. The story adults told me about the world I lived in didn't exactly fit with what I wanted, but I was good at adjusting myself to imagine happiness in it. Of course, times alone with my dad were a complete nightmare, but I had accepted that as a temporary component of my life, a soon-to-be-overcome hindrance to my full connection with the rest of humanity, a humanity that had something figured out, something I had never quite fleshed out in my own mind.
I live in a strange world. Teenagers in the 80's sang along to "We Are The World". We were scared by threats of nuclear war in a climate of adults who acted like the crises would be resolved soon, leaving room for something. Peace? No one fed me big dreams anymore. I was hoping to land somewhere in between my grandmother insisting I could be a doctor and my dad's "you could be a good cocksucker in prison" mantras. As my dad got more and more violent with me, I felt more and more alienated from the possibility of ever figuring out how to be like the other kids. By my senior year, I was happy with keeping a calm look on my face, hoping for no more than an invisibility of sorts. Can no one see how devastatingly out-of-place and disconnected I feel? Good. If no one saw it, maybe I didn't need to feel it.
False confidence is a machine of inertia. Through strength of will or fear of complete rejection and destruction, I learned to keep acting as if everything was ok. A day at school might be followed by a night waiting in the car for my dad to be kicked out of this bar so I could drive him to the next one. Getting up and doing it all over again with a straight face took a lot of self-control, especially when I didn't know what insanity might be unfolding at home while I struggled to focus on my physics test. The difference between refracted and reflected light got all mixed up in recalling last night's speed purchase and the general mood of my father while his female companion for the evening asked if he would buy heroin for her. What was this one's name? He didn't like buying heroin for women. That look in his eye was often a precursor to murderous violence. Coming back to the classroom, I would look around to see if anyone had noticed me, the one in the class who didn't fit. Then I would turn back to my test paper quickly, gripped with fear that my thoughts had been on display. What question was I working on? Wishing I had had time to study, I felt my self-confidence falling. Smart was all I felt like I had. This would surely be another mediocre performance, another failure. I always got the third highest score on these exams, always third. What if I had the chance to really try. At least I still had my potential.
I live in a strange world. It's strange to me. When dad killed Sandy in front of me, I felt like the stranger. I hadn't let go yet of my idea that I would someday assimilate and belong, not until that moment. Before that day, before those magnificent, gasoline and tire-fueled flames engulfing her body, mocking the light drizzle through the trees, I had had a chance to make it. Before that grey day, before that very second, I could have fooled everyone, passed for normal, acceptable. I watched him staring into the fire. A single drop of rain struck my brow and dropped from the tip of my nose. The cold mist in the air was my messenger from God. This was the end of my hopes. I was too dirty to ever be clean again.
I gave up on my life when I was 16, and I've been beating myself into faking it ever since. Every morning the sun has risen and forced me to keep up the charade. At times, like everyone else, I've felt happy and hopeful, forgetting my childhood trauma for years at a time. It's always been there, along with the nagging reality that I just don't belong here, driving me to recreate and also retreat from the patterns of my youth, sabotaging my happiness and wreaking havoc on the people around me. At 42, I can honestly say, this is as much as I've been able to figure out. My life is still a train wreck. The cars stopped moving years ago, but the parts of me that still see it happening are still impacting the parts of me that tried to forget and pass for normal in this world that still seems so strange to me.
In finding myself, how long is too long? If I don't take my whole life to do it, won't I just be accepting a false construct? Could I be satisfied to live out the rest of my life based upon a version of me that I made up for the sake of peace? Should I shorten the search for self to lessen the difficulty of life; move forward in false happiness with my fingers in my ears, blind to the nightmare swirling at my deepest core? No thanks, man on a plane who has no fucking idea what it's like to be me. I get that people just want me to be happy, but I'm not. Would you be? Are you? Would it be the end of the world if we all admitted how we really feel about this life, this strange world? Maybe it would only be the end of feeling like strangers.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Bible Reading and Writing
Writing about Sandy's murder is hard work. The Investigation Discovery channel has done a couple of shows on the subject featuring well-diced interview clips with me. I am working on my own version. It's a big story to tell, for me, because remembering watching my dad kill his girlfriend opens more than just a can of worms in my mind. I've spent most of my life stuffing that shit down and keeping the cork in tight!
Those who know me personally, while professing to like me a lot, have certainly witnessed the pressure of whatever's in my head leaking out in angry outbursts, financial failure, and self-destructive sexual scandal. At this point, I want so badly to be the captain of my own mind, that I am going in, win or lose, to whatever horribly frightening shame and pain resides there. I simply must. Jesus! Why would I want to do that? I'm not really jumping in. I'm creeping forward, testing the waters, and, up until now, I've taken entirely too long.
If you read the rest of my blog entries, you may find them somewhat incomplete, filled with snippets of truth, shreds of emotion, and vague explanations. I'm circling the burning bush of my soul, with no lessor goal than to integrate my history, my God, and my own true life-purpose in a way that might just alienate me from family and friends. When, in the Bible, a man or woman follows God's direction, it's usually with an automatic judgment and death sentence from the church leaders of their time. If I'm on the right track, I expect nothing different. I hope for it.
Am I just looking for a fight? Sure, but my dad is dead. I wish no one physical pain. I cannot bring myself to fight in anger against any one. So, I intend to fight ideas. I intend to fight American Christianity and family values for their role in the alienation of my father and therefore, the death of my mother and LaSandra Turpin. Perhaps my anger is misplaced, but why not? The church needs to be judged before they successfully inoculate the whole world against ever taking seriously the book I bled for.
Yes, Christians, your book is a laughing stock among the uninitiated. Surely you know this. I know it's a wonderful book, full of useful guidance for turning this world around. Properly applied, the principles in the New Testament could have saved me from my childhood nightmare. Of course it's too late for me, but the world still groans in suffering. And, just hold your horses. We don't suffer because we don't have Jesus in our hearts. The world suffers for lack of the thing offered by Jesus that the church misses as well. Here's a good litmus test. Church, if non-believers aren't commenting on how you're following Jesus, there's no reason for you to announce it. Stay home on Sunday. Beat yourself over the head until your blood stains the pages of your Bible. That's how I read it growing up, and, after a lifetime in church, I know that hardly anyone else read the damned thing at all. Church, if you're not going to take the word seriously, just shut up. Even Greek mythology is useful because no one is crazily insisting on faith in Zeus! We non worshippers are free to learn the lessons of a system. Bending of the knee in a fancy building is no path to righteousness. Surely, we all know that. Surely, I don't have to explain.
So, what have I learned in this life about God, the Bible, and humanity? Honestly, I haven't learned much. I've mostly been caught up in unlearning. Don't we just take in what our parents teach us at first? Then they tell us there's no Santa Claus after all, or we come to realize that they're dangerous. Later in life, if we're lucky enough to be broken enough to seek help, we may come to see our parents as separate individuals and ourselves as changeable. Do some parents impart this to their children peacefully? hmm... Interesting...
Society discusses the rebellion issues of youth as if it's a foregone conclusion that adult systems are perfect. Surely, children who do not joyfully conform must be flawed in some way! Terrible Twos, Teenage Rebellion. Are two year olds completely responsible for not responding well to our systems? Are teenagers just too sinful to get things right without physical "discipline" of some sort? Do kids need to be scared by ideas like coal in their stocking or a Hell if they don't do what Mommy and Daddy say? I don't mean to be rude and beat up on religion, but when it's used to tell children they have something wrong with them, then it's just a fancy version of all the ways in which we communicate to children that they have something wrong with them. Maybe children ARE messed up. But are the adult world conventions we've bought into necessarily less messed-up?
No, it's natural to rebel against that which is unnatural. It's also natural to adapt, conform, and tell ourselves we're happy to be advancing the righteous system that was handed to us. Can it be natural to question all that we've accepted?
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
Those who know me personally, while professing to like me a lot, have certainly witnessed the pressure of whatever's in my head leaking out in angry outbursts, financial failure, and self-destructive sexual scandal. At this point, I want so badly to be the captain of my own mind, that I am going in, win or lose, to whatever horribly frightening shame and pain resides there. I simply must. Jesus! Why would I want to do that? I'm not really jumping in. I'm creeping forward, testing the waters, and, up until now, I've taken entirely too long.
If you read the rest of my blog entries, you may find them somewhat incomplete, filled with snippets of truth, shreds of emotion, and vague explanations. I'm circling the burning bush of my soul, with no lessor goal than to integrate my history, my God, and my own true life-purpose in a way that might just alienate me from family and friends. When, in the Bible, a man or woman follows God's direction, it's usually with an automatic judgment and death sentence from the church leaders of their time. If I'm on the right track, I expect nothing different. I hope for it.
Am I just looking for a fight? Sure, but my dad is dead. I wish no one physical pain. I cannot bring myself to fight in anger against any one. So, I intend to fight ideas. I intend to fight American Christianity and family values for their role in the alienation of my father and therefore, the death of my mother and LaSandra Turpin. Perhaps my anger is misplaced, but why not? The church needs to be judged before they successfully inoculate the whole world against ever taking seriously the book I bled for.
Yes, Christians, your book is a laughing stock among the uninitiated. Surely you know this. I know it's a wonderful book, full of useful guidance for turning this world around. Properly applied, the principles in the New Testament could have saved me from my childhood nightmare. Of course it's too late for me, but the world still groans in suffering. And, just hold your horses. We don't suffer because we don't have Jesus in our hearts. The world suffers for lack of the thing offered by Jesus that the church misses as well. Here's a good litmus test. Church, if non-believers aren't commenting on how you're following Jesus, there's no reason for you to announce it. Stay home on Sunday. Beat yourself over the head until your blood stains the pages of your Bible. That's how I read it growing up, and, after a lifetime in church, I know that hardly anyone else read the damned thing at all. Church, if you're not going to take the word seriously, just shut up. Even Greek mythology is useful because no one is crazily insisting on faith in Zeus! We non worshippers are free to learn the lessons of a system. Bending of the knee in a fancy building is no path to righteousness. Surely, we all know that. Surely, I don't have to explain.
So, what have I learned in this life about God, the Bible, and humanity? Honestly, I haven't learned much. I've mostly been caught up in unlearning. Don't we just take in what our parents teach us at first? Then they tell us there's no Santa Claus after all, or we come to realize that they're dangerous. Later in life, if we're lucky enough to be broken enough to seek help, we may come to see our parents as separate individuals and ourselves as changeable. Do some parents impart this to their children peacefully? hmm... Interesting...
Society discusses the rebellion issues of youth as if it's a foregone conclusion that adult systems are perfect. Surely, children who do not joyfully conform must be flawed in some way! Terrible Twos, Teenage Rebellion. Are two year olds completely responsible for not responding well to our systems? Are teenagers just too sinful to get things right without physical "discipline" of some sort? Do kids need to be scared by ideas like coal in their stocking or a Hell if they don't do what Mommy and Daddy say? I don't mean to be rude and beat up on religion, but when it's used to tell children they have something wrong with them, then it's just a fancy version of all the ways in which we communicate to children that they have something wrong with them. Maybe children ARE messed up. But are the adult world conventions we've bought into necessarily less messed-up?
No, it's natural to rebel against that which is unnatural. It's also natural to adapt, conform, and tell ourselves we're happy to be advancing the righteous system that was handed to us. Can it be natural to question all that we've accepted?
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
Lend Me Your Light
I had a pretty sweet childhood. Mom was a beautiful artist, intelligent and kind. Dad was all-powerful and safe. I lived on a peaceful goat farm, spending my days playing alone in the fields or listening to my favorite music in my room. I had nightmares. Why did I have nightmares? Was something wrong with me?
Everyone in the family knew it was remarkable that I predicted my mother's death one day in advance. At age five, I concluded that Jesus had magically revealed the future to me. In retrospect, I suppose their awestruck comments about my mental prowess were covering up that everyone knew he HAD actually killed her. I bet it impressed or shocked them that such a young man might have been more clued in than they realized.
Throughout my adolescence and teen years, Dad did his best to support my fairy-tale version of Mom's death while continually acting out the truth of the matter on my ever-stronger body and mind. He would drink and cry, sharing his shame over not being a good enough husband to her. I heard it so many times, but I relished in the retelling. These were the times when he was peaceful and proud of me. Perhaps deep in my mind, the part of me that knew the truth enjoyed these lies so much because it was just a matter of days before the scene would shift. Not consciously, but I was aware that I would soon be cowering under his blows, hearing in loud, angry, definite tones, how glad he was that my mother had not lived to see what a worthless cocksucker I had become. It was coming. It was always coming. I would endure his abuse in the moment, but when it wasn't happening, I didn't give it a thought. I lived in a delusion.
Thirty years after he killed her, almost to the day, my Dad also died. I wrote a respectful, dutiful obituary. I delivered his eulogy, fairly, kindly, blindly. I was happy he was gone, until he came back. In the months that followed his death, my mind began a multi-year unfolding that put my teenage anguish to shame. Friends remind me that I survived the hard times, that everything is fine now. That's so sweet. They're just wrong. I have mostly suffered alone the last seven years with feelings long buried. I've coped by largely distracting myself. Even fleeting memory glimpses have kept me on the edge of suicide for more of this time than I would have thought I could survive.
Finally, I'm starting to face that I HAVE TO face what happened. All of it's in there, in my head, driving me, hurting those around me, keeping me in the prison constructed for me. Hey, happy people of today, I get it. You might think I deserve to smile and enjoy life. Maybe you think I should put it all behind me and life the kind of life I want. Well, how about if we compromise? I'll live the happy life you think I deserve. Just please accept that the life I want to live is the brutal, demon-slaying bloodbath of exploring my emotions and memories. I must not run.
When Dad killed Sandy, I was numb inside. The year before, when he almost killed Patty, I was barely awake enough to see her as a person. Rewinding through my childhood, for most of my life, always lead to an idyllic story of my Mom's accidental drowning. After seven years of feeling and opening my mind, as much as I felt I could, I am coming to what feels like my most helpless failure, the failure not only to act but even to see what he did to my Mom. There in that trailer, alone in the country, the three of us wrote my tragic script. Visually, I only remember the time he cut her nose off. The rest I've pieced together from his stories, my knowledge of his lying style, and my own adult-life failures, the tapestry upon which the intuitive five-year-old in me acts out what he knows.
Now, I'm not like my dad. I paint pain, anger and bloodshed in self-destruction and passive-aggressive emotional manipulation. I wear the chaos in my painted, torn clothing. I carry the baggage in mangled possessions, stacked high in my car and the room I occupy in my ex-wife's basement. I parade my internal feelings of failure. I always remembered hiding in my closet. Now I'm starting to hear her screams from the adjacent room.
I want to write my life story. I have to write it. Soon, I'm going to be unveiling an investment plan for self-publishing, an opportunity for you, my readers to invest in this project. It's too much for me to struggle to survive, fixing people's houses, running out of money before payday each week, while bearing the enormous burden of entering the evil dungeon of my mind. I don't know if I can make it this way. Stay tuned for a chance to make a difference in my life and perhaps the world we live in.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
Everyone in the family knew it was remarkable that I predicted my mother's death one day in advance. At age five, I concluded that Jesus had magically revealed the future to me. In retrospect, I suppose their awestruck comments about my mental prowess were covering up that everyone knew he HAD actually killed her. I bet it impressed or shocked them that such a young man might have been more clued in than they realized.
Throughout my adolescence and teen years, Dad did his best to support my fairy-tale version of Mom's death while continually acting out the truth of the matter on my ever-stronger body and mind. He would drink and cry, sharing his shame over not being a good enough husband to her. I heard it so many times, but I relished in the retelling. These were the times when he was peaceful and proud of me. Perhaps deep in my mind, the part of me that knew the truth enjoyed these lies so much because it was just a matter of days before the scene would shift. Not consciously, but I was aware that I would soon be cowering under his blows, hearing in loud, angry, definite tones, how glad he was that my mother had not lived to see what a worthless cocksucker I had become. It was coming. It was always coming. I would endure his abuse in the moment, but when it wasn't happening, I didn't give it a thought. I lived in a delusion.
Thirty years after he killed her, almost to the day, my Dad also died. I wrote a respectful, dutiful obituary. I delivered his eulogy, fairly, kindly, blindly. I was happy he was gone, until he came back. In the months that followed his death, my mind began a multi-year unfolding that put my teenage anguish to shame. Friends remind me that I survived the hard times, that everything is fine now. That's so sweet. They're just wrong. I have mostly suffered alone the last seven years with feelings long buried. I've coped by largely distracting myself. Even fleeting memory glimpses have kept me on the edge of suicide for more of this time than I would have thought I could survive.
Finally, I'm starting to face that I HAVE TO face what happened. All of it's in there, in my head, driving me, hurting those around me, keeping me in the prison constructed for me. Hey, happy people of today, I get it. You might think I deserve to smile and enjoy life. Maybe you think I should put it all behind me and life the kind of life I want. Well, how about if we compromise? I'll live the happy life you think I deserve. Just please accept that the life I want to live is the brutal, demon-slaying bloodbath of exploring my emotions and memories. I must not run.
When Dad killed Sandy, I was numb inside. The year before, when he almost killed Patty, I was barely awake enough to see her as a person. Rewinding through my childhood, for most of my life, always lead to an idyllic story of my Mom's accidental drowning. After seven years of feeling and opening my mind, as much as I felt I could, I am coming to what feels like my most helpless failure, the failure not only to act but even to see what he did to my Mom. There in that trailer, alone in the country, the three of us wrote my tragic script. Visually, I only remember the time he cut her nose off. The rest I've pieced together from his stories, my knowledge of his lying style, and my own adult-life failures, the tapestry upon which the intuitive five-year-old in me acts out what he knows.
Now, I'm not like my dad. I paint pain, anger and bloodshed in self-destruction and passive-aggressive emotional manipulation. I wear the chaos in my painted, torn clothing. I carry the baggage in mangled possessions, stacked high in my car and the room I occupy in my ex-wife's basement. I parade my internal feelings of failure. I always remembered hiding in my closet. Now I'm starting to hear her screams from the adjacent room.
I want to write my life story. I have to write it. Soon, I'm going to be unveiling an investment plan for self-publishing, an opportunity for you, my readers to invest in this project. It's too much for me to struggle to survive, fixing people's houses, running out of money before payday each week, while bearing the enormous burden of entering the evil dungeon of my mind. I don't know if I can make it this way. Stay tuned for a chance to make a difference in my life and perhaps the world we live in.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
I'm God, and I'm Crazy
Warning: If you are prone to strong negative emotions and judgments when hearing unorthodox and potentially "heretical" declarations, turn back NOW!
I'm God. No, seriously, I think I Am. Yeah... well, hang on a bit, and I'll try to explain. I want to address everything, all at once, my life, the human experience, the meaning of existence, and the dizzying circus of my own mental perception and interaction with the whole. How can I boil down my experience growing up with my dad and it's deeply interwoven religious training component. I'm not exactly sure how to summarize my ideas here in a single blog entry, but I think, if I had to boil down my overall direction into a one word, one question, one answer, it would be "God." Three words? "I am God." Let's see if I can get there, with a surprise ending for you, my lucky reader. Save your thanks til the end. :)
Today I caused pain for someone close to me. I probably do it every day, for someone. I could argue my case, but that's how I hurt my friend. I see that I'm always defending myself, even though I'm tragically at odds with myself or rather, my selves.
After I went forward with the circumstances of Sandy's death and whereabouts http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/09/california.body.found/index.html some suggested I was an accomplice to murder. Aren't we all accomplices to the entire human experience? My dad grew up in this country, in this culture, in a Christian home, in a Christian nation, in a society that worships money, individualists, and violence. By purchasing and participating in this society, all of us are accomplices. If we did not work to stop it, we allowed it through inaction. Of all the people in America in 1987, I was the only one that saw what my father did. I didn't stop him, ultimately, but I was trying. All of human history is complicit in the making of Ernie Christie Jr, Sandy Turpin's murder, and my traumatic childhood. I should ask the "accomplice" crowd if it's sinking in on any level that they are accomplices through their own passivity, not only to Sandy's plight but to the suffering of a whole world, using accusation as a way to salve the shame of their own helpless inaction. Can I let you in on a little secret? I don't think turning the tables on my dad would have been an easy manner. There were great risks. I didn't want to get killed. What's your excuse? We as individuals don't know how to find out who's being abused, and we don't know how to help. True. But do any of us spend any time trying to figure out what could be done? How many of us are even trying? How many of us have the time? Aren't we all too busy working our jobs to pay our loans and keep our houses? Are the rich to blame? I think I'm to blame for allowing there to be rich and poor in my world. I'm certainly not doing all I can to even the playing field. I didn't stop my dad from overpowering Sandy, but I don't do anything to stop CEOs of large corporations from living high off of the sweat and misery of their armies of minimum wage slaves either. I didn't do anything to stop my country's government from murdering millions of civilians in Iraq.
Why is it offensive for me to suggest I'm a god? Because none of us want to carry the shame of selfishly denying benefit to others when it is in our power. We want to feel justified. How dare I acknowledge my power and lift the curtain of plausible powerlessness to which we all cling! I'm sorry. I know it might trigger shame to think about what we're not doing. I personally would not be able to read a blog like this, but I think people are generally better than me and less likely to take things personally than me. Well, no, that's a lie. I know my writing will offend. Who cares?
I'm offended by anyone who judges me over Sandy. Do you know why? It's because such judgment automatically puts me in a cross. I think we should choose one of two paths of thought about the crimes I witnessed. Either I should have done everything I could to save her or I should be excused from any responsibility. If you think I should have saved her, then I think it would only be fair for you to devote your life and finances to saving someone or something. If you want to get away with living your life in complete denial, then please allow that I was perfectly within my rights to watch and not intervene in Sandy's death.
Of course, I'm only offended because of some expectation of fair treatment. Clearly, my dad taught me that life is inherently unfair; he said as much on many occasions. Jesus even teaches that Heaven requires accepting less than our "fair" share for the sake of love. Philosophically, I agree. How about this? I totally failed to stop my dad from killing Sandy, but I don't want to blame anyone for being oblivious to the suffering they do not see. How about we all just try to evaluate ourselves and our own contributions with the greater good of others in our minds? How about we learn from our mistakes? I'm writing a blog. Yes, the rest of my life might be ordinary, but I try to love people as much as I can without allowing them to run over me and beat me into the ground. Can I let you in on another secret? Do you know how people can be kind of selfish, ruthless, and uncaring? I've known a lot of cruel people. On the whole, my dad was just like everyone else.
My dad used to say "If you don't get to Heaven in this life, nothing will change when you die." What in the world did he mean? I've spent a lot of years pondering his ideas about salvation. I don't believe the way I used to believe, but there is a sense in which I was saved. Through faith in something greater than the world of me and Ernie Christie Jr, I managed to hold on to hope for something greater for me. I learned to suffer and wait. I learned that I was capable of choosing my path, even when I didn't feel like I had a choice at all. I've been saved by Jesus in that I didn't just follow my dad's path completely.
Now, he believed in Jesus as an actual being with a personality and a plan for our lives. I believed the same until after my dad died. Then, I began to think about all the things God "saw" when I was growing up. Sure, I never stopped my dad, but neither did God. Whatever impact I had on my dad was god-like in its proportions. I never saw God adjust the situation at all. At least I started telling dad he was wrong. At least I convinced him to stop hitting women. The only gods in those private moments in my childhood home were my dad, me, and the ideas of "God" in our heads.
For me, the only useful application of religion is done here, on Earth, while we live. I turned the other cheek thousands of times. In one sense, that got me hit a lot more. In another sense, perhaps I had a positive impact on the whole course of things. Either way, following Jesus kept me stuck there loving him, and following Jesus gave me the strength to survive it. But in the end, I'm the one who was there, made choices, and now carries the weight of it all.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
I'm God. No, seriously, I think I Am. Yeah... well, hang on a bit, and I'll try to explain. I want to address everything, all at once, my life, the human experience, the meaning of existence, and the dizzying circus of my own mental perception and interaction with the whole. How can I boil down my experience growing up with my dad and it's deeply interwoven religious training component. I'm not exactly sure how to summarize my ideas here in a single blog entry, but I think, if I had to boil down my overall direction into a one word, one question, one answer, it would be "God." Three words? "I am God." Let's see if I can get there, with a surprise ending for you, my lucky reader. Save your thanks til the end. :)
Today I caused pain for someone close to me. I probably do it every day, for someone. I could argue my case, but that's how I hurt my friend. I see that I'm always defending myself, even though I'm tragically at odds with myself or rather, my selves.
After I went forward with the circumstances of Sandy's death and whereabouts http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/09/california.body.found/index.html some suggested I was an accomplice to murder. Aren't we all accomplices to the entire human experience? My dad grew up in this country, in this culture, in a Christian home, in a Christian nation, in a society that worships money, individualists, and violence. By purchasing and participating in this society, all of us are accomplices. If we did not work to stop it, we allowed it through inaction. Of all the people in America in 1987, I was the only one that saw what my father did. I didn't stop him, ultimately, but I was trying. All of human history is complicit in the making of Ernie Christie Jr, Sandy Turpin's murder, and my traumatic childhood. I should ask the "accomplice" crowd if it's sinking in on any level that they are accomplices through their own passivity, not only to Sandy's plight but to the suffering of a whole world, using accusation as a way to salve the shame of their own helpless inaction. Can I let you in on a little secret? I don't think turning the tables on my dad would have been an easy manner. There were great risks. I didn't want to get killed. What's your excuse? We as individuals don't know how to find out who's being abused, and we don't know how to help. True. But do any of us spend any time trying to figure out what could be done? How many of us are even trying? How many of us have the time? Aren't we all too busy working our jobs to pay our loans and keep our houses? Are the rich to blame? I think I'm to blame for allowing there to be rich and poor in my world. I'm certainly not doing all I can to even the playing field. I didn't stop my dad from overpowering Sandy, but I don't do anything to stop CEOs of large corporations from living high off of the sweat and misery of their armies of minimum wage slaves either. I didn't do anything to stop my country's government from murdering millions of civilians in Iraq.
Why is it offensive for me to suggest I'm a god? Because none of us want to carry the shame of selfishly denying benefit to others when it is in our power. We want to feel justified. How dare I acknowledge my power and lift the curtain of plausible powerlessness to which we all cling! I'm sorry. I know it might trigger shame to think about what we're not doing. I personally would not be able to read a blog like this, but I think people are generally better than me and less likely to take things personally than me. Well, no, that's a lie. I know my writing will offend. Who cares?
I'm offended by anyone who judges me over Sandy. Do you know why? It's because such judgment automatically puts me in a cross. I think we should choose one of two paths of thought about the crimes I witnessed. Either I should have done everything I could to save her or I should be excused from any responsibility. If you think I should have saved her, then I think it would only be fair for you to devote your life and finances to saving someone or something. If you want to get away with living your life in complete denial, then please allow that I was perfectly within my rights to watch and not intervene in Sandy's death.
Of course, I'm only offended because of some expectation of fair treatment. Clearly, my dad taught me that life is inherently unfair; he said as much on many occasions. Jesus even teaches that Heaven requires accepting less than our "fair" share for the sake of love. Philosophically, I agree. How about this? I totally failed to stop my dad from killing Sandy, but I don't want to blame anyone for being oblivious to the suffering they do not see. How about we all just try to evaluate ourselves and our own contributions with the greater good of others in our minds? How about we learn from our mistakes? I'm writing a blog. Yes, the rest of my life might be ordinary, but I try to love people as much as I can without allowing them to run over me and beat me into the ground. Can I let you in on another secret? Do you know how people can be kind of selfish, ruthless, and uncaring? I've known a lot of cruel people. On the whole, my dad was just like everyone else.
My dad used to say "If you don't get to Heaven in this life, nothing will change when you die." What in the world did he mean? I've spent a lot of years pondering his ideas about salvation. I don't believe the way I used to believe, but there is a sense in which I was saved. Through faith in something greater than the world of me and Ernie Christie Jr, I managed to hold on to hope for something greater for me. I learned to suffer and wait. I learned that I was capable of choosing my path, even when I didn't feel like I had a choice at all. I've been saved by Jesus in that I didn't just follow my dad's path completely.
Now, he believed in Jesus as an actual being with a personality and a plan for our lives. I believed the same until after my dad died. Then, I began to think about all the things God "saw" when I was growing up. Sure, I never stopped my dad, but neither did God. Whatever impact I had on my dad was god-like in its proportions. I never saw God adjust the situation at all. At least I started telling dad he was wrong. At least I convinced him to stop hitting women. The only gods in those private moments in my childhood home were my dad, me, and the ideas of "God" in our heads.
For me, the only useful application of religion is done here, on Earth, while we live. I turned the other cheek thousands of times. In one sense, that got me hit a lot more. In another sense, perhaps I had a positive impact on the whole course of things. Either way, following Jesus kept me stuck there loving him, and following Jesus gave me the strength to survive it. But in the end, I'm the one who was there, made choices, and now carries the weight of it all.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Dirty Old Man
I once had a lover, and she used to call me her Dirty Old Man. I won't go into much extra description of the circumstances surrounding such a nickname. It paints it's own picture. Anyway, that's what she called me. It was sexy and romantic. It was her special name for me. I guess I imagined that, for the rest of my life I would look back and remember "Dirty Old Man" as simply the super hot and creatively personal nickname she charmingly bestowed upon me with a wink.
Today, while getting a haircut, my mental paradigms about myself and my place in the world were drastically shifted by the young girl with brown hair getting her hair cut in the chair next to mine. When I first noticed her reflection in the mirror through a darting glance, I was vaguely aware that she was looking at me. I made conversation with my stylist for a few minutes and then looked again, this time purposefully. She was looking at me again. We stared. I felt uncomfortable, smiled. She smiled in return. Afterward, I realized she was quite young, perhaps under fourteen years old. I avoided making eye contact again. Now, I'm not the kind of grown man that is going to try and capitalize on sexual opportunities with underage girls, but we had had what I like to call a moment. I couldn't help but notice, throughout the rest of my haircut, that she was looking my way from time to time. Who could blame me for avoiding such an interaction? I felt shame for having even entered into that short, shared smile. Yes, aren't you relieved? And yet, I felt bad for not returning to our friendly exchange, bad that I might make her feel unappreciated, undesirable.
Do you ever feel like we have signs on our foreheads like "Hey, you can take advantage of me." or "Hey, I won't fight back!" or "Over here! I'm easily fooled?" I sure feel that way. No one knew what I was going through growing up, but the bullies at school didn't need to read my book to know they could get away with harassing me. It seems unfair, but I think I wore my victim role on my face, inviting new people to try and exploit me. I can make sense of getting hit at home and getting hit by bullies, but, and this is the point, it hasn't been so clear to me what sign is on my forehead with women.
Just for now, let's try on "Dirty Old Man." What if that's the sign my young lover saw? What if the much younger girl getting her haircut was reading the same sign? It's hard for me to know what she read. Generally, I attract women with dysfunctional relationship habits, lots of self-hatred, and lots of anger toward some man in their lives who greatly disappointed them. Dirty Old Man sounds sexy and desirable, but leaves plenty of room for hatred and judgment later on. There might be something to all of this, but assuming women are reading a sign on my head is convoluted and keeps me from looking at my own part in interacting with other humans and myself. Plus, whatever any girl reads on my head is most likely more about her than me. There's something to the types of people we draw, but I can't sort it out at that level anymore.
How does Dirty Old Man apply to me? Getting easy stuff out of the way first, I am a man. To an ever increasing number of people, I am old. Dirty? Well, with a wink, I'll tell you I'm not so bad. In my defense, I live among human beings, a species that conspicuously hides its sexuality with clothing, lies, and shaming judgments. At least we don't stone adulterers in the streets anymore. No, we just destroy them socially, if we can. Some people shudder at the growth of shamelessness about sexual behavior, but, what good has all this shame done for us? So, I'm sexual. I enjoy it. Sex in this society is already hidden and forbidden so much, and my family was full of rules, secrets, and lies about it. So, yeah, a little bit of dirt is a little bit exciting to me. I'll admit that.
What draws me to women is something different, something about their vulnerability, something connected to my mom and my shame for allowing my dad to beat her for years and ultimately kill her. I guess my heart is drawn to abused women like the fists of those bullies were drawn to my face. I don't mean to be abusive. I don't think I really am, but, in these recreations, it always seems to get told that way. From my side, I feel compassion and reach out, the woman shares her vulnerabilities, and then I'm an asshole for not having loved the right way or for having needs of my own. That's fair. I usually enter romance as a man without needs. I'll give for a long time and then start wanting something back.
My dad was this way, except his interactions often included violence. He would present himself as cool and without needs, until he started feeling attached. Then he would begin building a case against the woman, ultimately unleashing his anger. He wasn't a serial killer or stalker. He didn't kidnap anyone, well, unless they had been lovers previously. He had a nasty habit of believing that he owned anyone he had ever slept with. I guess I'm included there.
What was the sign on his head? Had he been sexually molested as a child and felt like the other person took all power from him? Just questions prompted by the last paragraph.... Your thoughts?
Do you ever feel like we have signs on our foreheads like "Hey, you can take advantage of me." or "Hey, I won't fight back!" or "Over here! I'm easily fooled?" I sure feel that way. No one knew what I was going through growing up, but the bullies at school didn't need to read my book to know they could get away with harassing me. It seems unfair, but I think I wore my victim role on my face, inviting new people to try and exploit me. I can make sense of getting hit at home and getting hit by bullies, but, and this is the point, it hasn't been so clear to me what sign is on my forehead with women.
Just for now, let's try on "Dirty Old Man." What if that's the sign my young lover saw? What if the much younger girl getting her haircut was reading the same sign? It's hard for me to know what she read. Generally, I attract women with dysfunctional relationship habits, lots of self-hatred, and lots of anger toward some man in their lives who greatly disappointed them. Dirty Old Man sounds sexy and desirable, but leaves plenty of room for hatred and judgment later on. There might be something to all of this, but assuming women are reading a sign on my head is convoluted and keeps me from looking at my own part in interacting with other humans and myself. Plus, whatever any girl reads on my head is most likely more about her than me. There's something to the types of people we draw, but I can't sort it out at that level anymore.
How does Dirty Old Man apply to me? Getting easy stuff out of the way first, I am a man. To an ever increasing number of people, I am old. Dirty? Well, with a wink, I'll tell you I'm not so bad. In my defense, I live among human beings, a species that conspicuously hides its sexuality with clothing, lies, and shaming judgments. At least we don't stone adulterers in the streets anymore. No, we just destroy them socially, if we can. Some people shudder at the growth of shamelessness about sexual behavior, but, what good has all this shame done for us? So, I'm sexual. I enjoy it. Sex in this society is already hidden and forbidden so much, and my family was full of rules, secrets, and lies about it. So, yeah, a little bit of dirt is a little bit exciting to me. I'll admit that.
What draws me to women is something different, something about their vulnerability, something connected to my mom and my shame for allowing my dad to beat her for years and ultimately kill her. I guess my heart is drawn to abused women like the fists of those bullies were drawn to my face. I don't mean to be abusive. I don't think I really am, but, in these recreations, it always seems to get told that way. From my side, I feel compassion and reach out, the woman shares her vulnerabilities, and then I'm an asshole for not having loved the right way or for having needs of my own. That's fair. I usually enter romance as a man without needs. I'll give for a long time and then start wanting something back.
My dad was this way, except his interactions often included violence. He would present himself as cool and without needs, until he started feeling attached. Then he would begin building a case against the woman, ultimately unleashing his anger. He wasn't a serial killer or stalker. He didn't kidnap anyone, well, unless they had been lovers previously. He had a nasty habit of believing that he owned anyone he had ever slept with. I guess I'm included there.
What was the sign on his head? Had he been sexually molested as a child and felt like the other person took all power from him? Just questions prompted by the last paragraph.... Your thoughts?
As I learn to let go and grow, I'm finding that my perceptions are not so permanent. At the wise age of 42, I'm seeing myself in everyday life like never before. I'm feeling my feelings more powerfully and fully, and, yes, making those I love most quite miserable as well. I'm probably pissing off lots of people, and I just haven't noticed. Maybe it's been this way all my life. I've been doing lots of writing and soul-searching, and it sounds good to attribute the changes to my heroic efforts to be a better person and bestow my gifts upon mankind. Oh, how I love to represent myself that way. Really, that's only part of my story. I say I'm wise and 42 with tongue in cheek, a high-five to a very special young woman who has spent the last couple of years experiencing my foolishness first-hand, perhaps for her own selfish reasons, perhaps to give me the gift of insight. Maybe it's both. Maybe neither of us knew what we were doing. I'm trying to learn about how the world sees me and how I choose to interact.
We all have patterns of loving and patterns of pain that seem to go hand in hand. May we all learn about ourselves and make the healthiest choices we can.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
We all have patterns of loving and patterns of pain that seem to go hand in hand. May we all learn about ourselves and make the healthiest choices we can.
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
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