Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps, till the legend, over steep ways to the stars, fulfills itself.

W. C. Doane

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Got some demons to chase

I sit here, alone in my room, with nothing but the sound of the outside's cold winds to keep me company. A nagging voice sits in the back of my mind. One that's been speaking quite loudly as of late. You are not loved. You are alone. Though I know there are people that may contest this, life has shown me that thoughts that float in my mind, do so with the utmost accuracy. You may tell me you love me today, you may say that our friendship is forever but the truth of the matter is, one day you will walk away.

These demons that lay dormant within me for periods of time rear their ugly heads every now and again and haunt my soul. "You're not good enough" They whisper in my ear. "No one really loves you all that much" Somehow I believe them.

I'm working on it, every day is a little better than the next. Hopefully someday I can look back on these posts and say to myself. You were loved, you were always loved. Not only are you good enough but you're better than you ever expected you would be.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

It's not Just About Chris Brown and Rihanna, It's About so Much More Than That.

It may seem silly to rant about this. I know I said I would delve a little more into my personal life and maybe this does affect me because there are elements to this, that I feel are personal. Rihanna and Chris Brown are performing a duet. The first thing that came to mind when I found out about this was, are you serious? I saw it all over Facebook and had to google it because I honestly thought it may have been a prank or a joke or something.

I dont get it, and for some reason I take this to heart. Why is it ok for violence to happen within a relationship? Why is it ok that this man beat his girlfriend to the point where bruises covered her face?

Why has Chris Brown come back on top when he did this to another human being?



My mother had this face. My mother carried these bruises. Maybe not to the degree these pictures show but she certainly faced abuse at the hands of a man who promised in front of God and the state, to love and cherish her. I remember my mom constantly having to face my father when I was a child, I remember having to sit in a room and play with my little sister or hold her while i heard screaming and yelling and crying and hitting in the other room. I remember closing my eyes and hearing something break, wondering, what did he break this time? I remember standing and watching because he'd yell at me when my mother told me to go to my room, and feeling helpless because I was never able to do anything.

I was recently asked by a very close person to me what kind of a kid I was, and after some thought I remembered. I was an extremely insecure child, I was lonely, I felt ugly and fat, and never good enough. I still feel many of those things today. Not all the time, I've worked very hard to grow past that, but old wounds are some of the hardest to heal.

Forever I felt like i didn't fit in with people my age, that I was an adult living inside the body of a child, of a teen. I hated myself and everyone could see it but me. I lived that way because of abuse. I felt that way because I never had a safe place to go, except my very vivid imagination. My home was filled with turmoil, therefore I was too.  I couldn't forgive myself for never having been good enough. Good enough to stop him from drinking, from hitting, from very nearly killing my mom. To be honest I sometimes think he couldn't forgive himself either.

He's sober now and has done many things to make up for those years. He lives and breathes to take care of my sister and I. He's the kind of dad who'll read my 3rd year advanced stats textbook, because I cant do math to save my life. He'll drive 4-5 hours from Ottawa to Toronto every weekend for a month, so my sister can take a class that will guarantee her to pass her Nursing licence exam. He drives my mother anywhere and picks her up, because she's honestly a terrible driver. Seriously, her friends tell her they're afraid of her driving. Rather than risk her getting into an accident he'll do the work. He's a wonderful father whom I love dearly, even though we disagree on God knows how many topics. I dont want this post to be about making my life out to seem like it was tragic. Like every other human being on this planet, I've had ups and downs.

All I'm trying to say is that abuse happens to more than the people physically involved in the cycle. Children everywhere see this, and the media's unbelievably positive spin on it and think, my idol Chris Brown raised his hand to his girlfriend, his partner. He's rich, good looking, very talented, why not hit me too? So you get tweets like this:





This is what happens when we dont talk about the long lasting effects of abuse. When we don't educate our children and tell them that abuse is about much more than the physical wounds one has to bear. It's about the long lasting, heart wrenching pain someone suffers when their wounds have healed but their souls haven't.  It's about a little girl or a little boy like the kid I was, who felt so alone. Will seeing something like this normalize the behaviours? Will it make them think it's ok to hit and be hit? I can only hope not.  So here we are, these are my thoughts on the lastest celebrity gossip. I think out of it came one of my most personal post yet.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

I remember...

I'm sorry it's taken me forever to write. Life has such a way of grabbing you by the hand and saying Let's go! I'll write more soon enough but I wanted to share something I wrote for myself recently. I've been taking this poetry class and one of the things we were asked to write about was a memory, specifically one from childhood. We were given examples of your mother baking cookies, or reading you stories. I did have a few of those but some of the most vivid memories of my childhood were not those happy ones, they from my dad who was an alcoholic. When he drank he was very violent, so here's what came of that poem. It's nothing amazing as i'm just getting into the rhythm but tell me what you think....





I remember...
Eyes so smooth and glossy
So full of heat and anger
A face so seemingly familiar
Yet not all the face of a man I thought I knew

I remember...
The stranger that barged his way
Into my home
Into my childhood
Into my safe spaces
A face so red and flushed
Like hot and angry molten lava coursed through those inner veins
Bitterness forming the unfamiliarity that haunted this body

I remember....
Lips that refused to hold a once affable smile
Breath that left the bitter, lingering damp smell of whiskey in the air
Eyes heated in a raging anger,
Long gone the soft smiling eyes of yesterday

I remember...
Heavy hands cast onto a body that refused them
Hands raised in fury
Pounding fists into a body once promised to be cherished till death
Broken souls revealed on broken bodies
Hues of reds, blues and purples

I remember...
The shattering of objects that once were
Items that once held shape and meaning
broken into small shards on a wall that held the dark secrets of that home

I remember...
A dark room, closed eyes
The sounds of a young girl's deafening heart beat
Though nothing could stifle the screams penetrating the doors of that space
I remember falling asleep to the sounds of violence.