For new readers, I highly recommend that you return to October 2021 when Little Me was fighting the inner flight from her dysfunctional childhood and adolescence to get over her “Daddy issues”.
Sixty years and some Rock is finally letting Lm fend for herself; her regressions are fewer and her boundaries tight. There are fences to mend and some details to box up and burn. Sixty years it has taken this one inner girl to accept that her father, her idol, first love to whom no one could ever compare was and is a fraudulent character created in his head and placed into hers. No man matched his wit, his charismatic charm, his ability to control an entire room, and several other’s lives. She no longer sees him this way, in fact she pities that he was so ashamed of who he really was he had to hide behind falsities his entire life. That’s a truly gruesome story. Lm’s husband says that he knows she still ” misses him” for one of her weaknesses is sentimentality, recalling both hilarious and almost unbelievable tales of her father’s antics. Rock knew she was healthy when on her birthday her father managed to email her an ” I will always love you” birthday message. It meant nothing to her and she quickly blocked him and deleted it. It was to soothe his soul, not hers. He will be eighty this month and surrounds himself with trained sheep who jump through hoops to please him. Lm doesn’t wish him harm and from her understanding of karma, she is just as susceptible to its varietal awakenings. In a warm, cozy hotel full of books and antiques and oddities of interest she sips her Rooibos tea in soft yellow lighting, Norah Jones had sung repeatedly for an hour via the sound system and she no longer cries. Her husband has treated her to a two night get away and she knows his authenticity, his love awaits her.
As many older readers know this blog is mainly a reflection of LittleMe’s aka “Lm’s” real past where she identifies truthful occuranses which have caused her much anguish from childhood. She has a professional diagnosis of cptsd, a severe anxiety disorder which can be triggered easily (including panic attacks, nightmares, and low self esteem); she bounces back and forth with her better self and iconic protector, ROCK. Rock is ever present and takes care of her when she is having setbacks. He also pushes her to do the work to heal. Lm is also a writer who posts fairly regular short stories, poetry, prose and other forms of artistic expression. She also lives in a state of severe chronic pain and was diagnosed with CPS, or chronic pain syndrome. She loves life, animals, nature and especially forests; she is extremely protective of her family and the few very close real friends she clings to. She sets the bar very high to develop trust in others, even questioning her deepest sense of self frequently. Lm dodges people who she finds detrimental to her continual quest to clean up her mental and emotional health. I appreciate all of her readers who keep giving her support and encourage her healing process. Be Well. Be You.
ROCK wants to help Lm clean out her mind, release her memories into the sea like ashes of another self. He wants to help her create a beautiful new sense of self. It’s a job that no one can truly help her with as she is full of fire. He is not phased by her pissy shouting, her spit fire retorts nor when she knocks him over if he tries to lend advice. Truth has only one meaning, “cut the crap” and say what you mean. She has been foul lately. She has begun to speak to new people, coming out of hiding about her childhood, her shame, her sense of failing brought on by two gnarly parents, abusers she kept in her life because she was desperate for love. She wants to hear the words spoken outloud to her; she wants her mother to say, “I was physically abusive; I crossed a line and you didn’t deserve it”. She wants her mother to say, “I regret not allowing you to develop your sense of autonomy in a healthy way; I prevented you from following your dreams”. Lm wants her to say it, not think it. She knows her mother is fully aware of her behaviour that drove Lm to live with her beautiful other mother, Elle, her baby sister D and BaDDaD. Even though BaDDaD was risky to be around she knew Elle would not hurt her and she would have her precious D to hold onto, care for and love. When she initially got to her new town she was given freedom she’d never felt; she could walk out the door and go to get a slice of pizza and sit at the city docks watching sailboats out in the Chesapeake Bay; this alone was all she wanted. The sun sprinkling down and bouncing off the soft waves made her calm. She would get ice cream with D and watch as she licked the wooden spoon, careful that her baby sister would not get her first “brain freeze”. She started a new school and then she began to lose her way inside. In psychiatric terms it’s called “transferance”. Despite choosing to leave her mother, she also needed her; the cookie making, funny stories and playing scrabble and their shared love of beauty. Lm began to unconsciously try to become more like Elle. She wore Elle’s clothes without permission, she tried to behave like Elle in the mirror and no one understood her perserverance to create a bond that was like the one that she would truly hold onto throughout her life with her own mother. Her mother was not a horrible human being, in fact she was quite self sacrificing and had been through a very rough childhood. Often Lm would see in her mother’s enchanting brown eyes a hint of sorrow and try and cheer her up. The mother and child bond is complex, never perfect yet nevertheless necessary to evaluate and often, despite the obstacles, worth the effort to understand. Then she hit a big snag, one that she has to expunge from her own self-loathing NOW. She met her first big love who would later leave her with a sense of dirtyness, worthlessness and scarred. She would grow to hate all men, never sure how to please anyone and her family never intervened. BaDDaD didn’t care enough to stop it. Her mother had no idea what she was living through when she fell into the hands of this nice Catholic boy with bad, bad, bad, bad, BAD behaviours. He was in some ways, a replica of her father’s hidden side, full of lies and deceit; she continued to go back to him for she had no true persona, no guidance, just a broken sense of identity. Her only interests were finding love, being loved and clinging to the wrong people for it. His name was Tom. Since there are thousands and billions of Tom’s she doesn’t care to give him a break and a hidden name. He deserves to be outed for what he was, likely still is and how he used and abused her. Tom treated her like a doll and knew he was treating her poorly; he often would sleep with all her friends and other girls when she was at home with D and family; he introduced her to drugs and alcohol and soon, nothing mattered but him. She would pursue him, often waiting in his shared living quarters with his best friend K while he was having sex with another girl in his room. K would hold her while she cried and say, “I don’t know why he is like this”, drying her tears with empathy. This would go on for several years until Tom’s father sent him away to study. They met when he was twenty-one and she sixteen. Throughout her twenties she would suffer inner crisis struggling to know who she was, why she wasn’t happy or good enough. She did not know how to be herself and was lost in her own garbage of memories. Rock has led her to the point where she is tossing memories into boxes and trash bags, loading her past up and readying her for the dump. Lm is not garbage, in fact far from it. She is stronger and stronger each and every day and her slip-ups still arise now and then, yet she is prepared to let go, to savor her life and with her sword in hand, she is determined to battle her inner warriors. No one, no woman, no girl, no person should feel weighed down by their TRUTH. The car is ready, the engine started and all the rubbish that has held her back for so many years is being tossed memory by memory into a gargantuan hole. Lm is learning to save herself, not wait for someone else to save her. Rock is proud and will always be on stand-by; they are merging, if a stone could weep Rock’s tears would break the dam that has held back Lm’s growth. Thank you Rock for believing in Lm’s goodness.
From birth we bloom into small pieces of our influencers; be they biological, guardians or our adoptive family, they mold us and reinforce our beliefs. They can be good or bad and some down right insane. Lm comes from a broken one, a narcissist, sociopath, alcoholic, fraud. At some point in time we have a chance to release ourselves from the bondage of all negativity, hurt and wrong, after wrong, after wrong. I am not responsible for my father’s failures, dishonesty and lack of stability within himself. He had chances to show by his actions that he did give a shit. To do better. To live on a good path. He couldn’t do it. It was not impossible; it was a lot of hard work and his blue eyed white freckled privledged ass got him in and out of places, spaces, around rules, regulations, and he was a damn good con artist. But hard work he was too good for. He portrayed himself as the educated, worldly, white collar type. All starched and pretty when he really was just like thousands and thousands of others who’ve hailed from the “projects” of larger USA cities. He was a product of the government’s way of helping out people, of all creeds, races and dreams to bunker down and guess what to do with the rest of their lives. He would escape because he could lie himself into a better world. I watch all these fraudulent Netflix true stories and keep expecting him to be found and investigated. How the hell has he gotten away with his ugliness? There are many black men and women who have struggled legitimately to rise above their strife. Not everyone is leaning on a junkyard dog selling smack to babies. I was lifted from this strange and perilous lifestyle by my mother. She worked her ass off and honestly fought to the top. My father screwed around with his polluted version of his reality for years, yet still believes he is better than the rest. His current wife, the enabler and also younger than me he has used and abused; let’s agree it is their story to tell. I can only say that if you have one door slightly opening for you to “UP Your Self “, broaden your life and be better than those who have wronged you go for it. Hanging back because it feels comfortable or an anihilation of your duty to family togetherness is what the weak choose. They don’t run when their own sibling bleeds. As the Black Sheep I, Lm, am free because the one who was to teach me right from wrong left me with a puzzle with lots of pieces missing. ROCK puts these pieces back together and intel comes in slowly but surely of more lies upon lies that bury BaDDaD’s front. Behind those cold blue eyes are mounds of unearthed relics. The feeling he continues to project upon new people in his life makes them feel like royalty. They don’t see the grinding of his teeth, the tensing of his jaw when he is deciding his next move. But Lm does. He is 79 years old and can’t bare to to reveal his reality within. If he did, he’d be alone. That won’t happen because one thing that this white, nice looking well dressed man has that women of any color, men who are not white and those who have based their lives on trust, faith, love, TRUTH and honor is he will succeed in keeping his lifestyle through selfishness and living on lies. He will survive because he is a master of his craft. He recreates his name and his madly perceived world repeatedly. Does he or any bad man ever truly pay? Is their any truth to karma, any paybacks or divine intervention? I don’t know anymore. I just know a bad thing when I see it coming because I learned what a bad thing was growing up and running far away from my trauma and triggers was all I knew, until ROCK pulled me to my feet. I still pray just in case there is a higher deity who will show me that my own suffering has not been in vain. ROCK wants BaDDaD to pay for his violations of the heart, the lies, the life he has led. Lm has no belief in retribution. Lm just wants to be heard because she is good. She was always good and yet has days in which her mental anguish is so forceful she must go back down the stairwell and wait for some light again.
Words form and stop, quivering at my lips I say nothing. A rush of warmth rises inside my throat leaving me choking on my own emotions. A battle ensues between my psyche and my gutteral instincts. I divide my shivering heart into portions like raw meat and pack them away making sure they are placed so far away from resurfacing, breaking free and falling out of my mouth. I am the keeper’s key, the guardian of truth and I am aligned with no one, not even my own conscience. I see from behind, from above, below and further within Her, that is, Littleme. I see in my mirror ROCK and turn away in denial, never wanting my scarred outer skin to acknowledge it’s own shedding. I have heard among many other words of advice to let sleeping dogs lie, a rolling stone gathers no moss, somethings are to be put to rest; I lick my lips drenched in salty tears and feel sewn up with my secrets. I know that my only chance of survival is to let go of the words begging to be spoken, to follow in the steps walked before me and keep my head down. To be truly seen is not going to happen. No magical wand will be given to me so for now, for Lm I raise a white flag and surrender to the unresolved, the pointlessness of words that are chained within.
Littleme, that is Lm, has a very bad drawer full of horrible, never released from her grip memories. They come from so far away but changed her entire life entirely when three words were said to her, “I love you”. By now she’d moved north to the east coast, the Mason Dixie line and Maryland’s capital, Annapolis. She was so stuffed with emotions, drowning in her regurgitated pain and felt smothered. She hoped this move would save her from hiding in the closed gymnasium during lunch, standing on toilet seats quietly, stealing cigarettes and never eating without self punishment. Sit ups and runs and more sit ups and excuses to hide her body from an ounce of flesh. It was her last chance at control. When walking along the city docks she loved the ting-a-ling sound of sailboats moored in neat rows, the fisherman pulling up baskets of crabs and the liveliness and freedom she’d not known before. Walking shop to shop, discovering alleyways and for once, even if BaDDaD had no time for her she was breathing calmly. A solemn walk around the historical homes, perfected gardens and boys eyeing her felt good. She was registered into a Catholic school as it was nearby and she could walk there in the morning sun or fog from Elle and BaDDaD’s home and her soft and sweet smelling sister that Elle had blessed her with. She loved her uniform which made her fit in without much judgement but make-up was frowned upon. Only three other girls wore make up in school and they were pushing buttons and perimeters. She didn’t want to push anything, just be loved. The one who got her attention was sly. Not that great of a young man but his younger brother was in her class. He was a straight A student and she had been also until she stopped caring. One sunny spring day, late March, perhaps it was St. Patrick’s Day, two older guys were sitting drinking canned beer from a small boat at a prime spot to see all the passersby. Lm walked past and a guy called out to her with messy blonde hair with eyes that looked like shiny blue gems. He asked her if she knew his brother and introduced himself. Both of these rowdy over twenty- one year old guys were brothers to a boy her age in her religion class. She presumed they could not be dangerous and obliged them with coy and polite conversation. The tornado of events and fucked up-ness that was unleashed from that point changed her entire life, her belief in Love, yes, the one with a capital “L” ; shame was all she felt. Her father was sometimes trying to keep the two apart but what could he do really? Parenting is a full time job and he couldn’t hold one down in his past so it was obvious he wouldn’t have the answers. The boyfriend pursued and among one of the places he lived was on an old fishing boat with his best friend at the time nicknamed, “Mo’. Lm hopped off her bus often just before her own stop over the drawbridge downtown. She had a craving for Love and he was meeting her needs even if he was a lying predator and a drunken druggie whom she obliged on a sinking boat. He always had weed and every drug imaginable. He told her how he liked her hair, what clothes suited him the best and mostly how to satisfy his sexual needs. What she didn’t know was he kept an entourage of young women to keep him happy and his demolition of Lm’s mental health would benefit him and confuse her for years to come. Nobody was stepping in or up to save her. He gave her an STD of some kind and she was terrified of seeing a doctor. She was absolutely nothing. Ruined. Used. Lost and lost again and again. To this very second Lm has not forgiven him or his friends who lied and withheld his sexual meanderings. Not even now can she let go. He soaked her in lies and words so tender yet he was the true definition of a monster. BaDDaD and this guy were much more alike than she realised. Within she had this desperate pleading need for her father and soon she would transfer all of her attachment issues onto this very bad man. She began failing classes, running away from her BaDDaD’s often to see her very unhealthy “boyfriend”and she would lose many opportunities for fun with good friends because she was always afraid of losing him. Eventually she did; his father intervened and he was sent to Maine for his Captain’s license and planned to join the merchant marines. She wrote letters, called often and even took me of BaDDaD’s credit cards and flew to Boston and then took a bus to Maine. The sheer vulnerability she carried was taking her down. She was on the Titanic and no one was going to throw her a life vest. It was one of the most pivotal changes she would go through and at her lowest point she had no one to talk to or see her suffering. BaDDaD just wanted her to be beautiful and continue to idolize him, which she did for many rocky years. Putting this drawer away so Lm doesn’t dare to dream of the nasty, cruel boyfriend. There will be much more on the wild, unreigned years of her life. No one knew, NO ONE how bad she felt inside and she would learn much later that men hurt you. The nice ones didn’t want her. A sweet friend paraphrased her redundant lack of genuine suitors as, they perhaps felt “out of their league” and intimidated by her beauty; she would carry a sense of a strange faithfulness to the horrid sleazy guy who used her nativity for his personal gain. The #METOO movement has brought Lm to her demons door and she will forge straight on telling her TRUTH. Rock will help her from swirling down the drain.
“Going Round in Circles..gonna fly high like a bird up in the Sky, sky skyeeee”
It’s not right! Wrong! You’re lying! You do not know what you are talking about. You are a fool! Your truth or mine? We use many words to express our anger because the one in front of us does not believe our words. Maybe, we do it because their words do not agree with our reality rather they’re influenced by the eschewed abyss presented by film makers and social media, marketing and societal comparisons.
Regardless, ROCK knows what’s true and hammers on, not leaving one piece of Lm behind; he will never give up on telling her story, and the stories minor or major and the one’s seemingly unimportant will all give her the ability to be whole, to split and peel away from him and he will let her go. She will fly and be heard, safe and healthy. Lm is not even close to being understood. She is so buried and hidden that to get near her, really into her heart, someone must work very hard to prove they are worthy of her trust. When her father’s lies spilled over into her life, he reinvented her world without her ability to change his scheming; she could not stand up to his bite so she surrendered. It took her fifty plus years to do so. Now, she is not going to let her story be his to tell nor to fill with his polluted nonsense and she will expose every single detail about him. He may never know, but that’s not the point. Her story will be set free and she will soar above it all and for the first time in her life her wings will not be glued down, clipped or tied. To get there we must trudge on through the small things and the big events so she can be felt. She after all, was his golden daughter until she began to open her eyes and see him for what he was. A user, an abuser, a scam artist, a sociopathic liar and pervert; damn he could have been a winner for his performance throughout life is worth more Oscars than all the stars embedded on the sidewalks in Hollywood. He still has no clue that she has her sword sharpened and is ready and ROCK will be with her until she is prepared for her flight.
RealStuff by RealMe 
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