A year since I found myself

I just wrote down on my to do list, to remember to get out the hot glue gun out, to fix Jay’s headliner in his truck.  The irony of that is I have been staring at that problem for several years.  It’s just in the last few weeks that it has begun to bug me, and I have finally figured out how to fix it, and that is indicative of many things over this last year. 


Today is June 6^th, 2016, and it’s been a year since I started taking Buspar.  It has been perhaps the most incredible year of my life.  I could never have believed life could be this good.  For the first time in many years I feel I have come home to myself again.  Opened to new experiences, and found myself again.  My brain and heart, once dulled by sadness and pain, now seeks out beauty in each day. 

I wanted to write you about all the things that Buspar has allowed me to do, but as I have thought about it over night, I have come to realized, half of what Buspar has done for me, is about what is gone in my life.  Gone is the daily anxiety, the tapes in my head that tell me I am an awful and horrible person, that I will never be good enough, the thoughts of suicide, that all I do will just end in failure.  For the first time, that I can remember, I want to live.  I am eager to greet the dawn of each new day, not angry that I am still alive.  I don’t remember feeling this good, at least, since before Oma died, when I was 7. 

Buspar works a bit like water, it wears away and repairs the bad stuff, drop by drop.  Slowly your eyes begin to open to things around you.  I feel like I have been asleep for at least the last 10 years, if not longer.  My PTSD, from years of abuse, had left my emotions dulled.  I have had to deal with each new intense emotion as they surged in my life.  I cry at the drop of a hat, but I don’t use it like a weapon, like my mom did.  I smile.  I am happy, truly happy with my life.  I fall in love with Mr. Jay, every day all over again.  It’s not that Buspar has given me back my life, it has given me a life I never dreamed possible.

A year ago today, the computer I am typing on, sat in a dusty bag.  The desk it sits on, was covered in junk, and I felt did not belong to me.  The dirty clothes and dirty dishes were more numerous.  My grooming and personal hygiene were subpar.  I was terrified of the next moment, not knowing when I would have a panic attack, or what the cause was.  I was a woman who frequently denied or felt ashamed of her biological genealogy.  I rarely cooked dinner.  I had no energy to exercise, and back spasms ruled my life.  I was blind to the problems in my life, big or small, and had no ability to think up how to fix them.  And I seemed to constantly be seeking out people and animals to save, when the only person I wanted saved was me. 

Today I write you from this computer, no longer dusty, on a desk I now claim as mine, above it a wall of inspiration for both my book and my life.  The dishes and clothes are not piled up.  The floor has been recently swept.  My nails are chipped, but painted, as they are every week.  My grooming and personal hygiene are exemplary.  I am no longer ashamed of my biological genealogy, and in fact I am quite proud of it.  Dinner is already defrosted, and I am thinking of how to cook it, and it’s not even noon yet.  I am looking forward to my evening floor exercises, and my walk in the morning.  Now when I see a project that needs to be fixed, it does not take me long to figure out how to fix it, emotional, mechanical, or otherwise, as if my brain was spinning at a faster rpm.  Drop by drop I am saving myself. 

I find there are not enough hours in a day to listen to all the music, read, clean, or write as much as I want to, but damn it I keep trying. 

In one year, not only have I increased my reading, introduced new music in my life, have a cleaner house, but I think my greatest accomplishment has been my writing.  Since August 2015 I have produced and posted over 95 articles to this blog, and at last count 152,368 words give or take a few.  My book currently has 17 chapters and 82,959 words.  In less than a year I have produced 235,327 words. This does not include plot outline notes, articles that will not be published, interview notes, and notes taken from the self-help books I read.  Not to mention hundreds of hours of research.  It is a staggering amount, even for me.  Saturday, I introduced myself to a new person and told them I was a writer, and for the first time, I didn’t feel like a fraud when I said that. 

When I picked up my pen, proverbially, to begin writing again, and started my blog, I wrote incessantly at first, terrified it was just a side affect of the medication and that all this would go away.  I know now, it is not.  My writing is here to stay. 

I am ever grateful for all Buspar has done from me.  It has given me courage to end relationships, go on without people in my life I thought I could not, start and deepen new relationships.  I can’t wait to see what the next year holds.

Ilsa

 

 

Homage to Latonia Barto

Death comes for us all.  No one is getting out of here alive.  It is inevitable.  How we live between birth and death is what matters, not how it ends.  Every death touches us all.  Each life lost is a detriment to the entire world.  We are all human: gay, straight, cisgenered, transgendered, Muslim, Christian, Pagan, Democrat, Republican, Black, White, Yankee, and Southerner.

I’ve known love, and I’ve known loss.  One thing I know for sure is we all return, whether in animal or human form, or as a single drop of rain.  We as beings, both human and otherwise, seek this life, this existence.  We choose this life. 

The dead tell me what they crave the most is being with the living.  Being with the ones they left behind.  They can do little more than watch.  All life that passes away returns to us, if we are smart enough to see it.  It is a circle, ebbing and flowing without end, endlessly repeating.  It is dizzying, mesmerizing and heart breaking all at once.

My thoughts have turned to death, because earlier this week my beloved friend and spiritual soul sister LaTonia passed threw the veil.  She was a beautiful, kind, loving woman who never believed in limits or labels.  I pray she finds peace and rest on the other side.  For the last 7 years she battled Leiomyosarcoma, or smooth muscle cancer, but she was so much more then cancer.  She was a constant fountain of giving and creating.  She was a talented artist in what ever medium she chose. 

Those of you following along know that I met Melinda in a yarn meeting and that we were part of a group called Chicks-with-Sticks.  I have been into fiber arts since I was 11 and re-learned to crochet at Barbara’s feet.  Oma had taught me when I was little, in fact it is part of my first memory, but I forgot as I got older.  I have continued crocheting most of my life, learning to knit, weave, spin, sew, and tat along the way.  If it has a needle involved I want to learn to do it. 

I met LaTonia many years ago in a Chicks-with-Sticks meeting.  For many years we all coexisted happily together.  When Melinda and I parted company (Billy the Exterminator) I basically left the group.  I did not want to run the chance of seeing Melinda.  I went to one more meeting around Christmas to find out that the lady who ran Chicks-with-Sticks, was leaving.  Her work had changed and she was tired of all of the drama that Melinda and I brought to the group, all though she never put it like that.  It was all implied.  I was ashamed and embarrassed that I had caused so much trouble, so I left and did not come back for many years.

A chance meeting with LaTonia one day at the Pines Road Library brought it all back into perspective.  She threw her arms around me and just held me so tight.  She said, “Where have you been?  I’ve missed you!”  I told her how bad I felt about breaking up the group, and that I didn’t want to run back into Melinda.  She said that there was a new group called “Yarn Play.”  They were meeting at the same time, in the same place, with most of the same people, minus Melinda.  She had not been around in some time.  She invited me back.  I told her I already had Druid on Saturday, but I would try to see if I could balance two meetings at once. 

I did.  I came back and it was like I never left.  I joined my sisters in stitching and bitching ever Saturday.  When I stopped going to Druid after all the problems I had with D&K (Goat Problems) Yarn Play became as close to a coven as I had, for more than a year.  Although almost every woman there was a Christian, they were the women I went to with questions, my hopes, my joys, my fears.  They were my tribe of elders, although many of them were my age or younger.  Since Juno and I patched things up and I went back to my Druid meetings, I am back to balancing both meetings.  Yarn play in the mornings and Druid in the afternoons. 

LaTonia’s health was never far from our minds, especially towards the end.  Once we all got settled with our knitting or crochet projects, and if she was not there, we would ask where she was and how she was fairing.  LaTonia I think often shared with us, and not with many others, at least part of her struggle.  She once told me she stopped telling her extended family what was going on with her medically ‘cause she could not handle the drama.  I think they often saw her as broken and fragile, when she was perfectly capable, she just had cancer.  What stories were shared in Yarn Play I will not print here.  We keep each other’s confidences, and confessions. 

LaTonia continued to create beautiful and inspiring pieces of fiber art, whether in crochet or knit.  I don’t think she knew how to not create.  She made blankets for the Linus Project, hats for the cancer center, creating even when her hands shook. As I began to understand that her time was growing short, I encouraged her to begin looking at her projects still in progress, or “on the needle” as we say, and decide who should finish them and what should happen to them.  Last Saturday I watched as friend bound off a blanket LaTonia had been working on for about a year.  I knew if she had finally given up her projects, she was letting go.  I knew it would not be long.  She died the next day.

In November 2015, I began to write my first real novel, which is at the moment called “The Treehouse.”  LaTonia’s beauty and artistic ability became the inspiration for one of my main characters, who I named Anne.  Her beautiful son Gabe, became the inspiration for Anne’s son, and namesake.  I would call or message her with questions I had, about growing up biracial, Gabe, and motherhood.  We became even closer.  I gave her all that I had written.  One of the great joys of my life came at my 40^th birthday, when she told me she liked what I had written and had made a connection with Anne.  It was the greatest complement she could have ever given me, and I cried.  As LaTonia began to slip from us, I felt as if Anne was dying as well.  Since her death, it has taken me some weeks to get back to working on my book. 

I had had a phone conversation with LaTonia about a week before she passed away.  She told me she was not ready, that she wanted to stay.  She fought until the end striving to stay around for her son and her husband.  I asked her one time if she knew how long she had left to live.  She said, “I don’t want to know.”  She believed having an idea of the date of her death, would limit the quality of her life.  Latonia was a woman who always beat the odds.  Most of those diagnosed with her type of cancer live 3 years from time of diagnosis, 5 if you are lucky, she lived 7.  I believe because she attacked the disease both physically, emotionally and spiritually. 

She was a complex woman with a complicated history, just like all of us are.  Her smile, zest for life, optimism, patience, smile, laugh, and encouragement to those around us was infectious.  Her’s was a life lived fearlessly in love and compassion.  We are all the better for having known her. 

Ilsa

Dirty Laundry

There will be those of you who feel that I am airing my dirty laundry in public.  That I am telling family secrets, things that should stay secret.  That I have some kind of hidden agenda for my family.  Let me now lay all of this to rest.

Am I airing my dirty laundry in public?  That Is for you to decide.  But I can tell you this having been a house wife for most of my life.  That at some point dirty clothes start to stink.  And if you are not careful the wet ones will start to grow mold, make heat, and make you sick.  Honey at some point you’ve got to get yourself a box of wash powder and go to work!  It’s just the facts of the thing!

Yes I have dirty laundry.  Some of it is mine and some of it has belonged to other people over the years.  It has just been dumped in with mine.  I am now sorting thru what is mine, what’s  theirs and deciding what I can salvage, and what needs to simply be thrown out or burned with the trash. 

I sat down to write and put a few ideas on paper, for a few friends.  It has ended up being a book mainly about my life.  I have spent these last few months retelling these tales to yes warn you, to show you the goodness of the Gods and their affect in my life.  Yes I have set out to publicly humiliate a few people.  Those are the ones’ who’s full names I have listed in my works.  Because I could find no other way of ever getting justice for actions they did to me.  Others have had their names changed or only partially mentioned, as I am trying to protect them and those around them.  But I still want you to hear the story. 

In writing these stories, I have also been going thru old pictures.  I use the pictures to trigger old memories and remember what I was feeling back then.  I am trying to look for the origins, of why and when I began to feel anxiety about the world around me, and when I began to have my first panic attacks.  Writing this has been cathartic and therapeutic for me.  I have found there is not one beginning but many, like warp and weft when you weave.  It is all built upon each other.  Each strand having it’s own starting point, and an end point.  All of this lends itself to the final work.  It is my guess your stories will be similar in their mechanics. 

I learned long ago in 12 step programs that our secrets keep us sick.  And it is true.  To keep something secret, I feel in many ways poisons us and sets us up for illness in our life.  Since I left Mike I have vowed to tell the truth about life, and the whole truth.  Even if it hurt the ones around me, because I never wanted another person to suffer as I have, with abuse, being used or being repressed in such a way that their mind begins to betray them.  The way in which some people behave, to others they say the love or care for, should be criminal.  We must all learn to seek enlightenment and change how we treat our fellow beings.  Every day I wake up, I try to do better, to say I apologize when I am wrong, and to learn from not only my life experiences, but the experiences of others.  I think that is why it so important to listen to the stories of those around you.  You never know when it will become a teachable moment.  I am not perfect, I never have been and I never will be.  I have my flaws and inconstancies just like anyone else. 

I have no hidden agenda in my writing about the people in my life.  My father will never enter AA.  My mother will never have a clue.  Michael Liberto will never apologize for what he did to me.  Paige will never give me Jelly back.  And I hold no hope that any of the above will ever happen.  I have not written all of this, to force them into anything of the sort.  These ships have long since sailed.  No matter how much I may desire such a thing, I have long ago had to give up hope that any of these people will ever change their ways. I must accept my responsibility in each and every thing that has happened in my life.   I must accept each person in my life where they are.  I have encouraged them where I can.  And in many cases I have moved on.

I recently received a message from D.  She wished to speak with me and apologize. And also to let me know, where I misconstrued some of the things that happened between us.  I know her.  She is a snake.  Trying to slither back into my life and convince me, that the truth as I understand it is flawed.  I hear her rattles and know enough to stand my ground, so as not to be struck again.

I decided early on, that should I have people come back to me, and wish to revise MY truth that I would not allow them.  You cannot speak for me!  You cannot interpret the world for me!  This is my truth as I have experienced it.  No one can experience my life for me.  The way we interpret our lives is filtered through a life time of experiences, good or bad.  No one has the right to come to you and say, “I am sorry, but the way you understand what happened is wrong.”  They will have their own way of seeing their life, and it will not be the same as yours.  Our culture, the period of time we lived threw, those around us, our demographics, our gender, hell even our religion plays a part in the way we color our world. 

So in conclusion, no one has the right to tell you that, how you understand your world is wrong.  We are all different and we will all see our lives thru our own lens.  You have every right to feel and believe the way you do, even if someone believes it is wrong.  Keep writing, keep talking and keep fighting.  You will get thru this. 

Ilsa

 

 

Reader Responce

I want to talk to you a little bit this morning about the response I have had from a few of my readers.  As of this writing we have had over 150 views this week and over 340 since I started this blog.  While that may be a small number to some, to me it is incredible. 

I received an odd message the other day from an old friend.  It said, “We have lead parallel lives.”  I was a bit confused and I tried to contract her for a few days.  I was finally able to get a hold of her and talk to her about her comment.  We spent over an hour chatting online as she poured out her story.  How she has many of the same health concerns that I have, and that her husband had been just like Mike.  We had both lived thru the abuse and humiliation of a husband addicted to porn.  She then told me that she watched her husband turn into a predator, and begin to prey on her family members.  I wept behind my keyboard as I read what she wrote.  In all most 15 years of telling the story of my survival, I had never met another woman whose husband had been a porn addict. 

I was so angry over what I was reading.  Angry that he had done this to my friend, that he had hurt other members of her family, but I think I was most angry over the fact that I was not alone.  See when you’ve never meet anyone who has been through what you have.  You feel perhaps you are a fluke.  That somehow you are at fault. That somehow you caused this to happen, because surely no one else could have been through what you’ve been through.  You are bad and evil, and mistaken.  That somehow, perhaps you made it all up and it didn’t really happen at all.  And then you see it in someone else’s hand and you are like, “OMG! Maybe I didn’t make it up!?  Maybe I’m not alone.” 

It made me very sad to think of what my friend had gone through.  It made me even sadder and angrier to think that she and I must not be the only ones out there.  I am beginning to think I might put a Facebook group together for us survivors of this type of abuse, but as of yet I have no title for said group or how to even define its parameters.  What would we call ourselves?  Porn Widows?  Survivors of porn addicted partners?  I will keep you a breast of this situation.

These conversations also made me very, very angry.  We can have a national conversation about Viagra and erectile dysfunction.  We can talk about people surviving physical abuse, but when it comes to the sexual stuff, Oh NO! We shut down.  On TV, other than Law and Order: SVU I know of no other program that is currently discussing this subject.   Sex abuse gets so little national coverage.  We are such prudes when it comes to sex that people like me end up being embarrassed and humiliated over what happened to them.  We feel it is our fault.  There is also this prevailing standard that if your partner is using porn it must be because you are too ugly to fuck or you are frigid.  That needs to change.  Those of us who have been abused have got to come out of our hiding places and talk about this, if to no one else but each other. 

We teach kids about Stranger Danger, but what we should be teaching them is that danger may be closer to home.  A child is more likely to be abused by a family member then by someone they don’t know.  We need to teach kids, in schools, that their bodies are their own.  What is acceptable touching and what is not.  But if we can’t even teach sex education in school.  If we can’t even teach girls about their own periods and how their bodies work, because the Christian Right won’t let us, they will never let us teach this.  People will continue to suffer because somebody wants to take the moral high ground and say lets handle a subject at home, which has no morals at all. 

 I have talked to many women over the years.  The national average is that 1 in 4 women is sexual assaulted or molested at some point in her life.  Men are closer to 1 in 10.  Now those are based on reported numbers.  In my conversations with women the number is closer to 1 in 2.  I am to the point now that I assume the women I meet have been abused, unless I am told otherwise.  I can still count on one hand how many women I know that have never been sexual abused in any way shape or form. 

I want to say a little bit about porn here.  I am not anti-porn.  If couples want to get together and watch it, to learn new techniques, or to express a fetish together I think it can be just fine.  Many people use it recreationally. I think this may be fine too.  But when you get to the level of what we have been through. When you are denying your partner sex to gratify yourself with porn all the time, if your partner has to beg for sex or any kind of intimacy, you have a problem.  It’s kind of like alcohol.  You can use it responsibility to flavor cakes or enjoy a good time with friends, but when you are using it to cope you have a problem and need help. 

I have often told people that Mike was a sex addict.  They usually laugh and smile and say well that must have been wonderful for you.  I have to then stop and explain to them what that really means.  That porn addiction is classified under sex addiction.  I then explain that Mike was addicted to porn and did not want to have sex with me.  They then look embarrassed and say how horrible that must have been.  I think we either need a better word or a better understanding of the word.  Many people also believe that you can only be sexual abused as a child, and not as an adult, much less a sexually active adult.  That is just not true.

I have tried to be brave in all I have told you.  Apparently my attempt at bravery has inspired others.  My beloved friend Juno, has been so inspired by what I am writing, that she has begun her own blog to tell the truth of her abuse.  I think that is just wonderful.  Writing can be very cathartic.  Writing your own truth,  I think can be helpful to others.  I am writing mine, you should consider writing yours.

I have been telling Jay, that if I can help just one person, by telling my story than I will have done my job.  You know I have my bad days and I don’t understand what my mission on this earth is.  That I don’t understand why I have been through all that I have been through, and then these ladies talk to me.  And I think maybe I am alive, and been given the ability to write, so that I can help others who have been thru what I have through.  I am honored these ladies have come forward to tell me their stories.  I look forward to hearing more from y’all.

Ilsa

 

                                                                                                                                        

From where I sit

So I want to give you a little about my creative process, describe where and how I live for you.  I forget sometimes that you are not here with me as I write that you can’t see what I do.  And then I have the images of who and what you, dear reader, might be.  Am I your favorite blog you like to read as you are riding on something, exotic to me, like a subway.  Do you live in the city?  Are you lying in bed with your wonderful Wi-Fi.  Or are you at a public library.  Do you suffer from panic and anxiety like me?  Are you thinking of becoming Pagan?  Did you find me by Googling something about any of the above subjects or did someone suggest this to you on Facebook?  Who knows?  I figure, at least for a while, people who read this blog and follow me, will be people I know or they will be friends of friends.  I wonder how you see me.

I am 39, a woman, large, and of German and Scotch-Irish decent.  I was raised in Logansport, Louisiana but all my people are from Keatchie.  My family has been in this area for about 5 or 6 generations.  My husband Jay and I live on about 22 acres in northern Caddo parish, which is in Northwest Louisiana, USA.  We have a farm with, as of this writing, 6 dogs, 3 goats and a pig.  Those numbers change frequently.  I live in a trailer about 600 feet off of the main road.  I life so far back that I cannot get internet at my house, as the cable man told us, “we cannot give you internet as the signal would be too degraded.”  As for satellite internet, I do not have a clear view of the Southern sky and have been told I would have to cut my trees, something I refuse to do.  Now Juno, who lives in the house in front of me, is only about 300 feet off the road and has cable internet! 

I am also plagued with a cell phone problems, as in they don’t work out here.  I get one bar on my cell phone in my yard.  I have to leave the property and drive about 3 miles, towards the interstate before it will really work well. And what is worse is the house phone is based off a cell signal, so it does not always ring when someone calls, or I can talk for about 5 minutes before I lose my signal, or my personal favorite, you go to dial out and you have no signal.  Ugh!!!  I am lucky I have a tablet that picks up an internet signal, but I just have to go outside to use it. 

So my stories are typed up on an old IBM think pad, that someone gave me some years ago, and now refuses to connect to the internet. I am typing in Microsoft Word 7, and listening to James Taylor’s Before this world.  I try to write every day.  My stories are saved to a Gig stick.  In a few days I will drive the 7 miles into the closest town, go to the local library and upload these to my blog.  This is why I post so many stories at one time.  You are getting a week’s worth of writing at a time. 

Out my window I can see my porch, my car, my flags, onward to the goat pen and barn, a little farther to Juno’s house, and then finally I can see a tiny portion of the road and some cars as they drive by.  Our place is heavily wooded.  We have lots of wild life and lots of wights or fae. 

Have you ever seen a movie called “Conagher?”  It’s a great movie if you get the chance to see it.   In it is a lonely widow woman, Evie.  She is so isolated that she begins to write and ties these bits of writing onto tumbleweeds.  She says in the end, “I had to talk to someone.” I agree.  My life is very isolated.  I often do not leave my farm for days at a time.  At first it was because we were tending animals, then it became because I didn’t have the gas money.  I may see no one for days but my husband, Juno and her partner.  Trips into the big town of Shreveport take a while to get to, and then we never know if my anxiety is going to be good enough that day to go or not. 

I try to write every day, but some days that just does not happen.   Most days it does.  I have never written this much in my life.  I started writing about age 12; when my teacher told me I had the gift.  I never believed it, because there was another girl in my class who could write circles around me.  Over the years I have written when the muse descended.  I’ve written short stories, tried to start novels, and even got about half way through writing a book.  But one night I burned it all, and gave it back to Gods.  Telling them I no longer wanted this burden, to please find someone else to write these things. 

There was a time in my life, between Mike and Jay that I wrote an article in the local news paper called, “The Prodigal Daughter.”  It talked about the news in Keatchie, but also there were stories of my life.  I published one 500 to 700 word article a week, and some weeks it was hard to write that much.  I began to have a fan following and I began to understand I did have the gift.

That was the last major writing I did.  I am now writing, on average 1000+ words a day.  In eight days I have written eight articles, with titles for four more.  I have never, ever done this!  The only thing I can think is it is the Buspar.  My anxiety level has finally gone down enough that I have time and space in my brain for this.  And it just all keeps pouring out. 

I came up with the title of “The unexpected life,” because I never expected to live this long.  There were times in my life when I believed I would be an academic.  As a child I wanted to be an oceanographer and later, during college, I dreamed of becoming an anthropology professor.  During those days I never dreamed I would one day run a farm or make a living dog grooming.  Living the life I live now has definitely been unexpected. 

If I had talked to 14 year old me I would never have believed that I would ever marry, moved away from my family, or even be alive 25 years later.  Like so many with depression I felt my life would be short, and I have never planned for anything more than a few weeks in advance.  There is an old saying, “if I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have planned better or taken better care of myself.”  Now almost 40 I am looking at a life that I hope to go on another 20 or 30 years if I am lucky.

I am coming to the end of my child bearing years.  Many of my friends from high school are already grandparents.  You now know, or will know from later articles that I am infertile.  I have finally given up hope.  I have begun to break up my collection of baby items I have kept all these years.  Family heirlooms are now going to be passed to other family members.  What hurts the most is I have no one to pass my knowledge along to.  No one to tell my stories to and no one to sing songs too.  No one who will remember Jay and me after we are gone.  No one will put us on their altars and bring us treats on our birthdays.  We will just be gone, but I guess that is the lament of many childless couples.  But maybe if I keep writing and posting we might have a little piece of immortality, living on in cyberspace. 

Ilsa