Coming Out

This is the time when I want to shout from the rooftops “Look people I am doing the best that I can!” I want to get in people’s faces and say “Do you not understand that my brain is wired differently than yours because my mom walked away when I was a baby and didn’t return until I was 5 and I have PTSD from the 4 years of my childhood that I watched my dad become a crippled paraplegic, tied to a respirator and then die?” I am not “not-normal” because I like being weird (though I do) I am not normal because physiological processes  were disturbed when I was 6 months old and I was sent into an otherworldly trajectory until I was 23. There is a split in me. Sometimes one half is entirely invisible as I move through the world as if I belong here and sometimes, like now, I feel like a taut cotton thread stretched over a candle flame and my outer lint is beginning to singe. 

I am currently debating myself as to whether I should come out to the general public. No, I am not gay (though I am a proud friend of the family). Nor am I going to come out with my actual name on this blog as I still live in a small town. I want to come out as weird, bizarre, uncanny, and unusual and talk about why my weirdness exists. I want to be a proud survivor of PTSD from the 4 years I spent watching my young dad die. I want to be honest about why I can stay calm in a storm from the ability to completely emotionally detach from others as a survival mechanism to the work I have done in therapy to process the pain and anxiety of abandonment that I experienced every day of my life until I was 26. I want to stop feeling embarrassed or ashamed at my Goddess worshiping pagan roots or hiding how firmly I support feminism and how those believes are deeply rooted in my adolescent home within a schizophrenic led radical feminist cult. I want to talk about why I pull away from people who display addictive or unbalanced personalities because as a childhood survivor of mental-illness, alcoholism, physical and drug abuse I am scared to relive any of those memories.

I am a diplomatic person; I often hold my tongue in the face of adversity, but why?  Others feel no shame in shouting to the malevolence of feminism or the wickedness of paganism but I am not supposed to have an opinion, a thought or a stand to values that I hold as dear to my heart as they to theirs? Others are quick to defend the addict and to ask for evidence to support the innocence of the perpetrator but who is to defend the victim, the innocent survivor of heinous crimes committed to them behind closed doors in our homes and neighborhoods and to the blind eye of society? 

I want to be a voice to the voiceless a face to a cause. I want to stand-up and rock the mike, but in order to do that I must first be honest with myself and to others about what a scrumptious meal I can bring to the table. I have a locally grown, organic, well-aged, deeply seasoned truly mouthwatering life just ready to burst forth and fill your soul with words and vibrancy so powerful it will challenge your very taste buds as to what life is really supposed to taste like. Consider this an appetizer.