Fine and Angry

I wasn't going to write tonight.  I had other obligations and other things on my mind; some of it the normal grind of busy modern-ish life in a rural area and the daily life of a family household full of people lurching along on various tracks, some of it the types of activity that my overactive brain always allocates to the Life's Monkey Wrenches column of my daily compartmentalization.

I used to worry about that function, you know.  That absolute need to categorize certain things that I've just never been able to shake.  A place for everything and everything in it's place, as it were.  Spoons go in the spoon slot.  Socks go in the sock drawer.  Keys go on the hook.  Serial abuse by NFOO members goes in the isolation room at the center of my heart which used to have a much bigger padlock on it.  Or maybe the padlock's the same size and I just carry industrial strength lock cutters in my back pocket these days.

At any rate, I worried that dividing up my thoughts and feelings into little cubbie holes like so many shoe slots in a day care was bad for me, could even cause splintered memories and confusion.  One day my counselor said to me: "Vanci, a certain amount of compartmentalization can be a healthy thing, particularly when it comes to living your life while overcoming trauma."  So, you know, I've got a hall pass.

I was just sorting through the day, which included such new and dramatic turns as having a thermos full of coffee just freakin' explode for no reason as I stood next to it first thing this morning.  That took a bit to process - the space age glass inside the thing just went kerblooey and ended up looking like M.C. Escher had a fistfight with that mercury future cop from that terminator movie inside a plastic coffee thermos.  Trippy.  There was the power outage to deal with, no big deal as we have plenty of candles except that the well pump runs on electricity so no power also equals no water in the casa a la the People Who Are Crazy and/or Kind Enough to Live With Vanci.  Which, hey, as it turns it wasn't that big of a deal anyway as we found out that the well water test we ordered last week came back in and identified some potentially harmful bacteria in the well.  So, yay!  We shouldn't have been drinking the water anyway.  Oh yeah, and my car wouldn't start after work.  I married a mechanic, thank you powers that be because I am a car problem magnet on an evil X-Man scale, so that's no biggie.  Make the call, wait for the cavalry.  Just one more thing.

But you know, there's this full, lively, come what may rock star part of me that knows that I, we, will be fine. It's all going to be okay.  This is life.  Good shit happens to bad people, bad shit happens to good people, etcetera, etcetera and vice versa.  It's nothing personal.  Karma?  Maybe.  Kismet?  Maybe.  Stephen King-ish Dark Tower-esque life is a wheel speak?   Hells yeah.  It'll even out eventually.  And I dig that about me.  Bad day, yep, that sucks, but it's okay.  Some good things happened too.  I am the queen of the flip side, the ultimate silver lining seeker and finder.  I used to have to be, but there's a part of my personality that just goes there automatically - not as a dismissal of reality, I'm not babbling about some 'change reality through magical thinking' BS here, but I tend to see at least most sides to a thing naturally.  And there's always some good going on at the same time as the bad, and I like to acknowledge it.  Nothing about my life experience has ever been one dimensional.  So, like Bill Murray talking about the Dalai Lama in Caddyshack, I've got that going for me.

A haiku I wrote a while back for my daughters.  They call them momkus, fyi.

Make this idea truth;
You will always be okay,
Even when it isn't.

Cheesy and corny as it is, I believe that.  Not that it won't hurt in the middle of whatever 'it' is, but I believe in surviving, healing, working through and even if it takes awhile, eventually getting to okay and sometimes even all the way into the end zone of kick-ass awesomeness.

There's this thing that I realized today, as I said it, that I've said for a long time and it's true.  When the proverbial bacteria laced well-water hits the fan, I say,

"I've faced bigger demons."
Which is my way of verbalizing how it's easy, seemingly, for me to shrug the day to day crap that just happens off my shoulders.

For some reason, though, today, the truth of that phrase struck a nerve for me.  I've probably said it hundreds of times, and I have always known that it's true.  I really have stared into the abyss and walked away.  Not even remotely unscathed and unscarred, but damn it, I have walked away and that fucking counts.

Today I realized in a very concrete, visual way that when I say that, I am thinking of the demons that I have faced and often conquered; at the very least, all of those demons that I've faced are monsters that I have survived and lived to the tell the tale of the journey away from.  And those demons have names; they are my mother and my father and the creatures that they pieced together from rotten carcasses and spare parts in their lab of crazy; my sister and my brother, who eventually became their willing assistants.  And do you know what that mental picture means right now?

Make.  Vanci.  Angry.
That's why I'm writing tonight, because I am angry.  Why am I angry, you ask?
Well, I'm so glad you did!  Pull up a chair, I'll tell you.

I am angry because ANGER is the normal reaction of the healthy (ish, okay, ish!) psyche to being repeatedly and intentionally:
Manipulated
Harmed
Abused
Used
Set-Up
Trash-Talked
Diminished
Character assassinatd
Stomped on
Gaslit
And every other dirty stinking rotten horrible and awful thing that the monsters I was 'raised by' did (and would gleefully still be doing if I let them) to me.

Every story has two sides, they say and that is so true.  But what are we talking about when we say it has sides?  We're talking about perspective, feeling, inference, angles.  Hell, a story can have infinite sides when you look at it that way.  But what do those angles have in common?  Well, the story, of course.

And guess what the story that has all those different versions of telling really is?
Right here in the middle of the page, like a damn boulder:
THE TRUTH

And there is only one truth to a story.  There is only ever one set of facts that actually happened, no matter how it comes out of the spin cycle.  One truth to rule them all, on truth to bind them... no, sorry, got a little LOTR there.  Ahem.  Gollum.

My mother is a monster, straight from the forge of whatever greater overlord of dark places makes them.  She's a lying, narcissistic, child sacrificing, self-centered, master manipulating beast who refuses to acknowledge that she's ever, ever, done even a single thing hurtful to me, though she's likely sorry if I feel like I might have ever felt like it was possible that I misunderstandingly sort of thought that I felt hurt, though not because she hurt me, though, because she doesn't recall and she can't really think of when that might have happened, though it certainly couldn't have been that bad.

My father is a monster, also courtesy of the Demons R' Us customize-able order form.
He's a yelling, hitting, molesting, lying, self-centered child-hurting slimeball who hides behind titles and wives and other children and has always found a way to slip the noose and come out smelling as rosy as a two-bit shyster can smell and who's never apologized for hurting me at all because after all wasn't that a long time ago, like yesterday, and wouldn't Jesus want us to forgive the transgressions of the past after all and pave our way into a better, -
(sorry, just threw up a little in my mouth)

All of those things ^ there, what are they?  They're the truth.

And what am I?  I'm the little girl who lived through that and grew up to get out, get better, be better.  I broke that mold and doing so broke me for awhile just like the inside of that thermos shattered into a million pieces this morning and all of the shit they fed me poured out all over the place.  And I cleaned it up and I bleached the hell out of it and I started over again.  I've done it different.  I've rebuilt it, better, stronger.  Like a mobster with a new name, I'm out, and they couldn't drag me back in to their den of horrors for all the saltwater in the seven seas.

But I'm angry, yes I am.  Because when I have a bad day and I remind myself of the truth that I, we, will be okay, I have to also remember all the times that I haven't been, for awhile, because they tried so hard to take the ability to be okay away from me.

I'm angry as hell and I have a right to be.
I won't apologize for my anger any more than I would apologize for my happiness or my insane sense of humor.  It's an emotion, a perception, a feeling.
My anger doesn't rule me, it's an emotion and I am ruled by one thing, baby.
The truth.  Cold hard facts.  Just me and every detective Elmore Leonard ever made me love.

But I am also going to be okay, I am going to be fine, fine, possibly even finer than frog's hair.

I accept that I can be both.  After all, I've faced down bigger demons.

Love,
Vanci