Anger, Resentment, and Bitterness

"Deja Mynrah" was a girl I had as a classmate back a hundred years ago.  She was angry, and she was strange.  Everyone knew it.  She wore cat-eye glasses with rhinestones in the upper corners of her frames.  She had teased hair like Amy Winehouse, and she wore clothes that did not reflect the fashion trends of the time.  Deja was also a loner;  one didn't see her "with" anybody in the hallways or at lunch inside the school cafeteria.  I don't think I ever saw her laugh.  What I do recall is the time she slapped me across the face in homeroom because I didn't "save" her when some older 9th grade girls gave her a swirly in the girl's bathroom earlier that morning.  

Yep, Deja was a trip.  Somehow she survived our junior high school and made it over to our next stop, the local high school.  She graduated from it too, just like the rest of us.  I don't think I ever saw her at all from 10th-12th grades.  I wonder if she voted for me when I was nominated Class President.  Doubtful.

I never forgot about Deja and that anger of hers.  She lived on the same street as another childhood classmate of mine;  however, word on the street was that Deja's family kept to themselves.  When I found out who Deja's younger sister was, I could hardly believe they were related. They looked nothing alike in every sense of the word, and Deja's sister didn't seem to share Deja's anger problem.  There was a younger brother too, but I never laid eyes on him.  I know the family was close to being the same nationality as my own; thank the LORD they didn't attend the same church we did or I would have been totally mortified!  It was bad enough watching Deja be angry and strange in school;  even worse if I had to talk to her or her family at church besides!

Yeah, that was my typical mindset back all those decades ago when I was basically forced to see people in school that I could care less about in my own "real" life.  As Deja was a target of bullying (as I was myself!), she exacerbated her problem by being a nasty and bitchy person generally speaking.  At least I was funny.  Also, she was fugly in both directions:  inside out and outside in.  I wasn't fugly, but my classmates didn't realize that until much later in our lives.  Of course, I could be angry, resentful, and bitter too as Deja was---but I reserved those feelings primarily towards my parents and other "adult" relatives.  

When we were planning our ten year reunion from high school, we sent out invitations to everyone from our class.  Deja was the only person to send our planning committee a letter in response to our reunion invite.  She made quite clear how horrible everyone from our class was to her, how she'd NEVER attend any high school reunion from our class, how she was MARRIED now and HAPPY...so we were best off just leaving her alone.  

When I was at church years later, her younger sister came to sing during our morning service.  When I approached her afterwards, she told me that Deja was still an angry, resentful, and bitter human.  How Deja was still acting nasty, but this time towards her family of origin rather than classmates from junior high and high school.  Deja also had kids of her own by that time.  This news was very difficult for me to wrap my brain around, but okay she was a mother now too.  I could only hope she was better to her own children than she claims we all were to her while growing up.

I don't know what happened to Deja after that.  All I know is that when life is hard, you have to change.  If you don't, you'll stay stuck in the misery...in the anger...and in the pain that has plagued you for much longer than you realize.

What changes are you resistant about making?  Do you still rely on substances to make you comfortably numb?  Do you ignore that which you don't feel like doing, even though what you avoid IS your responsibility in the first place?  Are you still with your "person" who continues to beat you down in spite of the promises made, but not kept?  Are you still feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, and mistaken for the person you said you'd NEVER be like once you yourself grew up into adulthood?

Ironic isn't it how staying angry, and resentful, and bitter does nothing to heal the wounds of your past...or anyone else's?  As I've said before, when you keep bleeding onto people who didn't cut you in the first place, that signals that you have a lot of healing work to do.  So do it.  You certainly can do whatever you purpose and intend to do, beginning today.  Instead of doing what is easy and familiar, try doing what challenges you, makes you feel somewhat uncomfortable, but also gives you a new degree of freedom by doing it.

If you haven't heard of Shannon Hoon, he was the lead singer of a band called Blind Melon in the 1990s.  The very first song he wrote is called "Change".  I am including it here because it has been recognized as somewhat of an anthem for those who need hope in hopeless times like these.  The song is now nearly 30 years old.  Great songs like this one stay relevant forever.  Of course they do.  The truth is what always sets us free.  Set yourself free.  Do the right thing, and do it every day.  You are worth it.  

When life is hard, you have to change.

Until next post....

To Flip One's Script for Better Living "Now"...

When people come from an instant gratification culture as we here in America do, it's very difficult to see past our own noses of "need".  Where else in the world can a person wake up and decide exactly what they want to eat and/or drink as their own first meal of the day---and then walk, ride, or drive over to where "it" is being sold, made, and/or served---and then obtain it?  I can remember an interview with the former lead singer of the rock band "Kiss" that was aired on broadcast television many years ago.  In the interview, Gene Simmons said when he first immigrated to the U.S. from Israel, he was "shocked" when he walked into his first grocery store here in our country.  Paraphrasing, he stated that he never saw everything anyone could want or need to buy to eat or drink under a single roof.  Let alone arranged in neat rows so one could put whatever they wanted into a shopping cart, get in line to pay for it, and then take it home!  Yet it happened for Simmons just as it has for countless other immigrants to this country before and since his own introduction to America's "instant" way of life.

As a kid, my mother didn't drive a car, so everywhere she went was either by foot or by bus when my father wasn't home to drive her/us to and from specific destinations.  I got used to it, as did my little brother.  I can remember entire mornings or afternoons spent to run just one or two errands literally speaking.  The grocery and drug store was in one direction approximately 1/2 mile away---and the dentist/doctor and "more" stores were in the other direction approximately 1 mile away.  That was our lives back then.  I can recall walking through high snow to get to the "Roemer Clinic" because I was sick....or walking to "Cuda's" so I could get myself an Archie comic book on a Saturday for $.25.  The idea of going anywhere in a car, with my mother behind the wheel, was like imagining Elon Musk coming over to take me to Mars in his rocketship.  Not happening...ever!

And yet I managed to survive all that.  I got older, I got a bike.  I rode the hell out of that bike before I learned to drive...and then acquired my own car.  In this way, my own inner script began to flip when I could see "beyond" the pattern that was established for me early on in my life with my family.  Women don't drive cars.  Women walk or take the bus everywhere.  Women are literally dependent on men to "get around".  As this example has to do with flipping my script as pertaining to simple transportation-related issues, can you imagine the work to be done when our own inner script flipping involves so much more than that?   For Gene Simmons, coming to America was his family's "big-flip-beats-all" solution to the lives they had in Israel...

We rarely enjoy looking back at the past unless it's "fun" for us to do.  Everyone gets a kick out of waxing nostalgic when it can make us or other laugh out loud.  "Remember the time when...??"  Yes, of course we do remember "that" time that made us laugh like hyenas!  But what about the time when you were told that your dad always wanted a girl, but your mom didn't want another baby no how and no way!  And yet you still showed up.  Or how your older brother told you that you were a waste of space and how much he hated you for living and why don't you just get lost permanently because you shouldn't have ever been born anyway.  Dad wanted a girl...but you were born a boy.  Mom wanted a boy...but you were born a girl.  You should have been aborted.  You should have been like the "rest" of your siblings and not this freakish anomaly that you turned out to be with red hair and your grandpa's huge nose. 

Don't be shocked.  Children are often told what form(s) of "mistake" they are long before they even know what the word "mistake" even means!  Imagine the farming families of yesteryear where one or three or five of the kids weren't as "strong" or "hard working" or "resilient" as their sibling co-workers. You think I'm kidding?  Talk to anyone who had 9 or 12 or 15 brothers and sisters working "the family farm" as they were growing up and you'll find out more than you ever dared to imagine about children being mistaken for mules on a daily basis!

And now you wonder why we ALL have so much work to do in recognizing the relevance of flipping our own inner script when it's been more harmful than helpful to us?  I sure don't!

When we have adopted a shame-based identity due to the "stuff" we have been told about ourselves by whomever and whenever, our inner script doesn't have much of a chance of working for us as much as it will in working against us.  Shame as a state of mind is so much more destructive than shame which is based on literal wrongdoing.  When we confuse the two and we believe ourselves to be "bad" or "defective" or otherwise "a mistake" before we even do anything rightly or wrongly----we are pretty much doomed.   Never forget, we all "make" mistakes....yet we are NOT mistakes as human beings!

What are some of your own earliest memories to do with how "you" were welcomed (or not!) by your own family of origin/family system from the time of your own birth?  If you were adopted, what is your adoption "story" as it was told to you?  How does that "story" compare to the truth of what you found out since that time?  Was it o.k. for you to be born?  To be a girl or a boy?  To be the "newest" addition to your family in the eyes of your mother, father, sister(s), brother(s), and other extended family members?  Who celebrated your existence from among your family members?  Who did not?  Was it o.k. for you to exist, just as you were at that time?  Why or why not?

What happened to you...so you can begin to understand what inner script(s) motivate your decisions "now"?  Until we can see what we may have avoided seeing, we still won't see it.  And when we can't see it, we can't change it.

Until next post....

Intentional Change is All We've Got...

When I was growing up, there was this lady who would walk through the neighborhood dragging one of those wheeled metal shopping carts behind her.  She would be wearing a tulle babuska over her head, tied under her chin, and she would walk from her house to our central downtown shopping district.  I never actually saw her in any of the shops in town;  it seemed whenever I did see her, she was walking through the neighborhood en route.  I saw her so many times as a kid, I felt I kind of knew her.  It wasn't until decades later when I finally asked someone else from our neighborhood "who" she was exactly that I got an answer:  an "older" spinster cousin of one of my former classmates.  Okay then!

So what does that story have to do with today's blog post?  Plenty.  This former neighbor made a habit of her daily outings to buy whatever from wherever in our small downtown.  What she bought, who knows?  How she went about getting what she wanted was, in fact, well known.  Anyone could see it. She was highly predictable when it came to "this" particular habit of hers.  Anyone could notice it when paying enough attention.  The same is true for all of us.  We are, by nature, creatures of habit.  Whether the habits we have established for ourselves are more positive than neutral...or more negative than neutral...pursuing a change of habit doesn't "just" happen.  In this neighbor's case, unless there was a blizzard or a thunderstorm to stop her...she wasn't stoppable. She was firmly entrenched in her habits of choice and nothing and nobody was going to change that.

As you might have surmised by now, any successful personal change involves a decision, or an intention, to make it happen.  Nobody changes for the better by magic.  Nobody changes for the better because time keeps marching on.  And for certain nobody changes for the better because they are merely "thinking" about it.  Thinking about something doesn't count for much.  Actions have always spoken louder that both words AND thoughts!  With my neighbor, she didn't drive.  She didn't ride a bicycle.  And she certainly didn't have someone else to pull her around in an adult-sized wagon.  Yet her legs worked well enough and that's what she chose to use in transporting herself from Point A to Point B and back every single day.  And no, we didn't have Uber back then.  Yet we did have taxi cabs;  she didn't choose to take a taxi---except perhaps on those days when there was a blizzard outside or a major thunderstorm.  Who knows?

Just as change involves a decision to do it and the intention to pursue it on a daily basis, so does our own healing process.  Do you really believe that all you have to do is "do" your own life and all those unwelcome memories and other "junk" from your past will eventually merely fade away into nothingness?  Think again!  There is work to do.  Without the desire to find answers to help us understand "What happened to me?", we will continue to live in our own carefully constructed fog oblivion. 

Let's look at someone from the past to help us understand this principle.  Egon Schiele was born at the end of the 19th century in Austria.  His growing up years involved the existence of three sisters, one of which it is suspected he had an incestuous relationship with.  That sister married one of Egon's friends.  Egon's father was an alcoholic, and died early in his life.  When Egon became a ward of his Uncle, that uncle gave Egon the opportunity to attend art school.  Egon's paintings and drawings were not exactly G rated.  In today's world, he would still be regarded as a sex-addicted pornographer who had a predilication for sexually exploiting minor female girls.  He even spent time in jail for that.  Except back then, he wasn't glorified for it.  Today, he no doubt would be...and still is actually.

Egon's "Portrait of Wally" recently sold for $17 million dollars.  That's a whole other story, but "Wally" was one of Egon's first muses and lovers after they met and lived together when she was 17 and Egon was 21 years old.  Theirs was a relationship not like Tommy (Lee) and Pam (Anderson)...or Sid and Nancy of Sex Pistols fame.  High drama...mutual exploitation...and it all ended in tears.  As it turned out, Egon died three days after his wife died (not Wally, someone else) while six months pregnant with their child (Egon was 28 when he passed).  Wally died a few years later while serving as a nurse in another country.  The only positive change(s) in this sad story is that Wally somehow managed to turn her own terrible life around and walk away from both Egon Schiele and the life they had together for as long as they did.  

Had Egon Schiele been born into a different set of circumstances that did not involve sexual abuse, exploitation, and the development of a raging sex addiction and paraphilia involving minor female children....I wonder what he would have focused his painting on instead?  Would he have had a different set of outcomes than that which occurred during his own lifetime?  No one can say for sure.  All I know is that Egon Schiele was obviously a tormented soul;  it comes through clearly in the vast majority of his work.  $17 million or not, his was a life I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.  Worse yet, he didn't appear to have any interest in making changes to improve the quality of his own personal life, or the lives of those he initially idealized, then devalued, and then discarded.

If we think, we can change.  It's that simple.  And when we choose to change...when we intend to change...this is the same moment when our own healing journey begins in real time.  

Choose the change.  Be the change.  Do your work.  Otherwise, you won't get better and you won't stay the same.  You can only get worse.

Until next post....