Biggest Impact - Posting Challenge, Day 7

(Also be sure to follow along with Tina, Jean, Krista, and Tambo as they say much more sane and less esoteric things than me!)

*sigh* Seriously? Because, you guys can't handle the truth. Promise. But here it is in all it's squicky glory anyway.



The single biggest impact on my life is what you see right here.

Yes, I have tons of positive impacts. Every friend individually changed my life in amazing and healing ways. I had some teachers reach out to catch me when I fell. I had strangers help me in time of need. I have new people that, even today, are shaping my life for the better. I count them as my blessings and my guardian angels, and I know where I'd be without any one of them. There are not words for how grateful I am. But every one of them was only part of my path to recovery.

It takes a village to heal.
To destroy, it only takes one man.

Maybe it's because he got to me first, I don't know. But I do know that I have struggled endlessly to overcome, to undo what he did; I struggle even now, twenty six years after the day my mother finally left him. Every healing hand has had to find and soothe the wounds left in me, every friendly smile has had to fight with my withered self esteem and lack of confidence, every tolerant soul has had to deal with my shoddy memory, temperamental nature, and uncertain time sense.

I am a walking, talking PTSD poster, and I have accepted long ago that I will never be "normal." I am a broken leg that healed wrong, a curved spine, a hand with missing fingers. Some things, once done, can never be completely erased, and that's where I am now; where I will always be.

Unfortunately for me, this really fits. If I had to think of one thing, one single thing that has touched every aspect of my life, changed the course of my future, and altered every day I have lived on this earth, this is that one thing. I am strong, I am no one's victim, and I have overcome so much, but it remains that I can never get back, never heal or earn, beg, borrow, or steal those things he stole from me. In some very fundamental ways, I will never get better. Despite my best efforts, his shadow is over my life still.

Fuck you, fuck you very much.

Maybe another blog post I'll go into detail, but I'm pretty up after the superhero post, and I don't want to come down. Not tonight.

When Practicality IS the Dream

It’s two weeks until Christmas and my blog is snowing. No, seriously, there is a snow GIF on my blog. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’ll all melt off by January 4th–about the time that, I am told, snow will fall for real in my neck of the woods. Maybe by then I’ll have a job, so I can buy snow boots. Otherwise I’ll have to trust to thick socks and flimsy cloth sneakers.

I am looking once again down the barrel of my writing. The strange creatures that haunted the pages of my comics are calling to me again, wanting to give birth to themselves from the corners of my mind.

I’m not sure how I feel about that, either.

In the midst of a crisis of confidence--or perhaps a four-on-the-floor depression, who the hell knows?–I decided my writing was…well…bupkus. Utter, total, and complete bupkus. I was a hack, a wannabe, with all the writing talent of a squid, and I’d be better off investigating a real line of work, like, say, my local 7-11.

So I stopped. Completely.

But the ideas won’t go away. They flirt on the outskirts of my mind; tiny black-winged figures in the distance, soaring over the trees, somewhere between threatening and begging, waiting to be brought screaming to life beneath my typing fingertips. I find no joy in creating them, no joy in the process of making them coherent in the plot-line, and some pain in that they won’t tell me what they’re up to! I only have the vaguest, most frustrating idea.

But there is a perfect beauty to their flight, their menace, the way they can destroy and mutilate lives, then disappear without a trace. There is a terrible wonder in the way they devour others, and something inspirational in the heroes that oppose them, though they barely know what it is they’re up against. There are so many story threads here that I need a chart to map them–brother to sister, brother to friend, sister to friend, friend to friend, friend to lover, lover to lover, lives blown apart by the deepest connections, ties severed and wounds flayed as only the closest of friends can do, now in desperate need of mending before the darkness comes for them all.

And still, I’m writing a blog post instead, putting off the damned struggle of herding and wrestling all these ephemeral cats down onto the paper and pinning them in place, my collection of feral, furry little butterflies. I’m dodging the scratches to my psyche, the claw marks in my hopes and dreams, the little teeth biting viciously through my self confidence and tearing it away in chunks. I avoid the specter of my own failure by failing to try, and while that accomplishes nothing, at least I still hold the dream that I could have succeeded. You know, if I really wanted to.

You ever wonder how it is we can so easily lie to ourselves, even when we know what we’re doing is a lie?

These days I sometimes wonder if that’s all any of it is, a lie. I will never get a job or unemployment, but run out of money and be kicked out of my home. I will lose everything I own and roam the streets begging for a little compassion from a cash-strapped and increasingly hostile country, hoping not to be raped or murdered by people who see how vulnerable I am. I will never go overseas to meet my one true love, but break his heart and my own with false promises I can never keep. I will never see my son again. I’ll be seen as a shameful influence and a fuck-up by his parents. And I will never, ever, not in a million years, write my bestselling novel.

So why even try?

Sometimes the answer “because I need to eat and maybe keep warm” is the only one that keeps any of us going. It’s certainly a good enough one for me. So I will try again, for god and country and a desperate need to eat.

And who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky.