Waking Up to a World on Fire

The following story is a personal journey of pulling back the curtains on my life that happened as a result of stay at home orders, extra time and the explosion of civil unrest. I’m sharing this as a voice to others that I know have experienced similar if not the exact same things in the last few months. Know you are not alone.

I was 13 years old the first time I refused to back down from a teacher because her information was wrong. She informed me she was a teacher. She knew the information. I informed her I could read as well as she could and had referenced the original documents. I didn’t care that she was the teacher. She was still wrong. The next day she came back and apologized because I was right. It was in Texas history. Don’t challenge me on the Texas Revolution. No really. I know more than you. That’s not arrogance. That's a fact. In college for the same subject, I got pulled aside after a test. My professor handed out all of them except mine. When everyone was gone, he looked at me and said, so you are Lisa Hudson. How old are you, Lisa? I was kinda freaking out and told him, I’m 18. Is there a problem with my test, sir? He just laughed. No. Not really. I just wanted to meet the first person in my 68 years who knew more about the details of the Texas revolution than I did. I never would have guessed it to be a tiny redhead 18 year old girl. And he proceeded to ask me questions about where and when I had learned things. And I asked him why he thought I knew more than he did. And it was the exact location and names of the cannons that were dumped after the Alamo. I told him I read it in the archives. I had memorized something out of a document at 12 years old that apparently no one had ever recorded in a published book at the time.

I don’t say this to brag. I say this to help you understand your power when it comes to gaslighting. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how much authority a person has, if you know a fact because you have done the research yourself, and have the numbers, the names, the dates, don’t back down. People get things wrong. You get things wrong. I get things wrong. But if you have the evidence and the proof that what you say is true, STAND BY IT. FIGHT.

This was written months ago. I think the knowing was starting to creep into my head. I think it was the down time and perhaps the first time in my entire life that I had relaxed. I was doing things I enjoyed. Life was simple. The world was an utter disaster, but I only had one rule. Don’t bring home COVID to Sam, my immunocompromised daughter. That’s it. So yeah, there was and is mom worry, but I’ve been self isolating since March 13th and am pretty strict about going out. Safety precautions have become habit. I am doing everything I can. I can relax. I can commit myself to self improvement and self reflection with the intensity that I have wanted to for years. I can concentrate on me for once. So I did.

And I kept getting memories of my childhood flashing back to me as I worked as real as the day they happened. From smells and smiles to emotions. Some of them I sat with on my porch for hours going over them. Happy, sad, angry. But mostly happy and this almost strange feeling of wholeness that I haven’t felt since then. I sat with those the longest really absorbing that feeling, and starting to wonder where it went.

Things pushed on my consciousness. I had dreams of my granny. As much as I loved her, I have dreamed about her maybe twice in the almost 20 years since her death. But they became common. I was 4. I was 12. I was 25. I was 47. And they all had a common theme. She was telling me to believe in myself. She was reassuring me about my decisions. She was supporting and guiding me. In the two where I was older, she held my cheeks and leaned in and said Lisa, listen to me. You are not crazy. You are not stupid. Stand up for yourself. What did I teach you?

She was referring to one of my earliest memories. One that is etched on my soul. I was maybe three years old. And I was being bullied and I was heartbroken. I just wanted to be liked and to play. I didn’t understand why I was being bullied. What I had done wrong. The exact words she said have faded. Up until my teens I could recite them, but I never forgot the message. But Granny held my checks in her hands as I sat on her lap crying. And she told me Lisa, there are two choices you have when people hurt you. You can run or you can fight. If you run, you better be able to run fast enough they don’t catch you. And if you fight, you fight to win. If you run, it teaches those bullies they can be mean to you. If you fight, they will know that you won’t be easy to hurt. You have to choose what you want to do. You don’t have to fight. But you don’t have to let people hurt you either. Five minutes later I am told, as I don’t remember this, there was screaming and crying from the backyard. I was chasing my bully crying my eyes out while pinching her as hard as my little hands could. And I never stopped fighting from then.

I started analyzing my personal history of standing up for myself. The above excerpt was written after the last dream I had. It was easy at first. I can list HUNDREDS of times I had NO issue standing my ground from the time I was three until yesterday. From arguing facts to wielding golf umbrellas and charging headlong into an actual fight. But something was nagging at me. If this is such a part of you, then why do you feel crazy and stupid even when you know you’re right. Even now.

Part of me wishes I never asked that question. Part of me knows that question was the purpose of the dreams. I needed to understand who I am and why. I had explicitly asked for help to understand who I am. And I was given the path to the answer. I needed to remember why I felt that way. Because it wasn’t always. I can remember NOT feeling that way. I can remember having no remorse or question about the validity of my thoughts and actions. I can remember why I fought and what I was fighting for without doubt or hesitation. (Even in hindsight, I was right, btw) But somewhere it got foggy, and I started questioning everything I knew. And I needed to see why. So I dug deeper.

I’m not great at everything. There are lots of things I’m down right bad at. But recognizing patterns isn’t one of them. If there is ANYTHING that I have a genuine gift for, it is pattern recognition. And I found the pattern I was looking for in laughter. Or rather it found me. Whoa, stop. Why does laughter make me cringe and immediately start analyzing the situation for problems and inconsistencies? And I realized it was the common denominator in nearly every memory where I felt unheard, made fun of, and dismissed. I didn’t associate laughter with something being funny. I associated laughter with feelings of unworthiness. Laughter was mean. I could see it in myself. How I had used laughter as a weapon. In fact, it was my go to. If I wanted you to know your argument was stupid, and you weren’t responding to reason, the next step was laughter.

Well, that’s ugly. I don’t like that at all. Gonna have to change that because ew. That’s not who I want to be. I do not want to make someone else associate laughter with unworthiness. In fact, I don’t want to make people feel unworthy at all. What the hell, Lisa? It felt gross and awful. Why would you do that?

And the second I asked myself that question in honest disgust at my own behavior, I knew. It’s hard to explain what my eureka moments are like. What “knowing” is like. I imagine it’s like what people are describing when they say their life flashed before their eyes. Because it’s a series of sharp visual and auditory memories strung together at a blindingly rapid pace with an underlying pattern. That when strung together form a theme…and an answer. You can see the formation of the pattern that shaped the action. You can see the graph of acceleration and intensity over time. You can pinpoint where in time the graph changes, and knowing when, you know why. Like I said, part of me wishes I never asked that question. Because that eureka moment was soul crushing. Knowing a member of your family made you question yourself so much and used laughter as a weapon of reinforcement enough that it made you feel stupid and crazy isn’t something you WANT to unwrap at 47 years old.

In fact, I saw it, and put it away. No. I can’t deal with this right now. I am not ready to come to terms with this knowledge. I am not ready to address this. I’m not even ready to accept this, but I already knew. I just needed to give my heart time to process it. Because it hurt. A lot.

I stewed on it for a few weeks. Taking one memory at a time and analyzing it. Trying to find another answer. Trying to disprove the knowing. Each memory you could rationalize and justify on its own, but when put together, you really had to ask yourself if it was possible for it to be a coincidence. But in the analysis I noticed another pattern. One I couldn’t prove and was much more subtle. But it was there nonetheless. Other people saw the pattern I was seeing in retrospect in the moment of the action. To some degree, they knew too. To some degree, I already knew that even before the eureka moment because I had asked at the time.

To that knowing, I pursed my lips, folded it up gently and put it in a box that said examine in 5 years. Nope. Can’t even begin to process that now. I am in no way ready to think that is possible. Let’s just focus on the task at hand.

And that’s where I was, still trying to process in pieces. Still pushing against the theory to see if it had any real time validity, wanting to prove it wrong, when the pattern jumped straight off the page, into my lap and screamed “I’m not a theory, you idiot! I am your experience!” And it proceeded to rip out my throat. I was still stunned and bleeding when it came for my children. I came up out of my seat covered in blood screaming the hell you did! I fought back. In that moment, it was no longer a theory. I knew and had processed it was real and my lived experience. And it had been turned on my children, and that was UNACCEPTABLE. The response to me standing up to fight was deafening confirmation that I was right. I had not been loved unconditionally by everyone. Love was a reward for desired behavior and personality traits. If I didn’t present as the desired person, it was withheld. If I spoke out of the designated thought parameters in anyway, I was made to feel stupid and crazy with laughter being the most common but not the only form of control. As I experienced this gaslighting in real time while knowing what it was, I could hear is my niece screaming in my memory “You never wanted ME! You don’t love ME! You don’t understand ME at all!” At the time I said wow, she is just like me, but I didn’t hit that stage until I was like 13. Good luck with that. And I laughed. I’m not laughing now. I wish I didn’t understand that sentiment at all.

Let me make something clear. I didn’t want to be right. To be right would be to rip out a huge hunk of my heart and destroy it irrevocably. But when you stand up and face it, and the response is to have that piece of your heart ripped out and stomp on it while being told it was never yours to begin with as it’s destroyed? There’s really no coming back from that. It is what it is. This is your raw reality. And then you can see all the shattered pieces. Then you can start to mourn the family you thought you had.

But it’s 2020, so nothing is as simple as dealing with one issue at a time no matter how huge the issue. No. You gonna face the whole bloody picture no matter how ugly. I had barely patched up my babies before the buzzer rang again on multiple fronts. When I answered, the universe walked straight to that box marked revisit in five years, tore the lid off the hinges, dumped the contents in my lap, and walked away. This is real too. Deal with it.

The contents of that box were both heavier and lighter. It offered insight into the ebb and flow of the graph. It explained the peaks and pauses. It both reassured and horrified me. I wasn’t imagining it. I know that now. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t the only one who saw. I was just the one who desperately wanted to be wrong. I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to know. But I had sincerely asked the universe to help me understand who I am, and the only way to explain it was to rip away the fog that I always knew was there, but never tried to penetrate. Because I knew. I knew deep down that reaching through that fog would destroy me.

For about half an hour, that was true. But in attacking my children I was given all the strength I needed to stand right back up. Yeah. I’m destroyed. I’m bleeding. Half my heart is in tatters in the ground. But I still have to be there for my babies. They need me. And they will understand if I bleed on them a bit as I bandage them up. We are all bleeding. But they come first. I can patch myself up later. What surprised me, and it shouldn’t have, is that as I was rising to help patch them, they were just as busy helping to patch each other and me. As the last of the proverbial wounds were wrapped, we looked at each other. You good? You good? You good? We all nodded. Yeah. Actually, I am. None of us had any comprehension of exactly how heavy those parts of us that were destroyed had been. How hard it was to tend the ever present assault and damage those pieces, that barbed bomb, had been inflicting on us our entire lives. I had the most damage, well, because I am older. I’d held onto and hugged and desperately tried to appease that pain more fiercely and for longer than they had been alive. They had started building barriers as babies. My oldest daughter told me, it only took you 47 years to get there, but you did it! You get it now! That’s all that matters. For anyone who read Leo the Late Bloomer as a child, why does that tiger always have to be me?

At first, I thought I had shut down and numbed out the pain. I have a history of doing that. But I realize now that’s not what happened. I feel the pain of my heart being ripped out. It just hurts less than holding on to that piece of me. I have the comfort of knowing I’m not alone. That I wasn’t the only one who saw it. There were people in my life who did everything they could to help me. I wasn’t defenseless and alone. I was protected and truly loved. I still am. Through them I was able to learn the beauty of unconditional love with no exceptions, and never even realized where it was missing until now. Not everything was wrong and broken. So many things make so much more sense. Weird moments became healing memories. The hurt has always been padded with love.

I still have a lot to process and unpack. I will likely have moments of clarity that insert themselves into my consciousness for years to come. I will do my best to let the pain of knowing pass into the calm of understanding and acceptance. I will accept that I will never know why. And I don’t need to. I only need to understand the reality of my experience so I can walk with my head up in my present to make way for a future that is without chains holding me to my past. With clarity, I am sincerely surprised and impressed I made it as far as I did. That I was even able to put enough stress on those chains to have them yanked back multiple times. That I had enough snap to know something was off and to ask the right questions for help. And I had enough strength and love for my children to grab those chains and fight.

I didn’t break free from those chains. I would have been happy to leave them where they were. I’m not a hero in this story. There is no grand gesture of defiance. I was just responding to my children’s pain, and I wanted it to stop. Those chains were ripped out of my chest as a punishment for having the audacity to refuse to comply and then fight back…a second time. It was revenge for the first time I fought and pulled hard enough on those chains that I had to be retrieved and pulled back into compliance.

Jokes on them. I didn’t realize it, but we are all better off free from those chains. As I told my youngest daughter at the end of the first night of this insanity when she asked me, are you gonna be ok? I told her. Yeah. I’m gonna be ok. This is really going to sound weird, and yes I hurt, but what I feel more than anything else is relief. She said, that’s not strange at all. You have been questioning yourself and your observations your whole life, and now you know you were right. That has to be a huge relief.

Yeah. Yeah it is, Sam. Sure, there is a massive hole in my heart where that conditional and performative love had been, but it is healing quickly. Real love does that. I will mark that space as reserved, so that if and when unconditional love is offered to us instead of love based on degradation and compliance, I will have a place for it. It will always be there. My heart will not be shrunken by hate. I will fill it with my love as a placeholder to keep it open until then. I am more than my experiences. I am ME. I am the ever growing I am.