In true Ani fashion
Oct. 2nd, 2018 04:16 pmIs it still LJ idol therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/996363.htmlif it’s on DW?
History, in full and in part.
Jan. 10th, 2018 10:22 pmTW: domestic violence, miscarriage, sexual assault, betrayal, death, addiction, pregnancy complications. the past the past who cares about the past? Only historians.
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January 10th 2002 I was raped in my bed by my best friend. The next day my girlfriend attempted suicide, and two days later her step-father died of a massive heart attack, she spent over half an hour giving him mouth to mouth and performing CPR while they waited for the rural paramedics to make it through the blizzard. We were on the phone the whole time, two weeks later she moved in with me. A month later I turned 17, my grades dropped, I lost my scholarship and dropped out of high school.
January 2004, my (then) boyfriend of 4 months, threw a fit and tried to hit me because during a blizzard my ex-girlfriend(mentioned above) who was visiting my mother was stuck staying with me and my mother for the night. The next day he apologized by showing up with gifts, replacing my glasses that he’d broken in a fight (that I was too poor to afford to replace) and proposed at a very public venue in front of a crowd while I was trapped with no way home but to go with him. I said yes, and that night we conceived Ari and her twin whom I would lose a month later.
January 25 2005, I lost the second twin of a surprise pregnancy conceived 2 weeks after Ari was born, ripping my stitches, I did not consent to that sex. I sat alone in my bathroom cradling the tiny creature as I bled all over the floor, no friends or family to help care for me or my not quite 4 month old baby.
January 17 2006, I miscarried much earlier this time, a baby I desperately wanted and had planned for.
January 6th 2007, with my 5.5 week old baby and 2 year old in tow I walked out on my husband in a blizzard. Within 7 days he’d threatened and bullied me into coming home. I was then forced to sleep on the floor and abused in every sense of the word until my final exit plan came into place 4 months later .
January 2010, three of my aunts died in the same week.
January 2012, i was hospitalized with severe blood pressure problems (216/120) in pregnancy and upper right quadrant abdominal pain, that was misdiagnosed as HELLP and told to prepare to abort G at 17 weeks. Thanks to some remarkable care and near lethal doses of 3 separate medications, we made it after many more hospitalizations.
January 2014, my close friend Bill, overdosed and died, I was asked to identify the body. I had ignored the last text he sent me saying goodbye.
January is hard for me. I walk on eggshells waiting for something to go wrong. That’s not to say that nothing goes wrong the rest of the year. Just that the original trauma is deeply ingrained. That first major unravelling of my plans, my scholarship, my goals of becoming a doctor, my life I had so carefully and meticulously planned since I was small was side tracked by a boy who didn’t believe in the word no. And I let it derail me so far off course that 17 years have passed and I’m not entirely sure how I got from where I had planned to be to where I am.
I am happy with my life. I don’t regret where I’ve ended up. It’s just... here I am, and where would I be if things had been different? If I hadn’t let that first betrayal take me so far off course? If I’d had any support? Anyone to turn to?
I try and be the person I needed when I was younger. I want everyone I love to have better options than I’ve had.
But I still walk on eggshells in January. I don’t really sleep. I just dream these vivid nightmarish flashbacks and wonder who I would be.
I’m still here, and I’m working towards being a survivor. But it’s hard to say truly that I’ve survived, when every year, I feel so deeply haunted by the very abrupt turn my life took on a very cold clear night.
Some things you don’t get over, you just get through. But what right do I have to say I’ve survived when all these years later I still let these things overwhelm me as much as they do?
When you've come into some dark shit and you're holding those secrets to protect the people you love. And then one of those people throws hot button venom at you KNOWING it's a sore spot, knowing they will hurt you.
And instead of eviscerating them with your own secrets and venom and anger and pain, you swallow, and sleep and wake up every few hours to their hurtful words in the back of your throat.
When you get up into the haze of January daylight looking out the window and say "it's snowing".
The bridge is a tangle of vines and broken boards swaying across the expanse,
with outstretched gnarled knuckles bracing weight precariously on ancient rites.
He grasps the fraying knotted threads that tether this world to the others.
The rhythmic sway of crumbling faith, fated, balanced, though serene,
planning/planting, every delicate moment, while shrouded in obscurity.
Blind terror glows, fickle and fleeing; embers flickering in the wind.
Liquid in glass swirls lazily in glass, cloaked carelessly in Bordeaux sin.
Laughter slicing sharply through the last shards of daylight,
the tap dancing of tongues; enmeshed.
Momentary wanderlust; wonder-lost, eclipsing ellipsis hanging in the air.
They resist.
Yup I said it.
I hate hockey.
In fact I think it's entirely possible that my first words were "I hate hockey" if not they should have been. I'm not much of an organized competitive sports fan in general but hockey holds a special place of loathing for me and I for it.
I grew up a middle class kid in an up and coming neighborhood, a pair of second hand figure skates marked my birthday when I turned 8 and several winters later a newer pair, and, figure skating lessons (that my parents paid for in place of groceries some months) and my dreams of landing a triple axle were nearly always sountracked by hockey pucks slapping against the boards of the local outdoor rinks.
I'm showing my age I'm sure when I start the next sentence with how heavy and awkward my Sony walk-man cassette player was in my hands as I flung myself around the "pleasure rink" that despite the posted rules was near always full of smaller future hockey players. The kind of kids who's parents had bought an entire goalie set for their toddler son and a Gretzky jersey to go with it, poor boy couldn't even stand let alone stop a puck, and yet he and his father and slew of older brothers cluttered up "my" rink with their veritable obstacle course of scattered equipment. Skating during the day or on the weekends was an exercise in frustration. So as you do, I found my work around.
An outdoor rink in Winnipeg is almost as practical as one in Florida. The idea is kind of novel but the reality is often miles away from satisfying. All Canadian kids I think though grew up with an immunity to the cold and even in Winnipeg with windchill factors of -40 for most of the skate able months of the year, we, the die hards, would trek out as the street lights came out from November through March to get in as many extra hours on the ice as possible. And then far too late at night, the the wind whipping ice crystals freezing solid tears to eyelashes, we'd trek home, crawl into bed, and wait for the alarm.
5:30 on a weekday morning and the city is still mostly asleep, the house quite and shivery, it's 1940's boiler kicking on with a heavy sigh would greet me on my way out the door, on warmer days, the sunrise was a breathtaking bliss of prairie sky streaked in pastels of pink, orange and blue, hoarfrost lined trees and the same rink as the night before, waiting for Vivaldi to start on my cassette.
In those early morning hours, in those late evening skates where the rink was mine, I truly felt like flying, zipping around on skates became a blissful escape and a beautiful therapy, wind whipped skin burns from the cold, arthritic hands that would shape and gnarl into my adulthood, and the sounds of the pucks slapping the boards, interruption my serenity.
I stopped skating when I tore all the ligaments in my ankle. Winters went from a beautiful wild child of pastels and fearless frost to a frozen pile of suck. January became a month of hibernation instead of exhilaration. Hockey sticks and laughter, skates scraping the ice. All things wrapped up in a ball of couldn't do's and shouldn't do's.
"If it were a hockey injury we could do surgery to repair it," the doctor said, "but you're not an athlete, right? I mean not a real one? You don't play hockey so there's not need to repair the tears. Just strengthen the surrounding muscles and stay off the skates for awhile".
It was a bad call. The injury didn't heal. And the injury never well.
I suppose I can't honestly blame hockey for that, after all it wasn't hockey's fault. I suppose the doctor should have been more interested in where I was going, versus where I was.
A year ago
Jan. 3rd, 2017 01:07 pmI was in decent shape, 3 months after that I was in amazing shape.
( Read more... )Things I wanna manifest in 2017
Jan. 2nd, 2017 02:57 pmI don't believe in resolutions but here are my manifestation wishes for this year:
A new-to-us house.
( Read more... )My life seems to have stalled beautifully in the ether of 2011. Time just stopped. For me anyway. 5 years go by, my kids grow and change and yet.... I'm shocked and surprised. When someone else announces a marriage or a pregnancy I am. Despondent. Surprised. Shocked. You were supposed to stay young forever. You haven't grown up. I'm still on Maternity leave even though my "baby" is almost 5. I want another baby. I can't ever have another baby. How dare you all grow up. It's wonderful and amazing and what have I done in the time since she's been born?
LJ Idol Season 10: episode 1 I need the struggle to feel alive
When we talk about character, we almost never admit to being the non-player characters or the side kick of the world.
( Read more... )Valentine in contrast.
Sep. 13th, 2016 01:53 pmSo this girl, whom if you tried you could probably track down a name on but I'm going to keep the vague as I know at least one "friend" I have on here is bit of a snake and I don't need much in terms of trouble, this journal has never been about anyone but me, and this will eventually get to the nervous breakdown of a point I'm having or making but saddle up because it could take awhile, get a fork this word salad will be delicious.
So this girl. Is as of yesterday homeless, 4 years younger than me, and strung out. And I want to do something but see previous points. And I can't anyway because there's nothing to be done. She's made her choices, she lost her kids (Whom she had at 19&21 - sound familiar?) some years back... she's been high ever since. And ya know. IN my own classist fucked up mind I"ve used her as a barometer for my own parenting failures, often at the encouragement of other staff or even "friends" of hers. "while at least you're not a _______, you parent your kids, you're a god mom etc." when I met her I even thought maybe I could mentor her, my kids are 4 years older than hers...
Thing is, she's lived her life for herself. Fuck the consequences. She hasn't (wouldn't, didn't, couldn't) grown up. She sobered up for awhile, Bill helped her get the kids back, he helped her in so many ways and his undoing in a strange way was hers.
But I've lived my life for my kids. I've stayed away from the drugs and a lot of the booze and general debauchery. I've dabbled lonely from a safe distance. And for years I've judged her.
And now here I am. Thinking maybe she doesn't have it wrong after all. Maybe we are all a stones throw away from walking away from our responsibilities and just being wrecked all the time.
I've lived my life for my kids.
She's lived her life for herself.
Neither of us are happy.
&it stoned me
Jun. 24th, 2016 11:06 amThe cemetery it's self is beautifully treed, with glorious markers, I've searched on a number of occasions for him, knowing he is in 38-0296. After half an hour of driving and finding sections A-P and sections 18-37 I finally downloaded a map of the cemetery to learn why I couldn't find 38. Select 38, is located beyond the military cemetery at the back, near the fence by where the airport and the highway connect, on the very edge of the property, there are no trees for a good football fields length and one would assume the cemetery it'self had ended where the beautiful grooming tappers into weeds and gravel and concrete bars and backhoes... But it does't around a curved road, with a collection of sparsely placed saplings less than 6ft tall is select 38, a series of mostly unmarked plots, in various states of freshly dug and grown over, some with small ground plaques to commemorate someone that was once cared about but mostly, unless you were to know where to look you'd think this tiny field of weeds was just overgrowth and storage. This is where they put you when you can't afford to die. When no one claims the body, when work, begrudgingly pays for the cheapest burial. I found myself drawn towards a poplar sapling as poplars are by far my favourite tree, their leaves applauding all summer long in praise of the breeze. And as I looked 3 feet from the poplar a small ground plaque engraved with the lyrics to "Blackbird" lay slightly overgrown, "take these broken wings and learn to fly, all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arrive". I looked for some signage to point me in the right direction but there are no signs in select 38, no directions, for the most part I would imagine there isn't a lot of demand for visitors to this section. I noticed that under "Blackbirds" marker was a mental circle with numbers stamped, in fact they seemed everywhere in the weed jungle, cemetery markers so they know where they've stuck what bodies I suspect, "Blackbird" was 0297, how serendipitous. Kicking at the ground around me I found nothing, several feet away was 0294 so all that left was the space between overgrown with weeds, I pulled and dug, leaning gingerly up against the baby poplar, and there it was, an overgrown marker of a friend no one loved and no one remembers. In this field of nothingness, the wasteland of the cemetery there lies my friend Bill, with no marker, and no headstone. Adrift in a sea of lost, I scrubbed at the cemetery marker until the 296 was clear to me, and I spoke to him for awhile.
I will buy him a marker, I will remember.
I feel like it is my job to remember.
I know I couldn't have saved him.
I know I didn't kill him.
Sometimes though, you just need to do something. And I need to do this.



(no subject)
Jan. 15th, 2016 05:18 pmHow damaged are you?
How wretched and meek?
Sharp tongues cut deep grooves.
How loved are you?
Hands held, hearts beat in rhythmic unison;
breath held, a calculated silence.
How safe are you?
Bundled deep within, gripping tight against the cold;
warm blankets, battle whipping north winds.
How strong are you?
Iron clad, stoic, shoulders back, facing the sun;
tall, silent, and fierce.
How frail are you?
Tiny bones, held against dark night(knight?);
shaking legs emerging slowly to uneven ground.
How free are you?
Wet winged emergence, chrysalis cracked;
dissolving silence into awakening.
