Revolving Door

OUR REVOLVING DOOR

This farewell speech is dedicated to all who are in the revolving door and bound by chains. Each person regardless of age may experience trauma that feels overwhelming directly or indirectly.

I want you to remember we are each individuals with our own reaction to action. Please try to remember not to compare your feelings and thoughts with anyone else. My personal experiences are many and with each rejection I dealt with tears followed.

Some of you may be at a place in your life where you block emotions and bury anything associated with pain. For the majority of my life I carried years of abuse, it began as a young girl; emotional, psychological, and physical.

I want to point out that as young children we are not able to understand the reasoning behind anger, and rejection. More often than not, I blocked the pain because I didn’t have the words to describe how I felt. I lost trust in adults and experienced anxiety without knowing it.

I believe we have all heard the simple sayings ‘you can forgive but never forget.’ I bring this up because It took years of my life to understand what it is to forgive. Only recently I realized that forgiveness is not speaking the words I forgive you, and instantly the pain is gone. Forgiveness starts with speaking those words to ourselves.

And then we repeat it until we acknowledge all the pain one issue at a time. I want to mention how important forgiveness is for us, not for the people who hurt us because chances are they don’t care. In my life I believe I sectioned each agonizing experience into a small box within the chambers of my mind and buried it.

I plead with you in this farewell speech not to do that. We all know and understand that this life is our only chance. There are no do overs, every word we speak and every action we take is forever. This is in reference to how we live our lives after being damaged emotionally. I found physical abuse to be easily forgotten. Meanwhile words of anger and condemnation I remember to this day.

The difference with that decades long revolving door is that the pain associated with the judgement is gone. I am at a point where I can give you this speech and have the freedom to do so.

I have family and friends who were shattered at young ages and turned to alcohol and or drugs. I started smoking at twenty-one and I had no idea how addicting nicotine was. I did not use substance’s to numb my pain, but avoiding it crashed my world three times. I was under psychiatric care at thirty-one. I suddenly experienced an emotional melt down. I had flashbacks that I couldn’t connect to anything, I had night terrors which are harrowing nightmares in vivid color and sound like watching a horror movie.

I had no trust in anyone and counseling wasn’t an option for me. I was afraid of the rejection and the judgement by strangers because if the people closest to me could hurt me, why wouldn’t a stranger? My freedom began in writing, freestyle writing was my best friend and then my largest enemy.

The blocked memories came rushing back like a torrential rain! I was getting flooded with images, clips and recordings I never acknowledged when they happened. Eventually our mind explodes and we are forced to deal with disturbing events.

I was married at the age of sixteen and had my first daughter at seventeen. She was a joy to have but my marriage was hell on earth. I repeatedly asked to go back home and was denied. I was in that marriage until I turned twenty-one. That was my first abusive relationship. Sexual, physical, emotional and psychological.

When I was able to get away it was due to the Fort Carson Military Police and my ex-husband’s Lieutenant. I will forever be grateful for those men and the military. That psycho man would call me and threaten to commit suicide and shoot his gun and be silent on the phone. I had no idea how to deal with him, where he was at or how to stop the excruciating terror I felt. I ignored the emotions and after time I consciencely forgot about it.

A few years went by before I got involved with a new guy. He was awesome and his family showed me what love meant. I felt awkward receiving hugs from his parents at first and I was slow to reciprocate the positive behavior. Life was good for almost ten years and then I began to have memories surface and my behavior changed significantly. End result was getting another divorce after having an awesome son and another beautiful daughter.

My meltdown started there and went full blown at the age of thirty-one. I made it through the majority of the memories over the course of four years. I did lots of writing and wrote a horror novel and destroyed it after it was finished. I needed to write that book for inner healing and afterwards I took an additional four years of not writing anything other than my journals.

I made bad decisions in reference to friends and men in my life for a long time. In twenty-thirteen I married a complete hypocrite and suffered more psychological abuse in ten months than all my previous relationships. That man suffered with several mental illnesses, he was delusional and a newly recovering alcoholic.

We divorced before our first wedding anniversary and I had my second mental breakdown. The second was nearly impossible to overcome, I had panic attacks on a daily basis every hour on the hour. I was scared I was dying and I couldn’t rest. I lived in a rural area where I couldn’t find a single physician to prescribe me anything for the first three months.

Slowly after losing my job, my home, my dog of seventeen years and being mistreated by family I relocated and lived in homeless shelters for the following three years. In recent years as in twenty-twenty one to now I finally learned how to say and do the farewell speech to the people who never loved me, to the ones that did but I wasn’t able to reciprocate that love and be free to speak to people of all ages about my life experiences. I never would have made it without my spiritual walk and my faith in the only faithful God I know.