God Loves You

(Just wrote this, still needs some culling and spit n polish, but let's see how it goes over.Migraine thoughts.
A little bit tweaked and some added with Bear's suggestion)

I wonder what it’s like to be in the frame of mind
To unironically believe that
The creator of the whole Universe-
(Of space and time
Who set the speed of light at about       
700 million miles per hour
And Absolute Zero at -273 Celsius.

The One Who created Gravity,
Universal attraction, and Magnetism;

That created the hugest stars
we have given names to like W26 and
Rigel and Betelgeuse and VY Canis Majoris;

The creator of the minuscule:
Of the cell, the mitochondria
DNA
The molecule
The atom
Protons, Electrons, and Neutrons.
And gravitons?
The Higgs-Boson and Bucky balls,
And strings…..;

The creator of Time and
The dot, line, cube, and tesseract
5-cube hypercube with 32 vertices, 80 edges, 80 square faces,
40 cubic cells, and 10 tesseract 4-faces.
And so on in spacial dimensions
And Time Dimensions with the Past, Present, and Future
Possibilities are the second dimension of time.
What is the third? Only God knows.

That guided millions generations of
millions of species of organisms
for 550 million years
From unmoving filter feeders
To The Precambrian Reign:

The Dawn of Dance, of deliberate movement in the water
The Era of Aquatic Arthropods,
Such as Alpha Predator Anomalocaris.
Sexes arrived so that the DNA could recombine
and make individual individuals
To the time when a spinal cord was developed,
The birth of the vertebrates:
Then distinct head, a jaw, then limbs,
And the Tiktaalak dragged itself up onto the dry land.
It developed the ability to breathe air
And it laid eggs that had a casing that made then able to be laid
away from the uterine water
Then they started developing the young inside the bodies of the females
And scales became thin and hollow and good for insulation and turned to hair
We became endothermic
And about 200,000 years ago,
The human race came along
And some we became able to
Communicate ideas through speech
And writing came along, first animals painted on cave walls

And the outlines of women’s hands,
And then the abstract development of the written word:
“letters” pressed into clay.
We questioned our mortality,
And we hypothesized about a god.

This God did not prevent rape or war
Child molestation or cancer
Complex diseases of the mind, body, spirit and soul.
(If there even is such a thing as a spirit or soul.)

God created those things.

God created Trauma.

God created PTSD.
We imagined this god as petty and vindictive
In fear of mortality we imagined
Heaven and Hell andA megalomaniac that can only be satiated
With the sacrifice of its most beautiful and cosmically rare of all creations:
Complex life forms.

How very ironic.

That this God will look to our little galaxy,

To One galaxy out of billions, “The Milky Way”

With our little yellow star, 2/3rds of the
Way out from a super massive black hole
Near astronomical feature known to us as Sagittarius A.
The Milky Way is 100 Thousand light years across

On the spiral arm known to us as
The Orion–Cygnus Arm a thousand light years long
It takes roughly 350 million years
For our little sun to take one rotation
Around the black hole; 2/3rds of
The life span of the time everything we know of
has ever been alive.

When we were at this place on the rotation of the galaxy lat time

It was the Precambrian explosion.
2,000 rotations ago of the third planet from “The Sun”,
It is said, a sacrifice was made of the only son of this God,
Who was himself.
Two thousand years is not even a drop in the ocean of existence
For some reason this species think it is more special than the others,
More Intelligent.
But if we really were, why are we forcing other creatures to learn our language
Rather than learning theirs?

Billions and billions and billions.)

So I wonder what it’s like to be in the frame of mind
To unironically believe that The Creator of all this
Loves you.


Not to stop the wars, the hatred and the racism
Not to help the tiny Mission off the downtown core
Who gave soup and blankets to the needy
From burning to the ground in the autumn air

Not to stop cancer or AIDS or Rheumatoid Arthritis or suicide
Or any number of painful incurable condition to all
The people and everything that relies on pain to keep them alive:
Anything with a nervous system and a brain it can go tragically wrong

Life is so precious

and it is squandered

And we are not holding hands for love and comfort to drive

This tiny planet to a positive place
So very Beautiful yet so Terrible

that we can barely dare to look

Instead we gnash our teeth and shout
“THIS IS OFFENSIVE!”

As the pale blue dot plummets through
Space and Time
But then again is all that is a bit harder to swallow
than vegetarian carnivores in a garden
with a talking snake and magic fruit
that gives knowledge to anything that consumes it.
You wouldn’t want to do that now, would you?
You wouldn’t want to KNOW;

That you unironically believe that

his god loves you and will put all of this aside so that

your baseball team will win.

 "God Loves You" R1
n. pearson Oct 20 2013<photo id="1" />

The Mortar: How This all Fits Together 1

I know how you feel, I've been in chronic pain since 1986. I've fought it for normalcy, to try and keep a job (but I've always been discriminated against because of the number of times I've had to go to hospital, my bosses called me "unreliable" because of my trips to the ER), and trying to have a normal social life going out to the bar and so on.

Sorry in advance for the novel, I just found it really cathartic to write again, and I wanted to get across the idea that I understand about the drinking but I didn't feel I could talk about it without taking about exactly where I was coming from. In places here and there are links to my blog, it is just links to deeper discussion of my trauma- more details of the story, as it were. Some people have really wanted my to write an autobiography, mostly fans of my mom, bleah. Haha. I'm sure if they saw the side of my mom that I have been exposed to, they might not worship her so much.

I've been in chronic pain since I was 17, so my whole adult life. I never had supportive parents, home life was so bad I moved out as soon as I could, and soon after my parents moved to the other side of the continent, and having no extended family, I was literally alone as a young adult, and got used a LOT because I just didn't know how things worked, and I didn't have anyone batting for me in my corner (mentoring or anything). I literally went through the "school of hard knocks".
 
I never felt love from my parents, there was blatant favouritism towards my younger brother, and it was made very clear that they hadn't wanted a girl. What happened was beyond sibling rivalry, it was constant clear harassment that just kept getting worse as the years went on (as an adult my brother didn't even bother to hide his pathological hatred of women and would brag about beating his fiancée in a loud voice in restaurants, for some reason my parents never did anything about his behaviour (which is why it led to that) and he never had to have any responsibility or accountability for his actions, that included never even having to apologise for anything he did such as intentionally destroying my things or killing my pets- although it is relevant, it is another story altogether.

My mom would always call me ugly, and would tell me that my life choices were limited to being a nurse or a housewife. Nothing I did was good enough for her. and she wielded my need to be approved of and loved like a club, whenever I would get on my feet in life, she would pull the rug out from beneath me and I would be scrambling to pick up the pieces. From early on, I accepted the fact that I was ugly- why else would she say such a thing? And that I was useless and unwanted, and the lowest of the low, that everyone had rights to trample me, and that maybe, just maybe, if I was nice to everyone, and honest, maybe someday someone would see me and believe me and be nice to me.

My dad was violent, mentally ill of some kind, although he was never formally diagnosed. My parents divorced when I was about four, I guess it was, even though my mom will never talk about it, I can't even get a straight answer about my own life from her. My dad never made it a secret that he didn't want a girl. After the divorce, he would call once every two weeks and talk to me for five minutes and my brother for twenty. I would have terrible panic attacks from this, I didn't know why my dad didn't love me. When I had an anxiety attack, I'd get punished for "hitting the wall", as it was called. (The walls were not actually hit, it was a euphemism for "acting out", but I wasn't having a tantrum, I was having a panic attack.) One of my mom's favourite means of passive aggressiveness was to use strange euphemisms that no one understood but herself and punish for them.

A strange rule she made was "if you tell the truth, you won't be punished", if you lie, you will both be punished". I don't even want to guess how she thought this would work, but this sparked my brother's sadism at a very young age. He would do stuff just to see me get punished unjustly, and he was very blatant about it. Since my brother was younger than me, he wouldn't get hit as hard as me- often I would have red marks and sometimes blisters from the hole in the wooden spoon. It didn't matter if I tried to talk to her like an adult and really explain that I didn't do the thing I was being punished for (usually I didn't even know what it was about, it was simply, "You know what you did". I stopped caring, and grounding didn't work on me, I would just draw or read or sew in my bunk. Once she was really mad about whatever it was that set her off, and she hit me in the arm and the handle of the wooden spoon broke on my arm. The look on her face was priceless. She didn't hit with an object for a long time after that.

She married my step dad when I was 10, he didn't adopt me or my brother, and in the early 80's it was unusual and confusing to have a different last name than your parents. In my young mind, I thought that we didn't get Bob's last name because of something to do with my dad, but when I was about 40 he told me that it was just because he didn't want me, and so he didn't adopt me. For him it was simple as that, he didn't really think of how destructive the repercussions of that sort of thing would be to a kid. Whenever I had an idea, he would day "just keep thinking, Nicky, that is what you're good at". It was his way of telling me I'm stupid, and that my idea was dumb and useless.

So, I was ugly and stupid and unwanted. "Just a girl," which meant I was around the level of garbage- a nuisance, best to stay out of everyone's way best I could. These were the adjectives I grew up with, a fact that I accepted about myself.

When I was 12, we moved from the States up to Canada, and I would see my dad once a year. When I was 14 he married my step mom and that year he started getting strange- I soon learned I had to lock the door when I was changing, and weird things would happen. He would sometimes quickly grab my breast and then pull away, and a few times when I was kissing him on the cheek as I arrived or left visiting him he would turn his head quickly and stick his tongue in my mouth.

I went to the school counsellor about this, and she said, "you must tell your parents, they will do something". So after school I told my mom, and she said that I have to make the choice whether I ever see my dad again. That was too hard and confusing for a fourteen year old to make. (I also told the same counsellor about the problem with my brother's sadistic behaviours, and same thing, "talk to your parents about it, they will know what to do". Mom was "too busy" and Bob said "we're not the kind of family that talks about things". I didn't know what to do.

During my teens, my mom was becoming quite a bad workaholic, and I really needed to talk to her, but she was always "too busy". There was a weird parallel  with my life though, for example, when I was going through puberty, she co-authored a book about what girls my age were thinking and feeling during their first period. She was too busy with the book to be bothered with me though, and when I got  my first period, she just told me to "read the box and follow the instructions, it's under the bathroom sink". It was like there were two of her- the version of her being a loving and caring and responsive mother (the version she let people see) and the real her.

I was really horse crazy, and the best thing when we moved to Canada was there was a riding stable within bike riding distance from home and school. The summer I was 12, I started to volunteer there- it started off badly though. I was so excited and wanting to impress the people in the office with my enthusiasm and knowledge, when we got in the office and I was brushed aside by my parents, I had an anxiety attack. That made a bad first impression on the barn manager, and even though I didn't know it or remember it until it was mentioned almost two decades later, it affected how I was treated there.

School was no better. Mom made me wear her hand-me down clothes, and I would get chastised and hounded for it. I had to get braces, and wear one of those ungodly headsets.  would get pushed into the lockers in the hallway, and I had some good foresight about what kind of white hot pain I would experience later.
 

Two years later, when I was 14 I was able to get paid by the stable and I took on the job as teacher's assistant. All the TA's kept one eye on the office door- one by one someone's dad would try and sneak into the office and have a "secret" meeting with Jean, the manager and owner of the lesson horses and many of the show horses. We all knew what the meeting meant. Some time in the near future, because of getting A's, or a birthday, or because she was "Daddy's Girl", a horse van would come up the long driveway and the TA would be upgraded from staff to Horse Owner, often a very nice show horse, too. I waited for my Day.

So there was bullying at home, bullying at school, and now bullying at the stable. Still, the stable was the only place I wanted to be. I had always loved the gentle power and beauty of horses. I believed they just knew if you were a good person, they would accept you.

My mom had all but completely shut me out. She was beginning to become Important, and she had no time for family matters, what she considered a nuscience. My brother become more and more of a terror, and I had no way to cull the behaviour. My parents were just not interested in parenting. My brother knew he could get away with bloody murder, and so he committed it on a regular basis. One time, when I was 16, I was so exasperated with my mom I said "when are you going to talk to me, when you retire?" She said I should make an appointment to see her. I was speechless. I really needed someone, an adult, to listen and to be proactive and to care. My mom liked to put on this show in  front of people that she was living and giving, she really got off on that shit. So I had no one that would listen to me. I started cutting. Mom and Bob saw the cuts, but said nothing. I started considering suicide again.

I made my dedication clear by living and breathing Horse. I got very good at drawing them, I learned everything I could and spent as much time there as I could. I tried to do everything I could to make it so I would deserve it, The years ticked by, and the girls that got their horse became meaner and meaner. I was actively snubbed- some of the girls went to my school, and as I was bullied there by them, I was bullied at the stable. I knew in my heart my day would never come, we weren't wealthy by any means, and my parents had told me flat out that I could never have a horse. But working there, the unconditional acceptance of the horses made everything bearable.

Then, in late summer of 1986, the Impossible Happened. One of my mom's colleagues was going on sabbatical for a year, and I was allowed to have one of her horses and keep her at the stable for a whole six months! She was a palomino Appendix Quarter Horse, a beautiful horse that I had gotten to see when she was four days old. All my years of persistence and work were finally paying off.  I was ecstatic. I had misjudged my parents, they were hearing me after all. I would have somewhere to belong, to be, maybe even the Mean Girls would become my friends.  I was afraid of jinxing it somehow. This was going to be almost as good as owning a horse, and I would be able to ride at any time I wanted, even on the beautiful wooded trails that the river nestled in. I don't know how I slept at all coming up to The Big Event.

The Best Day Ever
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/03/best-day-ever.html

So in the accident my nose was crushed and my cheekbones were caved in and my eye sockets fractured clear to the back of my eyes. I didn't know at the time though that I'd lost her, I felt that I was running The Gauntlet, that if I stayed committed to my riding that there would be no way I wouldn't get a horse now. I was in the hospital for six weeks and missed half a semester of graduating year of high school. My mom would not let me repeat the grade, even though it was an acceptable thing to do. While I was in the hospital, Tara's owner sold her to someone in another city.  I lost my dream horse, I lost my physical identity, but I kept my spirits up, I was extremely tough and I could handle this. I had no idea about the nightmare that lay in my future.

As the bones knit, I would have incidences of pain. Pure, exquisite, white hot pain, a bright white star of pain in my cheekbones. I would hallucinate, and vomit so that I couldn't hold down my meds. I had to go to the hospital regularly for pain control shots.

The first few times my mom or Bob would accompany me, then sometimes it would be one of my mom's colleagues from work. I thought they were doing it because they liked me. I thought them being called "Aunt _____" was mutually agreed upon, and that they were like a surrogate aunt because I didn't have any extended family. I thought they cared. "Aunt Wendy" came with me for a breakthrough pain shot. Depression often accompanied the pain. "It should be my mom at the ER with me, I wish she cared." Wendy didn't make any eye contact, and she looked really uncomfortable or something. Something was off. "She's paying  you, isn't she". Wendy started at the floor. There was an uncomfortable silence and the air become as thick as water. I never saw her after that day.

I met John. He was like no one I'd ever met. I had never been in love before, and when you are that young and in love, that person is your whole world. We were together just short of three years, when I learned he was cheating on me. My whole world shattered, I was broken.  He asked me to marry him.

About six weeks after asking me to marry him, John committed suicide.

I had a nervous breakdown. I had to move back in with my parents, which was awful. Bob became extremely abusive about my grieving.

Emotion is a Pejorative
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/04/emotion-is-pejoritive.html

I took two years of Psych, trying to understand it. At the end of the 2 year program, I met a guy who I thought was very sweet even though I thought he was a bit pushy in the relationship. I was living in a really crappy area of town, the kind of place that the police would ignore if you called them about noise complaints and such.

I stared going to bars more, I needed the noise, I needed to dance, and I needed to numb myself with drink. I made friends with local musicians, and would go to as many shows as I could.

One night the neighbours were having an exceptionally loud party, there was angry/afraid shouting in a woman's voice and smashing sounds against our shared wall. The next morning they brought out one of the guys who lived there in a body bag- apparently they had been drinking a lot and doing coke and the women were some prostitutes they had hired and there was an overdose. I'd had enough. So I agreed to move in with my boyfriend.

It started out really nice, but soon enough he became extremely possessive and gradually became abusive. He would have temper tantrums over the slightest thing, often something of his own imagination. He would accuse me of flirting with or sleeping with just about anyone he could list, it was absolutely mind boggling.

He would scream my name and if I wasn't prepared to "go upstairs" with him (which was pretty horrible, he would say terrible things to me and about my body), he would scream in my face and choke me and shake me...

Noise Through The Walls (DS1)
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/04/noise-through-walls-ds1.html

I'm The Best You're Ever Going to Get (DS2)
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/04/im-best-youre-ever-going-to-get-ds2.html

Following the abuse from Dan, I felt so beaten by the world, so deflated. I turned to the familiar- some of my step dad's work colleagues, they let me move in with them Janet and Gord. That is another whole nightmare on it's own. They were controlling and crazy. I had nowhere else to go.

Because of my pain and injuries and the traumas I'd been through, Social Services decided to help me, and they got involved, saying that I was in a really rare case where I was in an abuse situation with my landlords. Social Services helped me get an apartment (with a bathtub!) and I tried to put the pieces back together of my shattered life.

Social Services had me take a course about the dynamics of abuse, where I learned about boundaries and active listening and how to recognise an abusive relationship. This is when I learned that I had been abused my whole life- that the norm for me was abuse, and being the unwilling and unwitting reciprocant of being used and abused. I am a helper, a people pleaser, and abusive types seek people like me out and like a vampire, bleed us dry until there is nothing left but dust.

 I tried going back to school, majoring in Anthropology, but my neck was extremely sore and I couldn't focus.

After a four year wait, it was now 2001, I got into a pain clinic. A mere 15 years since my first persistently painful injury and six since my second. I didn't even know there were pain clinics.

The pain clinic said they couldn't do anything for my facial pain, but they might be able to help my neck- the physiotherapist coined it "multiple whiplash syndrome". I had been choked and strangled so badly by Dan that I has entrapped nerves in my neck, the origin of the extremely bad neck pain and the numbness and tingling in my hands. This is when I learned that Dan had actually done some permanent damage. I discussed trying to press charges again with the pain clinic psychologist. He said that I didn't have a very good chance because of the time that had passed. Great. So the waiting list to get into a clinic to give me a diagnosis exceeded the Statute of Limitations. That's some great care for your citizens, Canada.

I didn't know how to cope with that information, so I coped the only way I knew how: I went to the bar to talk it over with people I knew. That was a Tuesday night. A night that I struggle to remember, and struggle to forget.

What It Was Really Like
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/03/what-it-was-really-like.html

I didn't recover well from the rape. A body can only take so much, I guess. A mind can only take so much. Stress and bad memories blossomed into PTSD and the pain became worse, everywhere: chronic pain became Multiple Trauma Intractable Complex Chronic Pain Syndrome. I developed stress disorders like Fibromyalgia and ulcers and osteoarthritis. I didn't know who I could trust, the world seemed to be saying simultaneously "trust no one".

I completely shut down.

The last glimmer of god left my eyes- if god is forgiving and lets rapists into heaven then I want no part of it.