Childhood

Missy Knows-It-All True Progress Depends Vastly Upon Our Understanding of History

Warning: The following may be a "trigger" for victims of abuse. Please exercise caution.

I would love to forget, to package up the remnants and commit them to the past, stored away in a locker in the middle of a cold, dark room.  But everytime I do, something unearths them and inevitably, it takes me a long time to bundle them back up and return them to the locker.                     ________________________ The only way to progress is to have a firm understanding of history.

Innocence Takes An Early Flight

As a child, I was pencil thin. And when my body began to change, take shape, I was fit. I swam 4 - 6 hours a day throughout the summer months, marched in the band, was on the flag drill team, was a competition majorette (solo, partner and corp), played powder puff football and was a member of the junior varsity basketball team for a very hard working, ambitious coach who ultimately led us to national victory. But in my junior year, I started to gain weight at an alarming rate. Enough so that the band director pulled me aside to comment on it. It alarmed my mother. After a long discussion with her husband, the two confronted me on it. They offered me a deal.  A carrot on a stick. If I lost so many pounds by a certain date, they would pay for me to fly back home on a two week vacation.

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Despite my deep desire to see that happen, I never did reach their goal. Stubborn? Maybe. But the real reason for my lack of courage? I was subconciously afraid for my own safety and my weight was a security blanket even if I didn't (and wouldn't for another ten years) realize it on a conscious level. A decade later, as I mourned the loss of my daughter, I went into therapy. Grief counseling begat marital counseling which begat divorce advisement and finally swept into an eye opening series of abuse survival sessions.

Slowly and painfully we picked away the sunburnt layers to stumble upon the truths. It wasn't regressive therapy for I never forgot the horrors of the abuse I endured as a child. Instead, it was a heightened sense of awareness as I came to realize what happened to me in my youth was wrong ... very wrong. Simply put, I was the adult survivor of child abuse - sexual, mental, physical and spiritual. It would be another eight years before the pains, the memories and the inevitable cycle would be released.  As much as I wanted to escape from the visible scars of my past - my obesity - I had much more work to do. And thus the equation is solved.

By ridding the lingering anger, fears and the emergence of reborn cyclic behavior, I've crossed through the vortex and ame shedding the weight as I enlist beyond the survivor circle into the midst of an elite group that hold pride and dignity knowing they are victims no more.  I've been handed a titanium locker, given entry to an airtight and burglar-proof storage container that has been buried beneath ten miles of the earth and clay.  Each memory that has entitled my abuser to remain a constant in my life has thus been packaged away, not to be forgotten, but rather to be put in it's proper place -- a resting place, if you will.  Past attempts to rid myself of the shield I carried were unsuccessful only because, as I see it, I had not been given the tools nor the proper manner in which to deal with a past that continued to haunt me.  But that was then. This is now.  And now I can finally ease into this challenge knowing that success is the final step in true, permanent freedom.