Persist, Together...

Not that I should continue be shocked by the depravity of the people currently in power of these great United States of America, yet somehow the pure hateful words just keep getting worse every day the current Administration and all its supporters are continued to not be held accountable for their rhetoric, action, and idle inaction while huge swaths of people are degraded and brutalized.

However, a few weeks ago I believe I read the worst thing I have read yet, about the young woman whose life was viciously taken from this world and her family because some angry white dude couldn’t handle his despicable beliefs being countered by peaceful citizens of America who actually believe in who we are as a People.

Heather Heyer was a white woman, whose death has galvanized the good people of this country far more than the death of a woman of color would—or indeed ever has. She was a 32 year old paralegal who loved her country and all the people in it, and believed above anything else that we are only as strong as the compassion and equality we show for all.

I, too, am 32 years old.

I, too, worked as a civil litigation paralegal for most of my career.

I, too, stand for the equality of all people of this country.

Like Heather Heyer, I have never married and have no children.

With the full support of the elected government currently in power, The Daily Stormer took to the air waves to defame Ms. Heyer’s memory, calling her a slut, a waste of space, and assuming that because she was 32 and without babies that it must mean she underwent multiple abortions.

That there are actually live humans with souls who would believe, support, or stay silent while these sorts of vile humans speak their truth completely shocks me to the core of my soul, but in order to truly stand up for someone who is no longer able to stand up for herself because an angry white dude decided her life wasn’t worth more than his beliefs, allow me to share my own story with you.

I was born into a kind and caring family, in the great state of Wyoming, and while I never knew it growing up, we were dirt poor and struggling to make end’s meet.

Like other families, my parents both worked jobs just to support their homes, to afford cars in order to get to the jobs they required to raise us, and were at work constantly because both parents not working was tantamount to living on the streets with nothing. In the predominantly white towns we lived in, the reason for this scarcity was not because people of color or immigrants held all the good jobs.

Both of my parents are educated individuals, and both had in them instilled work ethic that seems to simply not exist anymore among the popular vein. They raised my sister and me with this same work ethic, and we were also raised with general ethics and morals—and were raised to understand that White Supremacy and beliefs held by Nazis or their supporters are wrong.

In fact, I remember being in elementary school where a young man classmate of mine suggested we use the name “Mini-Hitlers” for our group during a social studies project. In second or third grade, I had no idea what that even meant, but it seemed exciting. Until I got home that evening and had a brutal history lesson given by my war history buff dad and passionate-against-hate older sister. I never got excited about Hitler or any of his despicable beliefs again, that’s for sure.

Once you see pictures of millions of bodies that were murdered by an ideology, agreeing with someone who caused so much death no longer feels exciting, but disturbing.

My seventh grade year, we moved to a new town, and I was immediately targeted by classmates for reasons I still don’t truly understand. I was beaten up after class, bullied mentally and physically in and after Volleyball by my teammates, had my life threatened multiple times and—yes, was raped by boys who apparently never learned that someone else’s body is not a vessel for them to use.

Even after being raised in a kind and loving home, I learned from society and my own classmates and school administrators that my life was worth nothing to them, and eventually I started believing that too.

Yet, I persisted.

My family struggled greatly with how to handle my slipping grades and my depression and obvious self-harm and suicidal behavior. My mother, having no clue how to help me herself, recognized she needed to find someone who could and I was almost immediately put into counseling, particularly when multiple efforts to get the school administration involved only resulted in further brutalization, only worse now because I’d “tattled.”

I began seeing a therapist, and shortly thereafter a psychiatrist, and would spend the next 20 years battling life-altering trauma, depression, lack of self-worth, and yes—alcohol and drug addiction.

Understand that once you are in this cycle, you do not get out without extreme levels of assistance. Once you have been raped as a child, the instances of being raped over and over again are higher—it becomes the new normal for you. In fact, any other kind of treatment at that point feels wrong to you, and so the cycle of post-traumatic stress and feeling valueless to society continues.

Many girls do find themselves pregnant, but I never did. I began presenting at an early age with extreme menstrual pain, where at times I was home for a week being unable to walk and crying in bed with a heating pad and just wishing life to be over. When I wasn’t disappearing into internet chat rooms to be someone else in free-form role play games, I was drinking or drunk, or engaging in questionable behavior with the only people I could feel peace and safety with—druggies and homeless street kids who had worse lives than I ever did.

Yet, I persisted.

I stayed in school, and worked toward whatever I could, though at one point in my Freshman year of High School, I had a .46 GPA and my parents were beside themselves when they realized it was due to the fact that most days I went for my English class and then skipped the rest of the day to go downtown and hang with my street buddies.

The school never did anything, and in fact my Mom was never once called and informed I wasn’t attending class. To try and mitigate the damages both my parents could see from miles away while having no real idea of what truly was the cause, they set me up to go visit my aunt and uncle in Virginia for a summer, where I worked with horses and felt close to nature and had a break from the terror that had been my life.

I healed enough that I came back and started over with school, even having been accepted into Honors English the beginning of my Sophomore year. It didn’t last, and ultimately halfway through my Sophomore year I was transferred to the local alternative school, where I would slowly but surely be given positive chances to come back from what had been done to me by cruel actions of others.

Being an incredibly intelligent person, the alternative school quickly became boring to me and the day I showed up wearing the same outfit—red blouse and black skirt suit—as the Principal, realizing I had more in common with the adults than my peers, I made a transfer again to participate in the Running Start program.

Note: In Washington State, Running Start is the name of a program where juniors and seniors in High School can attend community college to earn their Associates Degree concurrently with their High School Diploma.

I excelled, but only by the grace of a professor (hereafter known as “Professor Salsa”) who recognized in me something painful and showed me worth I never knew I had and then asked me to redo a project. I took that positivity and I ran with it.

While working toward my college degree, I also worked in law—at first as a legal assistant and transcriptionist at low levels, and slowly worked my way up in a stressful field where I was forced to set aside my pain (or mask it with drugs and alcohol) to succeed. Succeed I did, though at times I feel certain it was by the skin of my teeth, the Grace of God, and the blind eye and/or faith of the leaders, mentors, and bosses I was blessed to work with.

At 18 I had my first abdominal surgery to try and find what was causing me so much reproductive organ pain. A cyst was found and was removed, but the pain persisted for years and I had to be on heavy duty birth control just to maintain my health. Back then, the insurance I had on my parents’ plan didn’t cover these treatments and so had to go to the local Planned Parenthood for medicine that helped me survive in a life I was already barely surviving in.

I drank all the time, though by this point I had given up the street drugs. Some days I went to work still drunk, but I knew my duty and I did it to the best of my ability.

I would have two more surgeries before I was 24 with the hope to assist my pain, and I spent more time in the Emergency Room for relief than I care to recount. After awhile I started going to the ER by myself because it was a waste of time for anyone else—we knew what was wrong, it’s just nobody wanted to do anything about it.

Doctors would tell me that having children would make the pain better, and when I became upset by thinking about how I was to raise children of my own when I could barely get through life sober, I would rage against the injustice. Then I would fall into despair with the realization that my worth to greater society really was only about my ability to procreate—regardless of how I felt about that or what I wanted or needed.

I didn’t want children, and one could argue having children would have been cruel and unusual punishment, to any child and to myself. I wanted a hysterectomy as early as 22, knowing in my heart and soul it was the only way I was ever going to have a fighting chance at a real life. But no one would give me that relief, because apparently the only value afforded to me as a woman is the children I bear and men I might marry.

By that time, you’d think I would have just given in—as every other piece of value I deserve just for being human had long since been stripped from me, through no fault of my own.

Instead I got angry, and I also got much sicker.

Instead of allowing me the relief a hysterectomy would have brought, I was put on an injection that bottomed out my hormones and made me insane. I also began regularly having to take prescription opiates just to make it in the “life” I was leading.

Yet, I persisted.

I made the conscious decision to quit drinking alcohol, ended a relationship with the first truly decent man I’d ever known—who cared for me better than I felt I deserved at the time—because it was unfair to him and to me, and then completely changed the course of my life by moving across country to stay with family in Virginia again. The healing had begun, but it would be a rough road from there.

Ultimately, I received a job offer from a small consulting firm in Washington, D.C., where I quickly learned just how out of my depth I was. However, and luckily for me, yet again I landed with brilliant and kind leaders and mentors who gave me a chance to rise above, and who ultimately would be the hands that kept me from dying when the time came for me to completely surrender to the abyss that had become my life.

It was white people who brutalized me—my own race that made me feel valueless as a human and as a woman. Yet it would be people of color who would show me what true kindness was, and make me feel value for the first time in my entire life. I earned my place where I worked, but it was an uphill battle and I have no illusions that this was quite apparent to everyone I worked with—certainly after a specific timeline.

I would undergo two more surgeries in two years, one of which I really never returned from. Again, hysterectomy was denied me and again my pain medication prescription was increased, and again I would attempt to return to regular life.

The week before my 27th birthday, I went home after work and I swallowed a bottle of anti-anxiety medication along with a good portion of my incredibly heavy-duty opiate prescriptions, and only through the need to talk to my mother one last time late that night would I find the courage to save my own life.

My mom’s sister was closest to my home and, though incredibly difficult for her, she came and picked me up and brought me to the Emergency Room I had come to know so well. By some miracle, my stomach would not be pumped, and I would be placed into a private mental health hospital, where ultimately the full truth of what I’d been through would begin to reach the light of day.

Reeling from physical issues that had long been out of control, prescription opiate necessity and addiction thereto, plus a complete break from my ability to sanely live my life, this particular hospital stay would be the first of many. I was forced to leave my job without saying goodbye to anyone, to my home I had come to love, and enter a kind of hell I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.

Yet, I persisted.

On September 11, 2012, one month after returning home from mental hospital stay #5, I would finally find a lady doctor who understood my pain and who would ultimately agree to take me through a full hysterectomy. The pure decline in my health resulted in my blowing multiple pulmonary emboli during the very first part of the surgery, whereafter I arrested right there on the table, and I would then spend almost a week in ICU recovering while intubated, days more in the hospital, and the next many months trying to understand how my life had gone this wrong years before I was even 30 years of age.

By this time, I was far heavier than I had ever been—weighing in at 265 pounds—and consistently told I was too fat and must lose weight if I ever hoped to accomplish anything. Never you mind that by that point that I had life at all was a miracle won by focus and pure will.

Seeing it from the perspective of our society, and already having firsthand experienced the anti-worth we have as women inside of it, I suppose being overweight was the most important thing to focus on by the broad majority of society.

During this time period I would be placed in mental health inpatient units several more times, one of which being a longterm facility in an entirely different state. The difficulty it had become to live my life was powerfully negative, especially since everywhere I went I was treated like just another fat, childless white woman who couldn’t work because of severe and complex post-traumatic stress, mood struggles, and intense physical illness and pain.

The following June 6, 2013, this same doctor would attempt—and succeed—with performing a full hysterectomy and finally my still-difficult road to full recovery was assured. Close to nine months later I would be completely off of prescription opiates, and back on track with therapy in a way I had not been in quite some time. Mental health medication worked once again to keep me even as I pulled my life together piece by piece.

Furthermore, I would absolutely find that many pieces that had been torn away by cruel hands would truly never return.

Yet, I persisted.

I finally saw some light at the end of the tunnel the first part of 2015, and I would return to work—first as a temp with a company I did not enjoy, and then later as a Paralegal for a local law firm that seemed to be a good fit. Though hired part-time, my skillset and work ethic quickly had me working full-time hours doing my job and also many aspects of other peoples’ jobs just to remain sane enough to go to work every day. Due to yet more cruelty by the hands of those I was giving my energy to support, it is only by the grace and support of my family and disability status that I did not end up back in a mental hospital.

Ultimately, facing these hardships at work was the best thing to have happened to me, because I proved once and for all my worth had nothing to do with my uterus, my status of disability, or any of the actions taken against me by people who saw fit to use their hands, hearts, and minds for the purpose of actively stripping that value away from me.

I found my power in the face of great adversity—and sometimes that adversity wasn’t created by people who were outwardly cruel, but also by people who chose to keep their head in the sand about what was happening right in front of their eyes.

I’d long found joy working with seniors at a local retirement and nursing facility, but through a passion for a television show that introduced me to a fanbase full of love and understanding, I also would also have my heart and mind opened in ways I’d never dreamed of. A few months later I would quit my job, where I was attempting to do what I had always done and in the ways I had always done it, all while fearing the return to the dark place where I would cease to exist at all.

Ultimately I opened a sole proprietorship and took on contract work as a virtual assistant, where I would work with yet more people whose goal was to strip me of my individual value, but who matched me with corporate leaders who would quickly come to recognize the value in me. Through said reflections, I would catapult into a life that I had given up hope of attaining long before even learning to drive or vote.

It was in this time period I would become a crisis counselor with the first-of-its-kind online chat helping people find solutions, hope, or just a safe space to talk about their emotional pain.

With IMAlive.org and its incredible team, I would also ultimately realize what good all of the pain I had gone through was for, and also the deep value my journey is capable of giving to others. As it turns out, I have a calling for the work, and it’s a gift every day I’m able to bring that level of assistance to people in that level of pain.

If nothing else, I have categorically learned that the actions and rhetoric of everyday people, as well as the intention behind them, is what causes the broad majority of emotional pain, self-harm, and suicidal behavior and activity.

At this time in my life I am 32, the same age as Heather Heyer was when she was murdered by the irresponsible and hateful actions of an angry white man, spouting beliefs in ideologies that have no place in decent society and that should be protested against with every fiber of our being, as individuals and as a society.

Yet our President condones them, even outwardly supports them.

Our Republican party leaders in power remain silent about them unless they are given no choice but to emptily call attention to the actions and rhetoric their usual silence has encouraged, with intentions not to save the people being hurt; rather, with intentions to save their careers and banking accounts.

Then the very White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis who caused the pain in the first place, go onto a national and international platform to call the woman they murdered a valueless slut because she dared to have a brain of her own, choose to have children or not in her own time, and peacefully protest against the ignorant, massively irresponsible, cruel, and evil ideologies of those who came out to destroy everything we stand for.

This is no mistake, as too many people who should be using their voices to better our society and everyone in it are instead using their voices for hate and doing everything they can, both by elevating a President, Cabinet, Judiciary, and Congressional base who would support the hate and certainly by continuing to remain silent while it happens right in front of their faces.

I am not a valueless woman because I am unmarried with no children, nor am I a slut. I am a hardworking American who has become successful in the face of adversity, regarding which I challenge any one of these angry white men to identify with in any shape or form. I made something of myself despite all of the cruelty and pain inflicted on me my entire life, and I stand for others who don’t have the resources and family that I was lucky to have…

I also feel lucky to be a white woman, who are somewhat more valued than any woman of color certainly is or ever has been.

Heather Heyer wasn’t valueless either. She wasn’t a slut, and she and her life’s memory deserve more—much more—than what she is being given by the people, party, and President whose ideologies murdered her on the street in broad daylight.

I stand for people of color, who were the only ones to offer hope in time of the greatest darkness I will ever know, and not out of obligation like so many family members and medical professionals who surrounded me.

I stand for immigrants, who are a cornerstone of what make our country great.

I stand for white people, though the majority of our vision of the world we live in seems to be quite skewed, and until that changes we all remain the biggest threat to decent society.

I stand for children who belong to parents who never loved them and never will because they never wanted them in the first place, as apparent by the rampant irresponsible childrearing going on across our country, as further evidenced by wide spread abuse and shortage of foster families to care for wayward children.

I stand for my Republican friends and fellow Americans, all of whom I love as the humans they are, though they drive me nuts with their blind support of their party leaders, no matter what they do.

I stand for the members of the LGBTQ community.

I stand for people of all religions, even though I find myself in disagreement with many of them most of the time due to the naked hypocrisy.

I stand for our good and caring and responsible members of our Police Force, though please God the good ones need to start setting an example.

I stand for our Military members and the veterans who come out broken and uncared for by the people who broke them.

I stand for the people of America and of the world, because all people are born into this world with value and it’s only other people who take it away from them.

I stand for Heather Heyer.

I stand for Democracy, these great United States of America and all the things it stands for after centuries of progress from the day our founders stated “We the PEOPLE….”

I stand for every last person who will stand up and say to anyone against who we really are “Not on my watch!”

Last, but never least, I stand for the World, because we are only as good as we are united against the hate that too many of our people—in this country and in others—represent.

#persist #love #life #kindness