Please let me start out with a disclaimer--I can use this opportunity, this space, these words to convey anything, right? I write from my heart. No one is paying me. I am not afraid.
Fear. Small word, big connotations. I have lived the majority of my life in fear. I spent a chunk of my life running. I wasted precious time. This all comes back to fear. Fear comes from within and can take many forms...my personal demon is low self esteem. Yadda yadda yadda, right?
My fear was given to me before I even knew there was a choice. We are all born into our parent's circumstances, mine was painful. My mom found out she was pregnant with me while she was still unmarried, and back in the day, good Catholic girls don't get pregnant. They gave you a choice back then-marry the guy, brave the mean, nasty world as a single mom (not really a choice back then), or go to the unwed mothers' home. My mom chose to marry the guy.
The problem was that the guy she was marrying had some deep personal struggles and undiagnosed mental illness. Bad, bad, bad. Put a kid into the mix and you have a recipe for a clusterf----. They tried. They struggled. They failed. End of story, right?
My mom left me alone with him. I was a colicky baby. He would slap me in the face to try to get me to stop crying. Didn't work. Gave me loads of problems. Gave me the pain.
I love a movie, previously not listed in my favorites called "Moscow on the Hudson", with Robin Williams and many other wonderful people. There was this scene in it. Robin Williams' character says, "...but I had my pain...and I could hold onto it and nurture it...". It was the closest thing that I have ever seen to coming close to expressing it. It is inside me, like a cancer. It has influenced my life in so many ways that I shake with the revelation. I have run from it. I have ignored it. I was in therapy for 8 years and still, it's there, like a blackness.
I hate that pain. I want to throw it up out of my body.
Over the years I have learned to manage it. First, I tried the slow death of self destruction. That didn't work. Then I tried enlightenment. Damn it, it's still there. Then I tried love. Still no. Then came Tabitha. Out of the worst of my pain, and close to death, came beauty. Beauty for ashes.
God loves me. I know that he does. He has been with me all along, I just didn't give him the proper place before. Now, with his help, I can ignore my pain and raise my girl. Thank you God. Tabitha gets me up in the morning, God gets me through the rest of the day. Love to you all. Let love rule-Lenny Kravitz
