I escaped into books from a very young age, mesmerized by Dr. Seuss and Winnie the Pooh and Frog and Toad. I relaxed into the stories Mom told as she flipped pages, while I sat in her lap. Soon I realized those black symbols on the page somehow helped her recount the stories and I became determined to decipher them myself. She taught me about letters, and about sounding out words. Before I ever entered school I was reading my own books, and sometimes the cartoons from the newspaper. I could even clumsily write my own words.

Most of kindergarten was boring to me. While my classmates tried to learn their ABCs I sped through our silly assignments. Yet there was storytime, when Mrs. Kenny or Mrs. Champine would read from books, or even sing songs that told stories I hadn’t heard before. As much as I hated bugs, Itsy Bitsy Spider seemed positively magical.

One day Mrs. Kenny read us the story of The Three Little Pigs. That wolf huffed and puffed, and kept pursuing the pigs. When the pigs finally built a house of bricks, the wolf still huffed and puffed but got nowhere. The pigs were protected and safe in their new home.

I thought the story was stupid. Even though I was little, I knew that the evil wolf should have the upper hand – that’s the way life worked! Even Itsy Bitsy Spider kept getting swept down the waterspout. I emotionally expressed my dismay that a wolf was outsmarted by pigs.

So my teacher challenged me – she suggested I rewrite it my way. With crayon in hand I wrote my very first story. In my version the wolf got his bacon. I felt proud that I’d corrected one of the world’s greatest wrongs. My story had pictures, and glorious words. At five years old I found my calling. I wanted to be a writer.

The unspoken piece here – pardon the pun – is that I was mostly mute as a child, and when I did speak it was with a stutter and heavy lisp. I had so much not to say. It had been made clear to me that so much of what I was experiencing were things I wasn’t to mention, and even if I did, most people didn’t understand me. Most the time I said nothing.

Yet through my stories I found a voice. In grade school I was exempted from learning vocabulary words and encouraged to write, reading my stories to the younger classes. For my ninth birthday I was gifted a typewriter, and started my first business – charging my classmates 10 cents or more for stories in which they could be the main character. I sold my first story for publication when I was just sixteen – a comedic romp starring a lonely ermine who sent off for a mail-order weasel-bride.

Four and a half decades later I still want to be a writer. Today, though, if I were to rewrite The Three Little Pigs it would end with the wolf renouncing his carnivore ways and happily enjoying tea with his new friends, and for Itsy Bitsy Spider, I would focus on the hope inherent in resilience and determination.

I want my writing to lead others from the darkness.  

I don’t believe in forcing smiles.

Mind you, I smile a lot. When things are funny, I laugh from my gut – loudly, unapologetically, and sometimes inappropriately. I’ve been known to snort, too.

I can’t remember the last time I had a deep belly laugh. My emotions are muted. It would be easy to attribute this to my depression, but there’s a huge neon elephant in the middle of the room that is a major contributor.

Invincible Hope is not a political blog nor do I typically offer commentary on world affairs, but the impact of the invasion on the Ukraine is felt in so many ways. Economically we’re seeing the cost of oil products rise, and most the news is about the conflict. This war is happening right before our eyes, as the media exposes the tragedies of war. This morning I listened to a doctor discussing medical treatment in Ukrainian hospitals which have no power or heat, and treatment decision-making not only for the battle-wounded but for the elderly folks who are dying of starvation and hypothermia in a world where food and fuel are now rare commodities.

I’m not just sad, but feel betrayed and disgusted with our world leaders. I hate that the world is not a safe place. I feel hopeless all over again.

Just as someone in Kyiv cannot find food right now, I could not find safety as an abused child. When things were relatively quiet my guard was still up. I would sit outside, alone, trying to predict the next violent outburst and how I could protect myself. Sometimes I ran away from home, but I had nowhere to go and would dejectedly return.

My nightmares have shifted from the abuse I suffered to dreams of war. In one dream I was general for an army, but there were spies in our midst and others who forgot we were in a battle, simply wandering off to tend to other matters. Most of my soldiers were little girls, as were our opponents.

It is as though someone draped a dirty sheen curtain over the eyes of my soul. My emotional world is dark and dingy.

Yet as I connect with family and friends, I find that I am not at all alone. Even those with backgrounds much different than mine are apparently experiencing that same sheen curtain. I’ve spoken with vets who are reminded of their combat experiences, and who, in spite of advanced age, are ready to march into battle again. I’ve heard comparisons to Hitler, concerns about the threats of World War III, and even of Armageddon. Fear abounds.

In a weird way, sharing this mutual fear helps me feel more a part of my community. I am not that little girl, sitting alone outside. I am a neighbor. I am a friend. I am a wife. Mom. Grammy. Colleague. I am connected. I am sharing in this experience.

I can contribute in some small way. I cannot march into battle, but I think I’ll bake some bread for my neighbor. I can listen attentively as she shares how she feels about the state of world affairs. I can try to connect, heart to heart. I can nurture that sense of community and fully lean into the fact that I’m no longer alone.

This weekend I attended a conference and spoke in front of several hundred people. I know many people who are scared to speak in front of crowds – I am not like that. Yes, I was a little nervous, but once at the microphone I settled in as though I was with friends. I tapped into the energy of the crowd to create a safe and comfortable space in which to communicate my point.

However, it is not that I’m always comfortable speaking. Had there been seven people in the room instead of seven hundred, I would have been quaking in my boots.

We all have fears. I’m scared of spiders, loud noises, my own emotions, and intimacy. I’m not talking about sex but rather, baring my soul in front of small groups. In a larger crowd, I can look amongst the people and never make eye contact; I feel anonymous. To avoid looking directly at my companions in a small group is awkward. To look in your eyes as I share my truth – argh. Terrifying.

At this conference there were also smaller breakout sessions, in which I found myself sitting in rooms with a dozen strangers. Yes, we had some of the same interests and did similar volunteer work, but I had traveled many miles from home to not just share with these folks, but to learn new things. I experienced trembling, queasy fear, and wanted to hide in my room rather than attend the sessions.

The juxtaposition of my general comfort in front of the grand ballroom any my near-terror in the smaller session, left me thinking about the effects of trauma on my psyche. It isn’t a giant leap to understand that kids who are abused by their parents or other loved ones, can have difficulty with all sorts of intimate relationships – either craving them, destroying them, or fearing them.

In her book, Women of the Dawn, a collection of stories about Abenaki women, Bunny McBride writes:

“In portaging from one river valley to another, Wabanakis had to carry their canoes and all other possessions. Everyone knew the value of traveling light and understood that it required leaving some things behind. Nothing encumbered movement more than fear, which was often the most difficult burden to surrender.“

I am no longer a child. Last year I celebrated being on Earth for half a century – I guess this makes me kind of old. Yet I still carry my fear – because it is “the most difficult burden to surrender.”

I know theoretically that I can put down this baggage. I can force myself to look people in the eye, and to speak my truth. It is easier, of course, to put it into written word and post on my blog. This is not particularly intimate, even when I share personal details about my life. I can’t see your face as you read the words.

I may not see your face, but I can see your responses. This week I ask a favor, as a way of helping me travel more lightly. Let’s make this more intimate. Share with me your thoughts about this entry, or about my blog in general. How did you react? What could I do better? What would you like to see in the future? Let me know your honest thoughts about Invincible Hope.

In her poem Essex I, Amanda Gorman poses the question:

Can you even be rescued if you’ve been ruined?

I’ve been pondering this inquiry.

Like most abused kids, I felt deep shame. I was selectively mute, not just keeping my big secrets but refusing to share much of anything. When I did try to speak I was rarely understood – I stuttered and had a lisp. It was easier to communicate with my fists, although from a very young age I hated myself for harming others. I knew what it felt like to be hurt, and causing someone else to feel similarly was an unbearable sin. Still, I was a frequent sinner.

Developmentally, children believe they are the center of the universe, responsible for all that happens. I knew that what my abusers were doing was wrong, but I thought it was because I was bad. If you’re good, good things happen, and if you’re bad, bad things happen. I was an abused child; therefore I was obviously bad.

I was also ruined – irreparably damaged, and beyond hope. I couldn’t have told you how when I was five or twelve, but I knew it at my core. After I reported my uncle for sexual abuse, my new therapist encouraged me to journal about the ways I felt ruined. I used a lot of paper. I hated people, distrusted everyone, and had an explosive temper. I even secretly thought my body was malformed, sure it must have developed wrong based on what had happened. I thought all of this was my fault. I was evil – rotten to the core. God hated me.

In fact, things got even darker in my world after I reported him. I was overwhelmed with the stabbing emotional pain of seeing the story on the front page of the local newspaper – shame, guilt, embarrassment, devastation, rage – a mixed bag of yucky feelings just eating away at me.

I attempted suicide more than once. It was only after my sixth suicide attempt that I became willing to grudgingly embark on my healing journey. I still felt ruined, but if I was going to have to suffer then maybe I could do so differently.

I sobered up, thinking that getting rid of drugs and alcohol would fix my problems. It helped, but I still needed to address the underlying causes and conditions of my substance use problem. I began working with my therapist in earnest, and over time shared the secrets of my past.

But could I be rescued?

I think one of the underlying ideas in the question is that trauma can have eternal effects. I have been alive half a century and inside, I still carry the pain of that wounded child. There is an African proverb:

The axe forgets but the tree remembers.

Yet while the pain does not go away, I have grown. I have created room for new emotions, new experiences. I have found love – both romantically, and in a much bigger way too. This weekend I met little Ira Privé, our newest grandbaby. My heart has grown in ways I didn’t know it could. I am like the scarred tree that managed to continue to live.

I was not ruined, nor was I rescued. My first therapist pulled me aboard a lifeboat, but she didn’t save me. I had to do the work to grow. I continue my healing process.

I also no longer believe that I am evil, or hated by God. I was loved then and am loved now. The Great Spirit of the Universe shed tears over what happened to me. Love, whether from humanity or from Source, feeds my growth. Love gives me hope – invincible hope.

Six years ago this month, I was admitted to a psychiatric ward for the first time. In many ways I was at the peak of my life – successful at my career, serving on government commissions and boards of directors, loved by my family – yet outside success was not translating to inside peace.

My mental health has always been a bit fragile. I’ve accordingly been in therapy and on medications for PTSD and depression for over three decades. But In 2016 I couldn’t manage it anymore. Inside I was unraveling. Hallucinations were frequent. Suicidal thoughts were near-constant. Emotions and memories from the past were bubbling up. The worse things felt, the more desperately I threw myself into my outward success. I couldn’t stop to deal with my feelings.

And then I had no choice. After describing to my psychiatrist how I felt and what I wanted to do, I was admitted to the hospital. My depression was so severe I could barely function. I could no longer eat. I had lost over twenty pounds in a few weeks. I wasn’t sleeping. I was rarely bathing. I was no longer running from my emotions – I simply felt dead inside.

I was inpatient for several weeks, while they tried more medication changes and eventually started electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Over the next two and a half years I was hospitalized a dozen times, had 37 ECT treatments, tried on new psychiatric medications in various combinations, and became more and more hopeless.

I asked for help anyway.

Eventually, a combination of things came together to help me crawl out of that hole. While I did need medications, they were only a small part of the solution. I was reintroduced to Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), was connected with my local community health center, and became very involved with a NAMI Connection support group.

I also decided to seriously complete a Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP). WRAP was invented by a group in Vermont led by Mary Ellen Copeland, and is a tool to help people with mental health challenges prevent crisis by identifying their own early warning signs and planning coping strategies to deal with them as they arise.

As I created by WRAP it became clear that my biggest early warning sign is avoidance of emotions. I find it very hard to deal with my feelings, particularly sadness and grief. When I feel sad, I also feel sheer terror. I will do almost anything to avoid those feelings.

Still.

Since completing my WRAP I have known that I can’t run from my emotions, but sometimes I still do. I’ve been feeling especially sad lately – mostly old crud – and don’t want to run. I don’t want to feel, either, so I’ve been sitting on the fence, kind of hoping that the feelings will just go away on their own.

They’re not.

Yesterday I talked about this in the Invincible Hope community – my private group on Facebook for women healing from trauma. I committed to getting off the fence, by sitting with the sadness a little bit, and said I’d share about it in today’s blog post.

I did sit with my sadness, letting the ugly warmth wash over me. I sobbed, only for about ten seconds, and then the fear took over. Darkness rolled in first as tunnel vision, and then complete blackness. Sobbing stopped. I didn’t pass out, but when I could see again, I felt nothing. No sadness, but no relief or joy either. There was nothing.

As I reflect today on this experience, I don’t see it as failure. I jumped off the fence. I stopped waiting for it to change. I may have still retreated into numbness, but it was not my conscious choice. That is a step in the right direction.

I’ve done it once. I will make this choice again. And again. I will make this choice repeatedly until one day I am able to release this grief and fear, and step beyond it, back into the place where joy lives.

I have hope, and it is invincible.

To learn more about WRAP and how it can help you, go to https://www.wellnessrecoveryactionplan.com/

Hope is a tricky thing. 

Hope that enough people will do the right thing to keep our planet healthy is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Without it, I couldn’t be an activist. 

When hope is something that drives you, it is a positive force in your life. But hope itself is not an action. Hope is a yearning.

I can hope all day that it doesn’t rain, but I have no control over the rain. If it rains, and I had hoped it wasn’t going to rain, I’ll be disappointed. This is one of the things that makes hope tricky. Having hope in a relationship can mean you want the relationship to be something that it isn’t and might never be. Your hope can keep you there when you should leave.

But let’s talk about the power of hope. Hope is the idea that what you’re going through will have a positive outcome. While you may not have control over all the outcomes, hope can be transformational. Hope can be a self-fulfilling prophecy because it can give you strength and inspire you to take actions in the areas you can control. As Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”

I began having chronic migraines around age 40. I didn’t know they were going to turn chronic. I thought I could just keep making plans, doing things, setting goals, etc. But after a few years, I stopped making plans. I stopped doing things. I stopped setting goals. At some point, I stopped fighting and started accepting. I am a very stubborn person who likes to set goals, and this acceptance was very difficult for me. I had to accept a new reality for myself that I didn’t want.

This acceptance changed me in many ways. For instance, I gave myself permission to do nothing. I have never stopped moving, and I had to stop moving. I had to literally sit still for hours and hours and hours at a time. I couldn’t watch TV or read a book or have a pleasant conversation with anyone. Just me and my “migraine chair” and very often my cat.

This is me with a migraine back in 2018.

I gave myself permission to stop making plans even though that felt like the end of my life. In essence, it was the end of my life. When I had migraines, I was a different version of myself.

Yet even with this acceptance, I never lost hope. I assumed my migraines were related to peri-menopause and would go away once menopause set in. I gave my 40’s to migraines but remained optimistic that my 50’s would bring me back to myself and a life that was pain-free. I did all the research I could and tried every reasonable solution to remedy my situation.

I could not imagine spending the rest of my life in pain, so I needed this hope of a better future to get me through the journey and to motivate me to help myself. I could accept my situation day-by-day, but I could not accept that it was my new, permanent reality. I had to have hope that what showed up unexpectedly would also exit in due time.

Without this hope, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into the relationship that helped me break through my migraines (which turned out to be largely caused by stress and lack of physical movement… a cycle that can be perpetuated with chronic pain).

During the worst of my migraines, I lived each day in the present but kept the hope alive that the future would be brighter (and it is).

I was sixteen when I revealed to the school psychologist that for years, I’d been molested by my uncle. I was concerned he might be abusing my brother as well. Bob asked if I understood that he needed to report this to the authorities. Of course I did – why else would I have told him?

A few days later we met with detectives, social workers from Social & Rehabilitative Services (SRS), and school officials to dig deeper into what happened and learn how the case would move forward. An SRS worker told my parents that my brother and I both needed to see counselors. My parents insisted we would deal with this ourselves, within the family. The worker leaned across the table and explained that it wasn’t a request – that if my parents refused to get us help we obviously needed, the state would be forced to remove us from their custody. She handed a list to my mother.

“These are local counselors that work with abused kids. Set up the appointments.”

Which is how I started seeing a therapist.

I didn’t talk much at first. I wasn’t sure what to say, and after years of hearing, “What happens at home, stays at home,” it was hard to open up about all that I’d been through. But I did eventually start to talk.

Six months or so after I started seeing this therapist, she said, “I’m concerned that you might try to kill yourself.”

I laughed. She was a little late. I told her I’d already tried twice that year. She called my parents.

Suicide has always been on the table for me – I can’t remember a time where I didn’t think about ending my life. I had my first attempt when I was six, but didn’t try again until a month after I reported my uncle. Several more attempts followed.

I’ve been in treatment for depression, PTSD and borderline personality disorder for nearly 35 years. I still struggle with suicidal thoughts and urges, although I haven’t acted on them in a long time. Therapy has helped me learn how to keep the thoughts from building upon themselves – from becoming the proverbial snowball. Medication is also in my toolbox. When the thoughts become too insistent, I’ve learned to ask for help. I’ve sometimes needed hospitalization and I’ve even had electro-convulsive therapy (ECT).

I no longer hide these thoughts and urges from my providers or my closest loved ones. When things are tough I say so.

And lately, things have been tough. As my emotional walls come down, intense grief and shame surface. The feelings terrify me. I want to escape.

But I don’t.

Instead, I talk about how I feel. I cry a little bit, here and there. I find people who understand. I ask for help – from my loved ones, and from God. My husband and I have a plan to help me stay safe.

Somewhere along the line I learned that I don’t have to act on my thoughts, nor do I have to do it alone.

Neither do you.

If you’re having thoughts of suicide or believe someone else is in danger, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can help. Call 1-800-273-8255. The service is 24/7, free and confidential. https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/