That’s the temporary subtitle until I fix it up, but that’s part of one of the things I’d talk about: if you try too hard to find the one word “that works”, you’ll forget the ones that actually do.
My life started falling apart again recently.
My godmother and a few friends and family disowned me, mostly because of my diagnosis of PCOS.
Turns out it progressed to the point where a hysterectomy will happen eventually, but whether it will happen in my up-coming surgery to clean out adhesions and drain cysts that are covering the entire surface of my ovaries or not will depend on whether or not the surgeon finds endometriosis. I won’t know what my fate will be on that until I wake up from it, but it will happen any time between this year and the next few.
I was asked if I was okay with the surgeon doing it soon if this time was it, and I said yes.
I took my grandmother’s advice, the surgeon’s advice and listened to my gut and didn’t tell anyone who I knew would say anything but “do whatever it takes to get better”.
I made the horrible mistake of telling one person who would have said anything but that. Word quickly spread.
A week in, everyone “knowing” and twisting the story by then, they have left me, believing I’m no better than my “parents”.
As much as it hurt to hear it, as much as it still hurts to think back on it and hear their words echo in my head, my grandmother warned me of this day, long before she died.
As she said, people will not understand when my time would come. Everyone will go to war for something they don’t need to even care about. Everyone will be tested. There will be some who prove themselves. There will be some who run and hide long before the action starts. There will be some who just won’t survive. Know that a real lover, no matter what the right person for me identifies as, will accept me and that if someone cannot, they are some of the last people I’d want in my life.
I also heard the story that human services was being investigated for knowingly putting foster children in bad homes. I heard there was an apology for it broadcasted on television, but as of the point of me writing this, I have yet to see it (it’s on my to youtube list once the wifi signal is strong enough to handle it haha).
A part of me is saying “about time, what took so long” while another thinks back on what I took out of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that something functions the way it does because it is impossible to function any other way, even if it seems “wrong”, most likely due to population. With about 100,000 foster children, I wouldn’t be surprised if our numbers were a part of how it’s structured. (I’m only assuming cause and effect, not pointing blame, for a situation that entitles blame would be where the blamed had the ability to stop the thing they should be sorry to have done, our large number isn’t necessarily our fault.)
After this happened, I sat down at my drawing desk (my boyfriend heavily encouraging me to write and draw is a very foreign concept for me) the next day. I keep a large piece of drawing paper on top as a mat to flatten out the surface–the table itself is one of those plastic collapsable table and it’s not surfaced for drawing. I wrote the strange words that some dream characters told my in a dream that night (Most of my dreams have reoccurring people showing up, hence the word “characters”). They ranged from “the peacemaker receives the most conflict, the very thing they live to avoid” to “kindness is best received by the fallen, not the weak, for the fallen seek to fly again while the weak have given up long ago”.
Before I knew it, the paper was covered in these. A lot of them I have held dear for years, but many manifesting themselves as though my hand were being moved by someone else. Soon, I felt an urge to write that was stronger than it had been in weeks or even months.
I won’t lie though, as nice as it is to know that someone with power believes what foster kids went through wasn’t right, it made me feel like my goal with the allegory didn’t mean anything after that. However, an apology doesn’t undo the damage and that doesn’t make everyone understand what happened or what’s happening, let alone make the ignorant shape up (the whole foster-kids-are-just-leeches-that-waste-our-tax-money arguments some people make are gettin’ really old, just sayin’).
If anything, the apology may find it’s way into the project and start a new arc. I’m as excited to find out where it goes as anyone else is.
Until then, I also have a short project of a lesson collection to get started on.
I’ll try and update its progress–no promises–and just see what happens. Round one of the drafting process has almost 30 lessons to share and I anticipate that’s the tip of the iceberg on what will be put on amazon…
J.D. Crawford 