Written Whispers

If you don’t understand why I used to say Quack and you just happen to care I recommend reading the post prior to this one.

I’d met her at one of the protests I’d arranged. My little way of showing my peers how little I cared if they thought I was strange, showing the teachers I was smarter than they thought, and showing the principal that at least one of us had read the rule book inside and out and could ‘use’ it just as well as anyone. Not to mention I wasn’t about to let us, even those I didn’t like, be segregated by jock, cheerleader, dork, and delinquent categories. Not for my sake or anyone else’s- simply because it was wrong.

And it was a damn good little protest if I do say so myself. Well organized with a decent turn out if only because the others had been curious. I’d even used the school’s resources and time to set it up. :) That’s all another story though- one I’m too tired to tell tonight. The one I do want to tell tonight is about how I met her.

She’d come only because the poster said to, sitting quietly at a table with a book in her hand, completely drawn into the world of words and art. I’d been preoccupied at the time but something in my radar went off, something in her aura. Something that made me think of how quiet I was before… everything happened.

After spending several hours in the office being told why I was wrong- though I must have been right somewhere along the lines as my method eventually worked, I found myself sitting in biology class right next to her. Still really shy myself I didn’t say anything to her the first or the second day, not even on the third. I’d never take the initiative to make a friend before. The few I had had always found me first but I was damned bound willing to give it a try.

She sat alone at lunch, spent all her time in the library, drew instead of paying attention in class, always had her nose in a book and sucked at math. I think somehow I’ve always known we were supposed to be friends. :)

Back in Biology class later down the week we had this in class thing to do. We each had to stand up when a part of the cell was named and make a sound to help up remember it. Our teacher started with the front row and everyone was making, pardon me, the most stupid sounds. A clap, banging a fist on the table, a stomp. They all sounded the same to me so- when it came to me, in the middle of the class, Miss Too-nervous-to-stand-up I said the first thing that came to my mind.

Quack.

And the girl next to me, the one no one had ever head speak, said:

Roar.

Several notes, a pencil, and a near detention on my part later we were friends and we’ve been that way since. Five years later she was my maid of honor, six years later and she still lives with me.

Here’s to friends! The real ones are never far behind.

I was chatting with Xean this morning and there was something she said that made me think about the past. I was telling her about my dorky moment with Ni and Ju and she h ad said something about the wacky moments that bring friends together. It just made me think of how some of the most treasured people in my life came to be in my life.

See, I wasn’t always wacky and strange. I used to be quiet a sullen creature. I cried a lot and spoke to no one, seeing everyone as a potential threat and treating them that way. When I moved in with my adoptive family I learned, in a very slow and painful but rewarding process, that a lot of people have good in them and even the ones who aren’t so great… well, I wouldn’t be here without a lot of bad people.

When I started learning things like this and being forcefully pried from my shell I was… I don’t know how to put it. I felt like an unprotected stick standing upright in the sand while the wind rages all around me. Completely vulnerable, scared, breakable, and as far out of my element as I could possibly be.

But with every way you can fall into a hole you can learn a way to go around, over, or through it. A.k.a. coping mechanism. I don’t know how it really came about but I developed a rather odd one. See, I was still learning how to hold conversations and because I’d hardly spoke I didn’t always know what to say- duh.

So, whenever one of those nerve rupturing silences would pop up… I’d say Quack Quack.

It’s an instantaneous ice breaker. Silence scared me, giggles and ‘what the f’s’ did not. Even if you don’t know what to say I can guarantee you that if you walk up to a random person (be it someone you know or not) and say Quack Quack 8 out of 10 times they will respond with some other animal sound and then everything is rolling again.

Now here’s the real kicker and pardon my shoddy explanation of the events before hand but I’m trying to keep it short. Before I lived with my adoptive family I attended middle school A then I transferred to high school B in another town. I didn’t come back to high school A for nearly my entire freshmen year. My point being that I knew people before but we didn’t have much day to day contact till I came back from being somewhere else.

I hadn’t changed much at first but it was while I was in high school B that I’d met my adoptive family, and shortly after my transfer that I moved in with them. My old friends,… people I’d spent time with because there was no one else and people who spent time with me just because I was there… didn’t quite understand the changes. They couldn’t understand why I was dressing different, blurting out things (first attempts at standing up for myself), and asking them all to call me by a new name. My signature changed, my style changed, my hobbies and goals changed. Everything.

Alas, it wasn’t more than a month after I’d developed my new coping mechanisms that they started to tell me I was annoying. I didn’t do it all the time but I was learning that I loved talking to people so they heard me say a ot more of anything to them than I ever had before. It’s needless to say it but over the months we all drifted away…

And the ones who would quack back at me and be patient with my odd little habits are still my friends today. It really proves that true friends are the ones who accept you for who you are even if that person changes and doesn’t know quite who she is.

My little coping mechanism did more than just this though. :) It also brought me together with one of my best friends, current roommate and constant sister, Ree/Kei but that’s another story that- like this one, deserves a post all it’s own according to me. :)

On a brief side note, some other odd coping things I had was that for awhile (and occasionally today) I’d almost refer to myself in third person. Not in an obnoxious way as I see the habit in general but just as easily as I say I. I think it’s because I’d changed my name and was constantly reassuring myself that I was the person I was becoming and not the one I had been.

Odd

I feel like my old self. Not ‘old’ as in how I was a few months ago before I started having all the flash backs and other PTSD junk but old as in how I felt when I first started to feel- when I first started to think of myself as a person.

The long story aside- after I moved out of the bio parent’s house when I was 15, a friend’s mom (whom I now call mom) took guardianship of me, I went through this phase of… discovery and change. Change being the bigger concept- discovery being what pushed it along.

I didn’t know the name of certain emotions. I cried so many times when I felt so happy because it was so strange to me. Now I have so many words- sometimes too many and I find myself working to use them all at once hoping to bring the same things out in others.

I didn’t know I had a favorite color, food, or music. I remember being asked for the very first time what my favorite food was and not having a single answer. They asked me what my favorite color was and I responded with the color I had always been told was my favorite- pink. They asked why I didn’t wear any of my pink clothing. My response ‘Cause I hate it.’ And music,… music was an exquisite challenge to discover and pinpoint just what I liked. There was so much I’d never contemplated before. I did certain things, collected certain things and avoided many other certain things and yet I never knew these were likes and dislikes.

I had always worn what was available- regardless of cleanliness, size, how many times it had been worn, and how absolutely horrible it looked. Then I was thrust into a department store and told to pick out things to help make me look however I wanted to look. That was an interesting experience.

All these memories- fond, sad, scary, and exhilarating, are all filed under the same word. Discovery. From each of these discoveries I began to change. They taught me that I was a person- I really mean this and I can’t stress it enough. Looking back I don’t honestly think I ever saw myself as a person and once I learned that I was… well, it’s been an interesting process figuring out who that person was.

You know you’ve changed when a school bully trips you one day- you cry and he laughs…

And two months later you give him the verbal dressing down of his life (even the teacher laughed) for bad mouthing a friend and he asks- “Why are you so different now?”

I’m getting off track. I said long story aside and for the most part I’ve avoided the longer story- to digress. I feel like the person I discovered I was. I mean, I’m always changing- that’s a given, we all are but it’s something else. When I went back into foster hell (foster care) I tried desperately to hold on to the nearly secure person I had become. I continued to fight for my opinions, seek out things I loved and avoid what I didn’t. I continued to look within and have long talks with myself- a process used to figure things out like ‘How do I feel about this and what about that?’

But even rocks can be worn down by the tide and I was hardly a pebble at the time. They broke me- not as bad as others had and I stood firm till the end as far as the important things went but a part of me still broke. It was a familiar feeling I had lived with far too often in a time when I had no names for the things I felt so to protect myself I cut off that wonderful bit of me that was always trying to figure out who I was. The curious child who was too open for her own good.

I was still me but only by a half.

Now though, that time of my life is over. I’m safe, happy, relatively healthy, and loved. I have to remind myself of this more than I’d like to but the facts still stand. Now I’m starting to remember, starting to get back on that rocky but exhilarating path of internal morphing and discovery.

I’m getting to know me again.

I wrote this some months ago during a venting moment. I’ve considered not posting it because the writing process was enough to get some of it out of my system but… I feel that if I don’t set it free into the universe the writing thereof won’t mean quite as much as I need it to. Maybe this will show others they’re not entirely alone.

Warning: Mentions of child abuse, drinking, bad thoughts, and manic depression.

~

I sat alone in a place that, until a week before, I’d so easily been able to call my home. A week ago,… things were different and yet so much of it was the same. Perhaps that’s why it hurt the way it did when I watched her walk out the door like she had so many nights before.

It was still early December, just a few short days after my 15th birthday… and the incident.

She’d shouted at me many times before. With reason and without. She’d backed me into corners, verbally pinned me to the wall. She had threatened and roared. She’d walk out left me to my own devices time and time again. She had even pulled my hair once.

None of it had been beyond normal in my perspective until the day she crossed some invisible line that I didn’t even know existed until it was already torn asunder.

Reacting badly to the booze in her system and all the people in our house, having used my birthday party as an excuse to invite all her little buddies over, she was manic. Flipping quickly between cheerful and cheerfully angry as easily as one flips a coin she managed to leave me alone until I drew attention to her by pausing the movie during one of her tirades.

Never before had I called her out. Sure, I’d held school protests, told an ex-step-father off, and even stuck to my opinion despite the ass kicking it granted me from several other girls in my class. That’s all easy stuff. Never before had I stood against her.

Just as I’d never called her out before- she’d never backed me into a corner in front of other before, proving just how far gone she was. Never had she grabbed at me quite like that, a bony hand clasping hard enough to hurt. Some will say she never did it. Others will say she merely held my chin. More still will say for that one moment she held me by my throat.

She shouted things I still can’t remember. Whatever had upset her was pointless and as quickly as it began it ended with her hand back in her pocket. She turned to my friends, cheerfully telling them that this happened every full moon- as if absolutely nothing about that comment was strange, and I pressed the play button for the nearly forgotten movie. I didn’t move from my spot for the rest of the night.

That was nearly a week ago.

I sat there in my too silent house, alone as I had been so many times before and wept freely. Sobbing until I was nothing more than a spasming mess on the floor. No one could hear me. No one ever did and that realization on it’s own was enough to force something unknown to rise up in me. Months later I would learn to call it betrayal but until then I would know it as an increasingly familiar hole eating me from the inside out.

I laid on the living room floor long after the tears had stopped. I had no desire to move, it was only eleven after all and she wouldn’t be back till three- if she came back at all. I’d left the television and radio off even though they were my usual and ever constant companions when she was gone. I needed the noise because the silence scared me. It had ever since she’d been awarded custody of me. The foster homes were loud and raucous to the point of another side of fear but with her… there was this sense of nothingness as potent as seeing the sun after years locked away in a darkened room.

It hurt me.

Even still- I didn’t turn my companions on. I didn’t want the false something.

I wanted… something else. Something I had no name for. There were so many of those then and later I would learn they had so many names and variations… What I wanted was comfort. I wanted to cry and be heard. I wanted to scream and be asked why? I wanted to be told what it was inside of me that I had no way of expressing.

I wanted to be with another person, any person. They could scream at me, drunkenly tell me I was a bad kid or just plain hurt me. It didn’t matter so long as they didn’t leave me alone.

Another hour passed before I finally pulled myself up off the floor. My hip hurt from laying there so long in combination with the winter chill rolling through the house. Cold air didn’t tend to be too kind on my little body ever since a group of girls had chased me down, one of them knocking me off my bike and onto the pavement. Long story short I had more than a few hip and back problems.

There was a bottle of Tylenol sitting in front of me on the counter and as I looked at it thoughts of reducing said pain flew out the window to be replace by another, slipperier sort of idea.

If I took them all how long would I sleep? When I woke up would this feeling be gone?

It was the first time I’d thought something like that and it both frightened and intrigued me far too much for my own good. By both nature and nurture I’d resented everything about pills ever since I was little, having had far too many of them forced on me at such a tender age. I knew they could kill me, they almost had once upon a time, but I didn’t need to take that many… just enough to find the comfort of darkness and yet another scar upon my soul.

It seemed like a great idea at the time.

Until I realized there was no one around to open the bottle for me.

Today Hunny and I went for a car ride with his mom. It’s was great and I really do love these little trips. We go along the back roads to take in the beauty of the woods, the lakes, and especially the wildlife. Deer, turkey, squirrels, ravens, ducks, geese, fox, raccoon, all kinds of little critters.

…the 100th Post of the Wannabe Violinist!

Oh my goodness! I’ve made 100 posts. Wow. :) I don’t really know what to type. It’s like when you finally fill a notebook and look back at how much you have written and giggle gleefully. Well, alright. That might not be what ‘you’ do but it’s certainly what ‘I’ do.

For my 100th post (yes, I enjoy saying that immensely) I would like to share some very happy news with you. Mind you, this is current news in my life even if it starts out sounding like a memory and I’m so happy about it that I’m tempted to cry. In fact- give it till the end of this post and I’ll include cyber tears in an attachment or something.

This post has been transferred to my private blog: The Tao of Me

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This post has been transferred to my private blog.

This post has been transferred to my private blog: The Tao of Me

To gain access to this blog please leave me a comment.