Oooh, the questions...

Yay, my sister's crying!  You are finally brave enough to cry.  Warning - once I started crying, I cried a lot.  It is disconcerting after years of keeping it all inside and locked away.  But it feels so good.  It's so cleansing.  And there are so many things that are worth our tears.

So, how long has it been since you have trusted anyone?  As your big sister, who comes from the same family chaos as you, I might reword the questions, and ask:  Have you ever trusted anyone?

Have you ever felt your head and body were connected?

I know you have been telling your story.  I just thought of another question though.  Sometimes when I am telling my story, it seems I am  sharing a story about someone else.  Do you feel the same way?  Sort of disconnected from it?  Every once in a while, though, it becomes real.  It becomes my story.  Maybe those are the moments of spiritual wholeness.

Your experience just triggered another memory.  As part of the twelve steps, I had to face what had happened to me, how I had been hurt, then apologize to people I had hurt.  It was so much easier to grieve  for those I had hurt.  I guess I'm still out of balance.

Find the knowledge and wisdom beneath what happened today, but please glory in the emotion.  That's a whole language we good little soldiers never learned.  We'll need lots of practice if we would like to become even intermediate speakers.  Fluency seems like a far-reaching dream.

Never wanting to kill our own perpetrator has to do with our own sense of self-worth, maybe.  I look at this young woman I just told you about, and she is so gloriously beautiful and bright.  How could anyone ever hurt her?  I don't understand.  I don't see the same in me.  I know it's not true, but part of me feels like - just a girl, a second class citizen, someone with less value than others.

There is a story about a young teen being raped and dumped on her doorstep by a football jock, another story about a young girl abandoned in Greece in the current news.  I  feel like our cultural misogyny is in my face.  I can't not see it.  Except for some of the indigenous cultures, I think it has permeated the whole planet, including our attitudes towards our Mother Earth.

Sort of sadly, Kind of pensively,

With everlasting love,

Clare