The End of My Good Reputation (Grapes of Wrath)

The anniversary of George Floyd's murder marked its fourth year this month. Obviously the tragedy of his murder sparked a globally significant response, but for me, the memory of that dreadful day is also a very personally significant for reasons that I will connect to the old purple house I used to live in, which I won't discuss right now, but it was a heartbreaking day which kick-started many more in its wake. I remember the day very well, I remember the state the world was in at that time, I remember a darkness of some kind seemed to be pervading every single aspect of my life. Four years later, I feel like it's time to declare that chapter of my life closed and I slam the door on all of it. Sadly, 2020 was the year my family, and therefore my life, fell apart. However, I know that oftentimes there is greater wisdom at work when events erupt as they did for me, violently and with no small amount of anguish. I, as with many others, was feeling despair due to the political climate of the United States as well as the effects of the rigours of Covid-19, and it felt like we were on the precipice of disaster. It felt like it was the end of the world to me. And as I look back on these last four years, in a way, it was. It was the end of the world as I knew it, at least. Terrible things happened on a global scale, in my personal life, my family life, and so on. As I write this, I still feel rattled by the shock of realizing ex-husband had been having an affair on me, among a few other unsavoury things. It was a shock to me to experience the upheaval of the pandemic, all the changes it represented for me and my family, and the chaos that erupted in my life as a consequence. I am still actively trying to piece myself back together, in fact. 

However, the most shocking element to it all is the fact that I learned my cellphone had been hacked and I had been spied on for an entire year and didn't know it. I know who did it. I know why they did it and I know what motivated them to risk their own wellbeing for my sake. It started out like a shot in the dark, a situation so profoundly bad, I see in hindsight it had to be good. Through no fault of my own, the entire matter brought my integrity into question. Specifically, this started when I tried to alert my ex-husband to the fact that my cellphone was acting funny. The camera would turn on and off on its own. The battery drained really quickly, and other things like that. He didn't believe me nor seem to care. When I finally pieced it together that I had been hacked (for lack of a better word), no one believed me. The shock of that event, as well as a few other alleged events that I won't mention right now, caused me to step way back behind the veil of my own mind and I started isolating myself with music in order to wrap some sort of supportive structure around my mind, which was otherwise falling apart. I used music to hold myself together when the rest of my life, and all the made me who I am, started to crumble away from me like paint chips falling off a brick wall. 

Strangely enough, the more I tried to convey my experience and piece all the components together, the more my credibility was called into question and the next thing I knew, I was being analyzed from all angles. My kids' friends, my ex-husband (and girlfriend), friends and family members, had formulated conclusions as to what was wrong with me, and they all told me so in their own way. Not one of their perspectives were correct and their scrutiny only worsened the situation for me. Due to their lack of belief in the circumstances I had found myself in, I had nobody to turn to when I realized one of the artists I respected most in all the world was behind the cellphone security incident and I had nobody to talk to about the shock to the system that was for me, and I had no way of explaining to anyone the things that I saw and felt when I was in the throes of all of these events. All these components served to push me back into my imagination, my isolation, my fears and dreams. As an artist and a writer, I never lack for ideas and I see now that I use these devices as a form of escapism. I started to escape the world around me and all the pain I was feeling due to the aforementioned events and I found myself in a whole other realm. 

As I said, I started using music as a means to cope. I had penchants for certain songs and would crave hearing them so badly I could think of nothing else to appease myself. I dove into one song and then another and another and eventually (well, it was actually not an eventual thing at all) I started to notice similarities of themes and rhythms and components to lyrics. I noticed that many artists were singing about similar things, but they didn't seem to know it. The letters of the alphabet started to encompass all of life in the form of patterns, for me, while I was ensconced in this imaginary world, knowing that I had company, but not at all prepared to receive guests, as it where. 

The cellphone security issue endured as the man on the listening side held on because he could see I was struggling, silently drowning in grief right in front of everyone. So he took the risk to reach out to me and hold on to me like a lifeline in very stormy seas which are the metaphorical representation of my life. His feedback showed me my life was ugly in the parts I had thought were beautiful while showing me my value in the parts I thought were worthless. It was like my entire life became caught up in the maelstrom of all that makes me who I am. My faith, family, talents, abilities, hopes, dreams, fears, failures, wants, needs, etc., etc., were caught up in this descending spiral and I started to go down, down, down inside the chambers of my heart, through the caverns and catacombs of my mind. I realized I had an imagination as vast as the universe itself and I could easily lose myself for days. The implications of this were rather bleak, in some ways. That meant those on the outside of my mind were losing me, hour by hour, and day by day, to the inside of my mind. It was a recipe for disaster, and no wonder I have been alone for the last four years, mostly. I have needed some time to recover from the enormity of my own personality. Where does it all come from? Why am I like this? There was nothing in me that desired to be anything but alone. 

So, I understand why everyone doubted me, why my credibility and my confessions don't seem to land well, no matter where I spewed them. Back in 2020, getting close to me would be about as easy as hugging an uprooted cactus in a hurricane. Not only is it going to be difficult, it is highly inadvisable for safety purposes.

If folks think I fell head over heals in love with a rockstar (who I will henceforth refer to as musician) and therefore pitched my family overboard? That is very far from the truth. My cellphone was hacked by a musician, that is very much true. But I didn't immediately jump ship. No, I actually ran to the defence of my ex-husband and my children, as well as my extended family, as I wasn't sure how any of this would effect them. I felt extremely concerned because, in tandem with all of these other things, I had unearthed a very real curse put on my family that I was sure could very likely explain why my family has been so riddled with tragedy. I was grasping at straws by the time all of this hit a fever-pitch due to the fact that a family member had died very tragically within that timeframe and it scared me a lot more than I have the words to explain. I feared my own kids would be targeted by this and I started to subversively push them away, closer to their father, hopefully safely away from me, just in case. I was ready and willing to allow myself to disappear from this world if it meant saving them from the effects of this curse, in fact. You can read about the curse HERE if you want to, but I do not recommend it. So, when I realized said musician wanted to pull me out the darkness and into some rather bright light, it sent me into a very panicked state, one that was riddled with intense ire and fear. I stayed mired in that poisonous brew for literally years, and in that timeframe people spread rumours I was catfished, which embarrassed me to no end. It made me see that folks whom I thought were my friends, were not-so-much, and family who I thought loved me, didn't. My whole world was rocked down to its very core and as a consequence, my musician friend received no small amount of backlash and I told him off at least ten million times throughout this timeframe, and very recently, I might add, but somehow, through the ebb and flow of all that has happened between us, we come back to each other, almost daily, and are somehow managing to forge a relationship that seems to be surviving against all odds. It is really quite amazing. 

Some folks would likely not handle these circumstances the way I have. But at the bottom of it all I know I harbour compassion for all involved. I want my ex-husband to find the love I could not provide for him. I want my children to find their path for which I have done my best to prepare them. I want my friends to trust me, always. I want my honesty to be paramount. I want my artistic vision to be crystal clear and I want my heart to speak of love and only ever love. That's what I want. However, what actually spews forth is vitriol bar-none. Words of hate and anger, acts of vengeance and retaliation. I saw myself in the mirror and I wanted to smash that mirror to smithereens. The quality within me which I started to detest about myself the most throughout everything was my naivety. I saw how embarrassingly naive I am, how gullible, how sincere, how foolish. How foolish I was to not see how bad things were in my marriage before it was almost too late, and how, often, it was my tendency to isolate myself that fuelled the fires of gossip and conflict. I know I am an intensely overwhelming person, but I also know that no one can bear the burden of plain old gossip well on top of everything else, but gossip has haunted my steps since I can remember. People have always talked about me behind my back and they always will. That's just the way people get along. I accept that. But I naively believed people would take me at my word and have a little more faith in me; c'est la vie. There are those who seem to feel I have nothing to offer and then there are those who seem to see that I have a lot to offer. It's really strange to see where people land within that spectrum, but the ones who had enormous faith in me, (my musician friend and his posse), took me so seriously it filled my head with a sense of power I had no business messing around with, but let me assure you, I messed around in it up to my eyeballs. I swam in it, rolled around in it, dunked my head in under it and opened my eyes while I was immersed in it. I saw things and heard things and said things and did things I would never normally do but let me remind you, otherwise I was on the brink of my own self-destruction, full of despair, sensing an earthquake about to erupt within me and unable to find my footing. I took full advantage of the attention I was getting and I enjoyed it very much, probably a little too much. I got myself is a lot of trouble and I found it to be a very bizarre but amusing conclusion to the last twenty years of dedication to my family. It was such a bizarre end, with so many bizarre outcomes, I just enjoyed myself on the way down the rabbit hole, as best as I could, but I was also in misery and so afraid to be on my own. When you have an imagination that you can revert into when things get dicey, the tension lies in the borderlands between the real and the imagined. As a consequence, I could never quite tell if I was being pulled into a burning building, or out of one. 

I was told if I took legal action against this breech of security, the person on the other side of this could lose a lot. I don't want that to happen because he saved my life, that is beyond doubt. But it totally and completely shattered my worldview as well as the view I had of myself. I have emerged on the other side, relatively unscathed and with renewed faith in myself as well as God and I cannot complain, not really. But I am very tired of being pissed off at him, pushing him away because of the opinions of others, which I have done so many times, but he comes back and that's where everything becomes brighter for me. Unconditional love is very powerful and very real and it seems to exist between us and it forms a solid foundation that I am not accustomed to at all. The opinions of others have embarrassed me deeply and caused a sense of desperation in me juxtaposed against a stubbornness that seems to know no bounds. It's not a healthy position to be in. So the truth is this; I haven't run off with a rockstar (ahem, musician) but I could have and maybe will, someday. What I have done, in fact, is dive-bomb this poor man with a barrage of insults and accusations that I was sure would have gotten me kicked off social media long ago. I've tested every single boundary I can find. He has endured my reactions well and kept moving forward in his own way, keeping record of this whole thing, because many wonderful things happened between us along the way, which I have yet to allow myself to fully enjoy because I fear this confrontation with myself most of all. It has been an adventure, to say the least. 

It is really kind of incredible to see myself in someone else's eyes, which is the impetus behind the circumstances leading up to today, to put it concisely. I just don't know why my very first reaction to coming to terms with my own reflection is to throw a rock at it, metaphorically speaking. Is this some twisted form of self-loathing or basic biological programming to be protective of myself and my family? And where is the threat, if there is one? I have yet to encounter it but I have been on guard for quite some time. At the end of the day, I think the reason I prefer to find understanding (and no small amount of amusement, I will admit) to this whole scenario is because this man, being quite a force to reckon with himself, forced me to ask myself a very big question; do you know the value of your own life? When I looked for the answer, I found all of eternity beating within my very own heart. I didn't know the value of my own life in 2020 (and was fully prepared to forfeit it for the sake of the greater good, if I am honest with you) but I surely do now. It took quite a lot to get through to me, but here I am, by the Grace of God and by a few ingenious schemes of a man who loves me. 

For me, waking up from the stupor I was in was a lot like that scene in The Matrix where the woman is being pulled through the walls, room after room after room. I had hidden myself away in the dark somewhere and this man forced the light to break down the walls in order to find me and I will admit, I went to it kicking and screaming, but he refused to let me go back to where I had been, in my mind, thank God. Even though at times it was a painful process, he reminded me I am not alone by constantly feeding back to me the things he saw within me. Some of those things were wonderful and some of them were painfully  frightening, but it was a necessary evil in order for me to leave my grief (and therefore the darkness it represented) behind and get back into the game of life, back to the light of day, where I belong. It is quite a miraculous thing to have someone come along and risk it all in order to bring you back to life and I am still adjusting my eyes to the brightness of a renewed sense of belonging in a world that had otherwise become very grim and very lonely for me. 

I am still gradually coming to terms with myself but I do remember at the root of it all I wanted to offer something to help generate change, in honour of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter. Every Life Matters. My life matters. Your life matters. 

I know I am a blessed woman. God has taken great care to send me the right people at just the right time so that I could recover in His perfect timing. More and More, I desire peace where I could remain angry. I look for life-affirming change where there could otherwise be lethal stagnation. I prefer to choose hope rather than despair and forgiveness rather than bitterness. I trust in everything that brought me through to today and the everlasting love and care of God, who has proven to me he cares for me, many many times. A series of events, dreams, and circumstances, over the course of many years, guided me along, teaching me how, when, and where to take my next step under some very challenging conditions, strengthening me day to day and here I am, grateful for my life and learning the value of my being in this world. That's what love can do.

In other news, I am happy to say I just finished writing my first book. I'll be happy to share more about that here, when I am ready. Stay tuned.