can't find my way home

I am good at pool because I grew up with a pool table in my basement.  And ping pong because the table fit on top of the pool table and my brother and I would play matches.  Haven't played in a while but it usually comes right back to me.  The blue chalk, the bridge cue, the break triangle, all the tools of the trade.  Oh, the green felt and the way my hands formed around the stick...like riding a bike.


Listening to the guitar chords of Eric Clapton. Singing the blues through those rich guitar chords, feels like private conversations between two other people, maybe I shouldn't be listening...but now he's live and the entire audience hears him...


Plant your love and let it grow...let it grow, let it grow, let it blossom let it grow...


Remember listening to this album while my sister and I drove to visit our bro in college, the same college I graduated from the year before.


when I was in college I had no college life.  maybe freshman year, before I started believing what he was saying about me.  before I decided to give up my friends, roomie, and study habits because of what he said to me.  Pretty pathetic when a college student isn't smart enough to make her own decisions.  I missed everything.  I look through my one yearbook from those four years and I see photos of people, students, having fun.  My fun was ordering a Garcia's stuffed crust with sausage and extra sauce and buying a pint of chocolate chocolate chip Haagen Daz from the Piggly Wiggly for desert.  And eating all of it by myself after smoking a one hit or two.  Pathetic.


I used to glob onto my neighbors.  They lived in a big house, 2 guys and a girl from Sweden...they smoked too and listened to great music, so I sat in their house and helped myself while they studied.  Pathetic.  That was after he dropped out and I was totally alone.  Thank God for people's sympathy. 


Freshman year I had fun.  I hung out with a high school buddy and we checked out the parties and partied hard.  i hid booze in my dorm room fridge and tempted my RA to open it to see if I wasn't lying...she didn't.  I safety pinned the calves of my jeans to make them super straight, like my friend across the hall did.  she was from Chicago and much wiser than a girl from the burbs.  We went to football games late and drunk. We sang Beatles songs in our dorm while eating the cookies my Grandma sent.  We bought posters at the union to decorate our walls and ate bags of flavored popcorn while we studied in the common room on our floor.  I always wore this bulky knitted sweater that tied closed...a gift from my dad from some carribean island or Las Vegas...and knitted bootie slippers from Canada.  We were comfy and content and carefree.  One year.


Then he started telling lies about me...to me.  What an ass.  Me, I'm the ass, for believing what he told me.  For believing that I was wrong and believing that I had to follow his ideas.  do his homework and laundry.  WTF?  lame and pathetic.  Abuse? possibly.  for 3 years and one after graduation.  No good times at college for me to savor...sad, very sad.


So when I look at myself in the mirror today, I try not to blame myself.  I try to say it's OK because you made it out of that.  You are OK now.  Am I?  Am I telling myself what I should?  what I need to hear?  It's easy to abuse yourself, to talk negatively like you have been for decades, to listen to the doubt and remember the shame.  Reaching for the light of positivity and compassion is difficult for an abuse victim.  Time moves slowly and every step taken may end up being negated by one back.  Frustrating to say the least.  Necessary to stay alive.

You don't believe the compliments at first, or after ten times heard.  You avoid situations that remind you of your weaknesses.  You cry because other people are happy and you know you can't be.  The negative talk.  The doubting yourself and wishing you were someone else. it's trying and tiring to live this way.  but you don't have enough energy to figure out the other way to live.  Decades of tired.


Even after I shed the old and begin the new, I am broken.  The healing is not quick.  The help is sparse and undefined.  The little things are disastrous and the big things are neglected.  He is kind and just as young and doing his best.  I am not trained to be a partner.  I barely know how to be me alone.