Y'all. Today and yesterday have been "I'm listening to my body" days. And my body has been saying, "stay the fuck in bed". And so I'm gonna leave the rest of the week to follow in yesterday and today's footsteps. This is all to say my metrics are trash. But like...cute trash.
Today
Activity: Blogging with the bestie!
Activity Prompt: Explain something that happened to you that is so strange that nobody believes you.
Alone or with partners: Me and bestie bloggin' it up as a twosome!
Drink and snack with activity: I am still eating my dinner, a veganified and ketoized halal cart chickenwith cabbage instead of rice.
Physical activities log
Morning ab routine
5 ab roller rolls: Nope!
Blogilates morning abs: Nope!
Quarter mile walk every hour on the hour, 10-5:
10: It's a no all the way down.
11:
12:
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
5PM Two Mile Walk: STARTING IN MARCH
Weighted walking: Still can't find my weighted vest! Also no.
Shoulder shrugs during the day: A few! I feel very weak today.
MON, WED, FRI
45 minutes of PB: Nope!
TUE, THUR
45 minutes of cycling:
45 minutes of weight lifting:
Macros
Carbs:
Fat:
Protein:
Calories:
One of my very favorite things in the world to do is tell stories. This isn't just a now occurance, I have loved being a story teller since I was a little girl. A family gatherings, my aunts love to recall to me how I would sit with their children, usually only afew years younger than me, and tell them long and winding stories, and my aunts would lovingly joke about how I've always been creative and imaginitive.
My daddy is my favorite storyteller. I have alway been so inspired by the way my father folds people into whatever he is talking about, whether it's one of his many ghost sightings, or a particularly funny evening he had at work. When my dad is on, it's hard not to be enthralled. I've always assumed that in our past lives, my dad and I were the ones who stayed awake to tend the fire and watch over others, and we came to know the stars intimately. We were the ones who invited others into our fold when they woke up in the long hours before dawn, and spoke fantasy into the ether and made the darker hours come alive.
Beig a storyteller is an artform, and I firmly believe it is not a thing you learn. You're either born into it, or you are our captive audience, there is absolutely no inbetween.
I was born a storyteller.
In my younger years, this meant I invented excitement and shared it with others. There are plenty of blogs I've written about where I made up ghosts and shared the stories with my friends, I would tell stories to my sisters, I wrote a play, I created whole worlds for my barbies...which were always drenched in violence...and my stuffies also went on adventures all the time. When our parents fought, I would drown out the fighting by telling my younger sister stories in the dark. Sometimes I made things up, though mostly I recited Disney movies. As I got older and life started happening to me in grander ways, my creative streak took a back seat and I started sharing real life adventures.
Like the night my grandfather died, I woke up very early in the morning, which was very uncommon, and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I took a book into the bathroom to read, and was startled when the phone rang a little bit later...a phone call that would wake my mother up to share that her father had passed away. I have always been certain I woke up the moment he died. My grandfather and I were very, very close. I'm not sure if anybody has disbelieved that story, especially against a backdrop of stories like that occuring with regularity across my lifetime. I have more unexplained stories like that than I know what to do with.
On our family trip to Ithaca, I wanted to visit my grandmother's grave, a place I have never gone to and I did not know where it was. My dad called my mom to ask her, and she said she thought it was at one cemetary in Ithaca, but didn't know for sure, as she hadn't been to her mother's grave since her funeral. As we were driving through the cemetary, I shouted STOP! to my husband, because I felt something. In my bones, in my gut, all around me, I felt something. Derek drove up to the top of the hill, which was not where I told him to stop, but when he parked, I jumped out of the car and took off in the direction of the place I felt pulled. As I heard my dad and Derek making a plan for everyone to fan out to find my grandmother, I found her grave in less than a minute. I didn't even have to look att any other graves, I walked right to her. I found her. I say now that I just knew where she was, and I did. I don't know how I knew, I just knew. My dad didn't believe me, when I yelled out, "I found her" my dad said, "no fucking way" and then walked over...it took him a minute...and was genuinely shocked. Everyone was surprised but Derek, who talks about my spirits as though they are a constant. A silent second spouse that he didn't sign up for, but is warmly resigned to having around. My dad didn't believe me, but was there to see that the story was true, and I'm not sure anybody I've recounted it to has disbelieved me.
The story of the laughing children in the hallway of the hotel galvez. The story of the girl in white at the abandoned mines outside of Vegas. The story of the voice and the impossibly slammed door in the abandoned warehouse in Walsenburg. The ghostly visits to my room in Ithaca when I was 16. The coincidences surrounding death, the ghost stories, the impossible knowing I've demonstrated my enire life, I've never really been met with skepticism, though it is possible that for all of these stories, there was always a gentle laugh once I left, and a loving, "oh you know Drea. She's a natural story teller."
The impossible things of my life, the things I've found most unbelievable, have been taken at face value with alarming consistency in contrast to the very true things that, when shared, people have no believed me about.
As a person who identifies as female, was socialized a female, and is suspected to be mostly perceived as female by others, I have almost never been believed by the masses when I share the stories about my abusers. It doesn't matter if the incident was sexual, emotional, physical, or verbal, it is those stories that people find most unbelievable. Surely I misunderstood what they meant, I've been told. Oh they would never do that to you, they're so nice to me. If that happened, you must have provoked it.
Even when I am disbelieved, I am disbelieved in a way that makes me the conductor of my own misfortune. My first abusers were my parents and my mom made sure that the one social worker who believed me and came to check up on me knew that I was, in fact,a natural storyteller. "Going through it because of the divorce" she had told the social worker warmly in the kitchen. "The bruise was actually from her falling off of her bike, you know how clumsy kids can be! She just misses her father". The idea of my mother, the inviting lady offering tea to an outsider, being a violent abuser was suddenly so exremely strange as to be unbelieavable. That social worker was the first person to throw water on my ideas of setting injusttice on fire, she would not be the last.
I am pressed to understand how a storyteller like me is dismissed out of hand for the more realistic things I share, and adored and never checked on the things we socially find the least likely.
I wish it were the other way around.
No comments:
Post a Comment