Waking Up Beautiful (Rated: Hey, don't read this if you are easily upset.)

I don't want to be afraid;
I just want to wake up
beautiful today.

Every time I go to the Clinton County Women's Center's annual Domestic Violence vigil in Triangle Park, I cry. And not just a few tears, either. Every year for about a minute, I feel as though I'm going to bawl out all my pain and frustration right there on the grass. And I want to. I want to cry and cry until I'm empty of things to cry about, until every last nightmare has worked its way out of my body. I have to work really hard to maintain any semblance of control whatsoever. And then I get strong, and I walk up to the microphone, and I lift my head, and I tell my story. I tell it because it needs to be told. I tell it because I finally can, because no one can threaten me or punish me or force me to keep my mouth shut. As Tori Amos says:

Sometimes I hear my voice, and it's been here, silent all these years.

That's why I started this blog. I put things about my past in this blog because it's my way of making my voice heard. Maybe no one reads it. Maybe people read it and think I'm full of shit. I don't care. I have a voice. I have a voice. I have a voice. I have a voice. Hello, my name is Tiffany Bernard, and I have a voice. Try to silence me now.

Abusers have a thousand different ways of silencing a person's voice. They make you believe you're worthless, that no one will hear you, that no one will believe you, that no one will care. It's a sad testament to the way things are that this so often seems to be the case. People turn away. They close their eyes. They stop their ears. They say to themselves: This isn't real; this doesn't exist. You can be begging for help in every way you know how, and the people around you still go: I can't hear you. They explain away the bruises, the exhaustion, the bloodshot eyes. They never seem to look at you twice. People who are supposed to love you do this. People who are supposed to take care of you do this. People who are supposed to cherish you above all other things in the world do this. They live on in denial, and you spend your days hearing:

You're worthless.
You're a disgrace.
You're a maggot.
No one will ever want you.
You can't survive without me.
If people knew who you really were, no one would love you anymore.
I should've gotten rid of you the second you were born.
I should just kill you now and get it over with. No one will care.

At a certain point in my childhood, my mother actually looked me in the eyes and said, "Do you want to die today, bitch?"
"No Mom, I don't want to die today."
"Then prove it."

This was the world I lived in. A world of fear and pain, a world where my own father would look down at me bleeding on the floor and walk away, actually leaving me to die. I wonder: did he ever ask himself, "Will Tiffany be alive when I get home from work?" My grandmothers, both of them, tended to a potentially life-threatening head injury I sustained one morning after my mother threw a sharp-heeled shoe at my head and busted it open wide. I had a concussion so severe I was limp as a rag doll and had to be re-dressed as if I were a baby, at nine years old. I had to be carried to the car and arranged across the back seat, carried into Jean's house and settled onto the couch. I was so tired. I did not understand why my Mammie would not let me sleep. "Wake up, Tiffy. Don't close your eyes, Tiffy. Talk to me. Don't close your eyes." Did she ever ask herself, "If I send this child back home, will I be burying her tomorrow? Next week? Next month?"

There were so many times I thought I would die. Tumbling head-over-end down the basement stairs. Having my head pounded against the hardwood floor until I became insensate. One terrible night, with my face pressed hard against the bottom of the bathtub under freezing cold water, hearing the oddly magnified sound of my fingernails scrabbling against the fiberglass. I thought I would die with my mother on top of me, so heavy, always so heavy, squeezing all the breath out of me with her weight pressing down and her fingers like a vice around my neck. According to research I have done, it can take anywhere from 4 to 10 seconds before a person faints from strangulation. After 20 seconds, you run the risk of traumatic brain injury, coma, or death. I have learned that the ten seconds before the blackness takes over are the longest ten seconds a person will ever experience. It feels like years. Everything slows down. Sound comes from far away and then just stops altogether. Explosions of color dance in your field of vision. You can actually feel the numbness creeping into your fingers and toes. Static starts to play in your ears and then gets louder and louder and louder until suddenly, it just stops. Everything stops. It's finally quiet. Dark. Peaceful. You are everywhere and nowhere all at once. You don't know how you know yourself, but you do. You are not afraid anymore. Simply resting. Finally resting. And you want to stay. You want to stay because you're okay here, you're safe. There is no screaming, no blood, no pain. You think, without knowing how you are thinking, "If this is what it's like to be dead, it's not frightening at all." You don't mind the idea of being dead. And then the world comes slamming back into you with the force of your brain moving in your skull, an explosion of pain, and you hear yourself drag in a breath as your body's instincts kick in and drag you into life. But something is off. The world still hums, like a thousand hornets trapped against your eardrum. You look at your hand and think, "This is a hand," but you can't remember what it's for. You can't remember how to make this thing called a hand work. You are surprised when it opens and closes. You try to get up and tip drunkenly, watching your own legs as if you have never seen legs before. You are outside these clumsy legs and hands somehow. Not entirely, but in bits: you can see parts of yourself that only an outside observer should be able to see: the backs of your elbows, the outline of your hip as you roll, the crown of your own head. It's as if your soul is saying, "Wait, wait, stop. I haven't caught up." The part of you that makes you a living, thinking, animate person has locked itself out of the car and is climbing in through the window to get back behind the wheel. And when it does, when everything is finally back in motion, there is no one to care that you were just strangled within seconds of death by your own mother. There is no one to care about your screaming headache or the fact that you're shaking with exhaustion and can barely dress yourself for school. There is no one to say, "Oh, honey. How awful. You must have been so scared. Have some water. Lie down. Rest. I'll take care of you." They're off in denial, still going: This isn't real; this doesn't exist.

I do not know how I survived. I honestly, genuinely, do not know. I should not have lived past my seventh birthday. I should not be sitting here now, feeling my fingers on the keys as I type, feeling my feet firmly on the floor. Is there such a thing as divine providence? There must be, though I don't know how I feel about that: I sometimes want to scratch out the eyes of the divine thing that provided the providence, whatever it is. If it has eyes. I want to launch myself at it screaming in a rage and beat the shit out of it. How could you do this? How could you leave me to suffer? How could you not even let me keep death as an end to hell? Didn't you hear me, morning after morning, praying to be whisked away before the blood began to flow? I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. 

There are still days when I wonder if it means anything that I'm still here. I tip my Paxil into my palm every night and settle in for what will most likely be long hours of nightmares and think, "Is it worth it?" I come out of my apartment into a crisp autumn morning and try to convince myself that the wind on my face and the sun in the sky make up for all the things I lost and all the burdens I now carry, but I'm not always sure they do. I'm becoming a social worker to better someone else's life at the cost of my own childhood, my sense of safety and security. I have crawled through Hell backward. They say what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, but to tell you the truth, I don't really feel strong. I still feel broken. Used. Sometimes I think I'm full of hairline cracks, and  the slightest touch of a hammer and chisel will crumble me like an unwanted statue. I'm not trying to be depressing or say that I do not want to live anymore, so please don't think that if you are reading this. I'm trying to say that I want to live, as a whole, valid, safe, and contented person, and I'm sometimes afraid that will never happen. That it was all for nothing. That I have no purpose. But I want one. And so I keep trying. I do my schoolwork and go to my job and tell my story to the best of my ability. I try to let other people know that they are not alone, in part for selfish reasons: to remind myself that I am not alone. I forget sometimes. But also because I'm pretty sure my purpose, whatever it is, lies there, in other people. I know I can do things well. I am an excellent writer and a good public speaker. I connect easily with other people. I feel pulled to fight for social justice and equality and change. I guess I do it because in spite of my bad days, there is still that little kernel of flame somewhere within me, that child who refuses to die, that woman who hears her voice and refuses to let it be silenced. Honestly, I do not know how that woman functions sometimes. I watch her in awe, and then I realize she's me. Some days I guess I just wake up beautiful, in spite of myself. I do know I try. I try so hard, and I just keep trying. I guess that's a thing they call hope. Either that or I'm just too damn stubborn to let anything kick my ass. Either way, I guess it works.