Candid Corvid Productions

I’d been on the phone all morning, trying to broker a minor miracle for our family’s situation.

My mind was buzzing and vision compressing from pushing hard against needing to lay down and give into pain my body was experiencing.

My youngest pulled me out into the sunny garden to see the wonders of golden spider web streaming from distant telephone lines in the early afternoon.

Their brilliant streaks of rippling spectrum were dancing in sequence along currents in the gentle breeze.

After we took videos trying to capture the amazing phenomenon (which I will post in Youtube here later), I found that I felt stuck inside my self.

I began to speak out loud about the sensation and emotions related to it, while my youngest listened.

We exchanged experiences of our perspectives over the last several years, and he was kind and pet my back when I began to cry, unexpecfedly.

“I don’t know who I am, anymore,” is what the shell of me was saying. “I don’t feel that I am worth anything.”

What am I – but a remnant survivor of past wreckage?

When you pick a piece of fruit from a tree, it may look fine and plump on the outside, but then you might find bugs, eggs, and maybe a worm in the center around its seeds.

My grandmother and mother used to tell me to cut around the rot, and that the rest untouched was still good.

But, when it comes to what’s stored in our bodies after trauma, there are often no visually recognizable aspects we can address like this.

If damage was physical, this is more straightforward in that there may be scars, tissue bunching, and eventually healing seen.

Intangible effects usually more prevalent are the energetic leftovers of negativity: those messaging signals that hardwire our receptors to forever after expect and look for danger repeating.

My weak link is my abdomen, as it is the last to respond in workouts. It’s still stuck in freeze mode, waiting for external “safe to respond” signals.

If success is compromised, those signals do not materialize – and its even harder to make progress in toning my body

Therefore, I’ve decided to not work on other parts of my body much until it becomes clear my core muscle fibers are actively engaging.

Hopefully, this will reconfigure internal network’s point of view once I actually feel that I am thriving.

I believed in “the progression.”

By then, it was middle of 5th grade when I was transported to the Bay Area.

There was no way I could win: everyone had grown up together.

And I was a sweet, white girl – not “street urchin” Mexican.

It was a painful ending to that year. I barely learned the 50 states as weathered lack of common language.

Junior high was only slightly better and much more confusing – being launched at last into the fabled “gate” classes, without preparation or warning.

I wasn’t ready for the mixed-culture preppy, high-browed, and narcissistic targeting of my open-hearted inquiry.

They didn’t know what to make of me and called me “tinsel teeth,” “electric light lady,” and not the least segregating, “Little House On The Prairie.”

I got braces early, my mom overpermed my fine, light blond hair, and I wore those types of dresses she still picked out for me.

What was I thinking in expecting that they could handle individual identity? Why couldn’t they see me for me – when I could see them so clearly?

I paid for it when the white, thick tom girl went after me with her chicola sidekick and the strung out, white bean pole tweaker henchman.

In that same long, dark blue dress – where I was doomed for sacrificial lambdom because I couldn’t run from them as it snugged legs tightly – I talked them out of pounding me by using psychology.

I asked the guy why he was doing the white badass girl’s work, and the chicoola what she had invested.

I apologized to the frothing butch if I had trangressed with her, and offered to be friends.

Divide and conquer was an inspired strategy – from where? I was only like 12 or 13!

And once the coast was clear, I did run home – crying and terrified, although the danger had passed and I’d already handled it.

When high school came, I just straight up said to my peers, “We’re older, now.” – and kept hanging around the same ones I’d been with.

By Sophomore year, I was one of them, and life was finally opening before me as I dared to make plans for university.

But, a lot can go wrong again, suddenly.

And just because I believed in continuous growth did not mean they also wanted the benefit.

Years later, I happened upon a boy from the group I’d had a minor crush on, but in high school sitting behind him, had realized he didn’t wash his ears.

Ear goop can put a reality check on any fantasy, and it turned out later he decided he was gay!

He certainly cleaned up nicely in that decision, but his attitude in the elevator was even more regressed with his nose turned up at me.

I don’t understand what people see in me, that they get all defensive and put on a show – as if I’d harm them.

Maybe my visage reflects their own truth to them.

Maybe it’s because when I look at them, I see right through the “glamour” and am ready to explore what being real friends could lend.

Poverty is not a fun state of being.

There’s just no way to get out from under the burden of judgment and debasement to one’s sense of well being.

When it first happens to you, you can believe, “Hey – this will only be temporary.”

Like when a husband leaves you and children without income, that’s an unusual circumstance.

Then you climb out from “the streets” and rebuild everything by opening a business offering housecleaning.

You get through the packed-in neighbors drinking constantly and fighting, the man abusing his girlfriend – which your kids are now exposed to in their teens after you strove to ensure they’d never be exposed to such things.

You get through the younger landlord living a door down from you and showing up on your doorstep in only a hospitql gown, straight from a night in jail after an accident from her own drunk driving.

You get pulled into trying to help her to secure a better life for her to lend stability for her and your own family.

She tries to get you to parent her and take over the bills, but you don’t go this far, sensing the dangers in liability.

She doesn’t pay the monthly mortgage due to her addictions, gets behind on paymemts, and her past party friend who is likely now on meth and cocaine talks her into trying to evict you so they can raise the rent by another $1000.

You fight her off for two months and get your family out of there, not paying the last month’s rent because you know there’s no deposit because she already spent it.

This all looks “great” on rental history when you seek replacement housing. Oh yeah, you’re considered a “prime” candidate for tenancy.

“Unlikely.”

You can’t use her as nearly four year’s reference now from money earned and paid by yoor own hands, and you can’t use the rental reference before that because your husband disappeared and made you homeless, causing a similar ending rent-unpaid nightmare.

Which, even though you sought her out while still poor and are to this day still trying to make good on 10 uear’s ago agreement, she refuses to give you all that time before credit.

Then, you move to a new state where you can’t compete for administration or other work: you are too qualified for factory shlopping, and 14 credits shy of your Bachelor’s degree against others who have their but don’t have your same work qualified experience.

You innovate to get into the health field and work your way up the ladder in a passive-aggressively hostile work environment where people refuse to trust your high standards and excellent professional etiquette.

When they at last find a reason, they fire you – by their own fault of exposing you to COVID.

Then that employer lies and tangles unemployment benefits as you must petition for, wait for, and experience multiple reschedulings of the hearing.

Hearing ruled in your favor, but system locks up as recalibrating payments.

Check back in a month.

Check back in another month.

You forge a way to get to a better community with a great job – and then get fired again, again arbitrarily. Even though you file a new claim for UI, is also gets tied up by the old one’s still being stuck in processing.

(Today’s specialist you called today admits in astonishment she’s never seen such a complicated mess in the system as your should-be-straightforward claim.)

Designed for and capable of so much more than an average wage earner, repeat “failures” try to crush you.