Acceptance and All Things Brave

The day I finally reached acceptance of my system was like feeling the sun on my face. It was 1996 and I remember I went inside and stood in the doorway of their house and just watched them for a long time. They have a viewer in the middle of the living room, a huge screen where they can watch what is going on outside. They have a sectional couch facing the viewer. On the couch sat Cassi, Cathi, Mimi, Sara, and a handful of Littles. On the back of the couch sat Richi doing his nails and every once in a while interjecting into the conversation. I just watched them and it suddenly occurred to me what they went through. It wasn’t just about me having gone through some terrible times at the hands of my family and their friends, my system did too. They probably got the worst. I stood feeling these enormous emotions slowly start to overtake ma and I remember I started to shake. Soon, I was crying heavily. Soon after that, as they have done my entire life, my system came to me and lifted me up, taking me to the couch and cared for me until I regained my composure. 

I don’t have words to adequately explain my system, what they did, who they are, and what they did for me. Words almost fail me. If it wasn’t for them, I would surely be worse than I am.  

I will never know what it is like to form friendships and bonds after enduring war. I will never fully understand how people share those fundamentally, soul altering experiences when faced with gun fire and carnage. But I can, with 100% clarity, know the bond I have with my system after we endured ongoing onslaughts of repeated torture, rape, mutilation of body and mind, and seeing in their eyes how even the light of day is kept at fingers length. I know the pain of a survivor. I fully grasp and understand how life goes on but in mechanical motion. I know and see how the heart is wrung close to death at the painstaking awareness that people in this world wanted us dead. It is not a cavalier statement, people wanted us dead, erased from the earth, wiped clean of any knowledge to our existence. And when you are a child, fighting against those odds, who you were meant to be becomes moot because that person is gone. In their place is someone who will never fully trust, who is constantly on guard, who is wrought with scars, both external and internal. 

So, looking at my system as the forefront of all things brave, one can begin to fully understand why to me they are heroes.