Sitting down in College The Holy Spirit came to me/1985

I was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1985 after running like a crazy person. I was expediently removed from Fort Jackson two days after that incident. I was unable to finish my Advanced Individual Training as a 71Lima (Clerk Typist). After that spectacle, I was put in 7West the Psychiatric Ward for about a day. The nurse gave me a Tetanus shot for all of the scratches that ran like a scarlet labyrinth down my legs. It was now that the pain began to set in, the throbbing slow pain of self mutilation.

I had failed my stent in the U.S. Army Reserves. Even after I had prayed every day, “Lord, make me like a rock.” I needed this job to send money home to my momma and little sisters. But from the beginning I had a terrible time with the physical training. From the beginning I walked around with my little note book and pen, writing things down. The cadre said I didn’t belong there,

“Go home, go to college.”

Now, I had no other alternative, it took me two months of phone calls and meetings with Cruz Bustamante he was the aide to my congressman at the time whose name I cannot recall to get my luggage back from Fort Jackson. You see I was whisked away, without being able to take my belongings with me, that quickly. Those were the politics of Fort Jackson.

I began attending City College, but I didn’t want to. I knew it was expected of me. I was a very fragile and shattered 19. I set my sights on History. I took five classes, Poetry, Psychology, Political Science, History of World Word II and Guitar. I also started working at Burger King. But I was empty inside numb this is when the cutting became a furious and demanding part of my life. The cutting eased everything inside that was desperate the animal rage inside me was assuaged every time I picked up that razor blade to shred my skin. I was freed from the overwhelming suffering of living, I was a failure, no one loved me, I never had a boyfriend my lips had never been touched. My momma at the time was dating and going out after her divorce from my daddy. My daddy reverted to his youth, driving a Supra and dating a young woman in her 20’s who resembled Holly from General Hospital. I mattered to no one. Not even God.

My older brother Boi had gone away to U.C. Berkeley, my little brother Jimmy had a girlfriend Irene he was sure he loved. My two younger sisters were young teenagers. Misi the baby of the family had friends, but Moe was a bit of a loner, and I was closer to her. We had been playing paper dolls for years together. We used to cut out pictures from magazines, the stars and rock stars of the day, and create characters and stories for them. Later, she being an artist used to draw faces, and I did the same, but I was not an artist. This was my respite, my fun the paper dolls with my little sister.

We still went to Mass on Sundays, we were Catholic. My God was Catholic. It sounds ridiculous, but denominations seem to want to make that claim. God was God, and above such politics.

Anyway, my momma began a relationship with Arthur a retired Green Beret from the Vietnam War. He lived in Selma with his four children, he was extremely poor. Sometimes I would go in momma’s wine colored car. She would be drinking, and she would buy me a Super Big Gulp.

But the aching was still there, nothing went away. I quit my job at Burger King, I didn’t fit in, I was continually writing on napkins instead of working. I was the one who filled the paper cups with soda so technically I was a soda jerk which was stupid because the sodas would become watery. This is what I did during lunch rush hour, and Jeff my supervisor continually screamed at me and belittled me. So like the quitter I was, I quit.

Momma didn’t care, not really. I had to walk to work as I didn’t have a car, I didn’t even know how to drive. There was no one to teach me, and I had no interest in learning. I was truly a misfit. I was the kind of person that watched the new Twilight Zone episodes, wrote poems, wore no make-up went to Mass because it was expected, visited my grandma, and cut viciously when no one was around. I wore a lot of long sleeves even in the summer, to hide the healing scabs.

College was no better, sure there were men I thought were cute, but they never looked at me. Daddy used to promise to come and take me to a movie then wouldn’t show up. This crushed my soul, and then I would start cutting, cutting saved me. I know that is wrong to say, but it was true, I didn’t have Jesus in those days, not really, but He was never far from me. For years The Lord saw my act, the pretense of attempting to hold a life together that was disintegrating. No one knew I was cutting myself with razors, except Jesus. Day after miserable day, I sat alone, praying I had the guts to commit suicide. I used to look down from the second story in the social science building, imagining myself flying down. It gave me hope to think such things. But my Catholic upbringing, forbade it. I knew I would go to hell if I ever attempted such a thing.

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Have you ever wished that you could just die to stop the humiliation, the pain, the terrible emptiness that constantly clings to you?

I am a misfit, a nobody. I didn’t any have any friends, certainly no boyfriend, I’m invisible, I want to hide myself, wear a bag over my head like the Elephant Man, be nowhere, just a raindrop, something that doesn’t feel.

Every day I have the urge to cut my skin to ribbons, until the blood is streaking down my body, it’s the only way I can survive, to end the terrible pain on the inside, to distract myself from that pain, that terrible suffering that won’t leave me alone, the scab of loneliness that clings to me, every day I wish I was dead, I think about dying all of the time, it’s like I’m not here, I’m surreal, I’m sleep walking when I’m supposed to be here, I’m not really here, I don’t feel like I am really here, the world is bruised black, the sky bruised and burnt, I am floating in the ocean devoid of life, drowning, gasping for air, gasping for air when I am in class, there is no escape from this emptiness, that swallows me, the void, the black hole that sucks me into it, only cutting takes it away, to bring me back to life, to breathe life into me again, because I’m really dead, I’m a corpse only they don’t know it, the others don’t know, I play at being alive, I don’t feel alive, I’ve been dead for years, let me slip out of this life, even when I don’t bleed, I am bleeding, I am hemorrhaging.

There is no escape, to tear myself from this, to rip myself out of this nightmare, so I cut to pull myself out through my own veins, there is no recognition of life, I am cold, frozen in a block of ice, I need to be thawed out, I can’t reach the world, I can’t reach out of myself.

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At 20, I felt ancient, like an old, old soul talking to myself, as if I were taking notes to God Himself. My parents were into their new lives as divorced people in their 40’s. Momma was going to have a baby from her second husband.

I sat on the concrete benches at the school. Not certain if I could survive the rest of the day, much less the rest of the year. I wrote in my journal, as I used to keep a journal in those days.

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16 May 85’

“Lord, I’m so afraid of being critiqued and attacked in poetry, and of not receiving the money for financial aid. I just want to get away and never have to face these people. God, please, hear me, I’m so afraid of being embarrassed again. God please, at 1:30 today, they say. Sometimes I feel like a lamb for the slaughter, my friends, are few, are none, afraid to face who I am.

“LORD, SMILE DOWN UPON me, APPROVE OF WHAT i Do. Please know how I feel.

Now all I can do is wait it is the hour of what I fear, or what I do not fear, and a few more hours until my other fears come to pass.

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16 May 85’

“He did not print my poem. Thank God for that, Lord. But I am still afraid, fear all over my face there must be something I can do. I need an answer, a reason to be. I should not be afraid of these things. But I am.

Please, make me strong, like a rock, so I will endure, fear is flowing through my veins rushing through my head.

Please help me, Jesus, look down upon me, so the fear will end.

I want to burst out into tears right now, but I cannot. Everyone will laugh, God, at me. I don’t believe I can take it anymore.”

I just felt compelled to write to God.

My cousin who was a Jehovah’s Witness had given me a bible a month earlier. My pushy cousin Sandy was trying to convince me into becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. The whole religion grated on me, and she never convinced me.

The next day I found that same bible. It was as if the Bible called to me. For some reason, only apparent to The Lord Jesus, I picked up that bible, and could not put it down. I read and read and read and read for hours on end, missing my favorite television shows. This concerned my momma who told me to put the bible down, and come and watch television with her. But, I couldn’t, The Word of God had such a hold on me that year that I read the entire bible in a month.

The song that played in my heart was REO Speedwagon’s, “I can’t fight this feeling anymore.” It expressed the surrender of my soul to God.

HE the Holy Spirit came.

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“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.”

(John 14: 26)

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“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and not of yourselves it is the gift of God, not of works lest anyone should boast.”

(Ephesians 2:8-9)