This exhaustion is born of giving away things that were never mine in the first place.

I'm still depressed. It's making me so tired that I can't seem to get up and do anything. And now I've discovered that I screwed up the kids' schedule for this coming week and I have two school events to attend for the youngest instead of just one and now I have to cancel therapy. I thought all the stuff she has been rehearsing all went to the same performance, but it doesn't. So, I will drag myself out twice and sadly, I will have to put on a performance of my own to make sure my kid gets what she deserves while a much older performance hounds at my heels.

I don't remember how old I was. It was in middle school, so I wasn't much older than my little one is now. It was probably sixth grade. I had to go to school in the evening for a choir performance and it was part of my grade. I told my parents about it because I needed someone to drive me there and I needed a dress to wear. I was a wearer of blue jeans and knew nothing of any 'dress'. My parents would not help me, but I had to go. They were angry with me that night because they wanted me to stay home and take care of my little brothers so they wouldn't have to deal with them on their own. My mother threw a big dramatic fit about the whole thing and forbade my father to drive me to school. I had to call all of my friends until I found one whose father agreed to let me ride in to school with them. Then, not knowing what else to do, I took a dress from my mother's closet that I thought would be the closest to what the choir director had asked the students to wear. It wasn't really that close to what was required, but it really was the best I could do. I didn't know that I should have worn a slip, didn't know that the dress was obviously too big for me and I didn't know that others would laugh at my inappropriate appearance. But laugh they did. And before I even made it to school to meet with ridicule and shame, I had to get past my father and his violent menacing to even escape the house when my ride showed up. He was angry with me because my mother was wailing and sobbing in the other room because I would not be there that night to save her from the needs of her own small children. I still remember how mean his face looked when I ducked past him as he was telling me what a selfish little bitch I was. So, I went through all of that to be where I promised I would be at precisely the time I had promised I would be there. And then I pushed aside the ridicule and the laughter (most of it was from ADULTS) and I got my ass up there and sang. I sang badly under all that stress, but I sang. I showed up and I did what I was supposed to do. And then I saw my father walk into the auditorium. No, he hadn't had a change of heart, he had come to make me go home because my mother had gone to her closet and discovered I was wearing her dress and she made him go get me. And so I rode home with this scary, angry man who spat words at me through barred teeth while he went on about how the dress I took was special to my mother. WAAAAAY more special than me - obviously! And this humiliation around creativity is not by any means an isolated incident. Not by a freakin' long shot. My creativity was overtly and consistently attacked from a very young age. That end of the abuse ranged from my mother scrunching up a story I wrote for her when I was five and screaming and yelling at me that I was crazy and that there was something wrong with my imagination, all the way to both of my parents cruelly making fun of my singing. The attacks launched against me for self-expression were vicious and relentless. Knowing that they were wrong and that it was abuse is not fixing the problem. I didn't blog about what happened to me after I shared something creative recently. It was a rabbit hole and I was hysterical and distraught in there. And now just having talked to some Girl Scouts about writing has me so depressed that I've been in bed for three days.