Whats going on baby bloo?

Life updates, I keep thinking about those videos that people do where they have recordings of them and they say that in 6 months they’ll show you how they’ve been because they’ve set out to be better in that video. If I had one of those but for the last two years I don’t think I’d recognize myself or I might catch second hand embarrassment and then first hand embarrassment. Then I would have no choice but to feel pride for myself, for how far I’ve come, for where I’ve come from and left behind. Which I do, I feel proud of where I am emotionally and that I feel with purpose now.

Working in silence is easy because only you know what you are doing so you can only really let yourself down if you fail, but letting yourself down out of anyone else in this world is the worst kind of let down. I am trying hard to keep myself disciplined and motivated. All my life I never gave myself a purpose, I have always been a quiet and anxious person. I have always hated that about myself, I have never been able to be loud when I wanted to be and needed to be, my sleep paralysis used to haunt me of my silence, fed off this fear I curated for myself. It’s been a lot of fucking work, and still is, to realize the things that haunt me and how to let go of that .

I was really just existing without any care in the world about what happened to me. I just always said I’d find a way out of anything I was in and that was that; it took a lot of pain for me to realize the hurt I was causing to not only myself, but to the one I loved most. I became absent in my own life, I lost myself at the worst time possible and I consider myself blessed that I started to pick myself up before I hated myself beyond coming back. Divine intervention had my back in order for me to reach this point because I had a bigger purpose and my dumbass had to be extra stupid and get lost in a world that I hated and had no idea why I was even bothering to be living like I was. I get stuck in loops thinking about what could have happened, the damage I had already caused and how it could have been worse, so, so, much worse-

Sorry, sorry, divine intervention also taught me I have to stop hating myself for what I have already done because second chances are for changes. I give myself more grief for my wrong-doings than the devil would and I have to stop that; I have learned I do have meaning, that if I am loud enough, fearless enough, something big could happen, because I am not meant to just be a side character, I am not meant to be nothing. I am meant to be creating and curating a new life, new hope that is just not possible if I do not stop being so anxious, so fearful. Angels in my head beckon to me that while I have time I don’t have time to get started, the future belongs to someone else if I can’t get out of my own fear.

Love must be dealt out somehow by someone. They’re waiting, heaven is waiting, humanity is waiting.

Sure, sure, I’ve been nervous but divine inspiration and intuition always kick in when it needs to, and I need to start being more motivated and disciplined about what I know I need to be doing. It’s like the universe is sending me a system update notification and I just keep hitting “remind me tonight” man, the universe probably wants to kick my ass. My life is still continuing what my sister and I had planned before she passed, I intend to do that. She told me, and I told her, we’d give each other something to do.

Well, aside from whats going on in my head, real life wise..

I am out venturing life and moving out of my apartments and into a nice RV trailer! Haha, yes! I am so pumped for it. I never really thought of buying a house or what I might do if I had to buy one, so much I don’t want to sign up for haha, so my partner and I got a trailer. I am going to start myself a garden and my dogs will be happy that they don’t have to walk down three flights of stairs to reach the lawn anymore. I don’t know what else moving into the trailer will entail but so far everything seems..hopeful.

I have been working nearly two months now into construction and it has been amazing honestly. I have lost a lot of my anxiety that I used to have, and to be fair, I learned that a lot of the anxiety that I had been so filled with was my own doing, I knew I wasn’t living how I wanted to be, I wasn’t myself for a really long time and I knew it and suppressed how I felt and dug myself deeper than I needed to be. After a lot of work and healing, I learned how to welcome myself home, I have come back to the center of myself. I have felt a lot less anxious about myself and more confident about myself. I am still a work in progress but I have felt more certain in myself than not these days.

I feel like I am pretty independent, I like to think I am a fast learner, I may only know basics so far but I am learning to build my first house and I can drive a forklift now. Working with my parents isn’t so bad, I mean now I am old enough to do more than clean up, so maybe thats why, or maybe it’s the being outside, the awesome muscles i’m gaining, or the useful knowledge I’m gaining for bigger things.

These days are more yellow than blue but the blue days are still pretty, rain is what brings growth. I am more than my sadness and pain but without it I would have not had the ground to grow into happiness and strength.

15 Things I learned growing up

Often times as kids, when we grow up in homes that had love and abuse, we blame the abuse harder than the love and it’s no excuse but sometimes we overshadow some of the really good lessons and some of the good times get shoved under the bed while we focus on the knicks instead of the cuts. When I say “I do not excuse my parents past for how they were to us” is different than understanding that they have also gone through pain.

We have to see our parents in the way we heal as well, we see what has harmed us and how we have reacted, positively and negatively. So, as humans how are parents exempt from acknowledgement in their past for their actions? Or rather how are they exempt from being viewed in the same healing light? In understandment and forgiveness or whatever you would prefer to do with it.

Sure, I learned a lot of stuff I had to get rid of, thats not to say I didn’t learn a lot of good stuff from them here and there as well:

1. Work, work, work, work. Don’t think you can’t do anything because if you just work on it you can achieve it. My mom would always tell me I had papeles, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do, so don’t let anyone stop me. My dad showed my sisters and I the responsibility of hard work from a young age, waking up summer days to go work construction with him to learn how we earn money in this life, how we work for our dreams, our existence.
2. Treat everyone equal, you’re never “better” than anyone else, but that is not saying everyone else is better than you. You do you in your own way and everyone else does them, so never let anyone tell you that you’re less and never make anyone feel less.
3. Friends to do bad things with are always available, and rarely are there ones who want to be good and good to you. So pay attention who you choose to have in your life.
4. You never need money to have fun, you just have to go outside. You’ll never experience anything better than just going outside and connecting to earth.
5. Protection and the meaning of sticking together, even when they were being tough I understood it was because the world would be tougher. My mom would kill for us, I knew a lot of the things that I couldn’t do was because my mother experienced the wrong turn.
6. Always keep going, never stop trying . You were meant to do big things so never put yourself down, never stop at feeling comfortable until you are satisfied at your success level.
7. Nothing in life is given freely and most of the time people are going to try to scam you out of whats yours so work hard on yourself and don’t over confide in people.
8. We are female, not weak. One of the most appreciative things I am of my father is thinking if he didn’t have sons he’d make sure he’d raise strong women. Working construction at early ages, and picking up jujitsu at the age of 9 because one person fucking with us was already one too many.
9. The words of others do not matter, so don’t pay any attention to what they say, most of the time it’s just gossip. Who has the time to care about another life that does not relate to them?
10. Learn how to be wrong, learn that not everything is about being right or wrong.
11. Learn how to differentiate when family or loved friends are giving you helpful advice/ telling you something you could work on for yourself, from when someone is trying to just say something to bother you and purposefully hurt you.
12. On the contrary know your flaws, know yourself. So when people try to say something to you to poke at you, it doesn’t affect you. Know who you are, know we are always working on bettering ourselves.
13. Life doesn’t have to be expensive. This one I picked up personally, by watching. I sat and my father would constantly tell me that life and living on my own would be expensive, it would be hard. But never once did he bother to show me how to navigate it so it wouldn’t be. My way of life is simple and I don’t like extravagancy. Life is already extravagant enough. If I have life I don’t mind if my shoes have holes, if my home is big, or whether I got expensive stuff. I want to live in a trailer in the middle of the woods.
14. Our family is all we have. Take it in the form of what you want, I don’t mean necessarily blood but once you have that foundation of people that you call home and family. The ones who drag you through the mud when you don’t want to. They are all you have, so love them, accept them, hear them, and grow with them and help them grow.
15. Another one, by watching and experiencing. Let it go, for your sake. For your ability to heal, to go further than what happened to you. release it in whatever way you need to as long as it does not physically hurt another person. Never take karma into your hands, but do not let that stop your words from spilling out. Say what you must, feel what you must. Hand back the guilt, the shame, the fear, and release for higher growth. Let them take their accountability and you take yours.

after thoughts pt. 2

I had a lot of problems, I was quiet, unexpressive, and angry. I had built up all this anger and frustration from not being understood, not being heard, being brushed aside and not being taught proper and healthy ways of expressing myself in the first place, and then not properly healing from all that hurt me after I took myself out of the situation. That made it hard to no only help myself, but to help others and for others to help me, in the ways I wanted and needed. It was my own unhealed self that contributed to everything I wanted to fight against.

When I was in high-school I wrote a poem about how I didn’t want to be angry like my parents, I didn’t want to be angry but I let that consume me at one point. When my sister fell at the beginning I felt like I had lost a whole part of me suddenly I had to learn to deal with all of what I was dealing with .. alone. We had been through so much together; I didn’t know what to do with myself or how to deal with my parents specifically, my sister was the only wall that separated them from me, she kept them away from me because she saw the anger and frustration they caused me.

We moved out together, we had been discussing basically cutting ties from our parents because they were manipulative, abusive, and controlling at the time. Before she fell, she came crying to me one day after we had already been moved out for a while, she came crying that my parents thought she had robbed them because they had a card scam going on and they had hundreds of dollars taken in their name for college books. She came crying saying her career was ruined before it started because my parents were threatening to bring legal action on something she had no idea about.

When my sister first fell there was so many things that I built up anger towards my parents, for the way they reacted to everything. I remember I tried so hard to step up so many times, tried communication instead of arguing, only to be shoved back down by none other than my parents. They were angry I was no longer controllable. Each time I disagreed my parents took it as rebellion, as punishment against them, and instead of communicating for us to be able to work out the greater good for my sister, we ended up causing a big rift in something that was already damaged. Took the responses as a slap in the face when it is not agreement because of this mindset they get caught in of “parents are always right one day we will see that.”

but, when will parents learn what their kids have been trying to teach them? That the best place to get your parenting skills is from the one you are raising, no one knows what kids are feeling other than themselves. I said it hurt, you should have said okay, let’s try something different. I always screamed to the void through everything they still don’t understand, they still don’t understand and the void would scream back that I also did not understand. My way of trying to be assertive and change things was being aggressive, the exact way my parents had taught me and that not only backfired on them for having taught us all that behavior, because when you raise a kid in anger how else do you expect to them to respond to you once they are free from the punishment of their feelings?

I said even I was given the option to start new but I started different and I began to gain resentment to myself that I then blamed on everyone but myself and created this hideous cycle of constant irritation instead of accountability and moving on healthily, for everyone. In my need to reclaim what I felt I never had: respect, I was so angry at everything that I began to reject everything, because I failed to learn how to communicate in order to use my power and need for change. I ended up being something I didn’t want after overfeeding off of my own self-power and not looking at it from the right perspective of how I could change things. I realized that healing for me was starting to learn how to be vocal. There is this billboard for solar lighting that says ‘make the right decision for the wrong reason’ and I never understood it until like months later my partner goes “I GET IT! it’s because you should be switching to solar because you want to help the planet but you’re actually only doing it because of the money you’ll save. So good for you but you did it for the wrong reason still.”

Healing for me through forgiveness was kind of like that billboard. I didn’t know what to do past forgiveness and releasing my anger from my past traumas. I forgave without really thinking about what I wanted next other than just not feeling the anger, hatred, and pain I was feeling. The universe sat telling me “That is great you can forgive but that anger you held is still necessary. You forgave for the wrong reasons, you forgave to release a pain that wasn’t all yours, you took the pain of others hurting you, parents hurting you and forgave to say it is better; but is it truly better than continuing to be vocal about things that have been done? Forgiveness and forgive and forget are two different things. We told you to forgive but not forget” I sat wondering:

has this forgiveness brought me silence? When I began to heal I saw that as I started taking accountability for my own pain I caused, parents started forgetting their own; right back into this cycle of “I was right and you are finally realizing that” It has been hard to try to heal and forgive at the same time because my inner child wants so hard to fall back into line and my parents toxicity wants to seep out of them.

I forgave because forgiveness is never bad, but that still didn’t mean that I couldn’t talk about things, how I was still healing from things, how I am still currently affected, how I still suffer from extreme anxiety, how I still suffer from emotional problems, I still suffer from abandonment and anger issues. I still am healing. when you decide to heal and forgive something like that things get weird. You can’t expect it not to be weird: “Oh, hey you used to beat me for cups left on the side of the fridge and I still shake when you come down and I see I forgot to put my cup in the sink, but thats all over now, haha, let’s go get a manicure.”

or how bout “yea, I really wouldn’t have body issues if it hadn’t been for my parents calling me fat for my ‘well being’ despite the many times I said I liked my body and I still think about that time that you guys didn’t say anything to my sister about how big of an order the tour of Italy is when she ordered it, but you said something to me when I had ordered it as a kid. I knew it was because I was fat to you and she could at least share clothes with you. Sorry you could never assume I was the one who stole your clothes as a teenager.”

or “I still get anxious to eat around you and I still have a lot of self conscious over how I chew because you used to yell at me all the time to not eat like a fucking pig and I couldn’t ever control how loud my chewing was, yea, haha I still hold my breath while I chew and curse myself for even needing to eat; but I really enjoy lunches with you.”

There were so many different dynamics to what I was thinking and feeling when I decided on forgiveness and changing how I wanted my family experience to be. I think forgiveness is a privilege not an obligation; no one is required to forgive anything just because of someone’s own traumas. I forgave because it was more tiring being angry than moving on, I didn’t think about how it would be after because while change on everyones part makes forgiveness easier, while they are healing from how to be less angry, children are healing on how to be less scared. While they are healing from not yelling, we are healing on trying to use our voices. While they heal from their own inner child trauma, so are we; but they seem to forget that when we say “okay, I forgive” it was baffling to me how many stories she could tell me about people she will never forget or forgive, yet, expects her children to forgive and love out of nothing but the fact that she birthed us how could we hold any grudges towards them? They were just trying their best.

While I chose to forgive that doesn’t mean I think everyone should, I think some people need to distance themselves, because there are parents who will never decide to fix themselves or cooperate with their children on emotional communication. Hispanic culture has taught us, hispanic children, that this abuse is okay. That it is normal and that is American culture who teaches us otherwise. There are a lot of problems and complications when it comes to the relationships between a parent and a child. I think forgiveness can cause us to want to silence ourselves because we start to feel bad that we are ‘hurting’ the person we are forgiving. But the reason I started to become so vocal over everything that has happened in my life as a child and an adult in detail, in vulnerability has been because I wanted to stop the cycle and I wanted something to come of it. Knowledge, help, change, something. It was not to forget it ever happened and just move on with it, but to do something with it. Wether that was just being able to relate to other people finally, changing someone elses thought process, actually opening my parents eyes to their own need to check themselves, open other parents eyes, parents out there that may want to see that they still can change, heal, and not have a terrible relationship with their kids.

Kids shouldn’t feel as if this is okay forgiveness is okay but don’t you ever think it validates what has happened to us as children, nor think you have to be silenced in your forgiveness. If people wanted to be remembered in good light they would have acted better, been better, listened better, then. Not just now. Our past life experiences are not something we age out of it is something we age with; if it is going to be with me forever, I will make something from it.

A letter to self pity: Sometimes it is you

There really is no other person that is going to be with you for the rest of your life more than yourself. No one is responsible for your life, your happiness, your trauma and how you handle it. Who are we to think that anyone is going to save us but ourselves? Who are we to think that anyone can change what we think, how we feel, if we do not start listening to ourselves first?

We say we don’t know why we are the way we are, why we are negative, we say we don’t care that we are negative, we don’t care about what’s happened to us, yet sit in our own anger, fester in our own feelings. When we do know, we just refuse to acknowledge it for ourselves, disguise our bad qualities as personality.

Blame everyone and the sun about how we are, everything except for ourselves. Blame the pretty girls for being too pretty, blame the healed people for being healed, blame time for continuing on while you sit complacent in your thoughts.

You have to admit to yourself that sometimes you are the problem. That aside from all that has been done to you, you still are the problem. When you choose not to take steps forward, when you choose to ignore the help, and when you choose to be the bad energy. For sure, we have struggles, we have things that hurt us that make us fall, but the thing is no one can force you to be anything you don’t want to be.

What makes your story so special, so unique that you think the world should bend at your will to make you happy? Each one of us has our sob stories, our past that made us be ways we didn’t want to be, and secret traumas, so what makes yours so special that you think you should be allowed to not force yourself up even on the days there is no one behind you?

Your negative thoughts, negative life is not anyone’s responsibility but your own. Anyone who chooses to stay past all of your bad just to be able to see you back in your light is hopefully someone you choose to love forever. If not even you would stay with yourself what are the people around you that stick with you, to you? So many people, so many lives, so many struggles, yet you want to sit and wallow in your misery?

I hate the Kardashians the only line I know from that shit is “there’s people dying, Kim!” and I use that religiously, theres people fucking dying, sorry, not really, to go there but there’s people fucking dying and suffering and you want to sit down each day at your own pity party gorging on cake because no one can heal you? No one can come swooping down and just fairy godmother wish your problems away into a new day.

It’s time to buck it the fuck up and realize you are the only one that is going to be able to pull yourself out of what you’re in. Yes, you’ll need help at times, it’s up to you to ask for it and express that. Yes, love is around you and you are just being stubborn and ignorant to it.

You’re going to have to drag yourself out of the fucking mud yourself and it’s time to realize that. Start wanting better for yourself, force yourself to be better, listen and connect to yourself and figure that stuff out because sometimes, it is you and it sounds like a personal problem.

after thoughts

I talk so freely about what happened to me as a child, all the things that maybe no one really understands why and how I’m here and that’s ok. Everything always leaves its impact and I’ve always thought what I choose to do with it after, maybe I couldn’t have controlled somethings and it hurt me, but I can control what I do with it after the fact. I think most of all, I have learned that while pain may have been dealt to me I still had fault in how I handled it.

Do you ever feel yourself ‘grow up’ while you’re healing? Suddenly your inner child caught up to where you needed to be and you see yourself as your own child in a way haha. I am my own baby. No one but ourselves truly know the fully story of our lives; my mom used to always say she knew us better than we knew ourselves, and I would always want to shout “but you’re not in my brain you couldn’t possibly”. Things that were jokes to her were jabs to me, emotions that only lasted 5 minutes to her, lasted years on to me. I would always think you are not in my head, you do not know how I feel things, think things, process life, what I have been through when your eyes were not there.

Yeah, well, I felt myself grow up inside. I heard how scared and afraid I was on the inside I felt everyday there was a child crying, when I started to deal with everything happening I realized how much anger, pain, and sadness I was holding. Feeling and processing emotions for me was always something I struggled with immensely, I never felt I could express anything without fear of something.

My mom will tell stories of how obedient and quiet I was as a child; my favorite story about how every time I was taken to the gym with her I would be told to sit somewhere and I wouldn’t move at all, the workers had to vacuum AROUND me because my mom told me to stay, and I was not going to move. I think back to those stories and I wouldn’t really think about it as a child I was just constantly afraid of everything, afraid of what would happen if I moved and didn’t listen to my mom, but also what if I didn’t move for that cleaning lady?

I was always so afraid and anxious to talk, to say what I needed, what I wanted, what I was feeling. I always sat thinking why am I so different than the rest, my sisters were so loud and friendly and able to go about socially easily. What happened to me that was so different? I would always think. I used to think that maybe what my uncle did was to blame. I wanted to find blame in my silence in someone for so long, this fear had to have been someones fault, my fear though turned into anger at one point.

I thought I was healing but I was healing in anger. I was healing and trying to change the world, my world angrily . It hurt me a lot and a lot of others, people that I cared about with my whole heart, I hurt. Por mi culpa, por mi culpa.

When I chose to start healing right and without anger in my heart I realized that all of my anxieties and fears at one point were getting worse because of how I chose to heal and react to it all, past what was acceptable. I had the opportunity to be new, and I also chose different. In my life I saw I could either stay angry for ever and continue taking it out on myself and my family in angry attempts to change everything to what I wanted or I could actually start trying to be new.

My parents where children with children, when I started healing I had to ask myself is the action unforgivable or am I holding an anger I no longer need? Can I replace it with love instead, allow growth and change or is it emotions I must simply relinquish to and accept as is? if I can accept as is going both ways, either way I win. Either I get liberation, emotionally, and my trauma is in a way released and I get to feel what I had wanted in the first place OR I can say in simple terms “fuck it, it happened to me lets roll with it, feel what we have to and then say fuck it and fuck them”.

When I started growing I realized I was the one prohibiting my parents and others from showing me that they had grown and were being new. They all stayed despite me being stuck in different. Sometimes I think we as people want to punish things longer than necessary, not allow growth, and stay healing without others because we think we deserve it but they do not.

My circumstances were weird ones, I admit. When I talk about my traumas and the way I move about it all, I never want to make it seem like every parents are like mine. Some are out there who do not care and only hurt. My parents hurt me yes, but they also hurt themselves and I learned to see people in the way I see myself and I realize maybe some things are not forgivable but not all things are unforgivable, and if I can be forgiven for my actions, I can forgive others too because being able to still be lovable after knowing you’ve caused pain is hard to not want to run away from the forgiveness. I had to start seeing people for just what they were and who they were. Stop projecting what happened in the past into the future. Because I was only keeping the feelings about the situation and the situation itself alive when I did that

Seeing it be able to be different even if my inner child didn’t get to experience it made my heart hurt a little, I wanted so bad to have the life I see my little sisters living now, how much my parents have changed and how I was happy to see my parents be the parents they also wanted to be. I thought of the phrases they used to tell my sister and I “Maybe we show love stupidly, or don’t know how to” and ” Well we never said we were perfect parents” at every lecture we got, every bad time I remembered had those words. I see now my parents had their own emotions they didn’t understand either.

Even parents have inner children that need healing and acceptance, I learned that and realized that through my anger I also blocked out every moment my parents cared for me, every time I expressed love to them and felt it back was blocked from moments where we were all in our own traumas. I can’t blame my parents for going through unresolved trauma, I went through it too, I learned how to learn and heal from it and my parents learned how to heal and learn from it and us too.

have you seen me?

I had a dream last night, I was walking down the grocery store. It was dark and I was cloaked in my favorite blanket walking with my love. I heard a group of people whispering as I walked on ahead.. Hearing whispers of

“I knew her”

” isn’t that… that can’t be.”

“That looks a whole lot like…”

“No, dude, I’m telling you, that looks a whole lot like Ashley?”

“That’s Ashley.”

I kept walking down the dark corridor ignoring the small conversation. Have you seen me? I’m Ashley and thats all you need to know.

I speak volumes without speaking.

Exist even when I am not around.

Just my sister

You know, the one thing that really bothered me outside of the medical side of Delmy’s journey was the way people reacted to Delmy, my sister, they acted like she was someone different , suddenly the Delmy they knew and loved no longer existed. People saw disability before Delmy.

So, the reactions I would get from people who supposedly loved her who could no longer “see” Delmy through her handicap was astounding to me, honestly. You know everyone asks what can they do for you? What can they do for you? But when it comes down to more than just comfort food, or a shoulder to cry on, it is like asking for a small loan of a million dollars.

Only my small loan of a million dollars was to be treated normal, what I fought for was for Delmy to be treated normal, all I wanted was people to still see the same vibrant, colorful person I still saw. I scream and I scream my sister is handicap not sick; everyone treated her like she was sick, or ridden with some type of disease. People, family, friends, acted like I, my family were begging them to come see our terminal daughter, sister, come on over to our pity party. When all we wanted was for her to still be treated normal, human, I never said I visited my sister. I always said I’m going to hang out with my sister, because that is what it was.

I had CNA once tell me I had to “continue my life” right in front of my sister while I was hanging out because I came every day to see her and be with her. I looked at him and said she is my life. She was my best friend, my mama dos, she was my everything, we were ride or dies. How could a CNA tell me that in front of my sister? Just like that, just because she was non-verbal and unable to communicate they acted like she couldn’t comprehend. She was disabled, not stupid.

When you’re blind you can still talk, you can still hear, so why because she couldn’t talk and communicate couldn’t she still comprehend, hear, feel, just exist the same as everyone else?

My partner would glare people down when we went to stores who stared at us, my sister who I had seen before so confident was torn down by what others thought being disabled was, what others thought being handicap was. She could no longer just be Delmy, she had to be seen as disabled first and no one cared to sit down with us and hear who she was.

People always thought we were delusional for wanting Delmy to go to therapy, be given the best and thinking we could get her to the farthest point she could reach. I don’t think anyone in my family expected us to get the person the Delmy ‘used to be’ but Delmy was still Delmy and as my dad said to a doctor once “If we can take her farther and she’s showing she can progress, why wouldn’t we want to push and push to take her as dependent on herself as she can?” Doctors treated us like we were crazy for wanting our sister to be seen as disabled with abilities. They just saw her as disabled and said “leave her like that”

but, to see people we knew, family, close friends of mine that my sister had taken the role of big sister for suddenly too thought we were crazy, no one believed in her. They saw disability before humanity. They saw disability as a problem. They were all waiting for a moment were we said “she’s back! she’s back!” and they’d all come running and do all those things they missed doing with her or I’m sure like a lot of people, they were just waiting to hear that she passed and I never knew which was worse.

In my head I thought not seeing Delmy as she was, for who she was, no matter what she looked like, acted, sounded, needed, was the worst. They made us feel like having a disabled sister, daughter, was a burden. I used to take my sister out in her wheelchair and longboard with her, I used to take her to the library, stores, daily things and people would stare like how could we be out living. If it made me angry what did it make my sister feel?

Disability is always viewed as a problem. I remember I went to the gym as a child with my mom once and I remember a time my mom nearly lost it on a lady for ignoring and side-eyeing a disabled man who was asking a question. I remember her angrily doing sit ups going off to me “I don’t understand why people act like that. They don’t know disabled live lives? It is rude. Rude to act like disabled people are supposed to be kept inside . They want to love too, they want to be human too, why is that something that people think is weird.”

I’ve encountered so many people who think we are some power family because we took care of Delmy and all we would think is this is what you are supposed to do. People would tell me “oh, you’re such an amazing sister!” and I would just think I am just a sister, this is what I would do with my sister if she hadn’t become disabled and it is the same thing I’d still do since she was.

Everyone made me feel like hanging out with my sister, reading, writing, watching videos, coloring, playing games was all charity, it was love to me, normalcy to me. So, I mean it was upsetting to see how many people could toss aside Delmy and see just disability when Delmy had a past that wasn’t always disabled. The world has made disability seem like a burden rather than just assisted life. All Delmy really wanted was to still be seen as who she was and to have people treat her human.

The way that people decided to view us and my sister made it hard for me to even simply conversate about her. I could never simply state what we were gonna do, what we did that weekend without a round of applause, the world thinks that adventure, life is only for the neurotypical. Do you know how many times I had to pull my sister up on to a sidewalk because there was no handicap ramp? How many people let us struggle to open the door by ourselves because there was no handicap door, they stood to WATCH but not help. How many people sat and stared at my sister uncomfortably while we stood checking out our groceries as if their stares weren’t making my sister uncomfortable? stood in line to judge but not understand.

So many treat disability like charity when we find ourselves communicating with people with disabilities, the lives of disabled people is full of miscommunication and people thinking families are “delusional” for deciding to let your loved one live the most comfortable life they can, or you are a wondrous charity case, how kind of you, us to love our loved ones unconditionally. The world treats disabled people like they are superstars for being alive, when all they want to do is exist; they treat the families as if they do charity by loving their daughters, sons, sisters, brothers. It is a disgusting concept to have that be such a hard thing for people to comprehend because when we are not disabled it is easy to grasp, but when the person is disabled of any sort, physically or mentally, suddenly it makes them less human.

Not everyone can come

My parents used to always tell me “friends to do bad things with will always be around, those are usually the only friends there are.” I believed that whole heartedly, I’ve experienced it first hand. I also believe you can’t love or help those that don’t want it, and wanting it but refusing it is still not wanting it. Some people either want you as their literal partner in crime or they want you as comfort so they always have someone to invite to their pity party.

Not everyone can come and the sooner we accept that the sooner you are going to find the people who are in your vibrational state. It’s okay to not be liked, it is okay to leave toxic family behind, if they do not serve you do not pay them, if they never served you once, why continue dishing out meals to them? We get so caught up in thinking everyone has to come because we want to change everyone or just want to experience ‘what could have been’ but not every one is at the same level you are at, not everyone heals the same, reacts the same and as we grow we change even more. Constantly changing until we are comfortable in who we are enough to stay longer in that phase of ourselves

When we get stuck in trying to bring everyone we forget about the ones that are and have been already with us. Step back and do not worry about others paths. Not everyone will understand what you are in this world and that is something we have to accept in every aspect be it helping, communicating, and relationships of any kind. So when we roam this earth fulfilling our purpose we have to choose to understand some people are for us to vibrate with. Letting go of people is hard but we have to come to terms when someone is not meant for us.

Learn how to accept what to rekindle and what to keep put out.

Higher purpose

Speaking of emotional turmoil and revelation, another load of stuff I never talked about was all that my family and I went through when my sister, I don’t know, I never knew how to describe it. I always just said when she fell. There was a lot of trauma there too. Ultimately that’s what made my family and I grow. So much to unpack there, I never talked about it because I never thought about what everything truly was, how we had been thrown into a different world we had no idea about until we were put into it, and we would have never known about it either, to be honest. The medical and care facility world is not at all kind.

We were always fighting a battle and I didn’t understand why. My sister went through so much, we have had to see so much, if I feel this way sometimes I sat there and wondered how my sister must have felt, I could only feel and understand so much of her. The world for the disabled is scary. I remember within a week of arriving at one of the facilities, the doctor at the facility had come to check-in with us and ask us some things and asked me while I was hanging out with my sister,

“Have you thought about if maybe it would be easier if she were no longer alive? For her?” and proceeded to tell me how they could help in assisted-death. My sister was disabled in ways, yes, but the fact he had the nerve to ask that when she had nothing pointing towards being terminal? I sat there shocked that he would ask that in the first place, but what made it worse was after I told him no, we weren’t ever doing that and neither she would want that for herself, as we the family wouldn’t, he sat insisting that I sit and think about it. It seemed more like he wanted to have her dead and move on.

The doctors told my mom that she would be nothing but a vegetable, the first month she fell, they hadn’t even tried to work with her first. My mom helped my sister walk again, we helped her walk again, talk again, even started showing her how to eat. No therapist would work with her, take the time to treat her human; human for two minutes to see how she needed to be talked to, treated, and handled so that she would want to help.

The world of the disabled is a silent and lonely one. No one cared to treat her human. Forgot she too was feeling, seeing, hearing, understanding. Despite not being able to speak. Oh, but when you took the time…everyone was always so surprised to hear she talked with us, she did things with us.

I realized through all of that I started a fight for her and everyone my family picked up along the way. I watched my mom not only be a mom and protector for my sister but various other residents at every home we visited. Care facilities do not care at all, when you find a good CNA and nurse believe they are angels because I have never seen so much sadness in all my life, how uncaring, negligent, and horrifying that side of the world can be.

Much less do families though as well, I used to see this one resident, her name was Cindy, she was right across the room from my sister at her first facility; she was disabled, low-function. She would do nothing but lay in bed and be taken out to watch t.v. in the living room area of the facility. No one would even wipe her mouth when drool hung from her lips, because she could not do it herself. No one visited her except for one man on Sundays who came and read her a book about cars, I thought she had no family until her family visited for literally 5 minutes on Christmas and then left.

I always sat in fear of how my sister would have been left had no one been there to love her like we did; what if we had been a family to leave her in the dust? We have been through so much and it was a fight.

Our higher purpose or, rather maybe what I say my higher purpose is: to bring light into this world like Delmy was already doing, accomplish and reach the heights we were meant to reach. How could you not want to help those who need help, protect and serve people really? I mean I didn’t sit helping my sister with her college classes helping her write bomb essays, fighting and discussing human rights to her peers to forget the fight we had been fighting ourselves when we were shown this side of the world too. I never really thought about what to do with my life honestly, until I had to fight for my sister and realized that there was a lot of people we were fighting for and I’ve always been one for fighting for rights,

Fighting for something though usually means speaking about it first and honestly after what we had been through, it felt like so much that it was paralyzing honestly because the experience didn’t need to be like that. So hard to navigate, so scary, so uncaring, so harsh, how they could have done somethings to my sister was horrifying to me, how they could just ignore us because of medical programs, how easily it was to see how racist they would be towards my parents but not towards me because I didn’t sound Hispanic, I knew doctors just wanted us to shut up and take her how she was; how pushed aside we were because they refused to believe in the disabled, in the disabled rights to be comfortable, to be acknowledged, to be treated like humans. Things as simple as access to therapy and proper medication.

I’ve been loud for so many things that I realized I had to be loud for my sisters fight as well because that is what we did for four years and I knew it didn’t stop after she passed; because there are still people like her, like my family going through similar things. How do I start better by being loud about it, not only that but the way I was being so loud about my childhood trauma and how to change that and how I’ve always thought what do I do now? After all, that’s what happened to me, what I’ve been through, what now?

Well, I fight for it to be different somehow.

spirituality

I went to church the other day for the first time in a long time. I never really had a problem so to say, I went with my parents when I lived there but eventually my sister and I stopped going. I used to have a problem with the way religion, God, and all of that was portrayed. No one really tells you that there are many different paths to God. They all make it seem like it’s either an A. or B. situation; B. being the devil and A. being God.

I used to have a problem with the way things were explained, taught, and disregarded when it came to the things I wanted to know. I mean yes theres faith but there is knowledge to the faithful too, y’know? When I was able to learn for myself, go off and be spiritual in the way I chose, I found out that God really didn’t care whether I was anything but loving towards them and the world.

It’s not God that’s the problem, it’s the anger we hold towards the higher and the blame we put on everything BUT ourselves. We’re quick to be upset that the universe would allow badness unto us but forget the steps WE took to land ourselves in that situation. We know what is good and what is bad yet we still push our limits to see just how far the universe is willing to protect us and sometimes, because we are so greedy in our actions before even being grateful to the universal life force, we become upset that we were not rewarded for our bad behavior on top of already being protected and let off the hook for our actions.

We victimize ourselves for our own actions and then hand over our anger, grief, resentment, or whatever it is we harbor, we hand it over to the universe and say “it is because of you, universe, you ALLOWED it to happen to me.” but truly how far are you expecting them to intervene for you?

I think a lot of people think of God as a punisher rather than like your parent who has to sometimes put you in your place because you chose to act out of line knowing that you shouldn’t of, boundaries exist even in heavenly realms. I feel as if sometimes a lot of people focus so hard on how to be ‘holy’ they block themselves from actually being. So much is focused on how to live, how to act, we forget that all it is in the end is love.

Love, love is loving the unloved, feeding the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, speak against injustice, protect and uplift the weak. We dismiss the fact we were promised paradise with the agreement of work. With the agreement of being the keepers of what was given to us: mother earth and humanity. Mother Theresa said ‘anything done out of love is one step closer to God’ and truly, that IS all that matters when it comes to living and believing. I don’t believe in religion because I believe my own life and the way I believe I am being told to live is right. I believe in my God, my Jesus, and my angels.

I still go to church because some little voice told me to and I can’t help but think of when my sister and I would sit together in church, make hand turtles to each other during misa back and forth; my short thumbs made for the perfect awkward speedo turtle and I can hear her laugh when I go.

It’s not God that is the problem it’s the way we are taught to perceive it and how we CHOOSE to perceive it. I think opening up to the energies of the universe would benefit a lot of us, it’s the concept of free will. You see God, Jesus, angels, and all that jazz how you see it and I’ll see it how I see it but there is still a universal life force within us that is calling for us to listen deeper to it and pay attention.