What are your plans for today? I called, where were you? Don’t they sound like innocuous questions? Like someone who cares about you and is simply concerned? Or is it that they are checking up on you? Are they keeping tabs now on where you go and what you do? Maybe they need to check the mileage on the car. Keep tabs on who I’m calling?
Does it seem strange to you to take such innocent questions and turn them into something sinister? It does to me. I used to be naïve and optimist. I don’t feel that way anymore. I want it back…I want to feel safe using my computer or going to the store. I don’t like feeling down and depressed.
So now what? How do I fix this? Can I fix this? How do I do that without hurting other people in my life? Children primarily. I suspect that there will be a fight over them. How do I deal with that?
So many questions…
Monday, August 30, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Today...
I got up this morning and I feel…nothing and everything. My heart feels numb but physically, I feel sick to my stomach and afraid. Of what, I don’t know. I eat because I have to but I don’t feel hungry. My head aches but more from tension than from anything else and I’m exhausted.
It’s hard work being something that you’re not. I understood this before but never really felt it until now. Before when I tried to be what they wanted, I honestly thought it was for the best. Everyone makes compromises in relationships, right? I didn’t understand the difference between compromise and surrender. Now I understand that I surrendered but at the time I thought it was a compromise.
This morning, my husband wanted to know what was wrong with me. I wasn’t my cheerful, optimistic self; I was, in his words, blah. Wasn’t that what he wanted? Someone who didn’t make any waves, who did as she was supposed to and followed the straight and narrow path? I have to be happy doing it too? Apparently, so I smile and say, “I’m just tired.” It isn’t a lie, I am tired. Tired of pretending. The ironic thing is that part of what came out in our argument was the fact that he wanted me to be honest with him. When I tried to be honest, I was lectured about the wrongness of my thinking. I wasn’t asking him to agree with me, I just wanted him to understand I felt differently.
When I went to my family reunion, it was so different. No one there cared about anything but that you were family. You didn’t even actually have to be related to be considered family. My dad’s ex-girlfriend came and was welcomed with open arms. I have, what most people would consider, a lot of kids and they simply welcomed them in, never saying a word about how many or lecturing me on birth control. I spoke there honestly about my beliefs and even though some of mine were vastly different from some of theirs, no one grew angry or outraged by it. Instead, everyone made others feel welcome and like they mattered. It was so vastly different from my husband’s family that my kids were in awe.
I wasn’t afraid there and driving home from the friend I had visited up there, I found myself wanting to turn around and go back. I didn’t want to go home. Prophetic…
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Compliance
Compliance is such a funny word, isn't it? Brings to mind thoughts of prisoners and prisons or forcing people to drink the kool-aid. I never really thought about the word compliance until recently. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that some times, compliance is the only way to survive the moment. No, not physical danger but emotional/physiological danger.
Confession time, my name isn't Noly and where ever I say I live...I don't. This blog is simply here to allow me to say all the things I really think because I can't say them where I am. I can't be who I am, not without paying a big price right now. I'm tired...tired of trying to be me and getting slammed for it, tired of trying to be strong enough to take care of everyone else and tired of being pulled back when I stretch out for a bit of freedom.
My husband says he loves me and I believe that he does but that love comes with a heavy price. That price is my compliance with the way he and his family think and believe. In no way, shape or form are you to be different. I tried, I tried for years to be what they wanted but then I nearly died and I lost a son. Suddenly, those things that they seemed to think were so important, didn't seem so important in the big picture. It was almost like coming out of a storm into the calm after. I got it...so I tried to be who I really was. Things became difficult between my husband and I and I began keeping secrets from him. You know what they say about secrets, right?
My secrets came out yesterday in a big way. What was this horrible secret that I had hidden from my husband you ask? Was it an affair? Perhaps I had become a hooker in my spare time? Wait, was it that I was the secret mastermind of a terrorist organization? No, no and no. My secret was that I wrote a book, a book that was a gay romance. Not so bad, you say. But to my husband and his family it was a serious crime. So how did it come out? I wasn't stupid enough to use my real name. Turns out that his family has been spying on me. Apparently I had shown too many signs of being different and they felt that I needed checking up on. They found out things that they should not have been able to find out unless they had joined groups that I belonged to and had gotten on my facebook somehow as a supposed friend. The length of that they went to is appalling. The saddest part was that those who did it couldn't even keep it to themselves and us but first told everyone in my husband's family, even his elderly parents. This was, I have learned, to put more pressure on me to comply with their way of thinking. At that point there were multiple phone calls to my husband at his work. There were phone calls to me as well, subtly trying to find out information about my website and facebook account. I confess here that I lied my ass off to them about it and tried to deflect them from it. Even as I did this though, I knew in the back of my mind what was coming.
Sure enough, I received a phone call from my husband that evening at my work, requesting I come home and talk to him. My husband, by the way, is an intellectual. He's very intelligent but like all very intelligent people, he assumes that he's right with everything. Not to mention that to him, debate is like a big game. I, on the other hand, know what I feel and think but have a hard time debating issues. Basically, I went into this already knowing the outcome. Some of what he asked for was reasonable. We had issues besides the writing that needed to be addressed and I had no problem with understanding where he was coming from and how we could work together to fix it. The writing was a different matter all together, as far as he was concerned, I was promoting a sin and I would cease immediately. Of course there were the usual platitudes of how I was an excellent writer and how I should write romance...just not one involving 2 men. Then I was lectured on the sin of homosexuality and why they can't marry. Every time I tried to explain the way I thought, I was told the errors of my thinking. Finally, I bowed to the pressure and gave in.
I feel like a wimp. I feel like my heart has died and that the world has lost it's brightness. I feel like a butterfly who broke free of the cocoon only to flutter into a spider web. Entangled, trapped, alone...that's what compliance means to me today.
Confession time, my name isn't Noly and where ever I say I live...I don't. This blog is simply here to allow me to say all the things I really think because I can't say them where I am. I can't be who I am, not without paying a big price right now. I'm tired...tired of trying to be me and getting slammed for it, tired of trying to be strong enough to take care of everyone else and tired of being pulled back when I stretch out for a bit of freedom.
My husband says he loves me and I believe that he does but that love comes with a heavy price. That price is my compliance with the way he and his family think and believe. In no way, shape or form are you to be different. I tried, I tried for years to be what they wanted but then I nearly died and I lost a son. Suddenly, those things that they seemed to think were so important, didn't seem so important in the big picture. It was almost like coming out of a storm into the calm after. I got it...so I tried to be who I really was. Things became difficult between my husband and I and I began keeping secrets from him. You know what they say about secrets, right?
My secrets came out yesterday in a big way. What was this horrible secret that I had hidden from my husband you ask? Was it an affair? Perhaps I had become a hooker in my spare time? Wait, was it that I was the secret mastermind of a terrorist organization? No, no and no. My secret was that I wrote a book, a book that was a gay romance. Not so bad, you say. But to my husband and his family it was a serious crime. So how did it come out? I wasn't stupid enough to use my real name. Turns out that his family has been spying on me. Apparently I had shown too many signs of being different and they felt that I needed checking up on. They found out things that they should not have been able to find out unless they had joined groups that I belonged to and had gotten on my facebook somehow as a supposed friend. The length of that they went to is appalling. The saddest part was that those who did it couldn't even keep it to themselves and us but first told everyone in my husband's family, even his elderly parents. This was, I have learned, to put more pressure on me to comply with their way of thinking. At that point there were multiple phone calls to my husband at his work. There were phone calls to me as well, subtly trying to find out information about my website and facebook account. I confess here that I lied my ass off to them about it and tried to deflect them from it. Even as I did this though, I knew in the back of my mind what was coming.
Sure enough, I received a phone call from my husband that evening at my work, requesting I come home and talk to him. My husband, by the way, is an intellectual. He's very intelligent but like all very intelligent people, he assumes that he's right with everything. Not to mention that to him, debate is like a big game. I, on the other hand, know what I feel and think but have a hard time debating issues. Basically, I went into this already knowing the outcome. Some of what he asked for was reasonable. We had issues besides the writing that needed to be addressed and I had no problem with understanding where he was coming from and how we could work together to fix it. The writing was a different matter all together, as far as he was concerned, I was promoting a sin and I would cease immediately. Of course there were the usual platitudes of how I was an excellent writer and how I should write romance...just not one involving 2 men. Then I was lectured on the sin of homosexuality and why they can't marry. Every time I tried to explain the way I thought, I was told the errors of my thinking. Finally, I bowed to the pressure and gave in.
I feel like a wimp. I feel like my heart has died and that the world has lost it's brightness. I feel like a butterfly who broke free of the cocoon only to flutter into a spider web. Entangled, trapped, alone...that's what compliance means to me today.
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