Finding My Feathers

The first year of high school was not what I would call fun. I wasn’t what you would call a feminine woman, I was plus size, but with the way I was built I never felt feminine. I was already in the cadet system at this point, lived in uniforms or olive drab. My interests were tearing apart engines, riding sleds, hiking & camping.  I was a tomboy through and through. On the other side Blues Music, and the bagpipes. I read voraciously. I loved to dance and just feel the music and creativity.

Yet I pulled on my masculine energy and wore It as a form of armor. After 40 years I've realized my entire personality was a form of self protection. It never hit me that I was trying to make myself more masculine, therefore less desirable. It worked too, my own cousin and his friends tortured me in that first year. Some of them have actually apologized as adults. Zach it meant everything to me that you acknowledged it with me. I had so much respect for you as a person after that day.

I actually have to thank them though, I wouldn't stand up to them, but it had started to build enough anger and resentment that I started fighting for other things. I became stubborn in who I was. In some ways unmovable in my beliefs, so unmoved I was asked to leave the school. It was a Catholic School, and I refused to rewrite an essay on my belief in God. I spoke about believing spirit is a duality, that the divine was not a man but both masculine and feminine. I explained my belief in the triple goddess, and the Similarities to the holy trinity. This essay wasn't disrespectful, I wrote

MY OPINION. MY BELIEFS. And it would be a cold day in hell before I wrote anything but MY TRUTH.

My beliefs became stronger, and after years of being made to feel small I finally started to find a little fight. I dove deeper into my Celtic roots as well, I consumed the laws of Wicca & The belief systems at a speed and ferocity that I couldn't explain. It finally made sense. Part of the Wiccan belief system is the law of three. Essentially any energy we put out into the world comes back to us x3. This concept seemed to be the glue that has continuously held my heart together, and my own darkness at bay.

Every time it has been broken or betrayed I tell myself that spirit will handle it. I let her give the justice and karma that is deserved. I understood that my actions, reactions and intent would cause me more harm then any they would receive. I took that to heart. Call if Self preservation but I applied the law of three to my life, and decided to live in complete intent with my words. I learned to control most of my anger. I learned to forgive, to let spirit handle justice. I learned to just live my life. I stood in this authenticity for years. 

The Small Moments that allowed me to Soar

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I can’t say I did this on my own. It was mostly because of the encouragement of two very special teachers.  The first, welcomed me into my new Catholic school, taught me that all religion stems from the same core beliefs. He believed and taught that in the long run, the only thing that mattered was to live in love, light and kindness.

He allowed me to teach the sections on Wicca in our world religions program and encouraged my growth. I'm not sure if Mr. Battigelli even knew the impact he had on my life. It meant everything to that broken little girl who only pretended to be strong. I hope someday he is able to read this and knows the difference he made for me. That all those little kindnesses, the acceptance were really the difference.

On the outside I was confident I was a leader in the community, I worked hard, I had excellent grades, held down multiple jobs. On the inside I felt worthless and broken, all of the things I was doing were to try to feel valuable, I needed those things for validation in ways I didn't understand.  Yet inside no matter how good I was, how hard I worked, how much I served others I wasn't enough. I couldn't erase my shame, I kept praying that I could just forget and let it go. It was eating me alive from the inside,   so I buried it deep and for years never spoke a word. 

The second Teacher, who deserves so much credit, can’t be mentioned here. I truly hope he knew what he did for me, and that he SAVED ME. This teacher is the only reason I am still alive today. It breaks my heart that I never got to say thank or goodbye to him. He changed my life in ways no one could ever truly understand.  When I was 15, I finally met someone I felt safe enough to be with sexually. Now he didn’t know what happened to me and we were kids, but in a blog post he spoke about me and my body in ways that were unforgivable. This blog post was printed and distributed by his best friend, someone I believed was my own friend. It was passed around our school, the school bus which had kids from all of the high schools, and that morning, I had sat through 45 mins of them reading it out to me over and over again and laughing,

People I knew, People I was friends with, and People I thought cared about me.

I gave myself to him and he gave me a beautiful story of how I was so loose it was like a hotdog going down a hallway, and that I was so fat I had DDD breast in the front and DD in the back. I wish back then I would have stood up for myself and been this petty. Ive come to learn it doesn't matter the size of the bun. If the weiner is the width of a Vienna.

When I got off that bus I held my head up, the tears back and I took the first stairwell I saw. I made it down one flight before I collapsed in tears on the landing, contemplating just giving up, I didn't want to live like that anymore. That teacher taught me a skill that has been both the bane and saving grace of my existence, he taught me to compartmentalize my pain.

He assured me the boy was the problem, and most of all he just let me speak, he held back his opinions and gave me the space to let out all of that pain that day,

I can't tell you how long he sat with me, but he didn't leave me until I was okay.  He also made sure it was dealt with, He ensured my parents knew, he pushed us to file libel charges, and I was never so grateful that my parents did. Everything ended with a warning for the students involved and I never rode a school bus again, but someone finally stood up for me, that teacher, and my parents.

It was one of the few moments where I actually felt like my pain was heard and validated. I worked and started using a transit pass for school instead. I took city transit to and from school for almost a year. Until my parents bought me a car. Yes I had to keep my grades up to earn it, and I was expected to pay for my own gas and maintenance, but I finally had a way for things to be a little bit easier.

The real difference was three weeks later. That teacher walked up to me at a high school football game, introduced his son and told me not to let anything bad happen to him. I don’t know why that felt like a challenge, maybe because his son has always made it one.  That day he gave me the most beautiful gift I had ever received, the gift of hope, a safe space and my best friend. I didn’t know it then. He helped me survive every bad moment after that. High school went on, with a slew of allowing people to take advantage of me, and hurt me. Throughout it all though I had him, and a couple other close friends: Neil, Jason, & Devon. With their support and friendship and a sense of finally belonging somewhere I survived, and even started to thrive. The more I wore that ambitious mask, the better I seemed to be so I kept it on and faked confidence and compartmentalized everything bad right through to adulthood. Continue Owl's Story