Hard to write

Hard to write--I find myself automatically censoring myself from expressing myself--yep, the people who have controlled my life for the last 10 years have done a really fine job of strait-jacketing my self-expression (interiorly and spiritually though, I refuse to give up to a lie).  Yes, it has been 10 years that I have lived in this hell.  I remember because the Spiritual Life Institute first started spying on me, and interfering with my life when I lived on County Line Road in rural Alamosa County.  One of my most vivid memories of County Line Rd, was waking up abruptly to an unexpected radio alarm about 6 in the morning. It was set to radio frequency and I woke up, shocked, to the words, "Princess Diana was killed in a car accident last night."  I am not an Anglophile nor a royalty watcher, but the words doused me like cold water.  Like most, I had a high regard for Diana, for all the reasons plenty of commentators have written about, but really I have come to admire her more as the years have passed, as I have realized how truly and desperately trapped she was by the expectations that others had of her.  Like myself, she refused to give up her quirky, unique self to conform and fit into the expectations of others--very powerful and highly resourced others.  I think it fair to say that the crushing rigidity and imposition of these others drove her to mental illness--depression and bulimia.  Had they just cut her a little slack, they would have realized that her quirky, unique self was a great and creative gift to the royal family, not a destructive challenge to it.  But she was up against a very entrenched institution, with centuries of accustomed superiority, and she just didn't have a chance.  My situation is similar to hers--I am trapped by other's expectations of me, but I have a spiritual resourcefulness and maturity that she lacked.  I haven't been driven to mental illness, but I have definitely been impacted.  My quality of life has been dismally poor for the last ten years as I have been forcibly denied any kind of friendship, privacy of life, employment, and freedom of expression.  In the last two years, as I have quit any kind of complicit cooperation with these people, they have destroyed my health by force feeding  me psychotropic drugs.  My body will never fully recover from the abuse it has endured, and continues to endure, though at a much reduced level.  The Serontonin has stopped, but some drug that gives me serious headaches continues to be force fed me.  I am depressed, and I believe the drug that I am being force fed now is responsible, since I can escape the feeling of depression by spending hours outside of the house.  I suspect that it is some kind of speed.  My depression may also be hormonal.  I have had my first period in over 3 missed cycles, and I really believe that I am being force fed progesterone which is turning my body into that of a whale.  I think my period was brought about by a 4 hour workout yesterday.  I had quit working out so hard because I was buffing out too much, but I am really dismayed as I now realize how my muscle is turning to flab.  I have fat cells and cellulite dimples developing on my body that I have never seen before--like on my legs.  The thought of having a fat, soft slug of a body is unbearable to me.  If I have to work out 4 hours a day to get back my muscular, hard body of which I was once so proud, I will do so.  It might get my cycle back on track too, another essential block of my self-esteem.

Some of my depression however, is related to a deeper realization that I am trapped by powerful forces which will never allow me to be free again.  These forces are either immoral, amoral, or a combination of both.  Religious institutions which abuse their mission of fostering and nurturing a spiritual life, and attempt to impose their will upon the individual by force, are immoral.  Corporations which base their decisions based on the profit motive and condescending cynicism for the customers they serve, are amoral.  Governmental agencies with six billion dollar budgets which violate the rights of innocent citizens of the country and constitution they are to protect and defend, are a combination of both.  Power is the great corruptor and soul destroyer, and somehow I have to make my peace with the fact that I will have to cooperate with these powers that have violated me so extremely, and indeed nearly extinguished me totally, in their stupidity and arrogance, rigidity and imposition.

That is why I have been thinking of Princess Diana.  I watched the final part of the Bashir interview, and while she never explicitly used the word, "forgiveness", (that I can remember), she was a very forgiving person.  The word she used a lot was "heart."  She was a person "of the heart."  I am not a person of the heart.  I am a person of the head.  That is why it is important that I listen to people who are people of the heart.  Diana was no fool.  She knew who her enemies were, and she suffered terribly at their hands, yet she also knew that it was her vocation and destiny to work with, and accept them.  Of course, one of them was her husband, and like many of the divorced, she knew the terrible pain of betrayal from an intimate, but there was no bitterness or anger in her pain.  She is a better person than me in that regard.  So I have been praying for enough forgiveness to accept the reality that I will be working with these power mongers who have caused such physical, emotional, and psychological devastation for the past ten years.  But I also know that boundary lines need to be drawn, and I know that I no longer consider myself a part or member of the Roman Catholic community for a whole multitude of reasons.  Forgiveness will not change the way I feel about that.  I don't even recognize that church as the one I joined twenty years ago.  That they would give a personal prelature and such powers as they have given to a truly perverse cult like Opus Dei (and they scared the shit out of me when I was in college--little did I know how truly scary they could be in their extensive power reach and abuse) is enough for me to leave.  I am relunctant to enter another religious community, but I think I am being gently called to consider it.  So I have got some praying to do.  Now all I have to do is keep the drugs out of my system so that I am well enough to pray...