I’ve been told that I need a lot of it… “Affirmation” that is. Who knows why? Maybe because I felt silenced when I was younger.

Or maybe just not heard. Now, I bubble my stories out to the world. Doesn’t matter if I have known you for one minute or many years. I’ve finally found a voice and my words help me connect.

Today my poor sweet husband gets much of the wrath that he does not deserve. Sometimes I feel him nudging me under the table. He says he is protecting me from me. I know he just cares, though I can’t help but feel a little offended and reeled in at times. Even though he probably is right. Maybe less is more.

But I feel I’ve been hushed for way too long. The problem is…

I have this story inside of me that I feel needs to be told. A story to empower young girls and perhaps make the men in their lives take a closer look at themselves. When I was younger I was in a very controlling relationship where I plainly just lost “me” for the sake of “him.”

Everytime I excused the way he treated me, I lost a little bit of “myself” in the process.

There is more to the story and my heart is conflicted in telling it, for I feel an odd kind of loaylty in the act of forgiveness that happened years later. I understand more now about my abuser and my heart truly does ache for him. But having acknowledged that, I feel that if just one person is taught something then the pain was not wasted. My message is that NO ONE should be hushed. Everyone’s heart deserves to be heard. I think Aibileen said it best to Mae Mobley in “The Help ” You is strong, you is smart and you is important.” If we were taught that as young girls and didn’t allow anyone to come and challege it, there would be fewer young women in the world allowing the abuse that they experience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZimx1wHYcs
Our opinions may not fit perfectly in the spaces that others want them to…

But we have a right to have them, just as they have a right to have theirs. Somebody needs to wake us up. Perhaps Glinda said it best to Dorothy when she said… “You had the power all along my dear.”

We All Break If We Don’t Bend

When did she leave? That part of me?
“she’d” never have allowed the pain.
I guess she didn’t want to see
the parts that still remained

like painted tea cups upon a shelf
handled with such care
always worrying they were too high
so why’d she put them there?

I know that we all have choices
in the messages we send
I can see it more clearly now…
We all break if we don’t bend.

Diane Reed
2013 ©
“Forget what hurt you in the past. But never forget what it
taught you.”
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