Crying in the empty room of the shelter, I pulled out my journal and scrawled "Personal Independence Day" on the next blank page as I began to write melodramatically about what had just happened to me. I had a sense of being totally and utterly on my own for the first time in my life, and it was scary instead of wonderful because I hadn't been remotely prepared for it.
But by the next year, when I had a job and my own apartment, I celebrated it.
And the next year, when I was in art college, I celebrated it.
The next year, I was married too young to someone I hardly knew, stranded in the woods with no driver's license and no idea that I had the freedom to leave any time I wanted to. Somehow I had not learned my mother's lesson yet.
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."
~Alice Walker
The year after that, when I had enrolled in community college and was working on getting a degree in teaching, I celebrated the day.
I continued to celebrate every year - by doing things for myself that I was usually too self-sacrificing to do. Sometimes - most of the time, when I was married - it was something so simple that I could almost cry thinking back on it. A haircut my husband disapproved of. Buying myself a new journal. Skipping the dishes and watching a chick flick instead. Going for a walk by myself in the woods. A step up from this would be visiting some shop or gallery that I had never been to before.
Over time, it became a sore spot and a big joke to my husband, who became less and less interested in me as a human being and less and less inclined to treat me with the basic respect accorded a human being. At best he would roll his eyes or accuse me of being selfish for causing him any kind of inconvenience - at his worst he actually would put a stop to it in some passive aggressive way (his modus operandi).
Immediately following the divorce, money was tight but doing those small things for myself was more common. Personal Independence Day might be the day I began attending a support group, the day I applied for Graduate School, the weekend retreat where I painted a picture to a live audience with music playing in the background. The day I attended the orientation to go on a trip to Ireland.
It took a few years for the scales to fall from my eyes so that I could see that I was worth it, that I deserved these things, and that I wasn't being selfish for wanting them.
It has taken a lifetime to be comfortable in my own skin, to not be that heartbroken girl whose parents had disappointed her.
A lifetime to realize that I had never been a victim on that day.
After all, it had been my choice to be left at that shelter.
My mother hadn't wanted to do it, but seeing that I refused to go back home where I saw only more pain ahead for the entire family, she took me back to the shelter. I had decided that I didn't have to live in a toxic, dangerous environment any longer. I had decided that my own worth was more important to me after all than what worth I held to them, or to others.
I went on to do the best I could do with what I had at my disposal at the time. I made mistakes, but I also made and met many of my goals. I am the person I am today because of that day at the shelter.
I am a wiser, more compassionate person. I have more to offer the world than I ever would have had if I had allowed myself to remain in bondage to judgement or oppression.
I am independent.
Being independent, I find more ease and joy in the company of others.
I love myself for who I am at my core, and I am aware that anyone else who gets to know me at that level can't help but love me, too.
And I celebrate that.
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