Healing Through Change

“Forgiveness does not change the past. But it does enlarge the future.” Paul Boese

It took a cancer diagnosis and prison in my early forties to bring into focus the nonsensical path I had chosen to be all I could be. I may have looked like a mature woman, but I was far from it. My stints with women who brought into my bullshit acts of coming in and out of their lives contributed to my ideas of what I didn’t have to do more than what I should be doing.

Years ago, a woman I had a somewhat complicated relationship with told me I treated people like paper plates. She said I used them then threw them away. I protested, but in my heart, I knew it was true. We met while incarcerated. It just happened that we were compatible females in an incompatible place to form relationships. We began a friendship by writing these wonderful letters to one another after I was sent to prison. During that time, Lynn and I were close to celebrating our tenth anniversary, but in my deceptiveness, I never mentioned her to LJ. When I was released, I went back home to Lynn at our place in Mission Hills by the hospital. We chose the place because the area was gay-friendly, and Lynn could walk or bike to work at Fedex on San Diego Avenue. LJ had a place near her relatives in Point Loma, and I spent time with her when I could. Her affair with crack had not gotten any better while locked up so when she did her two three day Houdini acts, I went home to Lynn. After a few months, I realized I could not keep up the charade. I was committed to Lynn because we had ten years of our lives entangled and entwined, but my feelings for LJ were intense. But, I did not trust her. As a lesbian, I felt the disappearances were due to a male relationship. Thinking about it now, my own lies and betrayal had more to do with my trust issues than her actions. The day I decided to do my own disappearing act, LJ hadn't been home for several days. Ironically, the moving company I called had only been there minutes when she arrived in a taxi. I told her I was going back to Denver to be with my family, and see you later bye. It was not her style to yell or get loud, so we said our goodbyes quietly, and I went home to Lynn. It was months before I went back to Denver. Though San Diego can be a small town when it comes to knowing and seeing the same folks in the same area.....especially in the black community, it also lives up to its "second-largest city in California" when it comes to getting lost among the crowd. I knew LJ and I had little chance of running into one another because in the twenty years I'd lived there, we'd never met until our stay at Las Colinas.

In retrospect…..the painful realization is LJ could have been a lifelong friend if I'd been less devious. She told me she refused to be a paper plate, and no matter how much coke she smoked, she was fine china. That stuck in my mind for years. Because of the cloud of addiction, I lost sight of the fine china surrounding me and treated most everyone like paper plates. It took four years of sobriety and therapy before I could fess up to my self-absorbed unfulfilled life. In sobriety, I want to be the highest form of myself. What I mean is, I want to achieve all the humanitarian things I pursued when I joined the Black Panther Party in the '60's and the women and gay rights organizations in the '70's. My work as a Human Resource Director for a corporation that had group homes nationwide for persons diagnosed with dementia and memory impairment was my introduction to mental deterioration. Who knew it would become the focal point of my continuing sobriety to be available to direct the care of both of my parents until their deaths.