Requiescat in Pacem, Zachary Dutro-Boggess

In my past, I came to learn a thing or two about child abuse. I deduced that my Aunt Helen and Uncle Frank were mentally retarded (sorry I don't know the most recent correct term for this). I know for sure that Aunt Helen was a victim of shaken baby syndrome. It became most apparent to me that there is a history of severe child abuse, perhaps even infanticide in my father's family of origin.

I shudder to think that if I had been born and raised in China, and once having been defined as "bad", I would have been subjected to severe abuse, even more so that I actually experienced as being raised in America. I suspect that with the appellation of "bad", I could have been killed. In China children were considered property, and therefore dispensable.

I have worked hard to heal from the trauma I was subjected to. My therapist thinks that I am pretty heroic to have gotten so far into recovery as I have. She admires that I chose never to continue the pattern of abuse, and that I committed myself to be a force for good in my students' lives.

 I think it's time for me to move beyond the pain of the past. I am almost done with it, I hope.

 The only reason I am thinking about my past abuse today is that Jon has written a poem in tribute to four year old Zachary Dutro-Boggess, who was murdered by his mother and her boyfriend in 2012. I think the link to me is that in his pictures, he looks so much like me when I was young.

Weight Loss & My Self-Esteem

I have lost a big amount of weight since my highest poundage 20 years ago. I was nearly 400 lb. back then. Now I am over 140 lb. less.

As I was walking toward Trader Joe's yesterday, I caught my full length reflection in the window, and I saw myself full length. What I saw surprised me. I was actually good-looking.

This realization is actually groundbreaking in that I always thought of myself as ugly. I know that the source of this belief was that I as raised to see myself as having no value, i.e., ugly, stupid, lazy, bad.

I remember when I had lost a lot of weight before, in the 70s, and I could not look at a full length image of myself and see myself as anything but ugly. I have been doing a lot of work for improving my self-esteem in the past decade. And instead of buying into the impoverished view of myself, I can actually see that I am not ugly, stupid, lazy, and bad. Paradigm shift is an accommodative learning; it requires a total readjustment of all I had previously believed about myself, and then adopt more accurate concepts about myself that I am now ready to embrace.