Courage...
"It's when you know you're licked before you begin
but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what."
-Harper Lee
Atticus Finch spoke those words in "To Kill A Mockingbird."
I am of THAT generation who grew up on great men speaking great words.
Some of our heroes were real and some were imaginary, it didn't matter to us.
What mattered is they STOOD for SOMETHING.
In my personal life, I don't stand a lot, I sit mostly. Bad feet from standing in heels for far too long in that pink ghetto called fashion retail. And that's okay because I am from THAT generation who also believed THAT only men should worry about greatness via morality.
An immoral woman was just another euphemism for a SLUT.
But women's roles are changing as fast as THAT glass ceiling is cracking.
If someone would have told me when I was a little girl, I would become my brother and my father's keeper, I would have laughed out loud at them. The chances were as slim as a woman becoming the President of the United States of America.
Mental illness is the killer disease on both sides of my family. It comes in the darkness and grabs you by the throat squeezing all the sanity out of your very existence.
I am one of the lucky ones.
I believe in medication and I believe in therapy.
Anhodenia, suicidal ideation, anxiety, you name it... I got it.
My mother passed away in 1991 and took our family with her.
For twenty-years my brother and father destroyed everything that family values stand for. The two of them were poster boys for mental illness. There is not one single thing on this planet my little brother is not fuckin' addicted to, including fucking.
Last February, the next step for them looked like homelessness.
I took them in.
Friends warned me.
"No good deed goes unpunished etc......"
There are no happy endings for most dysfunctional families drowning in mental illness.
It is what it is.
My father died in June.
There was no funeral. There was no money. The government paid for his cremation
No will.
No estate.
On the fourth day of this month, my brother did an early morning run on me. He left me with two months of rental arrears and a maxed out credit card.
Alas, the histrionics followed. A letter arrived in the mail calling me every name in the book....projecting all the fucking shit on to me.
There were no surprises.
Because I had realized the final outcome all along, the whole situation was doomed from the start.
You see, I never stood a chance.
But the point is...I stood for SOMETHING.
And in the long run.....when push came to shove.
THAT, gentle readers, is the only thing THAT really mattered.
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