Category Archives: anger

Aug9

once upon a time

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“Well, well, well…if it isn’t the consequences of mah own actions.” – Beverly Leslie, Will and Grace

In keeping with the “it’s always something” theme, the latest ultrasound shows that I have severe pancreatitis. There will be more tests now before a definitive diagnosis and treatment are discussed. The doctor’s office says I’ll have to stop drinking! That’s easy; I haven’t had an alcoholic drink now in several years. That would have been a glass of wine with dinner in a restaurant, and maybe once or twice a year – if that. The last time I was drunk was at a New Year’s Eve party the year I was 21. Over fifty years ago. And only because my husband and “friends” kept secretly spiking my Coke, because, well, that would be fun, eh?!

Anyone close to me will tell you that I have an aversion to alcohol. I think it’s evil. No, that’s not true. I know it is. I’ve certainly seen it play out that way among my family and friends. From a physiological perspective, I know it causes horrible consequences in the body – never mind wreaking havoc on the mind and the spirit. It burns holes in your astral body like flame to cellophane. It’s effects are far more harmful and long lasting than any study in our culture will ever admit; that industry is too big to fail.

It has ruined the physical and mental health of almost every single person I have ever loved. And that’s a lot of persons. Either directly or indirectly, it has cost me dearly. Never having been a drinker, I have been dealing with the effects of other people’s alcoholism since around the age of ten. That’s the earliest I can remember being the adult in my household.

My parents out to dinner, my four younger siblings in bed, I would set up the coffee percolator ready to go, make a plate of cheese and meats, cover it with Saran wrap and put it in the refrigerator before I went to bed. When the garage door opened around two-thirty a.m. I would immediately wake up, run down to the kitchen and plug in the percolator. I’d take the tray of snacks out of the refrigerator. I’d greet them as they stumbled into the house and begin triage, insisting they ate protein and drank coffee before tucking them into bed and loosening their clothes. I was my own kind of pusher.

I hated alcohol before I had graduated high school. I already hated what it was doing to everyone I loved. I desperately tried to save each of my younger siblings from it’s harm for decades. I’m still intervening. The addiction has now been passed down to the third generation, to my son and my niece and nephews. I’ve divorced two abusive alcoholic husbands, but not for lack of trying everything in my power to save those marriages. I’ve lost several friends to the disease, some to death and some to severe injury and jail. It has broken my heart over and over and over again all of my life. There isn’t a day I don’t feel loss and grief because of alcohol. The people I know who don’t drink are few and far between. There is no good that is ever going to come from a drinking habit.

Suffice it to say that my inflamed pancreas is not caused by alcohol. I’ve adjusted my diet for years without knowing exactly what I was dealing with. I’ve quit eating sweets or anything rich or spicy. There isn’t much I digest well anymore. As of today my diet will become even blander. Am I a lot of fun, or what?!

No, my illness is caused by anger and grief. No two ways about it. I may never understand the direct link between the pancreas and it’s psychic or emotional counterparts. In You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, she says pancreatitis is manifest rejection. Anger and frustration because life seems to have lost it’s sweetness. Well…that would certainly make sense. I’ve craved sweets all my life, trying to fill that void.

It is no coincidence this symptom flared up now. I have talked about just finishing a 6 week in-depth conversation with a group of extraordinary women, the Wayfinding Road. I’m learning to love myself – in fact, I’ve never understood what that meant. I’m discovering it now. And so what is not love must surface to be seen, and felt, and released. That is how healing works. Yes, I will do anything and everything the doctors advise. And I will spend time each day in meditation. I will pay particulate attention to the sweetness of life. I will open my heart and I will soften. And soften. And soften.

And in case I haven’t said this yet today – thank you for being here. You are precious beyond measure.

Aug4

sing your heart to all dark matter

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“Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places…” – May Sarton

Let’s face it, I have far fewer years left than I have already lived. That isn’t what makes me sad. What makes me sad is that I feel like I’m just getting started. Late, I’m just starting to get the hang of this life thing. And my hungry heart wants more.

Part of my infinite wonder and curiosity is an ongoing fascination with words and language. Maybe everyone else knew this, but I just discovered that every year the Oxford Dictionary drops words no longer used regularly in the cultural vocabulary. It adds new ones, too. So I’ve begun researching this. And I would just like to say that I unequivocally do not like what I see.

For instance, in 2024 some of the words dropped from the Junior Dictionary were acorn, heron, fern, kingfisher, otter, wren and willow. They were replaced with the new vernacular: blog, broadband, bullet-point and voicemail. I am LITERALLY lost for words. I vote for the inclusion of the cultural slang phrase WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Seriously. What is wrong with us?

The summer has been nothing short of surreal. Where are the birds? I used to have so many here, and yes, I have stopped feeding them thistle. Bird feeders convenient to my door bring mice and deer, bear, many smaller predators, and they all carry the tiny, deadly tick – which admittedly I am afraid of. I’m not going to wander afield to fill feeders. But I have natural thistle and honeysuckle and quince and all manner of flower and fauna. I do sincerely hope that my behavioral change is the only reason for the birds’ noticeable absence. Meanwhile, smoke fills the sky. You can see sunlight on the trees and shrubs, but when you look up the sky is flat grey. The air quality alert remains dangerously high for “sensitive groups.” Aren’t all creatures of nature sensitive? Hey Lord, there are too many canaries in this coal mine.

I’ve been saying for a couple of decades now that it will be the artists who save us. Let’s also face this: they’re our only hope. This group certainly bolsters that argument – The Lost Words used the words dropped from the dictionary to write a song, a blessing spell for us, and put it to music.

“EVEN AS THE HOUR GROWS BLEAKER, BE THE SINGER AND THE SPEAKER…” – The Lost Words

Oct29

mind meld thingy

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Ooohh, man. I have been going through it. Some dark nights. So I suspect you have, too…’cause that’s how this mind meld thingy works…the past week has been intense. My cat seemed to be fading fast and I could not get a vet to help. My vet seemed to have fallen off the face of the planet. Other vets I called, half a dozen or so, could not get us in soon. They were referring me to an emergency clinic an hour and a half away. I was afraid the cat wouldn’t survive the trip. He panics in the car and goes into shock.

One receptionist admitted that they have been operating with one third their regular staff since the pandemic. They, like all medical services in the area – and all services, for that matter – are understaffed and overworked. The past three years have seen a tremendous boom in population in this area, as well as tourism. We are now experiencing “overtourism,” to use the new buzz word. So assistance just isn’t available, not quickly or nearby, anyway. Lately I find myself saying, “we are on our own out here.” But I see evidence of this happening all around the country. It feels like I’m standing on the beach of life watching the water rapidly pulling away from shore…and wondering what that means…

And I was triggered – big time. In a recent post I spoke about losing it with my son. But I seem to be all over the place emotionally in a way that very much feels like I’m right back in some adolescent hormonally-induced rage. What is going on?!

And so, in my panic (because that’s what this was) I did the only thing I could do – I started working the 12 step process and meditating. Now, as I’m sure you know, sitting still to meditate is almost impossible when you are so upset. And yet you need to get your breathing and heart rate under control. Stop the panic, interrupt the pattern. And once I was able to begin, just begin, to settle…whoosh. In comes inspiration. Inspire – ation. God as verb.

I will let you in on a little trick I’ve used for about 55 years or so now. It takes some time to get started. It takes EXACTLY as long as it takes for me to remember that I am not in control. AND ASK FOR HELP. That’s the trick – you have to ASK for help. Specifically, I begin reciting The Lord’s Prayer.

I think I was in high school when I first went to a metaphysical bookstore. It was the only store of it’s kind in the Detroit suburbs at the time, and it still exists today. I went looking for information on natural healing for my bleeding ulcers. I found so much more than I could have imagined. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was an actual portal to a new life. Mayflower Book Store in Berkley, Michigan: https://mayflowerbookshop.com/

That was where I discovered what those cards were that my friend bought me at a garage sale, bound in a rubber band with interesting drawings on them. They were tarot cards. And I bought a book called The Gnostic Gospels. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches that we only ever need one prayer, and proceeds to recite The Lord’s Prayer. I remembered it from early days of church when I was little. When I used to hold onto the seat of the pew with both hands as hard as I could because I was afraid I would float out of my seat and get in trouble. Those huge, huge angels up in the rafters were singing to me and I wanted to sit up there with them.

I am not religious. I don’t like religion. I guess I’m not ready to forgive the millennium of atrocities it hasn’t taken responsibility for. I’m not that expanded yet. In fact, like Elizabeth Gilbert says, “I’m such a pagan.” But I am oh so very faithful. And like learning the tarot by observing the imagery come to life every day for many years, I have learned that The Lord’s Prayer encompasses any worldly concern you will ever have and transforms it – or you – into manageable information. Plain and simple language, like the plain and simple imagery of the tarot, that leads us right back to our divine imagination. Thy will be done. Phew…a greater intelligence, a higher consciousness, has got me. Contrary to all my innards screaming at me, I am, in fact, not alone here. And btw, I spent far too many years worrying about what anyone else thought about my complex beliefs and how they did or did not conform into societal expectations. I no longer assign power where it does not belong. No one owns the teachings that serve us, whether of Jesus or Buddha or the tarot or animals or nature. I speak them all. If you find something that works for you, do not let anyone hijack it from you.

I drove over an hour away last Friday to pick up medication for my beloved familiar. Within 24 hours he was a different cat. He is doing well; probably better than he has felt in a very long time. Dear little thing. Another close friendship isn’t faring as well, however. I lashed out at a friend in my anger and desperation last week. Yes, I was mired in grief posing as helplessness. Yes, she said something that felt insensitive. And we’ve established I can be quite verbally abusive when triggered. I wish there was a pill to fix this.

Unable to sleep, I am writing this at 3 a.m. In meditation only minutes ago I was offered healing, a little loosening…I can only hope she felt it also. I hope I will have the best words to say when we speak again.

I do know, just within the last few minutes, that all of this frustration and anger and grief has come to visit at the perfect time. It was waiting for the perfect storm to expose it so that it could be healed. I don’t have to be so brave anymore. On earth as it is in heaven is not religious hyperbole. It is real, here and now. I surrender. And I can rest.

Oct20

the cherished outcome

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“Oh love, bring every grief you’ve carried with you as a door you’ll walk right by / if you don’t stop to look with that loving heart and a troubled eye.”

Our troubles feel as if they are like stone, a compacted, impenetrable medium which will not allow us in. It’s time to “put my money where my mouth is…” so to speak. Time to show up, front and center, and face that stone inside, standing steadfast between me and my own liberation. I talk a good game, don’t I? All this wisdom about getting free. As if I had a clue.

When I am lost as I am this week, in the rock hard grief of my own making, I have few places I can turn. I can always turn to David Whyte. Ironically, I was introduced to him long ago by a friend I no longer have any contact with. She chose to stay in the comfortable captivity of her abusive marriage, and I had to stop pretending that I could be her supportive friend. If you read this journal once in a while, you’ll realize this theme has carried throughout the 13 years since I began here. I’ve gone no contact with more people than I have in my life anymore. Every single one has been a death I am mourning. In retrospect today, this seems an obvious theme. After all, I began this outlet as a means to help me process my divorce and separation from family, from everything I’d ever thought I wanted. To come up against that rock hard resistance and face the unknown.

C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying how shocked he was to realize that grief feels so like fear. There is good reason for that. Grief is the last doorway between us and our freedom, and we are terrified of our freedom. How, exactly, do we manage to be in the world, but not of it? Get back to me on that, won’t you, please?

It turns out that ignorance is never bliss; it’s really only ignorance. It also turns out that bliss was never the goal. It has always been awareness, whether we care to admit that or not. Bliss would be, well, blissfully easy by comparison. But awareness is how we get to freedom – which is our one and only job here. We like to pretend the god ate our homework. Yes, you read that right. So what is all this angst-ing about? Well, I have come up against the biggest boulder my heart has ever encountered, and I’m guessing you have one, too.

Since my teenage years, all of my relationships have been hard. I am hard. I have always been difficult to get along with. Something inside of me has always been as uncompromising as a boulder. I was the eldest of five children, and the scapegoat in a narcissistic family system. Yada, yada, yada…I married young. I got out as soon as I could, and I wasn’t going back. At the age of 24 I had my son, and he has been the light of my life. In many ways, my salvation. I don’t think I’d be alive today were it not for him, and I certainly wouldn’t be the person I am. He inspires me endlessly. But we are at odds right now, and it is breaking my heart. It has shaken me to my core.

Intellectually, I can explain everything. To tell the entire story, I have to begin with the health problems which impacted that pregnancy. I was always a nervous and thus scraggly kid. In high school I was diagnosed with bleeding ulcers. I struggled all of my young life to keep weight on. So I was considered medically malnourished when I became pregnant at 23, and I proceeded to lose 24 pounds. I gave birth to a healthy 9 pound, 6 ounce baby with teeth coming through his gums, but I left the hospital at just over 90 pounds. I’m 5′ 6″ tall. Perhaps because of this, he has always had some (miraculously mild) learning disabilities, despite an extraordinarily high I.Q.

During his first year in school he began to show behaviors that we would now recognize as autism. I took him to every doctor of every type that I could think of. We checked his eyesight, we checked his hearing, we checked his cognitive abilities. The doctors all told me exactly the same thing: this child is a genius. He is bored. With the wise counsel of some teacher friends we began a discipline of working through a daily checklist. I would write and draw it out on a blank sketchbook page at night, and he would work through it after school the next day. He had to complete it before he was allowed to play. It always included 2 or 3 light chores and 2-3 fun, creative activities. It always included Hug Your Mother (because I’m not above manipulation.) Then, an hour before bed we sat together and read a story or watched a favorite cartoon while I massaged his feet with a grounding oil, usually sandalwood. This routine was working beautifully. To this day, when he becomes stressed he will often create a checklist.

I am telling you this now because he has been struggling again. As mentioned recently, he is quite depressed. The aftermath of the recent natural disasters seems to have impacted him deeply. He is a highly sensitive person. But I, too, am struggling terribly as a direct result of interacting with him, in his mental and emotional distress. And because I am literally the only sober person he knows, I’m the sole voice of reason in his life right now. I must make mental health the priority of our lives.

And yesterday, I suddenly felt terribly helpless. I was consumed with fear, and I blew it. He came out of left field touting some wild conspiracy theory about the corrupt government having created the weather disaster and being out to get us all – and I lost my shit. It isn’t even that I necessarily disagree with everything he was saying, but I absolutely cannot – cannot – function from that perspective. It is mired in fear. It is entirely divisive. And it is utterly hopeless. Talk about a conspiracy!

I don’t know that I have ever screamed that loud before in my life. I screamed at the top of my lungs – at him. I told him he was dead wrong about so much of what he has recently adopted to believe. And in no uncertain terms I told him that he is subscribing to cult behavior, and that I am afraid for his sanity. I frightened him, and I frightened myself.

And so, shaken as I was yesterday, I must ask myself some very tough questions. Do I want to defend my own personal beliefs at the cost of anyone else’s freedom, including my sons’? What if he and I become estranged and never speak, as the current politics has divided so many families? Can I live with that? Are my convictions that important? Are yours?

Do I have other options here, besides finding “the truth” of the situation? Of course. Firstly, I recognize that if I am not experiencing peace, I have given away my sanity. Somewhere in the hours/days/weeks leading up to this blowup I have assigned meaning somewhere it doesn’t belong. If every upset is a setup (and it is,) I bought into somebody else’s agenda. Or in this case, depression. I picked it right up because it’s a familiar habit. And if I picked it up psychically, so did my empathic son. We can put it down just as fast. I’m not going to give assholes my vote this election. My pussy is not up for grabs. Neither is my mind. Out, demons, out! Here’s to our better angels.

Both my son and I lost our sense of humor – and perspective! After all, that’s what depression is. I fell into that bad habit, and so did he. Now I want my funny son back. I want my kind, intelligent son back. I’m thinking that screaming at him isn’t the best approach. But I’ve been holding on too tightly. Too much fear bottled up inside. It is no coincidence that I am having a flare-up of asthma symptoms. I have been holding my breath. I’m done with that. You want to see what created weather looks like? Watch out for that boulder rolling downhill. Tomorrow’s forecast is warm and sunny.

“You too have travelled from so far away to be here, once reluctant and now as solid and as here and as willing to be touched as everything you have found.” Thank you, David Whyte.

Oct11

True Confessions

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Thank you for indulging me this week as I shared my fascination with murder mystery television series. I make jokes that I feel homicidal at times; I hope you know that I can’t really wrap my head around that. I know that most murders are crimes of passion, and almost always committed by family members (after all, who can infuriate us more?) but it is hard for me to imagine losing control to the point of becoming violent. Mean, yes. God knows I have said some very ornery things to the people I’ve loved and respected most. If you’ve ever won an argument with me, it’s because I let you. That is not something to be proud of.

Like generations of girls before and after me, I was raised not to express anger. Sugar and spice and all that…seen and not heard. I learned to stifle anger with the best of them. The very best of them being exemplified by my Mother. I don’t believe I ever saw or heard her angry. And I do believe that is what killed her. She was never angry until one day she was sick and full of cancer. A particularly aggressive, fast growing cancer – liposarcoma. Cancer of the fat cells. She didn’t have any fat. She weighed about 90 pounds. She had been struggling with anorexia. It was not nervosa, it was a medical type of anorexia where she simply had no appetite.

One morning when she suddenly couldn’t walk we rushed her to the ER and within 24 hours she had emergency surgery. They removed an eleven pound tumor from her tiny, weak body. She would live another eight months. Her oncologist, who had also been my sons’ cancer specialist and would later become my sisters’, told me “it’s the cancer of unexpressed anger.” I believe him. And I know exactly what it was about. If anyone ever had reason to commit murder, she did. She thought about it. She talked to me about it one day, devoid of any emotion in her voice. And I understood completely. But she didn’t do it. She really wasn’t capable.

I don’t hold back anger anymore. I let ‘er rip. I’d get out of the way if I were you. I might scream and even throw stuff – but not at you. I abhor violence. I’ve been the victim and the witness to it more than I care to report; it grieves me deeply. We were given a clear divine directive: on earth as it is in heaven. There is no excuse for physical violence – NONE – ever. That includes hunting sentient life, and any mistreatment of animals. And it includes war. It has no justifiable place on this planet. PERIOD.

If you have violent outbursts, do whatever you must do to learn how to manage your anger before someone gets harmed, including yourself. Get help somehow. One of the ways I channel my angry fantasies is to read or watch murder mysteries. I love good storytelling. I like problem solving, and hatred and bigotry are problems. Big problems. I must confess, however, that I vet these mysteries ahead of time as carefully as possible. If I do see the violence take place I will have nightmares and be unable to sleep afterward. That’s why I like the genre called “cosy mystery.” You never see the attack. There is little blood. I want the violence pre-managed for me, thank you. Keep it cosy. And believe me, the irony is not lost.

Believe me, also, when I tell you that if I do ever decide to commit murder, it will be slow and painful; absolutely premeditated. They won’t see me coming. I will never get caught. But don’t worry, it won’t be you.

Oct6

when push comes to shove

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The year was 1980. We stood in front of the Oakland County Court Judge and my husband looked incredulous. He looked me dead in the eye and said, “Susan, I never hit you.” And the Judge asked me to respond, to which I had to tell the truth, so I turned and faced him, standing with his attorney at the other table, and shaking, said, “No. But you pushed me into the wall and I fell down. And you kept coming after me when I was on the floor.”

“I’ve heard enough,” the Judge stated, “motion granted. You will have 24 hours to vacate the home, and you will not come within 50 feet of your wife. Do you understand?” The neighbors had called the police three days before. They were tired of being awakened between two and three a.m. after he had returned from the bar and begun to attack me. The young officer asked me if I had somewhere to go. I had called my friend and business partner, woke she and her husband and their children. I would hastily pack the baby, two overnight bags, and the officer would escort me to the edge of town, the border of his jurisdiction. We would live on their family room sofa for the next three nights, and I would show up for this hearing at 8 a.m. Monday morning.

That was husband number two. Number one I had snuck out on while he was passed out high, and never looked back. It would be 14 years before I married again, husband number three. I was 40; he was 57. He was not a drug addict. He was not physically abusive. He was, however, an alcoholic and a gambler. I would divorce him and remarry him, believing he had grown and changed; he had not. He had learned some new language and become more manipulative. They all had addiction in common. They were all narcissistic.

The counselor drew three stick figures stacked vertically, and connected each of them via lines between their hands. Marionettes. He labeled them from the top down: father, husband, me. Apparently he felt a visual aid was needed. He literally drew me a picture.

However, it would yet be decades before a different counselor would finally convince me that codependence IS, indeed, an addiction. There is no ingestion of substances. The body’s physiology produces the substances to create the addiction. It’s an invisible dis-ease. I suspect the problem with overcoming substance abuse is that the substance serves as a symptom of the underlying mental health imbalance – that being codependence. No one is going to successfully get off substances if they don’t face the demon of codependence head on.

Industries have thrived upon the medical knowledge based on addiction recovery research. You can’t stop drinking; you have to substitute something that tastes like the alcohol of choice without the alcohol content. Hence sparkling wine and non-alcoholic beer. You can’t stop the brain’s addiction to smoking without replacing the action; hence the vaping industry.

There is no demonstrable action to replace people pleasing. That is the causal level of addiction. Fixing the gigantic hole in the soul. Fixing the original wound. And most of us don’t remember it like Robyn here. But we see the evidence, the symptoms of our dumpster fire lives as they float past us in the flood. So where do we start? Take the Adverse Childhood Experiences test (ACE) and find yourself a counselor. If you are old enough to read this you need – and deserve – a counselor. Carolyn Myss said it decades ago: therapists are the tribal shaman of the Western culture. Find yourself a shaman. And then a streaming service with British, South African, and Australian murder mysteries. They do it best. I will highlight some this coming week here, but only the really funny ones…

I am immeasurably grateful that I have never had a substance abuse addiction (well, okay, coffee.) But I am no less of an addict. I am a people pleaser, what Melonie Beatty (Codependent No More) refers to as a Master Enabler. I will forever be in recovery. I will never quit quitting. I will practice setting healthy boundaries as if my life depends on it. Because it does. So does yours.

And people wonder why I’m obsessed with murder mysteries…

Sep21

the journey to 100

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The PBS series is called Brief But Spectacular, to which I must respond, “yes.” Just yes. I became 70 years old this year. I was already intimately familiar with ageism; it’s been tedious for the past 20 years. Recovery from c-PTSD has taught me nothing if not how harmful it has been to skirt the issue of my invisibility. Like Grace, I refuse to be irrelevant:

But I’ve also dealt with gender inequality all of my life. And being raised to stand against racial prejudice in Detroit, I’ve certainly had first hand experience with racial discrimination. I remember being denied a table in a nice restaurant with Black high school friends – as one example among dozens. I remember how that felt. Firstly, the dissonance of questioning what was happening. How I was horrified by it and my friends didn’t blink an eye.

I was 16 in 1970 when the movie Five Easy Pieces came out. My best friend’s family was moving to South Carolina that summer and they took me with them. We were staying in a hotel until the moving van arrived a day behind us, and to entertain ourselves we walked – as a family with her parents – across the street to see the new movie. When lawyer Dupea (Jack Nicholson) says not to worry, “they haven’t hung anyone around here lately – at least not anyone white…” the mostly Black audience let out a collective moan. Afterwards we went next door into a drug store to use the pay phone so that I could call home and check in with my parents. An elegantly dressed Black woman was on that phone and so I waited around. When she hung up and I walked up to grab the receiver the cashier let out a yell. She came out from behind the counter with disinfectant spray and a cloth and wiped down the entire phone before allowing me to touch it. What foreign country was this?! You think that cashier did that for everyone regardless of race? Don’t be naive.

In 1972 I became 18, legal voting age. As the descendent of a founding father and presidents who owned slaves, I was being courted by Daughters of the American Revolution and The John Birch Society. I didn’t contact them, they contacted me. (It would be decades before technology would show that I have African DNA.) But I had never heard of these organizations, and so sought to educate myself. Back then you did that by physically going to the library and The Detroit News archives. You had to be able to read, you had to own a car, know how to follow a map, and most importantly, be able think for yourself. I would take all of that for granted.

Many evenings I engaged in conversation with my parents about what this new responsibility meant and how to decide who to vote for. Bless their drug and alcohol raddled hearts, they both told me the same thing: always vote for the person you believe to be best qualified for the job. And so I did the logical thing – I volunteered to work for the campaign of Shirley Chisholm, certainly one of the most qualified people for the position of President the country has ever seen.

And then. Then she made that statement. I didn’t think much about it at the time, which proves how much I underestimated her brilliance. She said, “Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being Black.” Jesus. Let that sink in.

Fast forward a little over five decades, and I am still female and now I am also aged. Don’t be fooled, ageism is as real as any form of bigotry. It is just as invisible as my African blood. And my blood is boiling.