When My Head Stops Hammering

When my head stops hammering (Is the pounding coming from inside or out?) -- and the ringing in my ears quiets down, I may begin to find my way, again, onto the sturdy, stable, serene path I’ve worked so diligently to build for myself.

When the hammering stops on that trash can I’ve been living in, now, for almost nine months, I think I will begin to discover that I have become a new me, a refinement of the me I used to be .

But today, as I wake up to a new life, I find myself, merely, in a puddle of tears

I feel me waking up to a new life, a new me,  a better informed me, an eyes-opened by circumstances me.

But who is it that I find here, now?

A Shaman/Goddess are the descriptive words that come to my mind.

Reflectively I am reminded that being blind made a shaman of me, years back.

Now my Ethics Complaint and the subsequent process it prompted, taking me down into the very core of my fears, anxieties and insecurities, has strengthened these latent capacities in me: the ability to face one death after another of ego-derived parts of me, resurfacing each time with greater clarity, enhanced humility and more compassion for myself, as well as for others.

And, as did my term of blindness (1998 – 2006), I am forever changed by what I have been experiencing these heart-rending, pressure-filled months.

In walking through the past nine months of this ordeal, I found myself reclaiming lost parts of me. 

At a point I noticed that even my body had come to feel different. Most amazingly, I realized that my body felt like my seven year old body. My little girl, ballet-class body seemed to be the one I was walking in.

One day, ambling on a pebbly road in modern-day, ballet slipper-like shoes, I found myself stumbling, feeling as if the young ballerina me did not know properly how to navigate a stony road in shoes so delicate.

Nothing else in me seemed out of place other than that my childlike walking didn't quite fit with the harshness of the road.

It was at that moment that I truly began to realize that my Ethics Complaint ordeal was truly changing me from the inside to the out, body, mind and spirit

I've walked hundreds, even thousands of miles, through the darkest places of the underground of my soul these past months, to come into the Light that yesterday ushered in for me. 

I had received an email letter from the Ethics Committee Co-Chairs that was so outrageous I felt shocked by its contents for hours after!

That communication, feeling at first like a sucker punch of rejection words, initially, seemed to be, not only a negation of me, personally, and all I had submitted, but also of essential reality, as I knew it. 

A redefining so outrageously bold, from my perspective, and out of touch with, even commonsense, that I found it almost difficult to comprehend.

Thanks to the wonderful support network of friends and family, available to boost me when I’m in need, later in the day I concluded that the inhumane treatment I had experienced throughout most of my dealings with that Ethics Committee seemed to be validated in that single letter, if one was aware of the context from which it came. 

Here, in my opinion, was a striking example, demonstrating that my original purpose in contacting them, based on an Ethics Complaint for sexual harassment and power abuse by one of my mentors, seemed, consistently, to be minimized and pushed aside.

However, sitting back, attempting to gain perspective, I realized that, with this letter, they had gone public, more or less, with their shocking emotional disregard of me. 

If I, too, chose to make my views public, they'd, likely, be called to account for their treatment of me, I thought, with immense delight, grateful for the documents I now held, illustrative of the difficulties I had encountered, almost ceaselessly, for nine months, with their demands on me.

Oh, the benefits of paper trails, I thought with a relief, feeling freed from bondage, at last.

From here forth it would not be me, cast as being the out of line one, as the insecure Child in me had feared being all these months, as their disrespect and lack of compassion for me built up, day after day, robbing me of the joy and well-being I had worked so hard to build into my life! And that I had entrusted them to help me more firmly secure.

Now they might, likely, need to be investigated!

Caught red-handed, in my opinion, and needing to defend their position!

Not I, the the suspect one, as they had portrayed me these many months! After all, how could a woman complaining of sexual harassment and power abuse being anything but suspect?

Now, however, with this one missive in hand to substantiate my complaints of them, my ordeal with the ITAA Ethics Committee was almost over; my term of travail could, now, begin to fade!

Soon my untold, held-back story could come out in full, if I chose to share it! 

And the strong inclination of organizational and business structures to disregard the #MeToo distress of beautiful women will be one brick closer to being dismantled!