Out with the old and in with the new

It's December 30th, well technically it's December 31st so I guess this thought process I'm stuck in is relevant as it is officially the last day of 2005. Today, or rather yesterday has been epipheral, because it has marked the ending of so many things and the beginning of others.

While running errands and answering a gazillion phone calls about a New Year's eve event I'm involved with, I had the unfortunate experience of hearing through that proverbial grapevine some negative things said about me amongst colleagues. Since venturing on my own in business a while back I've been learning that negativity follows closely behind progression, but that still doesn't make it any easier to hear or burden. So as I've been learning to toughen up my sensitive Libra skin, I've been dealing with several situations where there were negative things said about me that were completely untrue. You have to understand that it has been my natural inclination for the past thirty one years to fly under the radar to avoid the spotlight. Never one to enjoy confrontation or negativity, I've often stifled my true aspirations for fear of drawing too much attention, and we all know attention equals positive and negative feedback. I think I would've continued flying at a mediocre altitude had I not been forced this year especially to shake things up. So I'm shaking things up carefully trying not to kick up too much dust and yet the dust finds a way to come to me.

So as I'm driving home with my stomach in knots mulling over how to handle the latest situation I get to my front door and there is a box waiting for me. I look down and realize it's my baby. The first actual live copies of my debut novel are waiting patiently for me at my front door. Still plagued with the idea that no matter how much I try, everyone is not going to like me, I put the books in the house but don't open the box. Things have been happening so fast and I am not one who welcomes change.

I decide to contact my old boss and confront the situation. Letting her know that I respect her and hope she doesn't buy into the negative comments being tossed back and forth about why I chose to strike out on my own. After deciding what to say I sit back and look at the box. In one year I've gone from a subservient employee to an entrepreneur and published author. Now to some that sounds like a great year, to me it sounds frightening. My familiar altitude has been stripped away and I'm out there flying higher than I feel comfortable, I feel like a baby bird that's been kicked out of its nest.

A lady I used to work for once used that analogy when encouraging me to go on my own. I can still see her gesturing with her foot like she was kicking the baby bird out of its nest, "Fly, go on now fly." That's a conversation that stuck with me over the last six years. Six years ago I pushed the instruction to the back of my head and sought the safety of yet another corporate job. I found one and settled into my comfortable clock of mediocrity.....now the cloak is gone and I'm wide-eyed vulnerable and scared to death but backed up against the wall, one has no choice. Since then the next corporate job just wouldn't come, I found a job working for a company I loved, then was laid off.....did everything short of going to McDees to find a job, but nothing worked. "Fly, go on now Fly."

You see having a conversation with my previous employee is like shutting the door on that chapter...a chapter I wasn't really ready to shut. In the back of my mind, I wanted to leave the door open thinking perhaps I could go back one day. I've been that way with all my previous jobs nursing relationships with my supervisors and co-workers in an effort to rather be safe than sorry. Hearing the thud of that door close then lock is so final, but I get up the guts and make the call. I don't reach her so I leave a New Year's Eve message thanking her and wishing her well. Later she responds and I realize the door has closed, there is no going back. I'm saddened but I know this was inevitable, I'm being forced to grow. I read over her words with a phrase standing out and I know this was meant for me in more ways than one, "I am governed far less by other people's opinions than I am by my own
conscience," she replied. I nod, her words resonating within me, translated they encourage me "Fly, go on now Fly."

Speaking of growth, I finally get up the nerve to open the box and the feeling is surreal. I pick up a copy of the book and dust off the cover, it's mine. My name is emblazoned across the front and I flip through the pages immediately recognizing the all too familiar dialogue. It's mine. I smile at my husband and he returns my smile, I call my mother, my brother, my best friend and my old writing partner. They are all happy for me, but I realize this moment is for me. It's so symbolic its almost insulting. One door has closed, another is beckoning for me to walk through. "Fly, go on now, fly."

It reminds me of when I was in middle school and my body was developing faster than my brain, it's an awkward place, but you can almost taste the promise...seeds splitting, then bursting through a barrier to become a flower. I decide that regardless of what is around me I will remain true to myself. Admist the negativity I have to remain positive or else I am just guilty as those perpetuating negativity. Plus my inner soul reminds me I have been blessed with the intuition to know that negative words come from a painful place and usually have more to do with the lips they are uttered from than the target. Still I ask God to send me a tougher layer of skin as I prepare to face 2006.

I try to conjure up every relationship I am presently involved in socially and or business related and I vow to suffocate those that aren't positive and nurture those that are. I promise myself to make a conscious effort to stand closer to the morals and attitudes I am constantly telling others about, and then I forgive myself for all the times I've fallen short of those standards, over the last year and the years prior.

Most importantly I promise to cherish those things that I have taken for granted such as my husband, my beautiful children, my relationship with my mother and brother. Then I open my heart and mind to the possibilities, challenges and growth waiting for me in 2006.

Crackheads gone wild for Christmas?

While listening to a local radio stations this morning I over heard a skit pertaining to the upcoming Christmas season and giving examples of "ghetto gifts" now available for the ghetto fabulous ones in our lives. While I do have a problem with the term "ghetto" and how we as African Americans seem to go out of our way to glamourize that in which our forefathers struggled so hard to escape.....I have to admit there are some things and some folks who manage to live up to the connotative meaning of the word.

In any case, one of the hosts mentioned this new equivalent of "Girls Gone Wild" is made specifically for those who find endless comic relief in the fact that humans when under the influence of narcotics act in what can barely be described as irrational behavior. The video is appropriately named "Crackheads Gone Wild" and consists of footage taken from the ghettos and slums of America where drugabusers are just as familiar as broken windows, unkept children and roaches on kitchen floors at midnight.

Its not just this new video, I dare you to watch any stand up comedy show, where there isn't at least one or two mindless jokes about "crackheads" that undoubtedly deliver peals laughter from an audience of healthy or rather non-addicted patrons. And its doesn't stop with comedy shows; movies and music are both notorious for pointing out the de-humanizing antics of those addicted to what a large population of our community is proud to sell or at one time have sold. Every platinum rapper, save Will Smith has penned lyrics about the glory days of selling rocks on the block.

The interesting thing is most of us have family or at least know one person who has danced with the deadly white horse to their own detriment at some time in their life. Although I didn't know a person in my family who was affected by the disease one of the most important people in my life, paid the ultimate price for their weakness. In 2003 my father died unexpectedly from overdosing on crack. That is a hard sentence for me to say and equally as hard for me to type. I didn't grow up with my father and so I never saw him strung out and pathetic like we envision drug abusers, but sporadic conversations with my grandfather leave me without the benefit of hoping my father's bout with the powerful drug wasn't a tragically humiliating struggle.

Two weeks after his death I recall watching Comicview on BET with my husband when a comedian made a random joke about crackheads. He automatically laughed while I ended up bursting into tears. I don't know if many people understand how hard it is to cope with someone you deeply love being de-humanized because of an addiction. Even moreso it brings into question one's own self-worth and value if you are the offspring of another human being that is reduced to such an worthless, unvalued sect of our communities.

To be fair, I won't pretend that I didn't laugh at the same type of jokes a few months before my father's struggle was a reality, because I did. I won't pretend that I felt a genuine empathy with the drug addict in Menace to Society that O-Dog ruthlessly gunned down, because even though I cringed at the scene a part of me dismissed the violence as less than a casualty of the streets. I won't even pretend that I was overly impressed with Halle Berry or Samuel Jackson's portrayals of dopefiends in Jungle Fever because the extent of my interest was that Halle Berry could make herself so "unpretty" as to take on such an unglamorous role. My concern was never the person's story behind the dirty face, slurred speech and animalistic need for a substance that kills.

No, I can honestly say my perspective on "crackheads" changed when I put my father's face that has so many similarities to my own on each and every one of those characters. When Chris Rock made a joke about crackheads, instead of laughing without commitment, I envisioned my father. When watching movies where drug addicts are raped, tormented and even killed for sport, I couldn't help wondering if my father had been in similar situations and that was a feeling even worse than the grief I felt over his death. To imagine one's parent being treated worse than a dog and still begging, clutching, needing some man made substance, is I think one of the heaviest crosses for a child of any age to carry.

While dealing with my demons triggered by the undignified way that my father died, I met several other people who had parents, siblings or other family members plagued by drug addiction. Many of them were experiencing the same shame I was carrying and everyone had different ways of dealing with their emotions, but the majority opt to shut the person out of their life and heart distancing themselves from the reality of what their loved one is facing. If you can pretend the person doesn't exist, you can accomplish a double feat, (1)separating yourself from the person's weakness which is needed in order to reassure oneself, and (2)block out the emotional and spiritual pain that comes with seeing a love one self-destruct in a most pathetic and physically inhumane way.

Again I will not pretend that I wouldn't have opted to deal with my father's addiction this way if I'd been given a chance. I think this is how our society deals with everything that we are ashamed of and can't explain from child molesters, to child killers. Our natural instinct is to look for a way to distance and separate ourselves from the "bad person" else we be tempted to think badly or to worry about our own mortality. Although this is basic human nature, it isn't totally effective, because it results in a society of de-sensitized adults that don't cringe when they watch a gruesome rape or murder on television. These same adults later display the same nonchalance when the television show has turned to reality on the news or a crime documentary. Later these same adults can watch the struggle of another father,mother, sister or brother as they fall prey to an addiction that subjects them to be internal and external abuse at their hands and others, and be entertained. When you look at it from that standpoint, things aren't so funny.

So in closing I'm not suggesting that anyone take a stand against the unfair treatment or "crackheads". I don't mean to suggest that rappers cease talking about their heroic feats cooking up crack in the kitchen or that you feel guilty everytime you laugh when someone pokes fun at a substance abuser. My request is that you simply take a moment to digest the fact that no matter how dirty, pathetic, trifling or ugly that person may be, there is a story behind their existence. Somewhere down the line there were two pathways and that poor soul chose the wrong one. Who knows what lead them to make that choice. The adage, "there but for the grace of God, goes I" can be haunting, yet so prolific. Afterall their story began exactly like yours and mine, with a mother, father, grandparents and siblings, and although those individuals may not be active in that person's life and may never be again, just because they shut them out and we close our mental doors at their very existence, does not negate the fact that there is a human life under the degradation that is the "crackhead".