Week 16 (day 4 of journal) · AMP: The Artist Master Plan

14d (edited) • 1000 Fan Machine — Day Tasks

Week 16 (day 4 of journal)

I promise I won't wrote a book every time! LOL

BEFORE IT HAPPENED:

DAILY INTENTION Remember who you were.

SOUNDTRACK: The Awakening

This song reminds me of my birth and early years as a child. For one, because the beat is sampled from Age Of Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In, which came out the year I was born, and I was born under the astrological sign of Aquarius in 1969. My mother was heavy into Astrology and used to always call me “My Little Aquarius”, so I knew early on what I was. I actually felt like the song was about me, a few years later the stage musical HAIR came out. I must have been about three or four years old. We went to see it as a family. I don’t know who my parents knew, but we sat up in the Producer’s booth and watch it from there. I remember the nude dancers dancing under the red light. I really felt like the world was my oyster and I was it’s V.I.P.

I remember the week I turned 4 years old. My birthday is February 16. I remember a few days before my birthday my older brother coming home from school with all the Valentine’s Day cards he got. I remember looking at them and saying out loud ‘When I look at these cards I keep seeing birthday cakes in my eyes”….that’s because I had already assimilated that day to my birthday. Then that night, my dad came home with a bog velvet heart shaped box of candy for my mother. Somehow it still made ME feel special. Perhaps, unconsciously because I felt safe in a loving family, but also because I still felt like it was MY day too, so whatever was done on Valentine’s Day also pertained to me.

Then to top it all off, I remember walking outside the back door on my 4th birthday, and I was greeted by a bunch of kids sitting on a picnic blanket on the grass yelling “SURPRISE!” . They had thrown me a surprise party. These weren’t even my friends because I was only 4…these were my older brother and his friends, but my parents has set it up. We all sat around eating cake, ice cream and drinking juice, and once again, my heart was overwhelmed with a joy I never felt because they were all there for my sake.

By this time I had already DECIDED that I was going to be a singer. I already had a repertoire of songs I used to sing. Old Mc Donald, This Old Man, Mary Mack, The Animal Fair, etc. I first decided this in the back of my dad’s van while traveling on a road trip. I envisioned myself standing on a rock on a college campus singing to a small crowd of young adults who were standing around listening. (that’s where my initial movement name came from….The Voice On The Rock).

But also at 4 years old is when all of that happy go lucky joy got stolen from me.

I was at home, my younger brother must have been asleep, since he was an infant. My older brother at school and my dad at work. My mother was practicing on the piano. I was playing by myself in the background. I was acting out a scene from I Dream Of Jeanie. I was fully committed to doing the voice impersonations as perfect as I can. I remember being the Major first. I said “Jeanie!” Then I went into her part. “Yes master?” Then when I went into the rest of the skit, my mother stopped abruptly, jumped up from the piano, and charged me, and starting beating me relentlessly. I wasn’t sure what I had done. She kept beating me until I defecated on myself. Then she got mad and beat me harder. Then she dragged me into the bathroom. I’m crying and hollering the entire time, all while trying to figure out why this was happening to me.

She then unraveled some toilet paper and wiped the feces off of my butt and legs. Then she took the same tissue with feces on it and smeared it into my face, on both sides. It felt like she was adding extra abuse to the abuse, but maybe it was her demented way of wiping the tears from my eyes with tissue that just happened to be soiled.

A few minutes later, she put me in the bathtub, filled it with water, and made me scrub myself clean. The she stormed out. So I’m standing not sitting in the bath water crying, more quietly to myself as I cleaned myself. Then she walked in, talking in a very calm and sweet matter. She explained…she had to spank me like that because I had the devil inside me and she had to beat it out of me. I neither embraced it, nor rejected what she said. I just became numb to her words, because I didn’t know what to believe.

For years after that she would always say "Aquarius's are treacherous and she told my brothers that I couldn't be trusted". ...feeling alienated from them is another can of worms that come out later.

DAILY ACTION Description of self before this thing happened.

“I felt celebrated”

“I felt important.”

“I felt that I brought something to the world around me”

“I felt creative.”

“I was inquisitive”

“I was friendly with everybody”

“I felt content living in my own world”

“I felt like I was part of a family”

AFFIRMATION “My pain is part of my story, not my identity.”

17 comments

Week 16 (day 4 of journal)