Summary / Preface

Preface/ Book Summary

Pink Lady

Crush, crunch, crisp flesh breaks and the juices shoot everywhere.

I always feel violent when eating an apple. The sweetness (ooo pink lady apples... mmm....). I make a mess of it. Fingers sticky and in need of floss I survey the picked apart remaining core. I am six again. Eating was awesome when I was six, skinny and sun burnt.  I was scratched up to my elbows from climbing trees and I proudly wore mosquito bites on my knees.

I grew up with scriptures, prayers, routine, superstitions, poor choices and lots and lots of rules.  I grew up with books, imagination, change and daydreams.

This first aspect of my life, although a daily barrage, was a barely acknowledged ‘bother’. The second aspect of my life always held my attention first.

When I was a teenager, my family moved to Utah where the “daily acknowledged bothers” were in everything.  They were a ridged strangling chain link fence draped in the most dangerous kind of barb wire known; conformity.   Everyone and everything around me embraced scriptures, prayers, routine and rules.  And the very few who didn’t?  They were rejected, excluded; they became forlorn creatures of insecurity or impassable bullies with cruel intentions. 

Every prisoner dreams of escape.  Quite a rare few actually attempt it. It was sexual violence and my unanswered plea for help that triggered my leap into an abyss of shadowy dark water and I was nearly lost in the fall.  

To leave this religion is to be outcast-ed and thought the worst of. And sadly, I enacted and enforced this perspective by embracing all of the weakness perceived. In the following years I alternately drowned, thrashed and choked myself into a ruined human being.  

Until one year, one by one, along the edge of this black water, strangers, unlikely friends and persistent family members came to my aid.  Un-petitioned, unsolicited, they threw me life jackets of hope and ropes of will power.  Around this time I read Mary Oliver's 'The Journey' and at long last, I pulled myself out of a self-inflicted chasm of despair and onto the other side.

I owe my life to this phenomenal embrace of kindness. To you whom I owe my life: Thank you.  You helped me by giving me a break, by telling me I could, by showing me how, by believing I would. 

To the all the prisoners holding themselves back:  Don’t give up, don’t listen to the ‘You can’ts’. Forget about them.  Forget about their God in a cloud, their angels in stars.  All around are the best kinds of angels ever dreamed up; Decent human beings, acting on their intuition, their inner goodness and incredible charity. 

Starting from my earliest memory in 1983; this is the story of my escape.