Names

There is this moment when you wake up in the morning. Your whole reality is the pillows and sheets. It's warm and rather womb-like. It's nice. And then your mind starts working. You begin to consider the day before you. Your consciousness turns on and starts ramping up.

And for some people, the name-calling begins. They hear the names they have been called. And they believe them.

I always feel for people who were labeled, hard, in their childhood. The names comes rushing back every morning.

Ann Voskamp writes very eloquently about this in a piece she calls "When you call yourself names."

I have lived like a child who never learned her name, lost and wandering.

So it went each morning: I wake on cotton sheets, under quilt of fragile threads, and hear the calling of names. Names I’ve called myself; names learned when young, that refuse to be forgotten. Names I’ve made my own.

In the waking, they jab, and I drag pillow over head, press into mattress, burrow deep into escape, but still I hear and cringe....Read More

• Tags:  
• childhood
• listening to god
• self esteem

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