Yesterday, I Cried_ Celebrating the Lessons of Living and Loving - Iyanla Vanzant [81]
The equation had flipped! Rhonda was now in charge! Rhonda was now in the position of power. She was the strong one. Now she was the one who could hurt somebody. Rhonda had never been in that position, and she simply did not know what to do. At that moment, she didn’t realize that this was an opportunity to reclaim the power over her own life. She had no idea that she was in a position to change the pattern, to do something different. Instead, the frightening sight of John gasping for air and the implications of him dying threatened her independence. The battle continued in her mind. As brutal as John could be, she loved him. He was no different from anyone she believed had loved her in the past. Besides that, John did love her. He had told her so and shown her love in the ways she had become accustomed to—hurtful, painful, restrictive loving was all that Rhonda had ever known. More important, Rhonda believed she needed John to validate her, to save her, to make a statement that she had not failed again.
When you are trying to get yourself together, you must be vigilant. You must watch yourself carefully. You must pay close attention to what you are thinking, what you are doing, and what you are saying to yourself and others. Getting yourself together means paying very close attention so that you do not send out mixed messages. If you say one thing and do another, you are going to get mixed up, forget what you are doing, and fall right back into the same trap you said you wanted to get out of. When you are getting yourself together, you must eliminate from your modus operandi everything you have done up to the point where you realized you were a mess. You must think a new way, act a new way, and keep your mouth shut. If you start talking about what you are going to do, chances are you will get confused.
When you are getting yourself together, talking takes on another form. It becomes mental language, emotional language, and body language. When you cannot speak all three of these languages in a way that clearly communicates to people what you are trying to do, they too become confused.
Rhonda’s mouth had spoken one language: I can do this. Her heart spoke another: This is too hard to do without love. Her body was saying something completely different: He must love me. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t sleep with me. She had confused herself. She had not been paying attention. If you act like you are married to a man, take his money, and have sex with him, you cannot seriously talk about leaving him. Rhonda knew that, but when she thought about raising her children alone, she forgot. If you stay with a man who brutally beats you, you cannot talk about getting yourself together. She knew that too, but had forgotten because being beaten was familiar. She knew how to survive a beating. It was a pattern she had learned to live with. She had not talked to herself or anyone else about how to survive on her own with three children. She had forgotten that her ability and desire to do that was the only thing that mattered. It was that part of getting herself together that Rhonda had never figured out. It was the part of the language of living she had never learned.
On the way to getting yourself together, you are bound to slip and fall. Sometimes when you fall, you bump your head. The bump may stun you, and your thinking may become cloudy, your speech slurred. You will undoubtedly say and do the wrong thing, over and over again. When Tony told Rhonda he could not see her anymore, she was stunned. His girlfriend had found out about them and threatened to put him out. Rhonda was still sitting in stunned disbelief when John called to tell her that he forgave her, and that he loved her. The fog of confusion had still