Through the Fire

"How do you do it? It was just yesterday that you were crying over what he'd done and today you're not giving two shits to the thought of him or this situation. I'm in awe of you." It took a minute for me to process what she had just said and that someone could look at me and my issues and be inspired, moved by the way I'm handling them. What really threw me for a loop was that the woman who spoke is sixteen years my senior and is in "awe" of me?


As we continued talking, her question and statement began to resonate. I would have moments of flashbacks, things I had gone through with him; I'd mentally check out of the conversation and enter some of our darkest places that got me to the mind frame I'm in today. I was pulled back into time, long past and recent when the words that escaped our mouths were so ugly you'd frown at the sight of them, where the anger was so intense you'd black out, turning into the Incredible Hulk, and returning to yourself again at daybreak, when the pain runs so deep that there are no words written in the English dictionary to even express the emotion, where you've compromised YOU for him and you're lost in an abyss of loneliness and confusion.

All of these places I have visited on more than one occasion, hell more than five, and here is a woman telling me she is on awe of me? With each mini earthquake I was rocked, some where 9.5s and others were .1s, but I was moved nonetheless. I remember questioning myself, "when did he become more important than you?" And the scariest part of this conversation was my response, "I don't know." It took me taking a journey to Costa Rica, by myself, endless pages of writing in my journal and midnight hour conversations with God for me to come back to myself. And once I was reacquainted with this women who looked like me, sounded like me, but wasn't the ME that I remembered; she was betta; I knew I was a force to be reckoned with and hell on wheels from that point on.

At that pivotal moment in my life is when I started to own, really own, Trudi and all that embodied my being, good and bad. But even in this epiphany of mine, I still struggle with myself, at times, and with him at others. I haven't mastered how to completely escape those fierce moments when you can turn the house upside down over something that was recklessly said; however, the difference between the other Trudi and this one is my tolerance level. There was something about being burned by fire repeatedly that made me want to stop touching it, in fact, I wanted to avoid it at all cost. You see, he's a firefighter, he is trained and equipped to enter hellish places. Me, I'm armed in my backless sundress and four inch pumps, hot pink lipstick and funky hair, not the ideal or proper gear would you say? Yet, I've managed to come through the fire and I wear my second and third degree burns as a reminder never to forget the road I've traveled in the rediscovery of me. "How do you do it?" She asked. I look at my burns and keep it movin'.