Sexual Sanctity: A Memoir of My Burning Times and Learning Times

Chapter Three

Copyright ©️ Anshin B. Kelly, KaleidoShin, 2023, All Rights Reserved.

Chapter Three

The Fifth Spectated Burning

Section One: Clipping My Wings

The Fifth Spectated Burning was also not an isolated event and would span about two years. My mother's chronic abusive behavior towards me would take on an icier, and icier feeling in my late teens. I had been able to "escape" from home often; staying over friend's houses, and immersing myself in sports, and after school activities. It's as if as time wore on, she began to realize that she couldn't truly find fault with me, but instead of taking the steps to address her problems, she drove the nails deeper, and deeper into her hands, allowing depression to seize hold, and take the place of her Sense of Self. The care she showed others outside her family became more and more, her distant, perpetually thinning, memory of that Sense.

It becomes more clear to me as the years go on, and I write this, why she just simply didn't stand up to people in her communities (religious and secular), who squeezed/bullied her out of teaching positions in school, and in church. She never seemed to stand up for herself in situations that were fundamental, but she'd passive-aggressively, or directly, emotionally, verbally, or physically, exacerbate psychological-social abrasions and/or minor wounds, that really needed either letting go, or a much more humane, compassionate, and less aggressive, and reactive approach.

A particularly deep laceration from her, that would last years, happened when I got my first driving permit. I'd sprouted young, but mighty wings in the first few teenage years. I can see now how, even through all the brutal struggles of my young life, that I had a very new, very fragile, yet immeasurably resilient nugget of wisdom at that point; I could disengage from my tormentors. It wasn't an easy task for me, in fact it was excruciating most of the time; but I had a new sense, like the quickening of a tiny baby, in the first weeks of pregnancy, that I held the power. They could build their pyres all they wanted and prep their dungeons, and sharpen their knives and pitchforks, but I didn't have to be dragged in. My tormentors definitely sensed this, and because I was not yet strong enough to completely take hold of my power, I was still vulnerable to their cunning, and sabotage.

The time came for me to go out with my mother in the mini-van, and begin practicing driving. This memory is so painful, I carry the heavy-duty scar, but the initial wound was like a deep puncture wound; the kind that throbs and throbs, far beyond the wound site. God be with me as I write this important, and deep part of my testimony.

We lived in Byfield Massachusetts, where my sisters and I had visited, lived and worked all of our lives, because that is where my maternal grandparents were from. Byfield is far North Shore Massachusetts, about twenty minutes from the New Hampshire border. It is rural, beautiful, wealthy, trendy and very, very white. It has many beautiful, twisting, winding roads, and for God knows what reason, my mother thought it would be a good idea to take her brand-new driver out to one of these winding roads.

We had barely gotten on the road, of course I was a bit nervous, but I was holding it together, when my mother began rapidly throwing directives and commands at me, and very soon I felt very overwhelmed. She did exactly what she always did with me, she escalated, and when I didn't respond with speed and accuracy to her rapid, confusing, increasingly aggressive commands she began to get angry and to panic. Even then, I knew at that moment that the reason I pulled over suddenly, clumsily, but to safety nonetheless, is because I have damn good instincts. But my mother wasted no time; we'd barely stopped on the side of the road, and she took the events of what just happened and began spiraling the facts out of place; slicing and dicing mentally as she went, and spinning the facts into what picture worked for her complex’s toxic agenda:

"Anshin, lost control of the car, and we barely stopped on time, but not before she ran over a bed of someone's blue flowers. She's not ready to drive, and you know Anshin, she'll drive when she's ready to, which is usually not when everyone else is, she's different," and to finish with a flourish, "and that's ok, I accept her as she is."

She took care to tell every last person in my immediate and extended family, as well as many close friends, her maimed, tortured and false version of events. The experience almost destroyed me. Right down to the fact that the bed of blue flowers were wild, and not planted on anyone's property, her lie struck me down, painfully clipped my wings, and a terrible sense of brokenness and loss came over me. However, I'd learned to cope and survive the unspeakable all my life, and I attempted to hide my despair in a tomb inside my heart, the way I did with so much of the sorrow in my life. But, I know now it was the breaking point for me. That summer I began to spiral, for the first time in my life; I desperately wanted to do away with the pain, and I was going to try and destroy myself, if it was the last thing I did. I also wouldn't drive for another six years.

Section Two: The Devil's Kitchen

"Been a slave most all my life

So's my kids, and so's my wife

I've been working on the Colonel's farm

Ain't been mistreated, ain't done no harm

I'll be a slave to my grave

No need of me being free

Recollect when I was just fourteen

Freedom used to be my biggest dream

I'm older now, lot wiser too

If I was free what would I do

The Colonel's been right good to me

He's taken care of my family

The Colonel rode the buggy in from town

Hitched the horse and called us all around

Said he couldn't keep us here no more

I saw a tear as he walked toward the door

Oh Dear God, what did he say?

Now I am free to go my way"

Lincoln Freed Me Today (The Slave), Joan Baez

Even though I was in a deep crisis, the Force - Field of my Soul would prove to be absolutely relentless. I knew for sure that I couldn't take one more summer of slaving and abuse on my grandparent's property, so for the first time in my life I applied for a summer job. I remember applying too late and they didn't have a counselor position available, but they had a kitchen assistant job open. I took it. Reckless, but determined, I took the job. To my horror, many years later, that summer I escaped "the plantation" so-to-speak, would be deemed in my family's scapegoating lore about me, "as one of the times I abandoned the family, and proved I didn't care about them all along."

I met a couple very interesting women that summer working the kitchen. My memory of them is that they were pleasant enough, and gave me in the long run a little window into the lives of women outside of the communities I had grown up in. To this day, I have no idea what possessed the people in charge to give me, a seventeen-year-old girl, the responsibility of cooking breakfast for two-hundred people, alone.

I didn't know what I was going to do, but I had only two choices: I had to figure out a way to manage, or quit. I'm not one to quit, so, miraculously, I managed; one crazy, beautiful, fierce, relentless, and desperate day at a time, in The Devil's Kitchen.

The first thing I did to attempt to destroy myself and run, stark, raving, bloody mad away from my despair, was to stay up late with anyone of the staff hanging around, and not go to sleep until about two in the morning, almost every day. Then, I'd have to stagger out of bed at about five or six in the morning to prepare breakfast for two-hundred people. As you can probably imagine, by the end of the summer my system was so shot, I was dangerously staggering on the edge between sanity, and insanity, and life, and death.

One thing is for sure, I may have been in the Devil's Kitchen, but I was in God's House. I look back and see how the Relentless Love of God, surrounded my life through my Relentless Soul's Force-Field. Without knowing it consciously, those years may have felt like the end, but not only were they not the end of what is Essentially Powerful in me, but they were the beginning, and birth of the PowerHouse of a Woman, Mother, Healer, Artist and Medium that I am called to be on this Mother Earth. It was the end of something however; the end of lies and torment, the end of corrosive patterns of guilt, shame and regret, it was the end of the chronic illnesses that are complaining, self-pity, and scapegoating. My personal Burning Times were somehow finding less and less fuel to build pyres with, when it came to firstly, my inner consciousness. The deeply severed places between my Soul, Mind and Body, were beginning to heal, as the dark complexes and impetus behind my inner and outer torments, began to recklessly show their hand; and reveal how truly full of horseshit they all were. Behind heavily deceptive masks of so-called righteousness, or progression, or confidence, liberation, or chastity, when all was said and done; when they'd pulled out all the stops for years, and I never really bought in, all of a sudden, they had to start improvising, and being so used to getting their way, they weren't very good at it.

That summer I ran and ran, tearing my heart out, my hair out, my skin off. I ran; sick of crying oceans of tears for years on end that seemed to never fill the horrendous, relentless ache inside my heart, or please God, have pity and drown me. I ran sick to death of being told that I'm sexually unacceptable, both in the dogmatic, religious sense, and the socially promiscuous sense. I was sick to the point of screaming, to the point I could spit up my own stomach, and almost did - of wondering why I was unwanted, it seemed by everyone; including and especially by my own mother. I was sick to death of people's piteous looks, when fucking damn it, most of them knew damn fucking well why I was suffering, but never, and some of these people in my entire life, had the courage or integrity to actually ask, understand or try and help my circumstances. Some, had no idea I'm sure of it; but they certainly seemed to not have anything better to do than to torment me, and for that, I wanted to beat their stupid faces in until I died. I was so goddamn sick of life. I was so goddamn sick of humanity. I was so goddamn sick of myself, my wounds, my problems that seemed to stem from such a deep, dark place, I didn't know how to begin to address them.

I ran and ran that summer; trying to seduce a young man five years older than me, but my Force Field protected me. I realized later that he wasn't going to have sex with a minor, unless she decided, on her own, to get drunk with him. I never even kissed him. He wasn't going to have sex with a seventeen-year-old girl, no matter how hot she was, who could look straight into his heart. I could see he wanted to, it was the greatest test of his life, I'm sure of it. But I was wretchedly pissed, and the ache just grew and grew. I was wretchedly pissed with myself that for some maddening reason, deep inside I couldn't just get drunk and throw myself away like that. To express how pissed I was at that "goodness" and "sense of truth" that nobody, including the church seemed to give a fucking rats ass about that was deep inside me, I got as close to the drinking, and partying, and sexual promiscuity as the Force Field would let me. I never drank a drop, I never so much as kissed a man, or boy my age for that matter. I just stayed up as late as I could, watched movies I knew weren't doing me any good, deep into the wee hours of the morning. I even lay in the arms of the man five years my senior, all night, but he never so much as kissed me, just held me. Once his girlfriend called during those hours, and like a pin, painfully pricking the surface of my brain, I thought "what the fuck am I doing? Do I care? Maybe, but, caring never got me anywhere, besides, it will get in the way of my plans to just try and obliterate the pain…"

I ran, and ran until I couldn't run anymore, because I was exhausted, beyond words, beyond anyone's wildest dreams. I literally just collapsed at the end of the summer, and it worried my mother so much she brought me to our family Alternative Healer. This would be the first of many, staggering, yet forward moving steps towards personal healing, and inner peace, for me.

During the summer, us kitchen staff sustained burns on our skin and hair from a gas explosion in the industrial-sized oven. It was literally a miracle that we were not more hurt. I remember it was also a particularly scorching summer. I also remember I got a poison ivy rash, but this time, I wasn't taking no for an answer. I called my mom to help me get a prescription for Prednisone. I remember she did try to dissuade me, and suggested trying the Prednisone cream first, but I was adamant, and I knew to my deepest inner core, I wasn't going to budge.