Wished I had more energy today, but I don't.  Will be going to work at the group home today.  Would love to just stay home and draw or pretty much not do anything.  This cold has me really without a lot of energy.  Think being diabetic does not help, since my immune system is compromised when sick.  I will just sit it out till it passes.  I am amazed, just amazed at the strength of this group.  Think it takes a special person, a courageous person to literally go thru this pain.  Who would have chosen this path. But as these 20 years have shown me, it is worth it.  I opened Pandora's box and now I am sorting thru all those beliefs about me that I thought were true.  I remember when I first started therapy I saw an urn.  This urn was tall, beautiful etched flowers of all colors on the outside of this urn.  Guess that is the artist in me.  I remember visualizing this urn and saying to myself, that inside this urn (the urn being me) that there was garbage, smelly, yucky garbage.  I felt the only way to make the inside of me clean was to empty myself of the garbage.  Only then will I be beautiful on the inside as well as the outside.  I am in the process of doing that.  Perging myself of all the pain, the despair, the sense that I did not matter in this world.  I believed that I was nothing from my foster parents.  Since I never knew what being loved felt like, I thought I was unlovable.  For that I despise my foster parents. How could one not love a 2-3 year child.  That was the age I came to live in their house or better yet, their hell.  I was a prisoner in their house.  Held captive, by terrorists.  I remember a poem written to me by a soul mate Tobey, saying she was sorry that the foster parents lay waste on my playground as a child and made my playground a war zone.  And that is what these foster parents  did.  It could have been my real parents, but for me I am free to depise them because they were not my real parents.  For that I am grateful.  I must have gotten good genes from my bio mother and father.  For I am a gentle spirit, caring and warm and believe that what I went thru made me more compassionate and empathetic.  So there was something good that came out of terror and despair.  i have great compassion for the inner child in me.  I no longer hate her for what happened.  I am a lot more protective of her and know her as I have never known her before.  I got to know that child by realizing just how much pain she has carried for so many years while in therapy.  I will be forever grateful for the love of my friends, the therapists in my life who were my "enlightened witnesses" to my pain.  Had they not been there I am sure I would have taken my life.  I will never, ever quit.  There is a determination to experience whatever needs to be experienced to be whole.  This is one battle I WILL WIN.