Hello everyone: happy Saturday to all of you ever-supportive people who visit my dear friend Teela Hart’s blog regularly, I am Americana Injustica – and Teela is my right hand. I am simply here as a guest blogger in her absence, to keep her stats up (just kidding, we don’t need no stinking stats…) – to keep her spirits up. She struggles.

Some of you know, Tee is away for a time, to find some strength in the peace and quiet of ‘anywhere but here’…I’d like to report that she is on vacation, but I suspect that would be a gross mislabeling of her ongoing necessity to live in FEAR.

I don’t know how many of Teela’s readers have lived it to be here reading this now (likely quite a few I’m sure – myself included), but I can say there are a lot of us out there. Too many have experienced ‘terrorism’ or ‘trauma’ in its most cruel and raw form – within the walls of a place called ‘home’. Too many realize too late that they have entered a mind-phuq zone from which there is little hope of escaping; too many never make it out alive. TRUTH.

Today, I am strong.

Today, I am free.

Today, I can hold the light out in front of myself and the masses of shivering, terrified Survivors of Trauma who walk, newly freed, along a very crumbly trail at my back into a life of their very own.

Today, I have survived.

Despite my motivation and the fire within me to move others to safety, I was once the epitome of a victim, not a survivor. I was broken by my ex-husband in ways I honestly perceived as being permanent during the recovery from my traumatic injury…life never seemed to have the same feel as it did before being so brutally betrayed by someone I had loved, shared marriage and children with, and committed myself to. I thought I had it bad, as a newborn survivor of my near-fatal marriage.

But Teela….

It’s hard for me to really put it into words when it comes to Tee; when she and I first met, she said (and I quote), “…my story pales in comparison to yours…”, a line that I have never forgotten for a single moment since, as a very telling aspect of her personality and perception of Self.

She thinks she hasn’t been through shit; as if she’s not worthy to be called a Cut Throat Survivor sometimes, she forgets that she can be free, she somehow still doesn’t see herself for all that she is…it baffles me. I love her fiercely for this reason: she is so innocent and pure, untainted by the YEARS and YEARS of Hell she lived inside of – still open and willing somehow…still so very human in every way…

If ever there was a woman out there in the world who I would stab an abusive mf’er in his neck for – it’s Tee.

Teela has never been acknowledged for her long-term strife as a domestic hostage of someone she loved and committed herself to, because she’s built that way: to keep her word.

She’s earned my undying respect and admiration through her impenetrable strength at the clubhouse; she is our “mouse” of the house, but her voice, although very quiet and soft-spoken, carries distances that none of the rest of us can maintain, because we aren’t Teela Hart.

This is just my way of trying to publicly blast her TRUTHS while she can’t defend herself and be all humble in her customary ways. She would probably never let this post through if she was editing, but she’s not so I’m running with it…

I love you, Tee. I’ve got your back; ALWAYS.