Episode Fifty-Two: The Interview-Robyn

Robyn is resilience personified, strength embodied and "bravery walking" this life. In this interview hear how her knowing of self has led to truth, authenticity and the courage to live. (there's a UFO sighting in there too!)

Transcript

Welcome to episode 52 of Bite-Sized Blessings.

In this episode,

I get to interview a very good friend,

Robin,

Whom I've known for about six or seven years.

I'm continually amazed by her resiliency,

Her strength,

And her bravery.

As with all things,

Of course,

For me,

I put my own meaning on this episode.

And so for me,

The miracle is that Robin has been so steadfast and so true into living an authentic and real life.

However,

This episode does come with two trigger warnings.

Child abuse and suicide are discussed.

If you suspect a child is being abused,

Please call the National Child Help Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453.

And if you know of someone who is suffering with thoughts of suicide,

Please call the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.

And now,

Episode 52 of Bite-Sized Blessings.

You know,

I was an autistic kid,

Not knowing I was autistic.

They thought I wasn't paying attention when I was sitting quietly coloring.

I listened to everything.

And I asked my mother lots of questions because I was inquisitive.

My storytelling was her taking out the photos and telling—I'd point,

And she'd tell me the stories of the people in the photo.

That was my first storytelling.

And then my grandmother raised me for the first two years of my life before I even met my demonic stepfather.

I remember meeting him.

I remember what I had to endure if I was going to live under his roof.

And so when I was about 16,

He had his first grand mal seizure in front of me.

He was working on the phone.

He's writhing and foaming at the mouth on the floor.

And I smiled.

I was like,

This could be a real moment for me.

And then I snapped.

And because he was working on the phone,

We didn't have cell phones.

The phone was out of order.

I ran all the way up the street to the neighbor's house.

I knew that their door was always open.

That's how we were then.

And I called for help.

I didn't want to.

I didn't see him in the hospital.

It was the first time he had that seizure.

And I just prayed.

I prayed that he wouldn't come home.

And he did.

Everything that happens to us happens for a reason.

And if I hadn't gone through the huge trauma that I went through with him,

I wouldn't be the person I am now.

I feel that I'm an emotional being and an artist first.

I've always been an artist first.

But as you grow up,

Art is something that's acquired and that you have to be certified.

I never wanted to lose my creativity,

So I didn't go to art school.

But I've always made art.

Always.

Once I found out about autism,

I realized my mother knew on some levels,

Because all the things that I find out how you deal with autism,

She already was doing with me as a child.

She didn't have a word for it,

And I didn't have a word for it.

I'm an autistic person and an artist,

But I've always been a spiritual seeker.

Always.

Where do we come from?

How did we get here?

My dance practice.

I was a dancer.

I was dancing around the house.

I was always told to stop.

Stop.

Stop talking.

Stop dancing.

Stop reading.

Stop making.

.

.

Whatever I was doing,

I was told to stop.

I did for fear of violence,

And so I went into my interior.

I spent a lot of times locked up in the basement,

So I had imaginary friends with names.

I remember my mother saying,

You got to let them go now.

I cried like a baby,

And then I realized I just don't have to tell people they're still around.

My boyfriend,

Matteo,

And how I met him,

Oh my God.

People kept calling me Matteo everywhere I went.

I looked him up in the phone book.

I said,

Are you?

He goes,

Are you?

People call me your name every day.

I checked him out,

Became friends.

His birthday's the day after mine.

Both of our mothers had the same name.

Matteo was already doing five rhythms.

There was a video store called Blue Moon Video,

Which is now a bookstore on Guadalupe.

Carmen had a VHS of Gabrielle teaching,

And I rented it and rented it and rented it.

It wasn't until I did my expressive arts program in Boulder that Jane,

Dr.

Jane Goldberg,

Brought Melissa Michaels in,

Who was taught by Gabrielle.

So Melissa taught our dance piece of my expressive arts program.

As a kid,

I had to put a record on.

Once we had headphones,

The thing about autism too is we give kids headphones because it blocks out everything.

You put music on,

I can concentrate.

If I had music playing in my ears in school,

I would have done so much better.

I think a year alone in a cabin is intense.

I thought about killing myself every day and how.

I just struggled to get out of bed,

Wash,

Eat.

I decided I was going to stop eating.

That didn't work.

It takes a lot to get to that point.

It's not easy.

Once I realized I wasn't going to do it,

Then I called for help again.

I told my insurance company what I needed.

They said,

If you're not doing certain medications,

We can't find you a bed.

Because I had PTSD,

Two different mental health facilities rejected me.

They said,

We don't have a bed for a trans person.

We don't have a bed for somebody who has PTSD.

We don't have the help that's needed.

You need to file an appeal.

I got the appeal.

I couldn't believe it.

They told me I wasn't going to get it.

Then I got a phone call in the middle of the night that said,

You're leaving tomorrow morning at five o'clock in the morning to fly to Minneapolis.

That's when I got my autism diagnosis,

Which is so hard to get.

It could take six months to a year and cost thousands of dollars to actually get tested for autism here.

I got it like that.

That's why I went to Minneapolis.

I was there for 60 days.

I'm not a 12-step person.

That wasn't my problem.

My problem was autism.

What my psychiatrist said is,

Robin,

You just found the medicine that treated your symptoms.

Once he said that,

Then I realized I wasn't a bad person.

I was treating my symptoms I didn't know I had.

Once I knew what the symptoms were,

Then I could realize how to treat myself better.

Recently,

Relatively in the scope of your life,

Found out that you're autistic.

When you were a child and growing up,

Did you have any idea or concept that you were trans or was that.

.

.

Oh,

Immediately.

That was wrapped into my trauma because my stepfather didn't like girls.

He liked boys.

Every step of the way,

I'm a girl.

I met him when I was two years old.

I had already been raised by my grandmother for two years.

Her mother was a madam.

She worked in a brothel in Massachusetts.

She sent my mother to work there when she was 14 years old.

She was my Auntie Mame.

My grandmother took me to New York City when I was eight years old,

Nine years old,

To see the Rockettes.

We're in the diner and grandma's stealing the silverware and the sugar packets because she grew up in the Depression.

I'm like,

Grandma,

Stop it.

You're embarrassing me.

We're with other people.

Her brother,

Jack Freiberg,

Was a chauffeur for Albert Einstein in New Jersey.

I realized I've been connected to really great people who came from nothing.

My great grandmother owning a brothel,

And they say she swore like a sailor and wore suits.

So I said,

I want pink.

I want dress.

You're a boy.

So be a boy.

So I learned how to be a boy.

My mother actually said my father hated me.

So my stepfather,

She would say,

Well,

Watch your brothers.

So then I pretended to walk like them.

I lost all of that.

I would float into a chair.

And I learned how to like,

They put me on a wrestling team for God's sake.

Can you imagine?

Football.

They put me in football.

My stepfather was the president of the local football league.

So I had to play football.

And one day the coach yelled at me,

My mother called me rebel.

She named me rebel.

The coach yelled at me because my uniform wasn't clean.

And I said,

F you,

I'm going home now.

And I never went back to football.

I found a way.

My mother was depressed in bed and my uniform hadn't been washed.

And I got called out.

My mother was sent to Massachusetts to work for my great grandmother.

So it was kind of like this shifty thing.

My mother got damaged and then came back and went to Auntie Em.

Auntie Em got her a job at the telephone company.

My grandmother said,

You got to earn a living.

So you're either going there or you're going to find some work.

And she wanted to forget about what happened to her in Massachusetts.

So she just pretended it never happened.

My mother was Presbyterian.

My stepfather was Methodist.

My father was a Freemason.

My stepfather was a Freemason.

My mother was in the Daughters of the Eastern Star.

I was so mystical when I found out about it because the Masons had a female group and they were the Daughters of the Eastern Star.

And so when I did my expressive arts therapy program,

We were supposed to do some little bit of history.

And I researched what Daughters of the Eastern Star was.

I picked up my Auntie Em,

Gave my mother a Bible that she had forever,

This little white Bible.

And then my mother signed it over to me.

And I never opened it.

Religion has been hard to me.

I was abused in my church when I was a teenager in the basement of the church where a lot of things happened to me in my own house.

My oldest brother became a Jehovah's Witness.

He found religion in high school.

He met a girl.

I remember there were elders who came to our church to kind of battle out the Bible.

My father thought he knew everything and they knew everything.

And my brother and his girlfriend at the time did not stand for the national anthem.

And that in 1976 was a big.

.

.

People were looking.

I was there.

People were looking.

My mother looked over and she goes,

What are you doing?

And they go,

It's our religion.

That's when they started bringing in the big guns and hashing out the Bible at the kitchen table was because Jehovah's Witnesses didn't stand for the national anthem in 1976.

So when he became a Jehovah's Witness,

My mother said,

Oh no,

We got to do something with the younger ones.

She decided that my little brother and I needed church.

And we had a really sweet church on the beach.

It was called Bayview Presbyterian Church.

The minister was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen.

He had ice blue eyes.

His name was Skip Hansen.

I fell in love with him immediately.

So I was already told,

You know,

You're not a girl,

You're a boy.

Be a boy.

I can do that.

Doing it unsuccessfully.

So it was 1980 and it was January and I was doing my homework at the table.

We had a kitchen table.

I mean,

A dining,

Sort of a dining room table.

And we had a bay window behind me.

So I'm sitting,

My back's facing outside.

All of a sudden this light just comes in.

It's like daylight inside that.

It's January,

So it's dark outside.

All of a sudden there's light and there's an object floating above a tree across the street.

Now,

How do you make sense of something you've never seen before?

I hear my parents are watching TV in that other room.

They run to the window.

It's gone before they got there.

They saw the light.

The light filled up the house.

We called the neighbors.

They all saw it.

They ran like hell.

And I was sad.

I felt left behind.

I all of a sudden I was like,

Well,

Thanks,

But you left me here was my feeling.

And my parents said,

Don't tell anybody.

We're not talking about it.

I was able to tell my aunt Linda because she had an experience.

So they wanted us to,

You know,

She shared her experience and I shared mine.

I shared it with everybody.

They told me not to tell anybody.

I went right to school.

I mean,

How do you keep something like that quiet?

I was like a little crazy person telling everybody,

You don't have to prove it to me at this point.

Once the government came out and said,

UFOs are real.

I'm like,

Yeah,

They always swear to me.

They followed me everywhere.

I always saw ghosts.

I always,

You know,

Would be in a place and get a cold show or smell or a feeling or a sense because when you're highly traumatized at four years old,

You become hyper aware of everything.

And when I got my first memory of trauma at four years old,

I've had this memory forever.

I just kept pushing it down.

And I realized it was real and re-experienced the physical,

Emotional pain that comes with being assaulted as a four year old.

I can talk about it so easily now.

People are,

They're just like,

That's too much for me.

See,

I don't know what too much is now because to me,

That's nothing like it happened.

What's the problem now is people have,

They move away from you when you tell them your truth that they haven't processed their trauma and their pain.

So they want to leave now too much.

And I've had people say too much,

Which puts me in that lonely place of being abused and isolated.

My biggest thing is being with people.

Like I can't wait to ride my bike down that hill and go be with people,

People I love.

Growing up in New Jersey,

There's lots of old sort of ghosts trapped in places,

You know,

Like the history.

Coming out here was like a breath of fresh air.

I mean,

There's history and there's,

You know,

There's definitely places,

But there's so much space to hold it all.

My psychic sister,

Amanda,

We met our eyes locked.

We met at a party.

She'd had a dream about me the week before.

Well,

My father beat me up so bad and I was put out.

Her mother took me in who was a nurse.

They were from Berkeley.

I lived in their basement.

I've been in a lot of basement,

But they took me in.

Well,

Robin,

Thank you so much.

This has been awesome.

You just have had such a remarkable and interesting life with everyone that you've met.

It's been,

I just,

I'm so grateful.

That's the tip of the iceberg.

I know,

And I know.

I'm so blessed,

But I had to go through that.

I had to go through the cabin to realize,

You know,

I want to live and why I want to live.

I can sit at Consuelo's place and listen and not judge people for what the medication they're using,

What they're doing to survive.

I'm not,

I've been through it.

If I look at my history,

It's all in me.

So they're not going to tell me anything that's going to surprise me really.

Everyone's trying to get back to where they were,

Except they're not the same person.

They're not going to get back to where they were.

I'm not going to get back.

I don't want to get back to where I was.

I'm going to go that way.

So I'm smart enough after being in the hospital this last time to go,

What's going to get me forward?

Thank you so much for listening to Episode 52 of Bite-Sized Blessings,

The podcast all about the magic and spirit that surrounds us.

If only we open our eyes to it.

I'd like to thank my very special guest today,

Robin,

For sharing her story with me.

I'm so very grateful that she was so vulnerable and open.

I think sharing stories like this is important so that we know we're not alone in our sufferings,

In our trauma.

It's important to know that others have gone through the same thing and that there is a community,

Unfortunately,

Out there that might be able to help us heal.

Unfortunate because those communities should never have to exist.

I'd like to thank the artists who created the music for this episode,

Frank Schroeder,

Horace Hoffman,

Alexander Nagarada,

Music L.

Files,

Shield Music,

And Brian Holt's Music.

For complete attribution,

Please see the Bite-Sized Blessings website at bite-sized-blessings.

Com.

On the website,

You can find links to books,

Music,

Playlists,

And artists I think will lift and inspire you.

Thank you for listening,

And here's my one request.

Be like Robin.

You know who you are,

Deep in your bones,

In that secret,

Still place,

The one that's always whispering,

This is who you are.

Listen to that voice,

And then take the steps with bravery,

With strength and resilience,

And become all that you are meant to be.