When I first went to my lawyer, Kelly Clark, we sat in a large room with windows. I shimmied past describing what had happened to me, and he said I had plenty of proof for him to take the case.
And then he said he expected me to go to counseling and that if I didn't, he'd hand me a big check a few years down the road and I'd be the same girl, except rich. I'd have the same problems and it would be just as bad.
When I got the money he sat me down in a much smaller room and instructed me on how to spend it. He said that one of his first cases won several hundred thousand dollars and in the space of 14 months he was back to Kelly, asking for money. Both Kelly and the client went away from that with bad feelings.
Money doesn't change much in my heart, just in the physical trappings. I can afford counseling now, I can afford rent and food. I have the means to stay home and cry and shake and fall to pieces (whereas before, I was doing that at work). It IS better.
I just don't understand the church. Robert and I were snuggling last night and I asked him, "Am I just so stupid for my naivete?"
He said no. No, you just live as if the world were the way it ought to be.
"Do you think they love me?"
"You're probably not on their Christmas list."
"I sued them."
"Yeah."
"I can't believe I sued them."
"I know."
I wish I were smarter at things like this. I'm so fucking autistic and truthful, at the wrong times. But maybe there is some goodness in someone like me coming along and telling it, not just the way it is in my heart, where the damage is, but how it ought to be.
It is naive. But it's not necessarily a bad thing.
