Black Sheep Alphabet

B. Branded, blemished, backwards, brilliant, belligerent, bested, bitten, bitter.
All words that are B. I prefer to think of these as the backbone, the beginning, if you will, of what I am saying. All Black Sheep have a B and they all have a beginning. Mine is bitter and yet I belligerently insist I am brilliant which is so very backwards. I have blemished myself to the point I am branded and I now know that my ignorance bested me.

L. Liar, ludicrous, lamented, lame, lethargic, laughable.
The second step towards the perfect black sheep of the family and they are all words laughable in their irony when searching for acceptance. It is ludicrous to think that I could be so self-lamentable that the liar I had become was nothing more than a lazy and lethargic step towards isolation.

A. Askew, asked, ambitious, annoying, agonizing, apathetic, astray.
How did conditions of life go so askew? I was asked this and wondered at my annoying delusions. Had I become so apathetic to the joy around me that I preferred to spend agonizing days on the outskirts of family? My ambitious resolve to be different had led me astray.

C. Cornered, clever, covered, collided, coined, creepy, crazy, callous.
I find in this step I have cornered myself into telling the truth which has collided with my reality. I am not clever, I have not coined the term 'different' and I have covered my mistakes and the knowledge of them with callous actions, creepy delusions, and crazy hopes that someday the Black Sheep will be a good thing.

K. Keeper, killer, kind.
I am the keeper of wrong in my own little world, never noticing that I have become the killer of kindness from others around me. Were I kind I might have earlier called off this self-destructive behavior. I was riddled in the head and did no such thing.

S. Selfish, solitary, silent, simpleton, seduced.
How did I not recognize sooner that the selfish acts with which I perceived made me different were the very acts that left me solitary in a silent world? I did not know because I was a simpleton, seduced by my own over-inflated sense of self.

H. Help, holler, handed, hole, hectic, helpless, hopeless, higher.
At some point on our roads to self-destruction we have to recognize our helplessness and our whispered cries for help. I had to. I had landed myself in a hole of my own digging and handed myself the shovel to bury myself. My mind was hectic and my soul hopeless because I forgot to look higher than my own misery.

E. Escape, enigma, everything, Everest.
When I finally looked I knew I must escape. The thought of finding more than my own wallowing was an enigma with which I was unfamiliar and it took everything in me to climb the Everest of my shame.

E. Endings, egregious, empowerment, encouragement.
Endings for a Black Sheep such as myself are the beginnings to empowerment that I had long since thought I left behind and would never find. I had committed egregious acts against those who loved me most and when I acknowledged this I found encouragement that had always been waiting for me.

P. Prize, priceless, peers, perfection, past, penance, portrayal, poignant, purification.
After years of running and fighting and hating and whining I find that things I thought I was winning were no prize at all. What was priceless and what I had been seeking were the things so poignant and sweet that when I embraced them in the form of acceptance (self and otherwise) the purification of self-loathing that came after ripped away my past with a perfection I never knew before. A portrayal of the Black Sheep is hard to do, there are so many things, but this was my beginning and my end.