Dumbbell

The word, dumbbell, is the awful name she is forced to acknowledge. Her restrictions are brutish. Her words are intimate. Dumbbell is the shocking story of an innocent ten-year-old girl trapped by severe emotional bullying in a home ruled by her Daddy, an extreme chauvinist. In her own passionate voice, she lets you see, and feel, what it's like to be totally imprisoned in a maddening silence while confronting a series of cruel and demeaning obstacles meant to shatter her spirit. She dares to reveal her overwhelming helplessness, her consequential thoughts of suicide and what it takes to save yourself when saving seems out of the question. When desperate, she escapes into fantasies of her own making. She thinks she is alone. She isn't.Angels, 1,000 of them, descend into her space. They aren't real angels. What she sees is a steely white disc. What she hears are guideposts. She leans on her crutches, those mysterious angels, only to discover that the graceful rescue words floating toward her emanate from her own intuition and instinct. By the time she is twenty-one, her real name is a distinguished newspaper by-line. At-home bullying is the most common bullying, hidden by the adage that what happens at home stays at home.This narrative documents its specific realities and damages.