Sara Niles
My Books are My BIO: I am a Memoirist
Torn From the Inside Out, Chapter One
Living on the Flowerbed of Eden
"Thunder rattled the windowpanes two stories high, and lightning split the sky; it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings, and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I, nearly a foot taller, and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints. Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive."
A Good Memoir is not about a Life-It IS a Life:
‘A Pain so Great as to Tear the Soul Inside Out’
On a sunny day in 1960, a white haired, eighty-year-old man, walked up a steep hill deep in the countryside of Southern Arkansas, and walked away with a three- and one-half year old, little dirty girl-child, riding high atop his shoulders, holding tightly onto the old man’s bald head. The little girl was scared, hungry, as always, and she had no idea of the home she was going to. The little girl had been given away by her biological mother to an elderly Great-uncle, the brother of her maternal grandmother. That little girl was Me, Sara Niles.
Every life carries a tale, a backstory of origins, choices, successes, and failures; for a life is no small thing to live, some lives are smooth like paved roads, while others are bumpy and fraught with danger. An unconventional life, one without the prerequisite cushions of predictability and stability, is especially fraught with dangers, as was mine. The dire straits created by unforeseeable events and circumstances, just as the biblical verse states: “Time and unforeseen occurrences befall them all”, befell me more times than I can count. Yet, despite the tragedies and disasters that was my life-I still stand, and I intend to use my best efforts to Make it Count.
I am a different Sara Niles, than the young girl of my long-gone youth; I have the insight young Sara never had; therefore, it is the older version of me, narrating the tale that is so painful as to tear the soul ‘Inside Out.’
1973: Enter The Monster called Thomas Niles
The adolescence of Sara was not a normal one, because the losses accumulated until the only thing Sara had left was Sara. Once again, the fear of the three-year old child mounted and Sara attached herself to a ‘Savior’ of the worst type, marrying Thomas in 1973.
The Fairy-tale wedding soon became a prolonged nightmare in which the hopes and dreams of a talented child, were singularly shelved in favor of survival. The Storm would last awhile.
Violently Abusive people who qualified as Malignant Narcissists, with Dark Triad Traits was an unknown designation in 1987, when Sara Niles Fled into in a thunderstorm, with her five children, because Thomas Niles was on a mission to murder them all. Leaving everyone they knew, and everything they owned behind, Sara Niles and her children escaped certain death in which they would have been only a short news story in a small town; soon fading in memory as sad, forgotten, statistics. Thomas Niles would have been what is called by Dr. Park Dietz (1986), a ‘Family Annihilator, that is, that is what he would have been
IF he had succeeded in his toxic mission.
Family Annihilators are known to murder their families and avoid the consequences of their actions by committing suicide afterwards. Long before domestic violence shelters and educational programs awakened societal awareness to the dangerous behaviors of Domestic Violence Perpetrators and the lethal warning signs, Sara knew the only way to stay alive was to disappear. To live and survive in a traumatic environment requires a special strength; but to flee it, requires the courage to jump blindly off a steep cliff into a dark chasm.
“The sun would still rise, the seasons would still come, life would continue. I was thankful to have been a part of it; I would take the memories and savor them for the life ahead. I had been given the components that would comprise the fate of my destiny; they had aged into my soul so that part of the past would always remain with me. They would be there for me to draw strength from on days in my future when death would seem a triumph and life too hard to live any more.”
“Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. “Them’s the Good Lord’s words in red,” he would say reverently. These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment. The strength of character I gleaned from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes.”
“It was nineteen fifty seven, the Little Rock nine were escorted to school by Federal troops under the order of President Eisenhower to counteract the attempt of Arkansas Governor Faubus to prevent it. Southern racial tensions produced a supreme irony: Federal troops against the National Guard. This visible strife between state and nation was one of the evidences of the racial turmoil of the times”
“In the process of my evolution, I became a victim of domestic war, an emotional casualty for a major portion of my life, entwined, entrapped and emotionally involved until I learned how to become free. Freedom has never been easily gained and has often come at high cost throughout history, but one thing I will always know is freedom is worth every fight, and all pain.”
“To tell a tale so great as to tear the soul inside out"Sara Niles, Torn From the Inside Out”