I am reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. As I continuously recognize the magnitude of trauma through the story of others, I close the distance gaps between mine and me.
There’s a line in the book about how a human being could be so thoroughly bifurcated, and that has haunted me ever since.
Is that what I was (am), bifurcated?
And much more specifically not just from my other half, an other half, but from my personality, my soul’s essence. It’s heartbreaking to even write. As the truth seeps inside my skin and takes root.
I recognize, that I recognize the magnitude and then it disappears before my very eyes like the proverbial bird in the magicians cage once the cloth has been drawn back.
Each day a blank canvas in the way that only a survivor can understand, as if nothing has ever existed before. The only thing holding a human life together at times is the glue of the people around them, who they hold shared experiences with. I’ve taken for granted that hallowed glue, and yet I haven’t.
I have known how important and this knowing led me to rush desperately, or maybe it was the trauma and not the knowing that caused that, and to create these unions out of a place of desperation.
See what I do there? How I take responsibility for things I couldn’t possibly be responsible for. But then how does one figure it all out anyway. What is theirs and what is not theirs and what is fair has no place in the realm of humanity. Because things are simply not fair.
Fair is a striving if anything, it is not granted by some mystical or even judicial force, and it’s certainly not a perfect system.
Rather these days I think what is the lesson, and the lesson is always love. Not in simply a romantic sense but an all encompassing one.
Is material like this this so relatable because of my many life experiences and similarity or some divine force that has me connect with exactly what is needed at the time?! Both.
Do I bore you going on and on and answering my own questions in your presence? I cannot attach to that it isn’t my business anyway if you’re bored or not. And besides what do I always say?! You’ll never be bored. I’m not boring and my life is certainly not, though it can be quiet and peaceful now.
I’m learning to allow that.
Anyway this book and watching This is Us for the first time, has me breaking open daily.
There’s something about watching two people sharing life together that want their children that work hard at loving them well, that well just flays me open.
No surprise there.
Watching a father love his children and do his best, and the same for a mother. And how they balance their dreams and their own desires with that.
And how fucked up my path looks in comparison, which is why we don’t do that.
If I look at my life individually the whole story it’s so much easier to see the beauty in it. Watching families who love each other and have traditions and traditional anything just sets my skin aflame like the emotional burn victim I am.
Do you see my scars?
This book though. This show though.
Piece by piece I’m collecting me and I’m putting together a self that has all her original essence, from all the shards.
It’s slow.
There is no longer a rush. It’s slow and beautiful. Everything is art. Every meal cooked and eaten. Every dark thought banished by compassion.
This book opens me. My clients open me. Life opens me. It’s exquisite and excruciating and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
A continual surrender. A cease fire on myself. And finally burying my armor and replacing it with something realistic, something lighter…..
I’m at the New York Athletic Club, in the city that never sleeps. It doesn’t but believe me I do, or there is hell to pay. I’m old now 😉 I was old from the start, even when I was new.
I found out recently I was premature. 5 lbs 2 oz. I believe. I wonder what I was exposed to inside of her. From what I knew outside the odds aren’t in my favor.
I have these new connections with family that feel very grounding and positive and this morning I’m in awe and contemplation.
Is this what most of the other people I know have always had, just naturally. This feeling that they won’t just fly out into space at any moment.
A dear friend once said to me to keep defying gravity. Gravity I think. The invisible force that tethers one to earth. I was untethered and often unbridled and my defense system would shout that I wouldn’t change a thing. But now that I know what I know. You can’t unknow and all of that. I can’t even say that.
What is this feeling?
A feeling of solidness, inhabiting my body. Being at a dinner party with famous Broadway actors and actresses and not feeling less something, less anything.
Famous didn’t matter. It was an intimate gathering, natural. All people passionate about their arts. Some happy and fulfilled, some not as much. There were also wounds at that table. We all have them, some are just more apparent than others.
Yesterday we went to Westsider Rare and Used bookstore. I want to ravage every single one in this city. To touch every spine, cover, and page. To know which one I like best. To feel the knowledge pressing in around me, to hear all the voices of all of those brave writers that made it to the point where they were bound, gathered, and artfully decorated.
I’m ready for a cover and a title and a brand. Brand new. Look at you Christina. You can be and do anything. So what will it be? The crushing weight of possibility. No more crushing weight, only an unbearable lightness of being, he just died recently by the way.
One of the great loves of my life, very early on, came upon me reading Milan Kundera, the book of the very name of above, in a break room in a Trader Joe’s. I had a wedding ring on. I had more naïve enthusiasm than most would know what to do with at that time
All balls and no brain. Which is exactly what I needed to propel me out of a life I was not meant for.
I’ve been shot out of a cannon many times since so to speak. Jet propulsion. My swift expulsion from everything comforting. Including my self concept. Which is more than jarring, it’s actually quite alarming: disarming.
Apparently I’m a wrapper. Who knew. How much is channeled by my early days of resonance with Eminem’s music. Curtain Call. Relatable. It’s not debatable. My mind likes to rhyme.
One of my book store picks this time at random is Junot Diaz This is How You Lose Her. The cover looks interesting, actually not really so much. His name was in a compilation of writers on writing and this made me curious who he is as a writer.
I watched Ammonite the other day. I am haunted by it lately. Still sorting out what that is about. Can’t stop rhyming. Everything in divine timing….
A walk in the park and a stationary store before heading home on the train today. Muji…. I’m told the pages are creamy, buttery, gold.
I just sent out for my passport yesterday. And got two sheets of stamps. I love them. I got Toni Morrison ones and Love ones with puppy’s and hearts.
Here at the NYAC there’s an old fashioned looking letter drop. Between that and the stamps I want to write letters. The art of the letter is long lost.
I write letters that will never go to their recipients, ones only I will ever see. So many of the connections in my life are like that. Extinguished and never without good reason.
I spent so much time second guessing myself. Only to end up here where validation is around every corner and I am safely held.
I just put three new clients on the books yesterday morning. These are a little out of my comfort zone, something I haven’t done in awhile. Hopefully the freshness will be good for all involved.
Fresh eyes, no lies.
The truth will set you free. It always does. There are times I haven’t wanted to be free. I wanted to be held.
You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.
Ok for now back to writing and exploring this iron jungle melting pot, before it gets too hot.
There are things that need to be written from the origination point.
Im listening to I Will Find You by Audiomachine and it is transcendent. It’s making my experience of staring out at the water with my toes in the sand somehow more magical.
In this state I can feel everything I need to feel to have daily presence with myself.
Feeling is safe. Feeling will not kill you.
Writing is safe….
I’ve somehow managed to make my favorite day even better by permitting myself the experience of Victoria Erickson’s writing immersion: Ashes and Rain.
This is where we come alive out of the shadows and into the light….. next song! I can feel it rising, golden waves of sound. Ruelle Radio. The smell here is divine.
So many things are coming full circle for me at this time in my life. Breaking out of the story, any of them and into pure presence. Less perfection. Who knew how much of that I actually had hanging around. Not me that’s for sure.
My third immersion class today, and yesterday was my third Saturday that was my own. But who’s counting? Me. I am!
I’m reading the exact book I need right now. It describes this path I’ve been on. Stephen Cope Soul Friends. I can’t believe how similar so many of the experiences described are and that someone else was able to articulate it in this way.
So of course I’m on a reading journey that book spurned. Exploring Thoreau, Dickinson, Forster (Maurice), a separate peace. And many more. And also being introduced to many new poets via Victoria. Ada Limon, David whyte and more.
I will carry you came on. As I’m getting ready to depart and back in my car in its usual spot.
I have an immense feeling that I will live in Milford the rest of my life. When I die I’d like my ashes spread at Woodmont, at all my spots along this stretch. It has called to me long as I can remember. I first found it by wandering on some of my first run/ walks with self as a young mother trying to create a space for her thoughts.
I still remember the day I first walked down Belmont St. And as the road rose up there’s a moment when you can first see the water. That moment is my favorite part. I still feel that when I drive here. The moment water and I meet, magic.
I’m more embodied now which means that I’ve expanded from hours in the bath to bodies of water out in the world and to nature as well. I’m learning to keep my attention when out in the world, and to still be able to write.
We write alongside life…. Not separated from it. I am learning.
I think a new Sunday routine may emerge of contemplation by the water along with my exercise prior to my writing class 12-3.
I go to therapy one time weekly now. Friday mornings. It was a long time I did two days a week. Doing only one isn’t some accomplishment, as in I’m more healed. It’s just a natural progression to using that time in other ways. So maybe it is ha 😉
I’m getting ready to embark on a new level of healing with that therapy that is focused on the trauma held within my bodies. The things my mind cannot access. Denali sized blocks.
I’m scared. Raw and shaking. Heart racing. Sweaty scared. And I’m grateful to be able to fly that close to the truth and to survive it.
Transmuting pain into personal power. Becoming a healer also to myself.
I’m writing poetry. I’m thinking of the connections that drew that side out just based on the emotions encompassed within. Those who recognized the poet and the passion within me. Who saw. Who felt me.
I am with them all the time. They are with me all the time. There is no need for separation.
I’m learning to no longer censor myself. I am de compartmentalizing all that has been and this is a painful process.
Becoming fully embodied and present. It’s excruciating and also the most beautiful suffering I’ve ever experienced. That look you saw wasn’t darkness it was the depth of my ability to connect. Interpret as you will. But I see it now.
I see it now.
The transformation is exquisite…
I’m on the rise is the song on now….. pay attention…..
There are times in our life where we need that so badly that we accept it in the form of someone who doesn’t keep us safe.
Then what?
Only to be shown what’s possible but then put them back up even thicker.
Needs are an interesting thing.
I’d venture many if not most broken relationships are the result of not being able to communicate our needs and be responsive enough in the demands of the culture and society we live in.
I used to think America was the greatest.
Because I was told that right. Now I’m leaning much more towards it emphasizes all the wrong things.
What fundamentals are we built on? Stepping on the backs of others to achieve our own status while not considering others. A beautiful Instagram feed?!
When mostly behind the pictures are struggling lost souls.
There is no pleasure allowed, only the pursuit of the American dream.
I’m finding at this point in my life other cultures have it so much more figured out. That life is also about family and connection and pleasure and the TIME to have those things.
Time!
How is one to have time if they have not achieved society’s idea of the American Dream.
But what are my dreams ?! Where are my dreams?
Completing the stress response cycle ? Perhaps. Hint Emily Nagowski probably spelled wrong.
I dream of not having my trauma and coping mechanisms dictate my life.
I know I’m far from isolated in that dream. Many people share it and are seeking exactly that in my office.
Spoiler: I don’t have it figured out either, but I desire that.
There’s desire! Hi my old friend how have you been?
I need to understand you better.
You’ve caused such grief in my life, but also had my back and opened so many doors.
You raging compass.
You really fuck me up sometimes …..
But you also led me to my true self and north.
Why’s it gotta be so complicated. You get it Avril, and Taylor, and Pink…..
Music you get me. I’m writing this to the tune of the piano guys radio.
Music pulls down my walls and gives me back to myself.
It’s why I want to play it, listen to it, more fully experience it and myself. Don’t forget yourself champ. But how ?!
And the song ended.
Now maybe there will be a different rhythm to my writing.
I’m sweaty and lost and sad on a Monday morning. And I’m also hopeful and excited about the possibilities of the day. These are my defaults as much as anything else. Thank god.
Music stimulates my brain in the right way to bring the walls down. It’s steady. I am in control. If I don’t like a song I change it. But I rarely do actually. I like to take in everything music has to teach me because it’s safe.
Writing is too I am learning and I’m finally letting go and doing it.
Having no idea the outcome.
The guy in 22 is trying to navigate his grass. He stands over it puzzled begging it to look as nice as the other lawns. But he’s just beginning. Someday it will because of his patient attendance and devotion.
So it’s one day at a time for now with music, walking, reading and writing.
Finding balance between thinking and feeling. Head and heart.
They are navigating too…..creating their connection.
I’ve got approximately two and a half hours left of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and I’ve been savoring it. I’ll feel incomplete for a short while in its absence. I’ve been all or nothing so long, it’s nice to read it bit bit and then process and listen to music. I have a nice groove going on.
I walked to Natural Kitchen and got a bowl today. I think the tuna from there makes me a little allergic, probably some preservative they use. A major goal in the new year is to begin working with a nutritionist and allergist and really attend to my health.
Another goal is to spend very little and see if I can pay off my student loans. I’m coming up with a strategy with my financial advisor. I want to leave my children with a good financial situation and also make sure in case anything happens to me with my Crohns that I have wiggle room. So they and we are safe and don’t have additional stress.
*don’t worry I’m not leaving anytime soon, I just think that far ahead. It’s a part of me.
When did I suddenly become such an adult ?! Who knows!?
I was able to do quite a bit for those I love this year for Christmas and it’s all done. I’m usually panicking the night before. It’s pinch me unreal the things I’m able to do.
I’ve been that way most of my life though, pinching myself at things I just never could even have seen for myself. How rich my experiences have been. No corner of my life unturned and I shall continue living this way.
I wore my only human sweats today and grey under armor sweater with beanie and just felt cool ha. Feels silly to say but I did. I felt cool despite having my winter weight on, some breaking out on my face. I just don’t torture myself anymore and that feels very nice.
To not nitpick myself apart about perfection. Now if I could just continue to do that with writing.
Go easy on me baby….. appropriate.
Henri is asleep at my feet. The cat dog that she is. The little prince is cleaning up after his ugly Christmas / cookie extravaganza last night. Thankful those are few and far between, and also grateful to be able to be that house and have such a good group of kids.
I feel like Diane Lane in the end of Under the Tuscan Sun, something I want to read by the way. I’ve only seen the movie. She had felt so low at one point, like she was never going to have what she wanted and then realizes she did even though it’s completely different than she thought.
Yep my face is definitely flushing from this food. I get much less anxious about these things anymore. I go with I’ll be fine, and if I’m not I’ll know and be able to get the care I need. Not going to eat this bowl again. But I will for sure walk to places to get my food and even shopping. I love walking when I can instead of driving.
Maybe next I’ll bike everywhere and keep costs down. Anything can be an adventure. I could be happy the rest of my life walking back and forth to the library and eating a picnic lunch out in the sun with a book.
The simple things…
I just want to make sure my loved ones are safe and cared for and myself and we have experiences. That’s what I’m focused on lately, and that I make choices that are congruent with that. Yes a therapist word for sure. Shocking 😉
Writing a book lately feels like more of a when, than an if. That feels so nice. I could cry just to say it, but most important that I feel it. A sense of security and that it’s solid. If my circumstances change I still am solid. That’s taking root.
It’s my birthday tomorrow. It feels different this year somehow. I’m acknowledging it and not saying it doesn’t matter and I don’t need anything. It feels calm and safe.
In fact I need to see a show, A Strange Loop on Broadway and the tree and have a nice dinner in the city with my loved ones. I’m not anxious. Well maybe a little. About not finding a bathroom or anything that can happen, but the excitement outweighs. Mmmm.
I have more than I need. I can begin thinking about what I can do to give to my community and to my field and all of it.
I have so much more to write maybe today will be a twofer or tomorrow morning I’ll take some time for me to contemplate the brink of my forty second trip around the Sun.
I was going to talk about Evelyn’s sixth husband because that’s where I am. And how I feel for people so beautiful they get trapped in the upkeep of it all, it’s one thing to enjoy taking care of yourself, pressure however is quite another.
Ok so I wrote this a couple of days ago and didn’t post. It’s more an update than passion ridden prose. A theme I suppose. I have therapy now on Christmas Eve eve. Then walking and family time. I anticipate a lot of writing as I am present and coming to the end of Evelyn’s story.
And still well at the beginning of mine 💜
Ps and in true Christina fashion I didn’t talk about the title subject much at all. Stay tuned it will come along somewhere…. Soon. I think. Maybe
I’m having a rainy morning walk. I love it. I feel alive.
Found The Little Prince’s Rose this morning
I had a scary episode last night. I’ve had very little focus on any health anxiety and very few symptoms. But last night in a therapy session I was talking about my mom, and my trauma. My heart started to feel like it was stopping and flipping over, but for much longer than just one beat.
So I looked at my heart rate, it was 114 bpm. I took a few deep breaths and it immediately went to 70. My usual is a fib or palpitations but this was different. I consulted “the google” I like to call it this because it makes me feel my actual age and not my chronological one, which is around 90 years or so.
The Google says it was an SVT, maybe of course as neither of us have a PhD. I’m so grateful for no longer going down rabbit holes, but I also want to find the line of not ignoring something serious either. Sigh.
What’s indisputable is how trauma has ravaged my body. I’m angry. I’m angry!
Anger can be restorative. It restores our boundaries. It’s not to be dismissed as merely a negative emotion. A good lesson from The Language of Emotions and this past couple of years.
So I’m thinking about that girl that was plagued with terror and health symptoms. About how I understand now that’s what my body thought it had to do to get any needs met. Until it didn’t make any sense and I became discredited in my health anxiety, and had to figure out how to internalize less and ground more. Find new ways to meet my need, that didn’t require me to be sick.
This morning I was talking about how once upon a time I loved a little girl with my whole heart. That happening so naturally changed something in me. It was the beginning of some important lessons in love.
Children really are our greatest teachers.
Listening to my guy Teddy, sing about find something you can hold on to, find someone who will be there for you, because that’s all that really matters in the end. It’s hard to tell the truth when you lie to yourself, always give too much of yourself to someone else…..
Yes Teddy! That’s all that really matters in the end….
I feel alive and awake. Something that used to be a rare moment that often led me to dark places when I didn’t understand the full picture.
Now I take the time to do that. You take and make time, you don’t find it.
In my head my memoir is taking shape, as I read more, I hear more hints and glimmers of what my story will look like on the page. And why it’s important that I tell it. Made a difference to that one.
And mostly for my children because my story is also their story. A Life Itself reference.
Should I do another lap? I want to it feels so good, but it’s wet and cold, which isn’t bothering me, but I don’t need to increase my odds of getting sick. They are already high.
I need breakfast. I don’t want to interrupt this flow. Story of my life, except now I don’t drown in fear it won’t all be there when I need it.
My shattered and scattered mind. I see it more and more clearly every day. S. King would have suggested one less more there. Oh I also need to finish his book too.
I’m standing on my porch remembering. Remembering the pain all the times I tried to yell to be seen. All the days I sat here and cried and felt deeply. All the friends who were here to soothe. All the visits with my stand in father bringing groceries and unconditional consistency. I doubt he will ever know the depths of what he has meant to my story.
The difference between life and soul death is a fine line. I’ve walked it many years.
Love never goes anywhere…. It always exists as do all the moments. That’s what I’ve learned. You keep them, download them. It can be bitter sweet you aren’t able to make more, but we are all responsible for our choices.
I’m listening to the Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and I am captured. My full attention. And let’s be honest we all know how rare that is. I’m laughing heartily on my front porch. We are friends now.
I remember an old post about can you fall in love with a house. And the answer is yes, but that girl at that time knew very little about real love. Only an idea of love. Trapped in a coping mechanism that required creating fantasies and then attempting to occupy them.
Over and over I rode that haunted roller coaster.
Now I just sit here and observe, and I DECIDE what I absorb and what I don’t let it.
I was looking in an old journal of mine, I had written those letters large DECIDE. I learned about the power of our choices and Senja Foster taught my to have crystal clear boundaries and only participate as a whole person, with another person who had done that work themselves.
I show up and I always will, and I promise myself to never believe those rotten stories about her again. It makes me sad and sick to think of my relationship with me, it was the most abusive.
I made amends to myself when I walk and it’s changing me.
And I am fucking grateful! For every single moment, even the hard and bad ones, because I can walk back through them in my mind, and because I can now see where my boundaries are.
I was borderless. My phone tried to change that to borderline how funny. That’s how that type of crazy feels. It’s not a good feeling.
I choose peace now, and I live in it, and no one can take that, and I made it out of nothing.
Fierce and loving ….
I won’t settle for anything less…. Melissa Etheridge sings. That’s the energy I was writing the last few minutes in, her song Fearless Love.
I love feeling myself getting stronger. Trimming the fat in so many ways. Building self. I feel my muscles strengthening and celebrating the movement. I definitely want to stretch more though as I move forward.
On my walk this morning I am thinking about the kinds of being alone. There’s the kind where all your thoughts echo it’s so empty, and you’re at their mercy. If you want to grow you just sit with them until you understand. There are mean time’s. There’s temporary alone, when a loved on travels and it’s a short time.
There is the alone in your head that you are every single day. With your own thoughts that no one else knows. Unless you’re reading this blog 😉
There’s alone after a spouse has passed away. An empty cavern, with the crushing weight of figuring out how to re-draft every day processes. Lost.
And then there’s another kind. The kind I’m thinking about today. There’s the violent kind of being alone.
This is when you don’t expect to be alone, but you find that’s the case over and over. The kind where the words don’t match the actions. The kind that causes illness, despair, and for some people even tragedy. The kind where the dishonesty makes you feel crazy. Your mind wants to believe in the love you thought you felt. The love you were continuously sold.
The kind where the person doesn’t know how to relate in a healthy way. Lost souls. So they manipulate others to meet their need.
I’ve never been lost like that, but very close to it. I do understand. There’s never been anything wrong with my understanding.
I’m a lucky one, but I worked hard for it. So luck is probably not the right word.
Not swathed in a story, I sat in my stuff.
I sit in my stuff.
And you know what it has made me a better human being. Most importantly a better parent. With much more space and awareness for empathy for the experience of others.
A far stretch from a perfect one, but better each day.
That’s what I chose to do with that. And to only forget as much as is necessary to do my work and live a fulfilling life. But never enough to be naive like that again.
I miss that naïveté. In some ways I wish it was never taken in such a manner, but then I can’t, because I wouldn’t be here now feeling what I am.
Presence. Peace. Love. Connection.
The alone melts away and with it the anger and pain.
Love is not an emotion. It’s sturdy. It is a choice and a promise.
I’ve never been very good at the consistent aspects of love. So built for survival I am. The only moment is now. A men and black reset each day.
So I’m working on my consistency and sturdiness of self, also not an emotion. I work on them by being consistent with my every day small behaviors and choices. Those are building a solid ground inside me.
This way emotions are allowed to do their work to keep the balance between my head and my heart. To protect and serve, rather than turn against me. Karen McLaren The Language of Emotions, a Bible of mine lately. The passage love is a steadfast promise around page 120 or so.
This is literally a manual for healing trauma. I bought many copies to give to those in need this Christmas. Clients and friends alike. That and Letting Go by David Hawkins. Those are my go to sources right now.
I’ve been reading that passage in sessions, when warranted, and I get goosebumps and usually both parties tear up.
For all the pain and suffering in the world there is always the possibility of healing.
Choose
It’s a choice, not a feeling. You can’t feel better without the choice and commitment.
Now excuse me while I sit here and enjoy how my coffee tastes after the walk. It tastes better, more satisfying. And try not to fret about my baby having surgery this morning, far away. I sent her a “fever frog” from 1800 flowers. That thing is so damn cute. It sings and dances and comes with chicken soup. It was the only option that stopped me from buying a plane ticket and being there. That silly singing frog. Sigh.
Trying to care less about being cool these days and hip. Never really was in the cards anyway lol. I want to play. To help people in my presence feel lighter when they are heavy. Rather than going to their place automatically with them and then freaking out about it.
The above I’m working on a lot. As a recovering chameleon. Thinking of The Luckiest Girl Alive in this moment.
Balance
Lighter by Yung Pueblo is another good one.
I don’t want to sell anything to anyone. I want to align myself with those who prioritize their own healing and the ones that understand love is a choice and show up consistently.
My vow is that if I want this I will also be it.
I must
Good morning on this beautiful fall day! Finally a chill in the air. It’s extra delicious this year, with the warmth in my heart maintaining my temperature.
Christina Aguilera Just a Fool is todays angsty song …..
Random thoughts before I begin my client day. I’m out walking around the green. Looking longingly at benches to read on. Longing….
I’m contemplating words of an ex partner, some of the worst that could ever be said to me. We all become our parents in the end was the gist of it. I vehemently disagree and in my case I’m no where close, but being accused by scorned lovers when the relationship died was very unpleasant.
I went to lunch at Edge of The Woods yesterday. Their wraps have really gone down hill since the pandemic. The experience was lovely though. Exploring and finding new things.
I’m in the midst of discovering and becoming, finding the kind of adventures I want. Without that being daunting and feeling filled with land mines.
The sun beats down on my skin….. sweat drips down the small of my back and my neck and I love it. Primal.
Peaceful and primal is possible? I should think yes.
I bought a gardens something protein powder yesterday and I’m excited to make a smoothie with it this morning, even though it never tastes like smoothie king. Oh well. Drip drip….. sweat.:.. music…. Movement…: dreams!
I’m craving and pursuing health in all matters and as a human that’s hard. Consistency is hard, but I love the fruit of this labor. The flavor melting in my mouth. Descriptives.
So I wrote this the other day and didn’t post it. And now I’m in Asbury New Jersey. Joisy. Sun, sand, walks, reading, kiddos (little ones not mine), and just observing life.
And now this is weeks later again and I’m home on another adventure. I have a date with twin A today. My eighteen year old beauty who loves horses, and has a gigantic heart. We are getting lobstah rolls and then let’s be honest probably icecream. Mmmm.
It’s a Friday, therapy in the mornings, often a client or two peppered in to offset the ending of financial support from the other parent, and then an endless span of hours that’s usually filled faster than they can unfold. Today is pest control (mice ick), and notes, many many notes.
I bought a microphone, the one doctor Ramani has, lol. On Amazon Prime day of course. Will it be another item in my collection to dust, like the video camera and pulse oximeters to do Gottman therapy with. Sigh. Will I have a podcast? How can I choose just one thing?
Where is there room for me in my life. It’s all about you, the critic from past relationships gone bad chirps. Everything is always about you. Nothing was ever about me. Cognitive dissonance. Trapped, in the past, in the future, inside a coping mechanism.
Caged
Free
All or nothing
This is me….
I was talking to my therapist the other day about how I had imagined my life. As it turns out my first divorce still haunts me in the form of how that has effected my children’s lives. The way things were dealt with or not dealt with.
Anyway, I was telling her I had always had a dream of being with that one person your whole life. Knowing them in a way where you know all their selves. Where you grow together. I was devastated by divorce and realizing I was gay, it was a betrayal of everything I had dreamt of and everything I set out to do.
(Everything after became a dissociated blur in so many ways. In such a hurry to correct. To still have that with someone while my kids were little. And all the rushing was always the thing that made life the hardest. I had no discipline or no secure foundation to know that. To know there was another way. I didn’t know. Can you forgive me? Can I forgive me. Please.)
Which was to create a family that stayed through it all.
Now I just try to find where I fit ….into life, into my self, into another person, another family…. It’s often overwhelming, it’s often beautiful.
Mostly lost, a little found, inside a life where insecurity used to abound. There’s a budding security.
She reflected that I had that with my kids, but it doesn’t feel like it, because I was always desperately searching for my lost self.
I was
And desperately seeking to be loved, and more to be understood, when I didn’t understand myself.
And maybe that means they were searching for me…. That’s heartbreaking, but when I go back and look I held, I read, I snuggled, I was right there. I had the privilege of being home with them their most formative years. Do their little bodies remember? Will my painful mind?
What do I do with all of this now?
I get up and try again…. To be more loving, more present, to listen and hold space. To believe it’s not too late to be the mom I dreamed of having and being. It’s much more difficult now as I have to translate this to a template where they have their own lives and need me differently.
I want to go back and also I don’t….
I keep moving forward….
Being the change
At the conclusion of this post, which is now, I’ll be full circle to where the post began. Feet hitting the pavement….. pounding.
This feels like a nice moment to blog. I finished Saturday sessions. Hadn’t eaten so I made some chicken, rice, and broccoli. Had to throw in a veggie for good measure. Chicken and rice is universally my favorite dish I think or with mashed potatoes etc. the most likely to be digested properly meal for me. Simple and I love it.
It’s a dreary day. I see these as more external encouragement for relaxation. Last night I hung out with a couple of good friends and watched 10 Things I Hate about you. Collectively we are all going through heartbreak and helping one another. I never expected to find that, but here it is: everyone doing a part in easing the others burden, caring for one another. I never imagined to find all these sources scattered about it in moderation versus all or nothing.
Basically that’s what all of my work right now is about. Battling addiction I suppose. Also coming to terms with how we tell stories to ourselves to be able to deal with things, and I think that’s why I developed the habit of trying to throw as many true words out of me as possible so I would be forced to stay in the truth even when scared, because I prefer to live that way, even when it’s hard.
I suppose I learned that from the writing of Paulo Coehlo first, or at least to notice and value it. I remember reading his works and listening to them while stocking produce at Trader Joe’s.
What I’m overwhelmed about the most these days is something I referred to as “the crushing weight of possibility”, in my energy healing yesterday. Shifting from a scarcity program to an abundance mindset, as it turns out, is not for the faint of heart.
My energy healer Julie worked on my kidney Meridian, which unsurprisingly corresponds to fear, anxiety, feeling inadequate, etc. she said it was very blocked the first pass over, the second moved nicely. She asked me about my experience with the healing, and my first feedback was that I can receive so much more readily. And sure enough there are people seeing me, thinking of me, sending me things, helping my own work of seeing myself as worthy and deserving.
I feel comforted, held, seen, and am now willing to accept that expecting that entirely from one primary partner was not only unrealistic, but not good for either person involved. I’m learning.
This does not mean I’m not lonely or have hard days. I do often. It does however mean that doesn’t send me in a panic upon which I feel I’ll never recover, and dear God I deserve that break from my own pained mind.
I have long stood in my own way and made life way harder than it ever had to be. Takes one to know one, because that’s what I knew, what I felt I deserved, and was mirroring the relationship I had with myself.
I have clients who have put in five plus years of work and I’m watching them transform before my very eyes. For complex ptsd there’s no such thing as solution focused therapy in my opinion. That would grossly underestimate the level of suffering they have endured. That doesn’t mean good therapy can’t work quickly, but it takes a lot of repetition to lay down habits, and to pull the old ones up. Challenging long held beliefs is tricky business, especially when life is already so demanding on its own.
I’m getting sleepy. I anticipate more writing in the coming days as theories and thoughts keep circling back around to see if I’m ready to contract a creative process with them.
In my energy healing what she heard was The mind is not God. Separating myself from my thinking realizing they are different. Not needing to rely on my mind or fear my scattered mind. And that because I’ve been working at such a deep level such a long time that’s how rich essentially my life will be. It has enriched my work, my relationships with others, and my day to day life, and for that I am tremendously grateful.
Some things I’m grateful for: helping new friends make their new lonely spaces feel homey and less alone, bonding with people who I share trauma with, good food, people thinking of things I would like or that make me happy or comfortable, my Christmas Tree, cozy things, having enough money to buy the people I love gifts, having enough money to do improvements on my home. My continuing efforts at reducing overwhelm and fear based thinking. And for most of all, beginning to believe once again in my power to create the life I want, that that isn’t over, and perhaps was even just beginning.
Never have I understood grief the way that I do now. Never have I had connected empathy versus cognitive, the way I do now. This morning I went on a journey watching old videos of my life, my kids, our dogs, our found family members and I saw so much happiness and play and joy in them. I forget/forgot those existed as I stayed trapped inside a cage in my own mind. My own personal hell played over and over, which can be described as constant thoughts of what I was doing wrong or could do differently. That was my default.
I was talking to my dear friend Jen on the porch yesterday morning. We often talk about mother’s. And I said to her that I’ve played scenarios in my head a hundred times what I will say or feel when I get the call my mom has died. And resoundingly where I land lately is my mind screaming “it’s over”. That I will weep for all my pain, and also release. And what I realize about what I will let go is the struggle inside of me that if I just did something different could we have a relationship.
I would have done anything to love her better, I mean love her so much she became better, felt better. I would have tried everything and I did at one point. But I couldn’t ignore the anxiety and illness that plagued me as a result of that one-sided love and intermittent lashing out mixed with just enough of a crumb (so she didn’t look like a bad mother to other people).
I still feel like I abandoned her or being a daughter and not like I got out alive, the way I deserve to be able to feel. My mind plays tricks on me. It is not in my wiring to abandon. I have to be able to be honest and work through things, but it is not in my nature to abandon. Except I abandoned myself a long time ago, right along with all of them. And I’ve been reclaiming her for my whole life, while also trying to be a mom, with absolutely no template.
Sure there is no instruction manual, but I didn’t even have a rough draft. And I made myself into a good parent anyway. Not a perfect one, thank God, but a good one.
Chip dropped off potato salad this morning and then groceries later. I made breakfast burritos and dropped twin A at work, she drove and did well. Life just keeps happening around me, and now I am here too.
The entire energy in my home has changed. I never thought I would be here, never thought my best could get this good. It didn’t seem possible.
We had our first good therapy session as a family this past Friday night. For so many weeks I felt filled with bullet holes of all my mistakes and shortcomings. I would go home, cry and fall asleep and get up and try again.
You see I promised I would never supply myself with my children. That my need would be confined to an adult capacity and I would keep them kids. And when I look now I have been pretty successful at that. And they still have their experience with me as a mother and my shortcomings and wounds, but no longer are they distrustful of that.
They are able to get perspective and hear normalizing of the difficulty in the best of circumstances between parents and teens at this age, that it’s natural, and I have to hear that too, because for me…: the other shoe is always going to drop.
So here we are a year and a half of intensive two times a week therapy, including emdr, their individual therapy, and now our family therapy and there is some light. We are able to see the identity of our family with its own story rather than the constant comparisons that flay us raw. Make us feel less than.
We are our own story and it is a beautiful one. Our cast of charactersis unmatchable. I wouldn’t change a fucking thing.
If I had gotten what I wanted when I wanted it all of my energy would have once again been abandoning myself and this family, and while the dream and heart had the right idea, in practice Everything happens for a reason and in its own time. I held on so hard to the dream and a story, and didn’t trust my own reality.
The gift is that I’ll never do that again. I have a relationship with me, and a relationship with them. And a new relationship with life itself where there is a semblance of trust. It will likely always have a tinge of something bad possibly happening at any moment. There’s a lot of that in me, and that’s ok because I will and have learned to support myself through this and to choose supportive fellow travelers.
My work has deepened, and my relationship with self and others.
My story is far from over, in many ways it’s just beginning. Another life within the millions. Today I played piano. It’s been a long time since I could sit down and focus. I have an idea I can or will but then I just stare frozen. I can’t will my body to try.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been tallying the losses I’ve had. I won’t go into explaining how I’m not doing this to be negative I won’t do this to me. I am honoring my experiences.
In the past two years I’ve lost a home I lived in for 8 years, my first secure space. I’ve lost many possible pregnancies and a couple of heartbeats, I lost a dream of having a baby with a woman I love in a healthy relationship. I lost a dream of being a foster parent and providing more of what I didn’t even have. Needed to have it first. I lost a father in-law and a family. I lost a wife and more importantly an unconditionally loving human being who adored me and held me and supported me.
I lost a beloved pet and now a new one because we weren’t ready.
And then I lost my self respect personally and professionally. I lost touch with myself. And then I lost reality nearly altogether. I nearly lost my mind, and I definitely lost some of the health I’ve worked so hard for by spending my life walking away from unhealthy and toward freedom. I could have lost my life quite a few times over the past year.
I lost a soul relationship with a new family, kids and all, and a lover who still haunts my bones. I’ll love them forever, all of them in their own way, because they were a before and an after moment of my life. I send them love every chance I get, even when I’m hurt and angry. It just exists. I remember every single moment.
And I wouldn’t be me if the losses didn’t make me naturally think of the gains… I don’t have to try. So let’s see. I gained friendships that I didn’t even know I had because I’ve been so numb and removed from myself. They were there but I couldn’t feel them like I do now. I gained appreciation for family and attachment for the people who held me this past two years.
I thought I was grateful before, it’s nothing like it is now. I gained humility, awareness, a greater capacity for healthy self sacrifice. I gained a new home that now feels friend versus foe. I gained many lessons as a clinician and lost many doubts in my abilities ironically.
I gained a relationship with sex and my body that feels fulfilling and embodied and whole. I gained believing in my capacity for exercise and endurance. I gained pieces of my identity I would never have uncovered. I gained faith in my tefloness. I gained earned security. I gained the ability to value myself as lovable and deserving. and that line brought the tears.
I gained being less scattered in my burning brain. It has a permanent layer of salve on it. It’s soothing…. cool. Healing.
I gained the ability to be present over being lost in my head. I gained piano and enriching my already immense relationship with music. The ability to delay gratification and to not justify things in the name of scarcity.
I gained integrity……. one I was already built with but didn’t know how easily I could lose. I gained an intimate relationship with grief, and the understanding of how it can affect choices and so much more.
There are so many more, but these are the ones I can think of now.
So what now ?
The rest of my life being able to be present and not jumping ahead or freezing, for more than a little before I lovingly catch myself in a bear hug and ground, …..
I don’t worry whether I’ll write a book or not or what kind. I enjoy thinking about it and creating space inside my head for the discipline and dedication to breathe life into it.
I’ll be here writing, reading, connecting, singing, dancing, playing, working, living, and loving…..
