Tag: #anxiety

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At Home in a Heart that is Warm, and the Heart is Mine

Piece by piece she restores my faith that a person could be kind and stay ….. piece by piece she filled the holes that you burned in me at six years old…..

I woke up grumpy this morning. It’s a long day ahead, many bills to pay, many admin issues that need addressing. Ones that are intimidating. I’m tired. My b12 has been low, and I’m getting weekly injections. All of my therapies while deeply helpful, leave me gutted of energy by the end, and that leaves me fallen behind in other areas.

I’m mortal after all, not a God.

My tone inspired by the finishing of The Song of Achilles this morning.

Then as I’m in the bath attempting to rejuvenate my spirits and soak my sore body, I hear twin B singing of all things. I’m just a small town girl….. living in a lonely world…

It immediately lifts my spirits. I smiled from ear to ear. Then even more she texts requesting some time with me. I know it is backwards to need love from your children, (or is it just human all too human) but they are my only flesh and blood connections, and the only ones that have been my motivation to fight so hard against the dark experiences that marked my beginning.

I was waiting to enjoy them…. Wish I knew I didn’t have to wait. But I did. I had to connect with me first and that was nearly impossible.

We have had a turning point in family therapy. And even if it’s just a glimmer of hope (I think it’s more, that this is real), I am overjoyed with it.

Finally all being clamped down in our own story, corners, and pain…. It is relenting…. The icy grip releasing.

Could this thaw too?

It must Christina. You did. So how could it not? Remember what it took to get here.

The pool is getting fixed in the next couple of weeks. If nothing else to preserve the value of this home as improvements continue. A trip to a hot tub store in Milford last week ended in us getting the motivation to clean the thing out. I’ll have to post some before and after shots as I learn how to make the pictures blog sized and not make the whole post not work.

I can’t believe we cleaned that thing out. It has sat for four years and I thought there was no hope. That sounds familiar. Then you give a little time and attention and look what happens.

Look what a little presence does…..

Magic

Not a story, with intensity and a movie like script that must be followed or it can’t develop but everyday magic. These little moments….

I’m watching my kids become me in certain ways, and also them of course, but seeing my strength in them is exciting, and of course that I have not done every single thing wrong. The tale my mind so often weaved. Painful. Excruciating really.

Sometimes it really is all in your head. And that doesn’t make the difficulty any less or it any less real.

I spent my whole life running from my pain. Willing it away by just good ol’ elbow grease. I’d create a family. It’s just that easy. I was naive and foolish and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I had ideas, ran with them, then those ideas crashed and burned painfully. Being redirected was not my strong suit. I would stand defiantly arms crossed and be stubborn against my own behalf and not even know it.

It’s interesting to think now that all my rushing for self work was exactly what I needed to be doing because I could have missed out on connections with my kids. I think I just barely made the boat. On real live ones, not trying to figure it out cognitively, but feeling them in real time.

I have come back from the dead. I was dead inside. All the feeling parts. Maybe not fully dead, almost dead, almost lost, only a small part of human left in there. I had to fight myself, my mind, all while simultaneously figuring out how to support myself, to have healthy relationships, to choose a family for myself of people who show up for each other well.

I had to do the opposite of what I was… to slow down. To show the pain, so it could be seen, so I could be helped. Masking was suffocating me.

Last family therapy session I feel like I breathed for the first time ever. My first breath of oxygen as a flesh and blood human, not a robot who just works constantly and can’t feel.

It’s the most beautiful thing, but I’m also the most exhausted I’ve ever been and the most emotionally raw. And this of course coincides with a busy client schedule with some major shit (shifts) going on in the world, that people are feeling.

And some are not making it. Children taking their own lives, and how to hold space, but also not get trapped in the enormity of that reality.

To just smile at dinner or focus when earlier you sat in this pain with someone and your mind is beckoned to go there, and to the possibility of that happening to you.

I thought I knew what heart break was until I recognized how the very thing that saved me was keeping me emotionally distant from my children. That is heartbreak.

I just expected myself to exist without my story attached, without even speaking of it. I didn’t want it Or me, or my mother to hurt them, but It was always going to pass down to a degree. I held it back with everything that I have. Carried it really. Until I recognized the heaviness was crushing me, and that wasn’t serving anyone.

Now that I’ve set it down I don’t know that I’ll know what to do, how to be. I’ve been existing this way a long time. In reality I’ve been setting it down piece by piece and I’m getting to the part where I’m starting to feel naked without it. To shiver and shake with the new.

When it comes to new and trauma survivors, good or bad doesn’t matter, new has a high threat quotient.

Settle…. Stay…..ground

You’ve worked so hard to be here

Home in a heart that is warm despite the amount of cold it has felt….

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The Tank is Full

What makes life worth living for me….

I cry for how long I’ve judged my process and my decisions and choices. I cry for how hard I’ve been on myself when I’ve been surviving my whole life. Just because no one could see it. Judged for the ways I chose to save myself. Because I’m a mother, these choices meant I was selfish. The worst part is I allowed myself to believe those criticisms and as a result pulled away from my children.

I pulled away because I didn’t want to infect them with my particular disease. Survival is a great burden, and it’s hardly understood, except by those who have had to. I didn’t want them to understand, and then to feel close I needed them to. And that too became and unrealistic demand. I judged myself so harshly, and held on tight to that.

Holding on and letting go. Figuring out what to hold on to and what to let go of. The stakes feeling so high. I’ve softened all of that. Mistakes are the portals of discovery. In fact some of my most recent joy had so many in the beginning and that is what has made it feel perfect. The imperfect.

Because it’s real. You know? 😉

This morning on my sacred Sunday I am reflecting and wafting through my life. I’m listening to Exile by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver. I am just overwhelmed by the abundance I’ve created in my life by the self-work I’ve done. I’ve done the impossible, changed my wiring in so many ways. People don’t do this, but I am. And I’m fucking proud.

I’m so emotional lately…. That is when I can stop holding my breath. I still do that. I hold on and wait for the bottom to drop out, but I know when I’m doing that, and when I’m not, and it makes such a difference and when I’m feeling safe, when I can reflect, the tears immediately come. The gratitude. The joy.

I made it out alive and I kept my self on ice, ready for exploration once safe. Now I’m here, and so often I’m overwhelmed that it feels like I won’t get the experience in some way. Even when I’m right here in it.

This is a journey not a destination. This journey is so beautiful it brings me to my knees with emotion. The good, the bad, and everything in between.

I ran so fast and so hard. I ran on empty so long, that it’s hard to know how to operate on a full tank, and not just keep watching the gauge. No matter how many times I check, it’s full, won’t stop me from trying. Some things are hard wired.

I’m operating this new soft self. My mind tries to drag me to every worst case scenario and exhaust me into that familiar irritability, but I’ve hedged my bets with all the support I’ve allowed myself permission to seek, and to accept it.

My authentic self is finally taking the lead…. Slow and steady wins the race. I am steady. I am a rock. I am reliable and trustworthy. I am consistent and nurturing and so loving. I can see myself and it’s overwhelming.

I spent most of my life overwhelmed by fear, and now I get the privilege of being overwhelmed by love.

I just took a deep breath. Whenever I’m overwhelmed now, that’s what I do. The restless settles into security and then the fruits of my labors shine and sparkle all around. I blink my eyes and try to bring them in and out of focus. Yes Christina this is real.

It isn’t any longer all or nothing. My life is piloted by self trust, not story telling. And I will not shame myself for what developed out of survival, for I have always lived the philosophy of Maya Angelou. Once you know better do better. And I always have.

And now after 41 years on this planet I’m in my body. Through hell and back so many times. Fighting myself, fighting every battle that crossed my path, permanently in fight and flight mode. The story protected the mechanism and as long as that was the case the pattern repeated.

Now I am broken free. Out of jail and purgatory. It’s like having to learn everything from the beginning again, so vulnerable and raw.

I’m so exhausted, prone, in a good way. Laying spent across the earth finally without all the thoughts of illness and death.

Everything is a first right now in so many ways. Out of the dark night. Reborn. Now when I don’t want something to be over rather than dissociation, I open wider and connect more. It’s never over, the moments, they become absorbed into my being.

Becoming solid, whole, and present.

I am present, alive, for the first time in this way. Overwhelmed by possibility….. life is beautiful. I know I always believed in that, but I never felt it, not like this.

Recovery is a long road, and it can be beautiful. It doesn’t have to be dark. Turn on the light. Allow the universe to have your back and shine its gifts on your pain. Everything is connected….

Stay tuned

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Nightmares and Dreamscapes of the Shattered Mind

“It’s never too late to be who you should have been”

The pain has woken me up. Or maybe it’s the words that woke me up. Or did the pain wake me up to the words.

Until the events of the past couple of years I never realized how much pain I was in all the time. I wouldn’t have realized anymore because I fashioned a soothing and capable self for others as a means of survival. I must have found it made the pain stop.

I had an epiphany as I was awoken at 4 am out of a dead sleep that as I only had myself to rely on I decided to make her so attuned and soothing to others because that also made me feel safe. As I soothed another I was soothed, and I recognized they were comforted, but I couldn’t recognize myself.

I’ve lived my whole life trying to make the pain stop in what I thought of as a healthy way. And perhaps it’s a lot healthier than where I could be. I’m driven intensely almost all the time to find ways of existing that make the pain stop. The anxious thoughts, the many physical symptoms I deal with regularly. The fact I can’t concentrate to save my life and my mind feels broken.

I found ways around the shattered self that lives inside to the point I was afraid I was a sociopath. Because I carefully select an emotion based on practicality before I’ll let myself feel it. I need to know if it’s safe and acceptable to others. If it will bring me belonging or desertion, warmth or isolation.

Are there others like me? Where are the other people who raised themselves, lived through terror constantly, and made a strong self in the outside and spent their life afraid they were bad or wrong? Where are the other people that coped the way I have ?

The things I found to make the pain stop weren’t numbing, they were the opposite, tuning in not tuning out. I wanted to make my mother’s torment stop. I knew that. And my aunts and my grandparents , and my little brother’s, and all the other chaos that swirled around me. I was determined. I am nothing if not determined. I clamp down like steel, my iron will and my nostrils flaring. I was years before they ever did so in a calm primal manner that meant anything but terror.

The problem with fashioning a self out of many trial and error tries, to make sure you don’t become what you’re from, is that your true self is lost. Many people don’t have their true selves in tact for one reason or another. I’m far from alone in the pain of being pathologically lonely.

The problem with all of this above is you can never really trust what’s real and what isn’t. And you’re vulnerable to the same fantastical thinking that probably took you to a safer place. See how I slip out of first person when it gets close to the wound?

My beautiful writer and dreamer mind, the childlike one preserved on ice betrayed me a couple of years ago. Is this real is the first thing I asked my therapist in the first session. The one where I would ask if I had to choose between passion and safety and what each of those things meant. What I was referring to was a feeling that shook the tectonic plates of my world.

The feeling was as real as you and me. What meaning I attached to the feeling and why was the ultimate betrayal. Escapism at its finest. Why couldn’t I just be a gamer at this point. That wouldn’t have cost me my sanity. Or maybe even an alcoholic. The jury is still out on if that would have.

I think I was trying to recover a sense of faith in something along the way, and I really clung to spirituality. Everything happens for a reason I bought into that when it came to this. And as it turned out it did, but the reason I was so very wrong about. And once you’ve felt so very wrong so many times and for so long, the joy, the manufactured joy, begins to get further and further away.

The only thing that brought me relief in childhood was being brought into other families and feeling seen, and the possibility of belonging. I became childlike and wide eyed. So when I attended a couple of family events and felt I belonged there, with someone telling me also that I did, and they wanted and saw me, I became attached to that notion and all of the players involved.

The intoxicating mixture of the words expressed and the want coupled with the family gatherings at the right time of loneliness and the hook was set, and the story was laid down, and I wanted to believe that magic more than anything.

As it turns out when you set out to find what to believe in, and it’s never in who you are, you’re in for a lot of pain. No foundation for me knowing who I was got laid down. So I’ve flitted from here to there trying to make the pain stop.

The thing that does that the most for me is touch. Touch forces me to be reminded I exist and I’m less likely to float away in my mind. It grounds and comforts. It is something I spent a long time not understanding why I didn’t care for it when I longed so much. These days I can be touched by kindness, even a smile and it gets me through.

And once I did figure that out nothing was going to prevent me from that joy. I was determined and racing through life because I wanted a story book story. The years together, the wedding where I am celebrated. I am never celebrated anywhere. It was the opposite. So when the attention is on me in that capacity I wriggle with discomfort, but also desperately want that, with the wanting of a child.

Whenever I started to get serious with someone and attempted to piece together some of my memories to explain to them my life it always felt unreal. Like a lie. I felt like I had made it up. I know I didn’t, but even the telling feels like that can’t be a thing. It must have made it up it must be me. I felt like snakes were crawling all over my body and I was going to vomit. And desperately I wondered if they were going to want to choose me once they knew. so I stopped trying. It’s too dark and I know instinctively people don’t want to believe things like that exist. Conceal don’t feel… don’t let it show. A child knows who the world (parent) needs them to be. We are much more attuned.

I never even got to know that because I moved things along so quickly out of panicky desperation every single time, all the while looking exactly the opposite on the outside so sure. Is it any wonder I can’t trust myself.

Part child, part adult…. My own personal science experiment. Let’s try this or that and see how it feels. But I don’t know how I feel. Let me look at how other people seem to feel is that how I find out?

Why am I so different from other people? I’d imagine the answering of this question will be a part of my work. I feel like my therapist would say Christina you know why, and I’d stare blankly that way I do when my brain runs out of knowledge and explanations and I long to just feel.

I very much veered off of the poetic musings about pain that my mind made me wake up for. That post would have been beautiful. It split immediately off into my thinking mind grappling to explain it make sense of it, and left the feeling.

I’ve lived my whole life trying to make the pain stop while also “being a good person”. Or feeling like I needed to feel like one. As it turns out I’m all too human to be a good person all the time. I’m a person who feels the feelings of others when I’m at a comfortable distance. As it turns out once I’m up close the stakes are too high on that and I can camp down immediately and be completely blank, and therefore banish myself from my own graces as a result, rather than trying to understand. U

nless of course I can be soothing to that person, then it’s the perfect drug for the both of us.

In my life time bridging the gaps of understanding for others split off from themselves or their loved ones…. It stops the pain. When someone outside of you sees you with the most generous perspective and truly understands, it lets the pain out. The pain of not being understood. I put the words together to help the person understand how their coping has been shaped and how their trauma changed their stars, and how to find meaning in that, that at bare minimum can lessen the pain.

The scarcity I’ve lived with is trying to get the pain to stop, and the irony is to become connected to myself so I can have a foundation I’ve been tasked with being directly in it until I become real.

Until I become visible to myself, and develop my own consistency outside of anyone else and my own self. Not develop that’s what I did before. Uncover what was already there. “It’s never too late to be who you should have been.”

Pain itself has changed and shaped me in so many ways, as well as the things I tried to do to get the pain to stop.

I have learned if you get or are in enough pain for too long you’ll do almost anything to make it stop. There’s no calm reasoning and then you lose faith in yourself to be consistent and dependable and it’s just a cycle of pure hell.

I’m in so much pain it’s like being burned alive, and you’d never even know if you looked at me, although I’m quite sure I look different now, that now it’s beginning to show in the lines of my face and in my weary bones.

It wakes me up and memories float in and out without my consent. I can only sift through the ashes, as the tears make them stick to my face. I toss and turn all night some nights and others I sleep soundly and it is the day that is the nightmare. A gauntlet full of memories that pull me back to a place that harms and I have to start all the way over.

One little fragment at a time I recover myself from all of this, all the while having no idea who I’ll be and rather than the idea of having a solid foundation being exciting, I just get to be viciously aware it should not be happening at this time in my life. That I’m all out of order, because I get to live seeing that confusion and loneliness on my children’s faces. They’ve had to fashion selves too, in the absence of me.

What’s normal and what isn’t during this time ? How do I relate? What’s safe and what isn’t? What’s right and what’s wrong? Chaos and anxiety.

These days my strategy is finding calm and soothing from inside myself. Finding the impossible.

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Grief Will Drag You to The Depths of Who You Really Are…..

I’ve been hiding and it’s time I come out. I’ve been hiding how pain I’ve been in and how hard my life has been for me from everyone, because I thought if I did that I’d have a better chance at being loved.

People don’t want someone who is set so far back with themselves, people want people who are strong and confident and ENOUGH, which was the theme of my EMDR this morning.

I’ve proved every thought or fear I’ve had wrong about myself over and over, and yet I never get to benefit from my own warmth and love. I’m kept out in the cold from me. Always pressing my nose on the glass peering in at the warm family events.

And ironically enough my devastation would begin at one such an event. The complicating elixir of feeling like I could belong and hold my head high without being numb or shaking with anxiety. Dear Evan Hansen. We will get to that later. I was excited to be out in the world belonging, but where and to whom did I belong and why?

This is the level of lost I’ve been at for going on three years now. And I committed to the unthinkable which has been staying with and in my pain to dig myself out. Even writing those words I begin to cry hard. A hard guttural wild animal cry with frantic panicky eyes.

The things Evan Hansen did to try to become visible. Does anybody see me or hear me? And the answer was no. I became so effective at being seen as I needed to be to obtain love and affection. And my God if I never shame myself again for how I’ve needed to save myself.

This is the commitment I need to become fierce about. To repairing this constant demon of not enough (or worse bad and toxic) that is so deeply entrenched in my programming it’s threatening to squeeze the life out of me. I’m stripped to the bare bones of just who I am to lean on, and not what I do. What I do to fix it, what I do to understand.

I’ll get a breath and then get dragged back down to the bottom of the ocean with an anvil on my foot and drowning over and over again. Sputtering fighting for oxygen, every day of my life unless I became part of someone else’s family which always temporarily numbed the pain and made me feel safe and loved. But that could never be sustained because I was empty of myself. There was no self left that I could see. There were too many words inside my head that conflicted and too many emotions flashbacks.

I can’t get any oxygen. Help me.

I’ve been saying help me so often now, and it brings up shame every single time and more waves of unworthiness. Will this battle ever come to an end, or will these memories, thoughts, and genuine body harm and tired take my life along with my soul.

I’ve been battling for my life and the worst part about that is I don’t look like someone who is battling for their life. There are no scars that can be seen, no marks. This is why we teach visibility by example and why we protect.

Dear Evan Hansen…. I am you. That scared lonely child, who still tried to fight to be seen and then felt bad about that too. For shouting or crying because I learned to gaslight myself out of my own reality to try and survive with my mental faculties.

I think of Viktor Frankl here and why I connected so much with that paper on his book in grad school, and why I have my tattoo and why it means so much to me. He kept his by having meaning, and that meaning was the love he derived from his partner, that’s what he held onto, it was love.

The only meaning I could get in my childhood was acts of service, doing. That’s the only way I got attention of any variety and usually that was to obtain more of what I had to offer. It was not to protect, invest, and be interested in me just for the sake of being so, for the joy.

The purgatory I’ve been has been wanting to be the parent I didn’t have and to be able to do that for my children and trying every way known to man to achieve that. I knew I felt the most alive in the things I’d been so deprived of. So I tried for love.

And then I felt selfish and was told as much and became my mother who also wanted love, but she didn’t give it either, and I do. I am not my mother.

I am not her.

Most days I don’t think I’ll come out of this alive, that is my truth right now. Most days it feels like too much work to breathe. This trauma work while having no love needs met or secure family system and feeling horrible I’m not only not offering that to my children, but I’m not able to access it in myself well going through this. I’m all locked down and sick.

This illness of being lost to oneself and not having much in the way of relief is deadly. It’s a deadly game. I can’t digest food and my head feels as if it will explode. For so long the things I did to comfort were also harmful and I’m aware. I’m viciously aware. I can’t get out I’m trapped in here help me.

The more I say help me and the more I allow myself to be loved only in the safe ways I need to be that the universe constantly puts in my path, healing tries to take hold. And my nasty worn out mind tries to swat it away, and I crumble.

I can only hope that this experience leaves me in such a heap that I never forget I don’t know what someone else is going through and I become kind by design even though life has not handled me gently. The warrior of the light.

All of the ways I was responsible and disciplined long before I ever should have been eroded the very thing I would need in adulthood to sustain the love I so badly desired and deserved.

And this latest period watching my children shout at me to figure it out mom, we need you, except they don’t say that as teens, they say I hate you and you’re going to end up cold and alone because you’re so difficult to deal with. What I’ve been dealing with has been unbearably difficult and I’ve been primarily alone in it. Too ashamed to get any help or even visibility because I chose this right ?

Every time its my fault. Wired for abuse return to abuse. Every time its my fault. And the tape begins you’re selfish, you’re your mother, you’re….. and it breaks my spirit, soul, and heart. Never mind that happening from the outside I’m adept at always doing it from the inside. I could really go for a good coma right now. Yes Moira.

And then when the person that you love tells you in so many ways this is your fault, that’s a rock bottom that knows no bounds. And when you identify with their wounds, but miss all the differences, and you are betrayed and betray yourself and internalize more shame, it’s easy to get a full understanding on how people get to the point where they take their lives.

That will never be my path because it just is not. Not because I’m better than anyone who has. I am not. No more or less just different. If I don’t continue to make meaning out of this suffering by learning my story and then sharing it so others can get the words to heal, that being the healing, it will have been for nothing.

It’s not in me to give up, and I hope I passed that along to my children. I just need to figure out right now how to keep myself full of love and safe, and stay away from anything that is not that.

For my beginning today I reached out to my energy healer and my first step is to go see her, and what I will say is I need your love and support. I have no thinking left. I’m not there to think w her or come up with solutions. The solution is love. And I’m going to be it, and ask for it, and work on recovering.

This is what it looks like to grieve a childhood you never had, and both parents, and a broken and confused reality and scattered mind you have to live with. To grieve all the potential of who you could or would have been with the right ingredients.

This is messy, grimy, slippery, dirty, painful grief. I am going through these things, but I am not these things.

I am enough

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Onward… How to do branding without the selling part.

Had to break the drought it was time….

It was a series of unfortunate events that would ultimately lead me to the most secure relationship with myself I have ever embarked on. My story is taking shape. They say you write better from a more resolved place. Cheryl Strayed for example didn’t write Wild until around ten years after her hike through the Pacific Northwest.

So I’m sifting back through the events lately, as I also remain firmly in the present reality. Whirlwind after whirlwind when it came to relationships, and all because I never had one with myself, or my own identity for that matter. And that’s scary. No wonder I didn’t trust the world or myself. The very definition of anxiety. Homework: write fifty I am statements. The first time I attempted this I had around 3 or 4, and they were just titles.

Now I’m on the ground, and while my feet feel a little unsteady sometimes, I’m enjoying having more peace and clarity. I will be fiercely protective of that. My relationships with my children are becoming real and solidifying. They are no longer this touch and go, terrified thing.

I can tolerate being present now, without being swallowed up by fear and anxiety.

So often I look back at the girl who was consumed by intrusive thinking almost constantly. It was incredibly painful. No wonder my first objective was always shelter. And that to obtain that shelter I looked for the fellow vulnerable. I didn’t want to be alone. Except that I never was, I just couldn’t feel any different at that time.

I often tell my clients that our feelings lie to us, particularly if we suffer from ptsd or an anxiety disorder. Then our feelings can be really unreliable. We must get to solid ground and not be flailing about before we assess and certainly before we decide. Feelings are not facts.

So this morning I’m thinking about the ingredients and prescription for change. The thing people come to me for. Some want me to do it for them and have the answers, some want nothing from me, and come because they have been told they should, but aren’t willing or open. And my favorites the ones I work the hardest to show up for, are in earnest desire of change and willing to hear hard things, sit and be in uncomfortable feelings, and stay the course with trust and conviction. No wonder they and this work inspires me so much.

This is what I always aspired to be and do, but a lot of the information I needed was missing.

I didn’t know I was co-dependent and what would subconsciously feel like home time and time again, is someone to heal or fix, so I could also be doing that. That the relationship would be dependent on our mutual need and addictions, and not mutually independent and parallel. If I was alone I was lost to myself and frozen with thoughts of fear and inadequacy. Love become confused with desperate need, and boy does that create blind spots.

I have such hard nights so often. Last night in particular. Nights I just want to be held, feel someone else’s heart near to mine, smell their skin, sync my breath, and my whole nervous system responds. But being safe with a person means so much more than that now.

What it means primarily for me these days is that said person has the courage to hold themselves accountable and a secure relationship with themselves. This is something I’ve asked my therapist a hundred times if it even exists, as I stared blankly off, completely removed from myself. I couldn’t answer what I wanted or needed when I began.

I was in so much pain all the time, my only energy seemed to be to obtain momentary comfort, over anything lasting, secure, and that met my needs.

What I find myself wanting most sincerely (I was tempted to say desperately but that’s old, and I am new), is someone who wants to work as hard as I do on themselves, and stay parallel to me in that process. That we ebb and flow and dance. Secure attachment, which you can only do with another secure. I’ve been spending my life becoming an earned secure. Security is anything but natural for me, but I was always going to crack that code.

An integration of mind, body, and soul: bringing all the separated on ice parts, home. Reconnecting the nerves and the tissue. It’s been a lot of surgery lately. 2014 the year of my graduation from my masters, led to the beginning of the thaw. I found Morning Pages. I finally had some time that was my own, and some hope for financial security. It was my first toe in the water of living rather than purely surviving.

2016 the thawing gave way to whole hearted enthusiasm and I jumped quickly into a marriage. We didn’t even know one another apart from that we both had genuine hearts and were kind, and seemed to both want the same things. I can only speak from my experience of course, but what we really needed was a relationship with ourselves not with another person.

We didn’t legitimize ourselves or our own experience. We hid away in shame and feared that others wouldn’t trust our union. A self-fulfilling prophecy when you don’t know or trust yourself.

I have a personal belief we grow more in relation to others than we ever do by ourselves. But there’s a time and season for each, and that growth doesn’t always have to be found in romantic partnership. That has been a big lesson this past year. My determination sometimes preceded all logic. I can chuckle at that a little now, and appreciate that in myself. It has made for a lively story.

I am now growing in relation to lots of others, and primarily myself as I sit with me and pause and reflect and that feels safe. Holy shit I can’t believe I just said that. When I have ever felt safe all alone in the world. Except I don’t feel alone, and I don’t feel adrift either.

I am in pain, agony really, so many times throughout the day as I sift through the wreckage of all my past attempts at a dream, and now I’m am restructuring as the architect of my own life.

I am learning to live without outsourcing some of the most incredible aspects of my life, because I feared I wasn’t good enough. Often it feels like being in quicksand, that at any moment I’ll be pulled back under to that old existence where I couldn’t breathe. But then I look around and realize I’m in a beautiful field, and not on the edge of a cliff.

My goodness I missed this. I believe there are many good things on my horizon. The most forefront of which is thinking about what I need to say to the world, and how to say it. I’ve been working a beyond validation model for counseling for years, and I think I may breathe some life into that.

I have this magical ingredient as a counselor and it’s difficult to even put into words, and I think I’ll take some time doing just that. If I have a valuable resource I need to, actually scratch that I want to describe it so I can share. The thing about me is I want to share not sell, so I’m nervous about that whole process. I don’t want to brand or market, I just want to be my authentic self.

I’ve made such a transformation this past year and a half and I want to share that journey. Perhaps it’s so fresh I’ll need to share more previous ones first and trust that, my own memory and lived experience.

Why ultimately do I want to share it? I would have said before to feel less alone, which means I needed too much to be able to do so in integrity. I want to share it so I can empower others to have more satisfying lives. It’s so automatic who am I to do so? Until I look around and realize this ability to consistently self reflect and put this into practice with follow through is rare. So rare in fact that’s what led to the lonely feeling.

Where are the others doing this? They are working and sharing. Brene Brown, Nicole Lepera, Anita Morjani, Byron Katie, Martha Beck, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dr. Ramani, Ross Rosenberg, Melody Beattie, Anne Lamott, Stephen King, and so so many others….

I need to stay the course with my work and my relationship with myself no matter what… I said that to the tune of Callum Scott of course. Dancing on my own… I never intended it to be that way, but touching lives and being present has me feeling much less alone than I ever have.

I know in forward motion my task is to only entertain situations that make me feel less alone, not more.

Onward…. (Now I understand why this is the word Liz uses). It’s solid. It carries with all the lessons and the pain, and also still goes forward. It has conviction and strength, and also softness. The things I aspire to.

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A Feral Child and Learning How to Hold a Fork…

And Jordan Almonds, and Necco (gross)…. It’s a wonder that man had any teeth. Red Vines were my favorite….

This year’s love…. David Gray radio. A recent wound. A beautiful song. I am sleepy and groggy. It’s day 2 of quitting another unhealthy thing. 90 more and we will be talking. There will be so much more room for my gifts.

I have therapy this evening and then tattoo therapy with Bill. Bill’s nose looks like my dads and I feel some cosmic connection and intimacy with him. I have no idea why. I mean he is placing art on my body that will be there until I die. Now I’m getting emotional. Is that weird? Of course it is I say with a smile.

I am reading toward the end of Anne Lamott’s new book: there’s a chapter called Can You Love Me Now…. Where she talks of having a phd in morbid reflection and describes the panicky feeling of being lost in her head during a show her and her husband attend and what her saving graces of this event were. Lovely.

She is my companion this morning. I ache and I’m tired. Another trip down the rabbit hole Alice. Not exactly more like walking down another street. Let’s be kind to ourselves Christina. But the same reminiscent body aches, headache, and disease are the result. No thank you.

Anyway she talks about the candy Good n Plenty in the book and I’m transported. Good n Plenty always remind me of my late father, John Rexford Wilson. I can say that because he’s dead you know, and because it’s my story to tell. I created a warm memory of him as my rescuer and preserved that for years in the museum of my mind. I would later discover the actual truth was so much different than my own lie. But that lie kept me warm and even more importantly encouraged enough to get to another phase of my life.

So this candy. The pink and white hard shells that contain a hard often stale gummy piece of black licorice, which I detest. And I realized about myself that I would make myself like something I didn’t to feel close (an illusion) to him. I would eat them just to try and remember something warm. Movie theater candy for the one or two movies I ever saw with him. The very first gremlins movie at a drive-in in Ashland Oregon. He didn’t even take me, my babysitter Shannon did. She was beautiful, he was sleeping with her I believe. I was with him five seconds and still had a babysitter, anyway she was kind and beautiful so I didn’t mind. She made me feel like a person and not some unsavory thing, the way they looked at me. Something more than Lisa’s daughter.

Ever since beginning Mary Karr’s the Liars Club, which consequently I haven’t picked up since, I’ve had a memory that is replaying in my mind. At the table at my Dad and step mother Anita’s table. They were clean and hip and way too cool for me. They ate a macrobiotic diet and my dad worked for a company called super blue green algae cel tech.

Anyway I was holding my spoon or fork like a Neanderthal apparently. With my whole fist around it scooping piles of food. Cous cous and orange roughy. I still associate cous cous as a good memory despite what I’m about to share. They looked at me in horror and laughed at me, mocked me. They told me I was eating like an animal and why hadn’t anyone taught me how to properly hold silverware, as if this was my fault of course.

My whole life was my own fault from birth.

This memory just keeps replaying. I don’t remember how old I was. I felt like I was eleven or twelve. Did I actually eat like that all the way until then in front of everyone? How feral was I? Most of my memories are erased as if I was tased by men in black and that silver thingy that looks like a pen.

I love pens. A soothing thought amidst the flames of this memory and so many others buried away for my protection. The tears fill my eyes. Determination fills my heart. To love myself better than all of this first half of my life.

The tears fall on the page, they fall with all the disappointments of then and now. They make room for the joy. The kind that only courageous hearts find.

I didn’t belong anywhere and I’ve been seeking with that fearless determination amidst a fearful soul. They clash and merge and blur into butterfly soup.

I belong to me now and I am able to be present with them, and that’s all that matters. I will show up for me, and write for the world to connect with my words. Whatever weary travelers need to come across them.

For now I am still finding ways to access and get out my story. Who I am….. this journey is not for the faint of heart.

There will be a client on the floor as I call it in thirty minutes I guess I should probably prepare myself for that honor.

Thank you for listening to a piece of my story.

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Unapologetically Myself is Always the Answer…

  • Solo at bars equals less lonely these days…… when you just need to be around people….

I’m anxious this evening and I don’t know why. It’s been a long time since I’ve been anxious. Haven’t been taking anything for it or had any migraines. Most bad habits have stopped. Still definitely indulging in some “binge of the bad food” days, but not out of balance.

I’m listening to this RIOPY piano that I found an add for while reading a Gottman article. I’m reading and eating everything in sight and suddenly will listen to Fall on Me.

I had a date with Twin A today and it was delightful. We got lobster rolls and went to Rj Julia, and got a bunch of things that stuck out to us in these cute little shops. She got the cutest sun hat I’ve ever seen in my life, and a matching necklace and earrings that are simple and delicately beautiful. It was so nice to see her enjoy herself. We missed twin B who was working, and my little big guy who is working on his life.

And then there is the books…. Always….

I love the honesty with which Anne Lamott writes. I love her! Purely and truly. Bird by Bird is phenomenal, but today it’s her newest Dusk Night Dawn, and currently she’s describing what it’s like to get married in your late sixties, when you’re in “the third third of your life.

The day was mostly good. Despite not taking any new clients one slipped through the cracks and I had an intake (first session). These days I only get clients who literally appear as if they are sent specifically from the Universe. Literally nothing else. It’s a beautiful place to be in. I’m the abusive relationship slayer these days, a protector of young and adult children who have no language for what they are going through.

They come in for one thing and end up finding another, as often happens in therapy. My wisdom on interpersonal dynamics is unparalleled in a variety of areas, it’s just true, and my intuition gets sharper by the second. Someone commented the other day that I should have Brene Browns money or something along those lines and said when I get big to take them with me/ don’t leave. I’m told this regularly.

How? I just don’t see it. I know it but don’t know it. But regardless my response was I don’t think I want to be big. What if I couldn’t do this? And their response was along the lines of me needing a wider audience because the world needs it.

But I don’t know how to bring it forth without it being activated by 1-1. I don’t know, and anyway again I’m not sure what direction I want to go with my life right now. But I am sure I want to serve and that I have a certain sight.

What if I’m exhausted and just want to play with words all day and write fun and light fiction. I’m almost laughing as these words fall onto the page, at how I’d be laughed at by anyone who knows me well, if I was sharing this info right at this moment.

Anyway twin A wanted to go to her boyfriends, and passed on dinner. She’s crazy. So I sat at Founders house alone. I aimed for a seat w a view of the goings on on the green, outdoors. But all they had was at the bar. And low and behold while I had planned to write on the inside covers of my haul from Rj Julia, especially on twin A’s book, I am seated near a woman who keeps holding back tears. She had a bright teal top on.

She wasn’t very successful because they would slowly come down when she was quiet. Then she would wipe them away and go on talking cheerily. At one point my heart literally squeezed because I have been there so many times! I knew there was no getting out of her force field once I was settled despite my intentions and bounds these days. And sure enough….

So I sit here marinating in new disappointments and old, my heart aching, and then trying to comfort by reminiscing about my day.

I just heard a bang and am perhaps more jumpy than usual as there was just a shooting a street over today 🙁 Chip dropped off fresh bagels this morning and shared there was a civil unrest he could tell, and then reports of more info have slowly arrived throughout the day. We drove past it on the way home while they were filming live so who knows maybe you’ll see us in a news clip.

I have a new skin care routine to try tonight. I’ve never believed in such things. Usually they squeeze money out of you counting on preying upon your insecurities. For the most part I believe the body is an amazing design that takes care of all those things naturally. I don’t begrudge anyone something that makes them feel better, but personally I cannot get behind plumping, injection, cutting, carving etc.

But I tried some products the other day and I woke up with my skin feeling like I had just been born. So I digress. I’m still not sure I believe in it, but anything that makes me feel some comfort these days. Why not?!

The manager of the restaurant (I believe that’s who she is) is married to a woman who was at the bar with a friend of hers. They were chatting me up and commenting on my tattoo. I got w bunch of compliments today. They asked if I was an author because they saw me writing in covers of multiple books, ha. I said I hope someday and they said I looked like one. Loved that. also they told of how they met 15 years ago and they are so cute, so that made me happy for them, but sad for me.

Kids are doing well. I’m seeing more and more what I’ve done right, and not just all the threats and hard stuff.

So many things in my life are complete, but I am desperately lonely. A soul aching lonely. I am lonely for front porch sits consistently with my person, and consistency in general. I want what Joan Didion and her husband had, the type of relationship that makes you write gorgeous things, because you can’t not ….

There are so many moments I’m not missing anything and present and happy and self-loving, and forgiving, and moving in my life, but tonight I have hit a sad anxious period.

At least tomorrow is a sacred Sunday… my children will be around me… and I can wake up feeling the after affects of my soft skin, and smelling comforting smells, and appreciating every little thing.

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Marveling ….

So this morning I’m watching my teenage son pick himself up from some of his personal struggles and a new grief and I am in awe. I made that, but nothing could prepare me for the privilege it is to watch him grow. And if the events of this past couple of years didn’t happen, I might have missed it. That would have been tragic.

He’s so beautiful. Learning to be himself, and so are you Christina. My friends would say that, because they often see me better than I see myself.

I am coming back to life. I am breathing life into this home that felt like a tomb housing all my dead dreams. But nothing died, life just adjusted me back on my path.

A dear one sent me a Jay Shetty podcast where he was interviewing Martha Beck and this quote is what began it, “The variety of an ordinary life is infinite and precious.” Yes yes yes! She talks about what integrity means in the sense that she knows it. Which is when we are aligned with our true nature and purpose and whole versus when we are divided by being what society wants us to be. And the sheer difficulty of this because biologically we are wired for belonging.

For me, never having felt a secure beginning of belonging the only thing my frightened mind could do was focus on that pursuit and then society came along and caused people to judge me, knowing nothing of my origins or my pain.

Recently even a family therapist has contributed to some of this shaming, without realizing it. It has shown me how easy it is to shame/judge another, when what they need to grow is understanding, acceptance, and support.

It is so easy to say what a mom should or shouldn’t be while never even knowing her story. You cannot give what you do not have. And I’ve spent my life making sure I got it so my kids could have me available to them. Ironically that path and financial scarcity created the opposite. I’ve been in a hurry to become someone they needed. I did it without being given it naturally. I’ve been doing the impossible for a very long time. Defying gravity.

This has been challenging my approach as a counselor as well and there’s a shift happening in me. Moving towards the natural ability to nurture and support. One I always felt I was and would forever be without.

It is grief itself that has softened and humbled me into a calmer more loving person. I think of that anxious terrified girl who looked so strong and intimidating clothed in her defense mechanisms. A scared child, and easily irritated adult. I just want to hug her, she is me.

Witnessing how much suffering a human heart and body can endure is truly humbling. And our culture says just keep going. And yes we need to keep going, but at what cost if we leave ourselves behind by not acknowledging our own lived experiences fully.

Acknowledging, knowing, is the sweet spot between blame, shame, and or blindness and numbing. Acknowledging allows us to see what we are working with at full value and adjust accordingly. But for intolerable circumstances we make up stories about what’s happening subconsciously in an effort to feel better, but what that does is make us even more locked inside ourselves.

As I get to know myself I realize how invisible I’ve been to me. I’m often surprised when people say something that reflects they see me, and I see it so differently.

Learning to be Christina….

My relationships with my children are evolving, repairing, it’s slow, but it’s happening all around me. The realization of how much beauty I will get to experience as I get to watch them become. I could not have asked for a better life. I say that as if I did not create every second of it. See invisible.

Lately I’m filled with love…. There isn’t a part of this last time that I regret any more because understanding wipes that away. It’s exhausting to fight your own path, your own self. Especially now that I know my own heart, and have a new understanding of how my early life impacted me. It is not and will never be an excuse. It is reality. I was so so hard on myself.

Something I’ve unwittingly ingrained in my children, and now hopefully as they watch me change that, they can heal also.

I think of that feral self I was, and have so much compassion for her pain.

Martha Beck describes so eloquently the pain one can experience when divided and I was divided from self and any family system and I’ve been rushing to get to a place where I can enjoy my children and be connected to them and me, but that journey never looked like that to the naked eye, because you would need a deep understanding of brain, behavior, biology, and my story.

I am working on that last part now, the claiming and the telling….

Anyway it’s time to shower and counsel humans (my greatest privilege), and then have my own counseling. Just a typical Tuesday. I had so many thoughts as I always do, but lately it’s the quiet of my mind that I marvel…..

💜

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Tattoos and Transformations

All I know so far….. “you throw your head back and spit in the wind…. Let the walls crack because it lets the light in. “Perhaps this image will go on my upper arm in portraiture. Hmm

Good morning. So as it turns out I’m way more of a bad ass than I thought and at this point a lot of the habitual anxiety that I carried with me throughout my life is free to go. Thank you, but your services are no longer needed.

I’m working on a tattoo sleeve and in many ways not even sure how I got here. To be getting one. I’m a naturalist and I love the look of natural skin and I can be judgmental of myself while loving them on other people. What even is that?! Fear? Yes fear. That absolute asshole that separates us from a bold expressive existence that is our own. I have lived riddled with it, and it has obstructed so much of my joy.

These days what I am trying my hardest to do is honor and acknowledge what happened to me in a way that encompasses a wide range of compassion for my needs and desires. I was talking to a friend yesterday morning, my dear Mary and Pippin, outside in her beautiful oasis of a backyard, and talking about the difference between needy and needing. Lately I’ve been using this re-frame in my office. If someone says oh they are so needy, or oh I am so needy, my immediate question is: what are they/you needing? And it immediately changes the energy.

It’s literally astounding to the person asked that it could be seen any other way.

I am astounded by my life right now, and many days I’m not sure whether that’s a positive or not. It is not at all where I imagined I would be, and some of that borders on the miraculous and some if I am not careful threatens me with an impenetrable sadness.

I am deeply lonely right now, and also so far from alone. I’ve never understood things more or been closer and connected to ny loved ones. I am literally surrounded, and I can feel it and be present in it. It and I, are not invisible. That is priceless. I sleep well, for the most part, although this week has been riddled with anxiety and restlessness. I was so so anxious about this tattoo.

And I’m so grateful for that because it has shown me I am thinking less impulsively. Did you hear that? Not only thinking but behaving less impulsive. It felt impulsive or a mid life crisis. What a judgment there right ?! Who am I to have art on my body that is sacred to me if it means I could be judged or worse judge myself.

I looked at an arm that was not my own this morning and keep getting anxious I’ll reject it or won’t like it like that. It’s new and permanent, and it’s making me think of Attachment. I am continuing to read the book Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. I have been reading, absorbing, life rafting with that book for months. I believe I can finally mark it read soon. And not be so far behind in my reading goal in Good Reads.

The truth is I am slowly ever so slowly reading and writing more now. It has snuck up on me, this ability to attend and be still in a moderate way. Learning my way out of all or nothing, fight or flight, into real relationship.

The days that led up to my tattoo I was anxious for three nights, waking up all the time, strange dreams, and I’m remembering my dreams lately. The morning of (yesterday) I was nauseated with it. It’s insane to feel things this much, but I am beginning to embrace it.

In 2016 I got my et lux intenebris lucet (the light shines out of the darkness), Viktor Frankl quote on my inner left arm. I was so anxious I thought I would drop dead, pass out, get an infection. My intrusive thoughts were insane. My threat level was at a constant defcon 5! I didn’t realize even then why that was. So now in 2021 to have sat for 3 plus hours and got more done than I imagined. A half sleeve well underway. And I enjoyed it. Relaxed. Learned more about the guys at the shop. We shared trauma stories and I love them. Connecting. People stopped in and cared for me, my children got excited for me. I am literally surrounded by love and affection.

I noticed that I still want to ask other people, do you like this or it and go with what they say. It is still my tendency to be anxious and want approval, but now I pause and land on how do I feel and do I like this and I find my knowing. That is priceless.

Navigating anxiety, rather than it controlling me. I am driving and anxiety can be in the toddler seat, buckled in, where it belongs. I never even knew it spent most of my life driving me. I breathe a sigh of relief and the tears roll down. I am unashamed of the things that I’ve dealt with, and that make me me.

I am unashamed of my softer forty year old body, that’s sometimes hard to love. The changes in my skin, somehow slacker, and more lines than their used to be. I can’t even get lost in that because my eyes dance and are alive and not darting nervously, wanting to crawl out of my skin. You can’t unknow once you have decided to love yourself with the same ferocity and unconditional nature you would bestow upon someone else.

I am going to have fun with the images I put on my tattoo sleeve, the represent my life, my pain, my joy, my story. Sitting and having them emblazoned on me, is time and attention I deserve to bestow on myself. It is not an act of rebellion, it is an act of love, and I don’t need anyone to understand it.

But only to gravitate toward those who are gracious with their time and attention and desire to hear my story and appreciate it. and to let the rest burn. Not rejected, always redirected. Always path….

It’s Thursday and I love Thursdays because I get to have the best dinner company. I love it because I’ve never had anything this consistent in my life and it teaches me about love and life. It has stabilized me over the events of the past year and a half, and for that I am forever grateful. Does the man with the sad eyes and gigantic heart know that I don’t need to be walked down the aisle or spend every Christmas with him to understand that “because I knew you I am changed for the better, for good.”

The characters in my story are brilliant and I am loved, and I love them immensely and forever.

It is as legitimate as anything else in life. It doesn’t need to fit a traditional box and neither do I. I don’t need to be outside that box either to be validated.

Just walking that line of bravery between belonging and creating…. I love learning to walk that line. And the very act of living and creating an epic story with every moment of my life…..

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Family Therapy: Gains and Losses

I thought I was…… I was wrong

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 characters is 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…..