Tag: #lightwriter

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A Matter of Existing

My existence makes waves.

Does Every Existence Have it’s Own Prewritten Destiny ?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and how my upbringing, if you could call it that, has lent me always to believe those waves are a bad thing for anyone who comes across them.

Perhaps this is why I have dedicated my life to trying to make my existence useful and positive for others. And yet I continue to battle with the notion it’s the opposite.

Do I really have to make up for myself ?

I don’t have to do anything but exist to make an impact.

To try and be seen or attended to at all, my greatest trick was running my mouth. A chatter box, a blabber mouth, a chatty Kathy, a nuisance, a burden. I vacillated between this and making myself invisible to relieve the stress on my caretakers. I tried all manner of things to be seen with joy. I sold all my dreams and my soul to become small and quiet.

I learned to stand up for myself by doling out a wounding that might keep them away, so I wouldn’t be confused any further. Because trying to be loved by the sources that keep wounding you is an endless purgatory. I never knew what I was going to get. How does one adapt to that amount of uncertainty. The only thing I have ever been certain about is in my own ability to anticipate the next change so I can be ahead of it. Survival.

Evolution developed a sharp tongue on an otherwise loving individual. An array of defense mechanisms like many tangled weeds around my pyramid.

The closest I got to myself was finding some people scattered throughout the world who found my presence to be enjoyable, usually for the insight and unique way I had about me for seeing the world. A rare few took notice. They may never know how they saved my life.

I still feel great guilt and anxiety for how much space I take up in a room. I clamber to try and make up for my own existence. I embrace it and then apologize for it. I get excited about the impact I’ve had and then ashamed for it.

I am all in or all out. All good or all bad. Even when I have an understanding most don’t about all the shades of grey in a life.

My very existence is a contradictory thing with a life all it’s own. It constantly pulls me about the world saying, try this, no wait over here try that, until I collapse in resignation. Resigned to what though? I produce more questions than I create answers.

I am always looking for a place to call home that is a consistent shelter from the storm that is living. When things strike one as this profound every moment of every day it’s exhausting. My shelters are always temporary. Was I only ever meant to adopt and choose myself ? It’s not as if I haven’t been the one to leave the homes I find. When you’re on a mission how does all of that work? Spoiler: I never knew either. I just have a courage that makes me stupid enough to keep trying.

An ignorance I am strangely grateful for, while simultaneously longing for the fears that bind. I want the binding to be ties not fears. There’s a difference.

I get that confused with me being the exhausting thing, and once again try and make up for, clean up, my own existence.

I dream of creating something of beauty (besides my children) that can pay my debts for the pain I caused my family. Not every birth is celebrated. What becomes of the ones who aren’t. The jury is still out. Stay tuned.

When I see a Broadway show I imagine what it would feel like to be the beloved person who created that. To be celebrated. I am told that I should be celebrated just for existing, but this is too close to the grandiose roots from whence I came. A foreign concept at best. One I try and bestow upon others, but struggle with myself.

My most resonant prayer is that my children never face the exhaustion of existing that I do. Not in the way that I do at least. My rabid and vicious thinking that’s most often received by people saying, “you think too much”, or “too much introspection isn’t good” (my father), “you’re too sensitive”.

They might as well just say you shouldn’t have been born. I shouldn’t have. In the name of religion it was the worst thing that ever could have happened to my mother and therefore the image of my family. What is a family if not their image.

Perhaps that’s why I prefer to live in the depths, where true meaning exists, because that’s where my existence is beautiful.

So I’ve spent most of my life trying to find, and then give myself permission to be who I am. To claim my own voice and story and believe it’s contents. And while most of this post sounds terribly sad, I’ve experienced such beauty in my 10,000 lifetimes amongst this one.

And this season of my life is no exception.

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Now seeking: Myself

Now seeking: myself.

I’ve looked high and low, but most of all I’ve looked to find myself in everyone and everything else. Where I could fit, belong, thrive, enjoy life. I’ve looked in characters in books and movies and tried to emulate what they do, but nothing has ever seemed to fit.

That’s because I never looked to myself. I never even knew I could, that this was a thing, or that I had permission.

So many greats have paved the way for the self work I’m doing now. Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Jung, Nietzche, and then there was the women. The “mothers” who adopted me through the words they put out into the universe. A baby blanket. The arms I always needed.

Cheryl Strayed, Anne Lamott, Anne Patchett, Sylvia Plath, Joan Anderson, Martha Beck, Brené Brown, Oprah Winfrey, Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach.

And my spiritual mother Elizabeth Gilbert. The woman whose daughter I could be for our many similarities. And oddly it’s innate and learned, even when our DNA isn’t shared. It makes me believe in the ephemeral in a way my science “can do” mind has never lent to.

If everything you need is always inside you it’s hard to figure out what to do with that when all the research suggests a feral child like me has so much less chance for thriving. It makes me wonder if my mother had even less than I did even with two parents in their traditional slots.

I’ve learned a lot this past few years about not romanticizing things at face value, that just because people have families doesn’t mean they have suffered any less.

I am learning now that suffering is a state of mind more than a state or circumstance regardless what one goes through. Because we all have our stuff. It’s not the hand, but how it’s played. And we will play it from what we know, until we know better. Oh I forgot the beautiful Maya Angelou above.

I have woven together a tapestry of love from fragments for as long as I can remember. And is there anything so wrong with that? Is there some better thing to strive for? Or did I have it right all the time.

“But you don’t know what it feels like to fall in love with you, you don’t know what it feels like when you can’t go back” plays on Ruelle radio that has also been a staple of this time in my life.

I was thinking about the things that mark each time period in our lives. The signature drink, the favorite outfit, the fears, the desires, the songs, the vehicle we drive, and the smiles mouths and body we share during that time, and how they change and once they do that time period is over.

Would life really be better with warning signals?

We don’t know when it will begin or end. Even if we work really hard to know these things, we don’t.

I’m in the mountains with beloved found family. Gifts from the universe. Good people. I find myself and lose myself amongst these experiences. We are all interconnected and yet we all have our own emotional experience, and those are colored by the things that have shaped our lives.

The closest we can get to connecting is bridging the gaps in understanding by sharing our feelings. We each do things our own way, but we still strive for togetherness because we understand that’s where the most meaning is found in living.

I love these guys. I love being here right now. It’s exactly what I need. When my mind threatens to take me somewhere else I bring it back and there is joy to be found.

There is no glory in staring at a door wishing that someone will walk through it. Someone asked me the other day if I ever let anyone surprise me, and it made me think. It called me to look back over my life.

I survived by creating fantasies in my mind of just that, someone surprising me with showing me they were thinking of me and would show up. So I turned myself into someone who could make others feel that way. I became what I was looking for. Because that’s what the mystical they says about how to manifest what you’re looking for. Become it.

I became the guy with the boom box in Say Anything. But the thing is I never counted that. It didn’t count because it was just me being that and unless someone showed up for me in that way, it never counted.

It’s a hard thing nearing 40 to realize you never really felt connected to yourself let alone anyone else. I thought I was, that’s the thing. I was doing the best I can and I did it with my whole heart.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But I missed so much about me. Who I am. What I need. I became an incredible tool to see others in the way I always wanted to be seen. But because I was so good at, and everyone is in such need of that, it never moved past that.

I thought they would recharge and then pick up and do that too. Not exactly like me at all, just the effort. And maybe I just couldn’t see their effort in their way. I need to work on that. I have lots I need to work on.

So here I am on the brink of 40 a blank slate, having my whole life before me rather than behind, and my God I’m grateful.

The tears began streaming as I’m writing this. I’m alive and I’m ok. And I didn’t even know that. I’ve been in survival mode my whole life and I’m grieving that. Everything that came with. Every way someone has seen the product of what I created to get through my life with, but not the whole thing.

Someday someone else will show up for the whole thing, no matter what, just like I do for them….

For now I will show up with more of my pieces in tact, the ones I’m tending to gently every day, reconnecting them to myself is a slow and painful process. It’s surgery. Much like therapy. Yet very few people understand and respect the seriousness of this work, because we all want to see things for the surface and believe you can work that and just manage.

Yet we have tired, ragged, masses, angry, hurting, sad, lost, starving emotionally. We insult the new generation who are trying to teach us to recover ourselves. We call them all manner of things. They are not tough because they acknowledge emotions or what they need.

A society of martyrs who cause horrendous damage insulting those who take responsibility for their own happiness. But that looks shameful in the face of tradition.

What’s shameful is the cruelty than can be afflicted when we are not aware of ourselves. To allow continued suffering because we are too afraid to face ourselves.

I am not a perfect mother, in fact I’ve made more mistakes than most. That’s where wisdom comes from.

I am looking forward to being connected to myself and those I love for the rest of my life. It’s taken me nearly 40 years to travel here. I respect myself for this journey. I’m too tired for anymore shame.

💜

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I am an Instrument

Recently I had a really good talk with a beloved friend. I had said something along the lines of I’m usually that person that will bring something to someone’s attention, but I rarely get that same. And she said… “let me be that for you right now”.

Ask and you shall receive.

I have never felt I fit in anywhere. I’m reading Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown, and it’s exactly the medicine for my heart right now, and it’s perfectly geared towards the pandemic. She’s ahead of her time and I am of mine as well. No wonder we can’t find anywhere to belong.

I spent most of my life afraid of myself, a robot or an alien. My recent realization is that I am not those things.

I am an instrument. And as one let me be the cello, the piano, the violin, and the guitar. I have always wished I could be watched for the concerto of creativity and warmth I can cultivate in a client session.

Lonely oh so lonely without being seen as we all want to be. But lately I am seeing myself.

In my life because of scarcity every time I am meant to be an instrument maybe just in a small dose, I go all in always with my own need and it muddles things. I do have my own needs but I was always meant to fill them with source, my own source not someone else’s. So I’m not left hollow and wanting and internalizing exactly the opposite beliefs about my self.

And yet it’s this very suffering that cultivates the level of compassion needed to change the world. And yet what an overwhelming task. Who am I to and how am I to change the world? Is it one person as a time as I’m doing now, especially beginning with myself?

What is my task?

My life need has created this constant cycle of deep attachment and bonding only to part ways. I think I was never meant to attach my whole life all those times. The person and I were meant to cross paths, healing was meant to happen, but that didn’t mean that everyone you come across you try and create a life with.

Family, making one, being in one, was my unmet human need. So everything became about that. If there is an unmet core need it will continually trump anything else. It will override logic and create a lens that makes everything look one way, but not clear.

Three or four years later the water calms and clears and then restlessness and chaos ensues because I don’t have the answers.

I was trying to fulfill my destiny without any solid ground under my feet. The solid ground became the priority and I missed so much else.

However if we use faith, this says that everything is exactly as it should be and no horrific harm has come, and everything will be ok, especially me, and my tender worn out heart that has been through the shredder as of late.

There are no victims and no perpetrators, no us and no them, no sides. There is only the fulfillment of ones own personal destiny.

And everyone’s is important. And mine is a slippery one to nail down. It comes into view in brief moments, beautiful, and then everything goes dark and I flounder again. Lost and found, lost and found.

I am not an alien, I am an instrument. It’s overwhelming being an instrument with no map or music. What kind am I? What am I supposed to play? Especially when I can’t carry a tune, but perhaps that level of self doubt is outdated, if not entirely human. More human than human. Imposter syndrome at its finest.

I think I’m finally ready to accept I am an instrument and there is more to life than my frantic search for belonging to a person, like that will solve everything.

When I read Brené I am envious of her Steve. Of their dialogue and support of one another, and their journey, and taking the time to understand the other. The discipline and self-awareness love demands.

I want those things, but those are not for me to create. I have other things to create and perhaps that is where and when I will be found/and find someone who wants to do life with me enthusiastically and being willing to show up, the way I am for them. With my mistakes and all because there are plenty.

So much of the reason my path has been as it has is being revealed right now. I have been gifted so much love in so many corners of the world. I was moving too fast to feel it before. But now it’s wrapping me warmly. Coming out of the woodwork and showing up.

Whenever I come into contact with someone they react or connect to me. They feel my presence and I can make a lifelong friendship from one conversation in the car. The feels almost beyond my comprehension. I have had to weed out all the critical thoughts about how wrong this is. Especially in Connecticut lol. Stay in your own lane.

So out of balance with my confidence and my own need, my gift always gets confused and then causes chaos. It hasn’t been properly channeled because it has had to come together, and I’d like to believe it couldn’t come together without the exact path I am on.

So I can forgive myself for my sins.

Everything is a blank canvas right now, but this time I know I am the pen.

On being an instrument

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Fault Lines

“Sweet dreams are made of these and who am I to disagree. I travel the world and the seven seas, everyone is looking for something.”

It’s funny all these years later this song lyric is on my mind this morning. I have always loved it. I wrote it as my tagline for my original live journal, the birth place of blogging. Foxfire_1 I was ahead of the times and didn’t even know it. I always felt behind. Story of my life.

I am visiting Virginia and a home of a family which contains one of the key players in my life. Now they have all become key players, they are stitched into the fabric of my being. My mind is swimming with thoughts as usual and as usual I am trying to untangle some of them.

It’s an interesting mixture to be both a deeply feeling person and also a scientist who studies the humans. The only way to study me as thoroughly as I would like is to see myself through the eyes of others, as well as by learning from watching the many ways people do life. There are so many ways to live a life. I look around my environment in their home and marvel. I take things I want to emulate and I notice things I might do differently.

One thing I’m learning about this visit is it is one of the Hallmarks of great friendship that you help the other see themselves with a balance of generosity and also clarity. When done properly you have a powerhouse of a friendship that can make you both better. Both my friend and I tiptoe on eggshells in certain ways, but not the bad kind.

The bad kind is fear someone will blow up at you because you’ve hurt them in a way you didn’t even realize you were doing. This kind of eggshells comes from two people who have turned sensitive from the many ways they were harmed in life. This is the good kind of eggshells, and the remedy is trust that is built from being allowed to share with the other what is seen, and that the other translates this through a filter of love, rather than judgment or criticism. Not an easy task when the topics are on raw hot nerves.

For as long as I can remember this woman has been teaching me about being a mother, and a friend. She’s much better at it than she realizes, and I’m sure the same could be said about me. “We never know just how we look through other peoples eyes”, a lyric from a strange song on the Dumb and Dumber Soundtrack, because movie soundtracks were always a thing for me. So of course I had to look up the song, and it was as bizarre as I recalled. Pepper by the Butthole Surfers. LOL.

The lyrics so appropriate though in so many ways. I listened to this song in a cabin at outdoor school. It was the olden days when you actually had to carry a pile of cd’s and a discman anywhere you went. Our generations equivalent of walking to school six miles uphill barefoot in the snow. Kids these days cannot imagine the horrors we were subject to.

“They were all in love with dyin’, they were drinking from a fountain
That was pourin’ like an avalanche comin’ down the mountain

I don’t mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows
I can taste you on my lips and smell you in my clothes
Cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies
You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes”

We always have adventured together. Why do we adventure with other people, but then fall into depressive ruts when left to our own devices. Or is that just me?

We fall into deadly routines and forget to be alive while living. This friend of mine and I always wake one another up, but then we tend to drift apart and go right back. When you look from the outside it appears she adventures on with or without me, but then don’t I also? I don’t know since I can’t see myself from the inside. My adventures might just be different. Typically inside the minds and lives with others rather than feet on the trail. Maybe I need more of the latter. Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know.

By adventuring I suppose I mean having the motivation to do something out of the ordinary and then having the means and resources to follow through on that. I get daunted so easily it often takes another human being and a large leap outside my comfort zone to make any of this happen.

But the ingredients to have an adventure are quite simple. It’s the process that’s complicated, because it takes so much more energy to do something different. Paradoxically it also breathes life back into you. I am at a place in my life where I could use all the life breathed back into me I could get.

I was standing by my coffee maker this morning, impatiently waiting, as it dripped the steaming juices of life into my new favorite mug. And I closed my eyes and imagined what it would feel like to have someone I loved come up behind me and put their arms around me and rest their chin on my shoulder and just stand there. Holding me. It’s been so long since I’ve been held emotionally or physically. This is something I’ve fashioned my whole life around making sure I had an ample supply.

I never imagined myself being in this pandemic lacking human touch the way that I am now, and perhaps only slightly more important than touch, communication.

Anyway if you want a clue to knowing your unmet needs, notice where your mind goes when it wanders. The benefit of all of this is I realized it doesn’t kill you, and you can adjust to anything, but why would you want to.

Then I think about those that have been together for years who take those touches for granted, shy away from them even, or are so depleted that they feel like more work, an obligation. I think about the seen and the unseen. How much of the inside of people’s lives we know nothing about. We only see the surface unless you get up close. I am fortunate enough to be up close anywhere I am because people allow me that privilege and I earn it by being a safe space.

To see things with new eyes we have to get outside our comfort zones in healthy ways.

It isn’t always easy to find ways to do this, especially with the put your nose to the grindstone mentality, and all of the stresses life can throw at you. Like many a crisp new white baseball with its brilliant red stitching, launched at 60mph repeatedly from a ball thrower. That’s likely not the technical term 😉

Most people don’t even know the power they have to just switch the machine off at any time. Some cover themselves in padding and continue to stand there, some leave the stadium, the self assured believe they can just duck and weave armor less, the wise ones know how to find a delicate balance of all of it adjusted to timing and life circumstance and keep improving their technique.

Visits between our families include warmth, food, shared responsibilities, adventuring, pitfalls, moments of overwhelm and irritation for any given member, laughter (so much laughter), light treading, hard treading, growth, learning, and so many things I could not contain them in a single post.

One of the most special things about all of this is that it’s the product of the meeting of myself and one woman, when we were both such different versions of ourselves. Everything between us now has taken on such a new life of its own and there are so many new players since the beginning. In the beginning it was just two very lost young women each with a little boy and a husband that was not meant for her in one way or another.

Between then and now we both have acquired and lost, succeeded and failed, in a variety of ways. And yet we can still come together all these years later and know this is a special friendship that is meant to withstand the test of time, no matter how far we each travel on our own in the interim.

I am so blessed to have so many friendships like this. People who enrich my life and who I can connect with. People to share in the joys and the sorrows. People who are willing to pick me up when lately I fall repeatedly.

It is so shame filled right now. It’s not something noble or uncontrollable like cancer. This is suffering at my own hand because of my personal landscape and humanity. They are showing me patience and grace. They are loving me for free, and while probably being very frustrated at seeing someone function at such a small portion of their capacity. That’s the harsh version, the soft one is, it’s hard to watch the ones we love hurt. But eventually if you do the same thing over and over that grace turns to frustration.

They love me anyway…. they love me anyway…. and isn’t that the best kind of love.

Except when it isn’t, and that is the very difficult part right now. Sometimes loving someone anyway with faith and hope for someone they are not yet is an act of courage and worthiness, and sometimes it’s an act of self betrayal.

Sometimes faith is an act of betrayal.

When given blindly without evidence or reason, it can lead us to places we never want to find ourselves. I never imagined myself looking around thinking how did I get here. Not with all the self awareness I possess. It isn’t enough apparently. You do have to use logic to choose what is healthy and what isn’t no matter how you feel. This being one of the hardest lessons of all.

I like to learn my lessons the hard way that is for sure.

Oh the fault lines that are within me.

The Weakness in Me

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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We Bounce Forward

So today I’m at the Honda dealership waiting for a new AC condenser to be installed. I am reflecting on my very first blog post ever, written in Ansonia at a small coffee shop waiting for my Jeep to be serviced. I’m at another full circle beginning of a new life so it’s appropriate and poetic.

I need to find my way back to me, my writing self, my heart. Also though you can’t go back to something you never started with. So perhaps I don’t have quite the right calibration on the wording.

Because we don’t bounce back we bounce forward (after a hard hit) according to the great Martha Beck. So this is completely uncharted territory and that brings with it absolute terror. I’m trying to find enough excitement to balance it out to become unfrozen so I can budge.

A whole new world and a whole new me. I didn’t want either of those things my toddler whines. I wanted the comfort of the known, to be held softly at night while I sleep, to have the routines I am used to, to see the smiling faces of my children feeling secure and loved in as far as I’ve gotten towards those things.

Which was not as far as I believed. That’s a stunning realization.

I’ve been traveling the dark wood of my own soul for around seven months now. My life and my self is unrecognizable now. I have soared to the highest heights and crashed through the earths crust and straight to the center of hell. I’ve been bathing in flames lately, not the soothing water I had found.

Another death and rebirth. I am finding there are hundreds of those across a lifetime, not just one or two.

I am breaking another generational curse right now. This work is not for the faint of heart. I do it so I can be a beacon of light for others. For my family, my friends, my clients. I lose myself so I can find myself again so I can know.

So I can I know what’s on the other side, the inside, the depths. So I can be the tour guide on inner journeys.

But lately I’ve become stuck when the work involves needing to play and rest. I don’t know how to do those things by myself apparently. I know how to show other people. I can do this work when my nervous system is calmed by the steady heartbeat of a lover. I become my full self.

But left to my own devices I freeze. It’s a shame filled thing these traumas. You don’t end up working like you’re “supposed to”, and finding compassion when compassion isn’t what saved you, is nearly impossible: truly.

Could I really have been running all this time in one way or another …. is that really possible? Half dissociated and half frenzied running. Love is the only force powerful enough to slow me down or wake me up, but sustaining it like this became another matter. Add another layer of shame.

I have been running and when my feelings catch me, it is a storm. The degree to which I feel things is unreal. A product of the battle to keep my feeling parts, when it was unbearable so long. I was fierce to keep them, even though they end up burning me alive.

I long to put this way of living down. It’s too heavy. I am in this process. Putting down an entire way of living is like not have any skin to protect the nerves, the air hits them and the pain is excruciating. Every day for me is like this right now.

Eventually the battle breaks you open into your heart, and the space where it’s soft. Where you’re your full light in the world and love doesn’t feel so hard anymore. It’s something that flows naturally.

I cannot run anymore. I cannot default. None of my tools or tricks work anymore.

Naked and still….

Ps. Today is a very special day in a place of my heart that isn’t allowed to exist right now. So keep me in your warmth please. My heart is raw there.

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Lost Back in 2016

Is there anything better really than clean sheets and a freshly made bed?

I’m still sleeping on an eighth of it, but nothing lasts forever.

I watched Stuck in Love with the girls tonight. It’s a very full circle kind of thing. Very! I was watching this movie on repeat spring into fall of 2016. When I was taking my next steps into finding my writer self. Rescuing her out of the rubble. That was a year of discovery for sure. And of Jeeps and french bulldogs, oh my.

We even had a Stuck in Love themed Thanksgiving. That was actually really fun.

That was the year I got my first office that was all my own. The year I got Sigmund Freud, the fantastic Frenchie. The year I began morning pages. It was my four year pages anniversary this April. The first time I ever dated dated. Oh the perils of that, lol. I have some crazy stories. The first time I took three solo getaways by myself. The year I learned one could romance themselves, and that I didn’t need to be with someone to justify a nice restaurant or lavish evening.

The year I got my Et Lux Entenebris Lucet (the light shines out of the darkness) tattoo. My first real adult job that I ended up hating. This helped me learn to trust myself, being able to walk away, and hang my own shingle.

I was so much more naive and innocent then. I’ve grown backwards in so many ways.

I can’t even remember that girl.

I asked my therapist tonight how come some people seem to have it so much easier. Being wanted, chosen, things coming more easily to them. While others no matter how hard they work or try, things seem not to work out for.

There isn’t an exact answer I can share, other than dynamics and human behavior. I personally think it’s a privilege to be calm and grounded. One not afforded by everyone. You have to have had a certain kind of life, things you could depend on consistently for that wiring. I envy those people. Not enough to not be grateful for my exact path, but I do.

Lily Collins is absolutely gorgeous. Gahhh

Rian has my hands. My daughter has my hands. Right down to the lines on the inside of our palms. I don’t think I’ve ever stood still long enough to notice.

Have I really been running my whole life?

What does slowing down look like ? I don’t know but I liked my moments with her this evening. And teaching the girls how to drive and getting ice cream at the Sundae House.

I felt them. These things.

It’s staggering sometimes to realize how much of my own life I’ve been a guest star in. Never fully Inhabiting my body. My own ghost, and haunting.

I can get everyone to love me, but me.

What a cruel trick.

I’ll find myself between my own pages in my own story.

Or maybe in Tuscany or anywhere else.

I am going to busy myself planning a vacation soon. The idea of being all on my own with nothing to do or be responsible for is entirely appealing. Just quiet and calm.

My eyes are getting heavy….. it’s time to rest.

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Capital T trauma

I am going to be talking more about my trauma in the coming weeks. How very much it has impacted every corner of my life. My decision making. The way that I live and love. The choices and the way that I make them.

People my whole life have told me how strong I am. They admire what I do and how I do it. But the thing so often missed in all of that is who I am at my core and what I carry around each day.

How can someone be nearing 40 and only doing this work now? How can they not? Most people never do it. It’s almost impossible. I’m still determined to crack the code.

Right now I am researching the freeze aspect of trauma. How when I am overwhelmed I literally can’t move. I have to have a smelling salts wake up, and then I can mechanically make that call or open that piece of mail, but when I’m consumed it’s almost impossible.

I freeze all the time. I freeze when emotions are too overwhelming. And then I berate myself when I don’t reach out warmly and hug my children.

And adult is not supposed to be so scared. But when you carry a hurting child with you….. you can be either at any given time depending on the circumstances.

I present well.

On the inside I’m a tangle of coping mechanisms.

Please love me anyway. When I can’t love myself.

My way of handling my trauma was to give to everyone I’ve ever loved all the love I never was. I thought I had done journey after journey with self love. But truly I’ve done journey after journey of loving someone else so I can even feel the reflection.

Because that’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to love.

And I want to love my kids will all I didn’t have, and I have in so many ways, but connection. I still struggle with that. Because I get overwhelmed so easily.

Because I’m still a scared little girl.

I’m still a scared little girl…..

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Addicted to Love

“Whoa, you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough
You know you’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to love” – Robert Palmer

Hi my name is Christina and I’m an addict.

I didn’t realize this until recently as a matter of fact, because it seems natural to be allowed to pursue love. Look at how many articles, books, workshops, movies. So this isn’t a strange affliction unless you look a little closer at how I do love.

Recently I’ve been going to therapy. I finally found a therapist who is seeing me well, or I was finally ready to receive the lessons and my defense mechanisms didn’t block it, however you want to look at it. So I’ve been talking about the woman who brought me into this world.

She drove a 68 Pontiac Firebird. I still remember the window crank handles, silver and polished. The vinyl black interior that my long tan legs stuck to in the summer. The unsticking sound and painful sensation when I got up after a long drive (which was rare). At that time I thought my mother was so cool. She smoked, swore, dressed cool, listened to rock music, and she was beautiful. Blond hair, blue eyes and a smattering of brown freckles across her nose that were more in summer.

I still remember how many times we listened to Robert Palmer addicted to love in her car. What a foreshadowing that was for my life. Funny of the few memories that one stands out so much and those lyrics. It would be a huge part of my whole life. And very few from the outside will understand it. Only those who take the time and effort to truly ask because they care, not just to be in the know.

Having been primarily raised by her very fundamentalist Christian parents, even the fact she would take me out to eat meat was a novelty, and the good music was probably my main draw. I wouldn’t discover til later why Melissa Etheridge caught my spirits so much. My mom was a fan too I wonder what that means 😉

My Mom was addicted to love too. She was addicted to the exciting kind. The kind with bad men. So my addiction became mixed with not wanting to be like her, so mine was to find “a good person”. Why I thought a good person would be the answer to all of whatever it was I’m not quite sure. But what I didn’t know at the time this all started is how love should have been for me, and how much of a deficit I had.

I was so deficient in love that as an adult it became a larger focus than anything, especially knowing about who I am and what I want. Do you know I’m 39 years old and I still don’t know a lot about that?

I’m a lot of things that have identifiers. I’m a counselor, I’m a mother, a friend, a lover. I have lots of things I can perform and do those well. I can be caring of my friends, considerate of the world. I recycle :p But when it comes down to investing time into me, just for me, I freeze or fly.

My immediate reaction is to quickly get near another adult so nothing bad happens. I’m 39 years old and I’m still running scenarios all the time of what bad thing could happen. I’ll live with that forever because no one protected me. So I’m protective almost to a fault, because I don’t realize that I’m lovable. It doesn’t even register someone could love me. So I need more and different and to keep on moving.

I achieve. I learned I could gain acceptance, confidence, etc by facing the many anxieties that became me, but were never my natural self. I’ve had many re-births, college saved and changed me. My children the same thing. And every relationship I’ve ever embarked on has yielded a new self, because we grow the most in relation to others. It shows us to ourselves.

But being loved for free never felt like a thing. I’ve always had to earn it. To dance around begging to be seen. I’ve had to work my way out of a thousand behaviors I had from my trauma to even have a shot at healthy love. I keep trying for it, but I was missing a few things. And every time I think I figure it out I end up back at square one, with an even greater sense of being broken and a failure, as if love is the only measurement of my success as a person, the fact I’m breathing is a success.

I didn’t know until now how much I desire love with my children that is more than utilitarian. I was both parents and roles for so long I got stuck in the working, flight, fight, freeze mode of it all. I think I thought if I could crack the code with an adult I would ensure that I would always be a safe parent. I came from such a lack of safety it was a fear my whole life.

Do you know all they ever wanted was just a second of my attention and it was so often somewhere else. I’ve been stuck inside my head trying to stay safe, be safe, keep them safe, and the result has been a distance I never imagined. And I’ve been distanced from myself, and romantic love didn’t fix that.

What I wouldn’t give to have known that. Known they loved me for free, and that love was easier than I was ever taught, but it’s hard to accept when you’ve never seen how to love yourself. I had no model. I tried to learn from so many scattered sources, movies, friends parents. I tried to learn love intellectually, but feeling love that’s another matter entirely.

I could tell all kinds of stories and say I needed the high of new love. I would be accused of that I’m quite sure by my critics. But it’s not that either….

I’m a seeker by nature, but I wouldn’t even know how to feel it when I found it because the unmet needs were so varied and so great.

Recently I came across something “I’ve never felt before”, my favorite line of course. But it wasn’t the love of another, it was the seeing of myself that naturally came in their presence. It was the recognition I love differently now, and I can’t tell you the immense sadness that I never saw this beauty in the strength of my journey before.

People have told me all the time, but I couldn’t see it. That’s the saddest story. I’m still thawing, becoming, coming out of this waging war I’ve had with myself my whole life of whether I’m a good person or not. Without needing to make sure I’m with someone that validates that all the time.

Who am I outside of this addiction?

Outside the storm I see so many things I didn’t before. I had another rebirth recently and I’ve questioned the windows, the walls, the cosmos’s, the gurus, if this makes me a bad person. Squared up with my yucky stuff again. But the finding is that this question can no longer stand. And since it can’t I have room to see other things.

I have room to see what my relationship with myself looks like. I thought I’d already done this, checked it off the list, like it isn’t an ongoing process constantly in flux. Like all relationships, we have to re up our connection, and my connection with me will always be the trickiest. And if we aren’t connected to ourselves all our other relationships have crossed wires and don’t go so smoothly.

So now I’m having moments with my children I’ve never had in this way before. I get to be the other parent too. The fun one, the nurturing one, the playful one. The one that takes them driving instead of finding someone else to do it because if anything ever happened to them it’s unthinkable. So now I am giving myself a trust I always deserved.

Coming out of the million anxieties I was blessed with and the many health issues it’s caused and the fear it will all swallow me.

I’m coming out again and I’m a newborn right now. There are so many amazing things about being one. You see the world as magical, you’re not ashamed to show your emotions or ask for your needs to be met. You delight in small things.

I’m battling my addiction and learning healthy love…. and that is bringing me moments of joy I can actually feel and not just know.

It’s been quite the ride…..

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Finding my Memoir

Full circle smack dab in front of the mirror facing all of my shit. My patterns, my ugly, my everything. The lights are fluorescent and unforgiving.

I have never been so lonely. That’s the irony here. I look like the one who has it all, has it all together, and that’s the worst thing, because it can’t be further from the truth.

I’m terrified to create. My thoughts are so disorganized it hurts so much all the time. The only thing that gets them to be still is being a counselor and pouring all of me into another. That’s the only thing I’ve figured out to make myself still enough to be.

To just be.

I cannot just be. It’s impossible for me. And this gets me into all sorts of trouble my whole life. I never asked for this. Worse yet no one even knows what to call it or how to see it. I am unseen, but I am not unloved, or unappreciated. So that’s something.

I want everything.

You never think you’ll get lost again, and again, and have to find a new self again and again. No one tells you this about life. And for most people I think they won’t even know or worry too much about this.

But not for me. Everything is different for me.

I wish I could find anymore words but for tonight I can’t.

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Intentions and the Cosmos

“I am not a stranger to the dark, hide away they say, because we don’t want your broken parts. I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars, run away they say, because no one will love you as you are.”

Lately a great many things are shaken up in my life, in ways I never imagined. I’m finding a self I didn’t know, yet again. It calls into question everything. And when everything in your foundation is shaky it’s unsteady. My stomach is rumbling like the tectonic plates of my very foundation.

I’m always so sure about my truth. It speaks so loudly to me, but what it can never know is what the next day will bring and the next. To have an adventurous life you must be willing to continuously face down your fears. For me this is necessary.

As necessary as oxygen.

I have always been a seeker. A seeker whose main objective is security is making for an interesting cocktail. Obtain security then seek, obtain security, then seek. What if I had security from the beginning? I want to know who that person was too! I need to know her. It’s not a choice.

What I am finding is a security in myself that will keep me grounded and authentic to me at all costs and this is not a path for the faint of heart. This is loving my unloved child inside more than anyone else, because she needs it the most.

This isn’t a journey most can understand. It’s cold and lonely in here and yet on the outside everyone thinks I have it all figured out. One of the largest incongruences of my life. I’m human too.

Spoiler alert. I don’t. Not at all. But I am committed to my heart and my truth and recovering that little girl who deserved a real life full of love and support. This is my recovery.

This is me!!!! I could listen to this song and watch the beautiful dancing in this video a thousand times. It’s my song for 2020.

I’ve been shamed a thousand times during my life for my wounds, shamed instead of understood. And that pain has turned me into 100 percent heart. It’s open and it’s raw and if you want to see it just sit with me for an hour I will show you.

And if you’re my friend I will hold your heart with mine. And this is me. I cannot only be loved for what I provide others. I need to be loved for the very center of me, everything that has made me the things others benefit from.

The thing that wakes you up?! That’s a product of my suffering. It did not come cheap.

So here I am at 4 am, battling my Crohn’s Disease and holding my hurting heart. Zofran, toast, ginger tea, my trusty laptop and journal by my side. I’ve lost 10 lbs since Christmas, there is nothing easy about this.

“I am brave, I am bruised, this is who I’m meant to be. I’m not scared to be seen I make no apologies, this is me.”

This last year in my 30’s is mine. I don’t want to heal at anyone else’s expense, but I’m also not willing to help someone heal at the expense of me. I’m not sure what that looks like yet, but here are my intentions.

I intend to write about trauma, in a way no one else has before….. in my way. I intend to be more connected to my children than I ever have, and give them my wide open heart and presence. I intend to be still for me when I need to figure that out. I don’t have it figured out yet, but I intend to work on it.

I intend to discover and honor the body that has carried me this far. I let it take the brunt of the world. It needs to stretch and move with joy. It needs to release years of shame and being stifled and huddled terrified. It deserves to be nourished and cherished.

I intend to love bigger and harder than I ever have, and to always include myself in that equation.

“Look out because here I come. And I’m marching on to the beat I drum. I’m not scared to be seen and I make no apologies this is me.”