Hawkmoth Rising
Spirituality

Home Runs.

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I played multiple sports as a kid.

I played multiple sports really badly.

I was terrible at baseball. But I was our number one batter.

I had an unwavering belief in my ability to absolutely 10000% just swing for the fucking fences. And I usually did. If I didn’t, I would knock myself over from the sheer force of trying.

I think this is one of my favorite qualities about myself.

I have said before, what is true in the physical is true in the spiritual.

I can’t catch to save my life, I am kid in the sandlot levels of bad. Catching a ball takes a second, it’s unpredictable. You have to be able to map it out and make a calculated decision. I, am indeed, better off standing there like a dork with my glove in the air. I overthink it, I panic and I choke.

But if something is coming right at me and all I have to do is hit it as hard as I physically can? MVP, baby!

Ya’ll wonder why I like a good metaphor so much? It’s because they’re god damn enlightening, that’s why.

I have talked a lot on this blog about the work I have consciously and meticulously done to get through the hardest times in my life. I haven’t talked much about how strongly I have followed my intuition when it really, really mattered.

I knew I was supposed to move out west for over a year before I did. I would think on it, I would try to figure out where, I would price out moving companies. Every time I would get overwhelmed and I would ask myself how the fuck I thought I could ever actually make that happen.

I would stand there with my hand in the air hoping somehow it would fall right in. I guess you could say it did. That is one way of looking at it.

I can distinctly remember three moments in my life where I felt like the word ‘Go!’ was yelled at me and my entire life path changed course in a split second. Mentally, first and then very quickly after in my reality.

These moments led me to opening my own business, moving in with Perfect on Paper Guy and leaving on May 4th to drive out west.

I do not, in any single way, regret those decisions. They were the most instinctual decisions I have ever made. They were the exact right thing to do.

It’s funny actually, the snap decisions you think I wouldn’t regret, the ones I have made out of of fear and not my instincts, are often the ones I actually do.

Some things end. Businesses have shitty landlords and then you have to close. But I was so unbelievably successful, then and after. It blows my mind sometimes if I actually look back and think about it. It was incredible, I am so fucking proud of myself for it. It’s probably what most people would look over my life and label my #1 achievement.

Relationships end too. Relationships have things happen in them that are so fucking dark you can’t even imagine what your life would look like if they hadn’t happened. There is no reason I can possibly think of why we should have had to lose our child. I really can’t. But I will, never, ever regret meeting him or jumping when I heard the word ‘Go!’. It changed the entire course of my life, I am a completely different person.

I could look at these two examples and think that they are prime examples of how much I should not trust my intuition, look at how much heartbreak they led to! But I don’t see it that way.

When I moved in with Perfect on Paper Guy the second time, right before I ended up moving out west, I had the same instinctual feeling. The only time I doubted it, I asked to find a four leaf clover. Something I had looked for many times and had never found. I found one.

This could definitely be seen as ‘Do not, under any circumstances, trust your intuition.’ But again, I don’t see it that way.

It set me up in the wildest and most perfect way to move out west.

I’m sure there is something that will happen one day that will make me want to cry and say, ‘I wish I would have never moved to the fucking desert!’ just like I know I have with the other two in the worst moments. It’s natural when shit hits the fan.

But I will never regret it.

Right before these moments, I couldn’t imagine how I could get past where I was at that time. It felt like I was fumbling around in the dark trying to find my way somewhere.

Until the lights snapped on and I swung for the fucking fences.

I opened a business in three months. The physical labor of the build out was done in less than three weeks.

I started packing to move in with Perfect on Paper Guy the night we got back from Joshua Tree.

We made the decision for me to move back in and I signed out of my lease the next day. I started moving in that week. This was April 23rd.

The event that led me to snap was on May 4th and started driving with zero idea where I was going. On May 9th, I figured it out and signed my lease. I got back to Indiana on the 11th and I was in my new desert home by May 22nd.

It took me 19 days to move out west.

Something big is coming, I can feel it in my bones. It’s a deep seated adrenaline that’s starting to boil up in my soul.

Feeling it now, I realize that I had this for a month or so before I got pregnant as well. It went away when I saw those two lines. I knew something big was coming and it did. I had already swung.

I know something is coming and I’m spinning my wheels trying to figure out what the fuck it could possibly be.

The ideas I have seem outlandish.

But then again, they always did.

Something is coming, I’m poised and ready.

I’m not looking for the ball, I’m looking at the fucking fences. I know when to swing.

And, baby, it’s always a home run.

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Self Reflection

Wasting Time.

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I think about the future a lot.

By that I mean, I try not to think about the future a lot.

By that I mean, if I think about the future too much I spiral out into an existential crisis.

People like to ask you about your future. What are your goals? Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What are you doing this weekend?

My answer to these questions is usually, ‘I don’t know, whatever I feel like doing.’

I wish I was saying this because I am a totally free spirit who only lives in the present moment but I’m not. I’m scared to think I know what my future holds. If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that if you think you know what the future holds, you’re probably dead wrong.

So now I am afraid to know but I’m also afraid of not knowing. And I have absolutely no idea how to answer any of those questions.

I feel like I am in limbo. I don’t move forward or backward. I’m stuck.

I take the exact same road to get pretty much anywhere I need to go. I am usually focused on the road in front of me as I am a diligent and responsible driver.

There are mountains in every direction and on all sides of me. There are rolling hills, plateaus, giant crests in the distance. I see them everyday, they have blended into the overall landscape of my route to work.

Straight in front of me there is a massive mountain, like behemoth sized. It’s usually a giant grey geometric shape outlined on the horizon, it’s easy to forget it’s even there.

The other day I was driving to work and the sun hit in a way it hadn’t before and it was like I had never actually seen it before. It had always been right in front of me but that day, it was magic. It fucking ruled.

I sit in the exact same spot to see the stars a couple nights a week. Mainly because it’s spooky out here in the dark and it has the clearest view while also being close to my gate.

The Leonid meteor shower was last night so I went out to try and catch it before I went to bed. From my vantage point, I was looking up at Cassiopeia. When I went back out in the early morning, I was looking up at Gemini.

It wasn’t even a twelve hour difference.

I have a fun activity I do called ‘sun chasing’. This is where I go on all sides of the property, walk at different elevations and sit on different points of the fences to get the best view of the sunset or sunrise.

It’s a different spot every day. It’s also a different sky every day.

I have sat on those same fences while I waited for storms to roll in. I watched as the clouds moved in different directions, I felt the subtle shifts of the wind as it picked up strands of my hair. I tracked the first few raindrops in the distance to the downpour that came soon after.

I moved when I realized a metal fence wasn’t the smartest place to be sitting during a thunderstorm.

After a day and a half of rain, I watched teeny tiny little blades of grass grow up out of a bunch of old, dusty dirt. I wondered how long they had been sitting dormant, just waiting for the right opportunity.

They died, obviously, this is the desert, but that isn’t the point.

This time period of my life feels like I am standing still. It’s hard to track the passage of time here, there’s no seasons. I didn’t realize it was Halloween until I saw pictures of people carving pumpkins back home. I feel like life is moving forward everywhere else while I am floating along in an eternal summer.

Which isn’t the worst when it comes to hypothetical purgatories.

The days keep passing, they turn into months. I feel like I am wasting time. Like I need to be doing something. Getting out there and meeting someone so I could maybe get married and have a chance at having a baby before I turn 35. Or investing in this blog so it can be something more than a webpage I use to send my thoughts out into the ether. Or trying to learn enough about one thing enough to do something different with my career.

I could observe all of these things and conclude that I am stuck, I am standing in the same place while the world rotates and changes around me. Which would be a shitty metaphor and an even dumber science experiment.

I don’t know why I get all worked up about it. I don’t even know if I really want those things. If I did, I’d probably do something about it outside of randomly panicking about it every few days.

I’m not doing those things.

I’m watching storms roll in. I’m watching the sun rise and set. I am tracking the patterns the moon moves in as those days turn into months. I am watching as grass puts in a real valiant effort to grow out in the desert. I am watching as it dies too.

You don’t learn how to do all of these things without standing in the same place for awhile and letting the world move around you. So I guess it’s not a shitty metaphor at all.

Honestly, I guess most of the time I am just hanging out and doing whatever I feel like doing. And then I sit and listen to music while I write about it and send it off into the ether. Or I sit and write unhinged things I will never, ever send into the ether.

Oh, and I’m alive and actually living. I’m not grass in the desert. I don’t know what I am but I’m not that.

I take that back, I guess I am sitting dormant and waiting for that perfect opportunity to present itself so that’s not really a shitty metaphor either. I’m just not going to give it a solid effort only to watch myself die anymore.

When it comes to the future, I think I should just chill out. I think if I allow myself to move with the rotation of the earth, if I don’t try to cling to an idea, a space or a time, it’ll take me where I need to go.

Resisting it would literally be pointless anyway. I don’t control the damn earth.

I don’t know why I’m so worried about the future anyway.

I think one day I will be bopping along, the sun will hit something completely different and I’ll say ‘Oh! That’s exactly what I was looking for!’

The sky is different every single day. I don’t need to know what it will look like tomorrow, next week, or next year.

Thankfully, I have all this time to wait and see. Who knows, it might even rain.

Then it will be this grass’s time to shine, baby!

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Spirituality

Flies.

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After my morning dream journal and reflections, I went to sit outside. I have been doing this every morning but I am usually out before sunrise. It’s Sunday so I slept in and went out around nine.

It felt nice, the sun was warm on my skin and I was still sleepy so I enjoyed lazing around in it.

But then the fucking flies started to swarm. I prayed for them to go away so I could enjoy my morning. They kept coming, I kept swatting. But I didn’t want to go inside, god damnet.

So I just sat still. I was uncomfortable. I worried about the health dangers of flies landing on you.

I kept sitting still until I could focus on something else.

There were a lot of butterflies out today, a large monarch as well as many small ones. I watched as they danced around each other.

Palo verde trees are plentiful in my yard. They are inspiring in the way they grow, gnarled and spiked. They twist and turn up to the sun and they provide coverage to the baby saguaros until they grow even taller than they are. But they still affectionately hold them close.

Their bark is green, an evolutionarily trait they adapted to be able to produce the life giving chlorophyll they need to survive. The leaves they do have are very tiny, you can’t see them unless you are close. Leaves let too much moisture out and in the desert, moisture is scarce. You have to keep what you can. So instead, they grew to be tall and green.

Everything is green in the desert. People say it’s not green but it is.

The flies continued to swarm.

They remind me of what I have been thinking on recently, how evil whispers. How it badgers you relentlessly, only coming back stronger if you try to swat it away. It whispers until it’s screaming. It whispers until it’s drowning you, until it’s all you can hear.

The worst things seem to try and demand the most of my attention. It may just be a buzzing in my ear. But it distracts me the most from my purpose.

There was a period of time that I didn’t go outside after the sun rose because all I could focus on were the fucking flies.

My purpose is to stay present, despite the flies.

My purpose is to stay present with the flies.

They will always be there when the sun is shining. I can let them ruin my morning or I can choose to accept them as an inevitable part of the balance in life and enjoy myself anyway.

I enjoy looking at the butterflies and the Palo verde trees, protecting their little baby saguaros.

I wondered why the butterflies couldn’t be the ones swarming me instead. That would be much easier.

I guess that’s just how it is.

Good whispers too. It just doesn’t come back stronger if you swat it away. It’s polite. I wish it wasn’t.

Eventually, I did go inside. It got to be too much. But I had done what I came to do, I stayed in the sun.

I accepted the flies until, for a moment, they became nothing but background noise.

Then I took a shower to wash off the feeling of them. Purposeful, but still gross.

I think I learned a lesson. I also think that next time I sit outside in the daytime, I will wear pants instead of shorts.

Practical and spiritual, there is usually more than one lesson to learn.

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Heartbreak & Loss

The Choices We Make.

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I fell asleep outside last night. I am someone who falls asleep outside now.

Not for very long though. I was looking at the stars, sitting in a reclining chair at the bottom of one of the small dips in my yard. The sun had barely set but it’s dark out here, they pop up quickly. It’s like your own personal planetarium.

Sometimes when I see something so beautiful that I can’t even believe it’s real, I have this twinge of sadness. I usually ignore it and hope that one day it goes away.

When I woke up outside, I had that same twinge but it brought with it the memory of the last time I could see so many stars, the last time I fell asleep under them.

We were in Joshua Tree. 

The first time I saw the desert was on the back of a motorcycle, riding from Prescott to California. We spent time with my Mamaw in Santa Monica. We saw Tyler Childers in Inglewood. We spent three days in Joshua Tree at the end. 

When we were in Santa Monica, I thought back to the last time I was there. I wrote about it, even. It was when I was looking at the ocean and thought about how nice it would be to walk in and let the waves take me. I was, obviously, so fucking miserable at that time in my life.

When we rode by, when we went to that same beach, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to see it all again from these eyes. It was so healing that it was borderline overwhelming. 

We went to the national park. I had seen the desert landscape from the back of the bike but seeing it up close was something else. It was just so fucking funny. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at anything in the desert up close but I would absolutely recommend it. I couldn’t stop pointing at things, dying laughing and saying, “What is that? What is this? Look at that guy!”

I hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in months. But I couldn’t stop. In between my gales of laughter, he told me the names of the plants and animals. He showed me how to climb up a rock face and he scaled up a tower of them. I was too nervous to try after I slipped at the bottom.

Later that night, we laughed even more. I laughed so hard that I couldn’t get any words out. Everything was just so fucking funny. 

That night was the first time I had ever really seen the stars. Laying on our backs, he pointed them all out to me, he told me their names and we counted the ones that shot by. He showed me how to identify satellites and planes by their lights. He showed me how a few stars can become a whole constellation.

It was the first moment, the first place, that I felt like everything could be okay again. 

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with nature. I had old science textbooks I would spend hours looking at, realistic stickers of bugs all over my desk. I lived in the city so I had a small backyard but I was always out there poking around and trying to identify the different bugs and animals. I collected worms and threw a fit when I had to wear a dress that couldn’t get covered in dirt. I was usually by myself but I was always on an adventure. 

The best times were with my Dad. He knew so much about the woods and he showed me it all. He knew how to bait the hook, where to cast and he knew how to follow the creek bed. If I was an adventurer, he was the tour guide. I was just happy to be traipsing around at my dad’s side in the underbrush. I liked to be taught things just as much as I loved learning them.

When I was in Joshua Tree, he knew everything about the desert. He knew his way around, it was all familiar to him. As he showed me all of it, I was just happy to be traipsing around at his side. I liked to be taught things just as much as I loved learning them. 

You can see the parallel I’m making here. I didn’t see it until I started typing it out, to be quite honest. 

I always loved to learn and adventure by myself. But it was my Dad who really knew how too. He was the one who paved the way, the one who knew where to go and how to do it. He was the brave one, I just tried to be.

One night, we were riding bikes. He was doing tricks and I followed him trying to do the same. It was fun until my tire hit the curb and I fell face first into the pavement, scraping off quite a bit of the left side of my face in the process. I cried until I went back to my mom’s house. Trying to follow in my Dad’s footsteps, trying to embody his fearlessness, ended in my own pain.

I feel like I can feel that scrape on my face. 

When I was looking up at the stars last night, I remembered being too nervous to follow my partner up the rocks in Joshua Tree. I thought about how I got bolder once we got home, following in his footsteps, climbing trees and sitting on our roof.

I forgot how pure I felt back then, how I felt like the best version of myself. Being with him, living in our house in the country and going on all of our adventures brought me back to that sense of childlike wonder. It brought me back to how it felt to be stomping around in creeks with my Dad, nothing to fear, as long as he led the way. It felt like coming home.

It felt like everything could be okay again. 

Until I fell off my bike. Until he tried to go out the same way my Dad did. Until all those same wounds got ripped right back open.

I spent a summer remembering how it felt to be walking in the sun, nothing to fear, with my Dad by my side.

Somehow, I had forgotten how the story ended.

It took a few years after my Dad’s suicide for me to really grasp the fact that he had died. I didn’t really understand the true pain it left me with until I almost experienced it again with my partner. I understood it even more when I found out I was pregnant a week later. Carrying my own child, I couldn’t escape the gravity of it. 

The summer didn’t last long. It was always brief back then too.

The winter my Dad died, I didn’t try to be brave. I didn’t think I could do it by myself. I was too afraid to do it without him showing me how. I let my face heal and then I packed up all of my adventures into a box and I put it away in a spot where I could act like it, and my Dad, had never existed.

This spring, I wanted us to move out west. I begged him. We were dying in Indiana, it was sucking the life out of us. I thought it was our only chance, the only way we could get ourselves out of the deep dark hole we had found ourselves in. I thought if we just moved, everything could be okay again.

I am embarrassed to say that I begged him to come with me even after everything blew up. 

But when it did, I had to make a choice. I knew after everything that happened, I couldn’t stay in Indiana. I couldn’t pack it all up in a box and pretend it never existed. 

So I didn’t.

I went to the first place I could remember feeling like everything would be okay, the first place I could see the stars. I went where he showed me.

I went out west.

This summer, I built the life I had begged for.

I was my own tour guide and my own adventurer. I kept climbing rocks after I slipped on them. I learned the names of all the plants and animals. I caught the scorpions in my house. I found my own place to sit and watch the stars. I cried when I scraped my knees, I cleaned my own wounds and I watched them as they healed.

I can tell you quite a bit about the desert. I can tell you when the prickly pears produce fruit, when the saguaros bloom. I can tell you which holes have tarantulas in them and which ones have kangaroo rats. I can tell you about how calcite comes up to the surface after it rains and why. I can tell you which feathers in my collection came from what bird, which shed came from what snake. 

I am walking in my own footsteps, paving my own way. I have become who that little girl, happy at her Dad’s side, always wanted to be. But this time, I’m the brave one, not just trying to be. It’s an inspiring story, of course, it’s my story and it is all true.

Sometimes it just feels like something is missing.

When I am traipsing around, there’s no one happy to be by my side. When I learn something new, there’s no one here to share it with. There’s no one here to laugh with when I say, “What is that? Look at that guy!” 

When I see something so beautiful that I can’t even believe it’s real, there’s no one here to look over and know they’re seeing it too. 

I built the life I begged for. I built the life I chose.

Being brave just doesn’t always feel the way you thought it would. 

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Heartbreak & Loss

The Men We Weep For.

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When I was 9, I peeked around a wall and watched my Mamaw silently cry as she sat on the steps in her home. I stood, frozen, as I observed a mother’s quiet defeat from the addictions her son was wrestling with. Overwhelmed by her fears for him and her fears for me, she took a moment and she wept. 

When I was 16, I came home from school in a hurry to go somewhere I thought was really important. My mom followed me around the house trying to get me to stop, to listen. When I turned around, exasperated, she sat me down and told me my dad had died. He had committed suicide. In my room alone after the funeral, I wept. 

When I was 27, my brother, the son of my stepdad, died. Two days after his mother, both from a drug overdose. At the end of his funeral, my mom laid her head in my lap and wept. She wept for him and she wept for my stepfather, who couldn’t bring himself to face the day. 

When I was 28, I stood by my stepfather’s side as he took his last breath. Surrounded by his mother, my mother, my sisters and my aunts, his addiction defeated him once and for all. Collectively, we wept.

When I was 29, I experienced first hand how unresolved childhood and war trauma could manifest as violence, addiction and infidelity. Over and over again, I wept.

When I was 31, I almost lost my parter to suicide. After, I watched as he tried to advocate for himself only to be denied, cast off and failed over and over again by the system that was supposed to help him. I watched as he became a shell of himself. Still, I weep.

This could be seen as a collection of stories about the men who are selfish and undeserving of the women who love them so deeply. The women who begged and bargained with the universe, that did everything they could to save the men who didn’t or couldn’t save themselves. The women who left and came back, the ones you think should have had the backbone to walk away for good.

But it’s not. These women are strong, admirable women. They love deeply and unconditionally. I know because I am one.

This is about the men in my life I have watched dissolve into disease. The men whose light I’ve watched slowly fade from their eyes. The ones I’ve seen do horrible things that no one should be capable of. The men who drank themselves to death and the one’s who couldn’t find a reason to keep going.

This is about the moment I looked into my partners eyes and realized that I no longer recognized the man I loved.

All of the men in these stories were deeply affected by their childhood trauma, their mental health struggles and their addictions. They were ultimately defined by them. All of these men deserved better.

This is about our our fathers, our sons, partners and friends.

This is about how we talk about men.

When I scroll social media, I can see millions of posts, without even trying, about how beautiful and amazing I am for being a woman. I see post after post telling me how much I’m worth, how well I should be treated.

I also see millions of posts saying that degrading men as whole should be an acceptable part of my healing process. That I am better than men, I am worth more than men. I’ve even seen violence towards men portrayed a joke, going as far as saying they deserve it.

Can you imagine if you saw a post saying that degrading women is an acceptable part of a man’s healing process, that they were worth more than women? Joking that the women who hurt them deserve violence?

There are a lot of posts dedicated to the narratives of, “Men aren’t shit, men are worthless, men will never change.”

I haven’t seen many posts that focus on how much men deserve to know their worth, how they deserve to be treated, or how amazing they are. When I do, there are quite a few comments arguing that this isn’t true.

Positive posts about men are often geared towards finding the ‘one good one’ in the never ending sea of trash. A good man is seen as an exception to the rule.

Can you fucking imagine if thats what you saw all day?

How would you feel about your odds of being the one good one?

If you had made some bad choices in relationships in the past, would you think you could be any better? That you could become one of the good ones? Or would you feel you had lost your chance?

Why do we believe so deeply in our own inherent worth as women but men don’t deserve the same? Why do we think we can consistently grow and change but somehow men are unable to do the same?

I am well aware that a lot of the comments on these posts are about people’s individual experiences and I will never discount them. I will never say that someone shouldn’t have negative feelings towards the people who hurt them. I will never say someone say someone should have to stand by the side of someone who has treated them badly.

I have talked a lot about my experiences with men on this blog, I have talked about a lot of the men in those stories.

I’ve talked about how much I loved them. I have talked about how much I hated them.

I have made the mistake many times of having so much empathy for the men in my life that I sacrificed myself and my own well being in the process.

But I will never become so angry and short sighted by what I have experienced that I believe any man, even the ones I have wrote about, deserves to believe they are worthless. That they deserve to be defined solely by their past actions and cannot change. That they aren’t worth enough to try.

They are not worthless. They never will be.

The feelings we have are still valid. Our experiences will never be discounted. But I’m not talking about toxic relationships right now.

This is about the bigger picture.

This is about men’s individual experiences and feelings being valid too. This is about seeing them as people. This is about giving them the same space we do.

This is about how we talk about men.

Just like us, a lot of men have been hurt, they have been cheated on, they have been left. They have experienced being abused, humiliated, and frightened. I have seen that a lot of them are too embarrassed or ashamed to even admit it.

They’ve been conditioned to think it doesn’t matter. That if they do talk about it, their vulnerability could be equated to weakness. Some, even when they have tried, have been ridiculed or emasculated for it.

My entire blog is about my life experiences, relationships and hurts. I am honest about the mistakes I’ve made and how I have grown from them. I receive nothing but support and kindness.

How many men are writing blogs about their childhood wounds, their growth, and their toxic relationships? How many men are being vulnerable on the internet?

How many would feel like they were even allowed to?

Unprocessed trauma, from childhood or adulthood, often comes out in destructive ways. Anger, violence, infidelity, addiction. There are so many ways someone can hurt themselves and others when something lies under the surface unhealed and unacknowledged. This is not an excuse, it does not make these choices and reactions acceptable, it absolutely does not.

I have made these choices, I have wrote about them. If my blog was authored by a man, would it be taken seriously? Or would you condemn me and define me by my worst choices?

Would you think I couldn’t change?

When men have been hurt, they are often pressured to fight back, fuck off or forget about it. They’re not usually given the tools to actually deal with it, they’re expected to already know how. They’re expected to deal with it on their own. They’re not given a lot of sympathy.

Half the time, people don’t even believe they were actually hurt. I’ve even seen people say they deserved it.

If you thought your hurt didn’t matter, would you even be able to recognize it?

Would you even know what to do about it?

They’re not championed when they’re knocked down and get back up. They’re not usually told how proud someone is of them when they do.

They’re not really exalted for the changes they do make. It’s both expected and not expected of them. Really, it’s a lose, lose.

We seem to think that a man’s worth is defined strictly by what they do. Or what they don’t. Their worth is measured by what they can provide. It’s, honestly, usually tied to what we think of them and the quality of what we receive. It’s tied to what we think we deserve, not necessarily what they do.

Are they not inherently worthy for just being a human being? Could you look at your newborn son and think anything else?

At what age are they no longer allowed to cry? At what age do they no longer deserve respect, they no longer deserve anything, without earning it?

Their worth is not measured by what they can provide. Their worth is not measured by how we feel about them.

Noone ever deserves to feel like they are worthless.

In my career field, I talk to men every single day. The amount of times I have been told, ‘I have never shared this with someone before’ breaks my fucking heart.

Men deserve to feel that when they talk, someone will listen. They deserve to feel like they don’t always have to be the strongest person in the room. They deserve to know they matter. They deserve to feel cared for. They deserve to feel safe.

If men take the chance on opening up, they deserve the respect of actually being heard. If they are vulnerable, we can give them the space to do so without the fear of being shamed.

They have just as many emotional needs as we do. They should never be reduced down to simple minded morons driven by sex, food, sleep. They’re not animals, for fucks sake.

There is not much we can do in a world where resources for mental health are few and far between, we can’t overhaul the entire system in a day. Everyone is stretched thin, there’s not enough help to go around.

We can’t force the men in our individual lives to change and we can’t save them by our own willpower alone. That responsibility is still on them.

But we can change the way we talk about men. We can change the way we talk to men. We can change the way we look at them. We can believe they can change. We can be willing to have more compassion and love for men as a bigger picture.

This is about trying to break the cycle before it even starts.

Men are killing themselves, literally and figuratively, at alarming rates.

No one deserves to feel like they are so inherently defective that their only options are to continue to make the same mistakes, find solace in a bottle, or suffer alone in silence. If someone reading this needs to hear this, you are worth more than that and you deserve more than that.

I have lost almost every man I have ever loved in my life to addiction, suicide, or to the demons they couldn’t shake. They deserved better.

They were human beings. They were fathers, sons, partners, and friends.

We have to change the way we talk about men.

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Self Reflection

The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars.

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I live in what I would consider to be the most beautiful place in the entire world. I am floored by it daily, I can’t believe a place like this exists. There is rarely a day that the sun isn’t shining. At night, I can see the moon and the stars so brightly that it feels like I am legitimately in outer space. Stars shoot so frequently through the sky above me that it’s inspired me to diligently study astrology to see how all of this beauty could translate into my life. I spend so much time learning about the mountains, the rocks and the animals. I love every last bit of it. 

Writing my last blog, just a moment in time., sent me into a two day spiral. My body was an animatronic robot going through all of my normal activities while my brain was somewhere else. My head was wrapped in cotton while simultaneously going up in flames. Writing that blog poured lighter fluid all over me and posting it was the match that set it ablaze.

I was in the place that tells me this will never, ever get better. It sneers at me that I will never be free, I am cursed by it. There’s no sense in fighting against it, it is hellbent on dragging me into inevitable madness. 

Outside, the sun shone so brightly that it was boring into my skull. The mountains loomed over me, I was looking at them but I couldn’t really see them. They were ominous and even the moon felt like it was judging me. I can’t see the beauty around me when my mind is in the past, it doesn’t compute. My surroundings aren’t familiar to me, I hadn’t seen them yet.

Inside, I obsessed over every detail. Every moment in time that I might have been responsible for how everything turned out. Trying to fill in the gaps of what I couldn’t remember. I oscillated through outward rage and inward shame. I berated myself for wasting my days off by being in this headspace, for not being able to get it together and felt disgusted in myself for pouring out my vulnerability on the internet. 

I don’t really remember what I did Sunday. I know I did laundry and I cleaned. But I don’t remember anything else. This is par the course for episodes of this magnitude. I will be so deeply entrenched mentally and emotionally in the past that, later, my brain can’t even bring the actual details back up. I’m grateful there was only one day of this. Last year I lost a full month from December to January. There are only some details I remember from the time I was pregnant, most of it got thrown out completely. 

Monday was more painful but it’s also crystal clear. This is a good sign. 

I knew I had to take some sort of definitive action in order to leave the mental state I was in. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. I am always scared it will be one of the times it doesn’t. Those are the really dark times. But alas, we must persevere.

I have been journaling a lot recently. I have different journals for different purposes. My favorite one is used for writing down all of my nature observations in between the thoughts I have at the time. It’s grounding. I also have one for dreams and I have one for rage. 

It’s tiring to write it all out by hand. I have multiple dreams a night so I switched to cataloguing them on my laptop to better reference repeated themes and make connections. They have been extra vivid recently. They are abstract but loaded with meaning. They touch on the deepest parts of my psyche that I struggle to look at. They dig into the roots of my life, they aren’t concerned with my most recent past. 

It’s even more tiring to write out all of my rage by hand. My hands can’t move as quickly as my thoughts and there are many times I struggle to keep up. It’s frustrating. Yesterday, since there were so many thoughts competing for my attention and ultimately torturing me, I switched this to my laptop as well.

I spent hours, and I’m not even remotely exaggerating, hours typing out every single thought that came through my mind. It is 8,683 words. 8,683 words in the format of a letter I would never send. There was a point where it was only making me angrier. There was a point where I felt like it was only confusing me more. There were moments of desperation and there were things I felt embarrassed to even write. I questioned my faith in my spirituality. There is even a section that I go on a whole diatribe questioning if I had fully lost control of my own sanity. I was afraid that if I quit typing I actually would.

I had some semblance of clarity for a while. I took a shower and ate two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was more optimistic going through pictures and videos of my past few months and appreciating how beautiful it all really is. I posted them to put some positively out into the world. I laid down to go to sleep. 

But I couldn’t. Those fucking thoughts had me in a chokehold once again, careening me backwards. I went back to it. I typed it all out in the form of a text message. I knew deep down that I wouldn’t actually send it but god damn did it feel good to play with fire for a second.

At three am, my entire mind deflated. It had run 8,683 miles and it was exhausted. I was ashamed of myself for still feeling all of these feelings, for needing to write them all out. I was afraid that I was actually just a crazy person, obsessed with my own pain. I wondered if I even had pain at all, maybe I am just really dramatic. 

I focused on releasing everything I wrote that day, acceptance moves forward. Resistance impedes. I don’t want to carry it all with me anymore, I’m sick of being angry. I will embody indifference, I will find peace in my grief. It’s over, it’s all over.

I ended my night by writing a letter to myself, reminding myself that what is not released in some form can only fester, turning itself into bitterness. I reminded myself that there is a very big difference in writing letters you’ll never send and then actually sending them. I reiterated how proud I should be of my bravery to start over here in the desert. I remembered how proud of myself I really was. I remembered how far I have come since last year, since May 22nd, since Saturday night. 

I didn’t sleep much and I still had dreams. But they didn’t have much depth, they were surface level. In the last one I ‘realized’ that today wasn’t my day off and I was too tired to go to work. Simple shit. 

I wake up to my dog staring at me a few inches from my face. The second I crack my eyes open she is tucking her head under my chin and pawing at my face. If I sleep past six am she thinks I might possibly be dead and therefore unable to feed her. She is happy when she finds out that I am not. I am too. 

I get up to let her outside and the sun is shining in that particularly jovial form it does sometimes. It is hitting the catclaw vine that grows over the top fencing of my yard in the purest way. It is just bright enough and it’s refreshing, whispering promises of a better day as it graces my cheeks. 

I leave my front door open so the crisp morning desert breeze can come through the screen, clearing out all the remnants of the past two days. It is peaceful, it is optimistic. It’s a breath of fresh air and possibility. I am right here. The sun is happy I rejoined the land of the living. I am too. 

I am lucky to live where everything survives by sheer determination and force, I get to live in an oasis where things grow delicately and green, wrapping around my home in a way that creates a sense of loving safety. I get to live where animals come and visit me, I have become the Southwest Cinderella. 

I find true healing here in the mountains. It is quite the cliche, forgive me for that. But I feel one among the plants and animals that manage to thrive here, just like me. I am comforted by being held in the valleys of the ancient mountain ranges. They hold steadfast, reminding me that years of violent eruptions and moving parts could redefine my structure but it all ends in an awe striking result. 

You know I love a good metaphor and, lucky for me, it’s chock full of them.

It only took two days to find myself firmly rooted back into the present. That’s not a long time at all. It wasn’t time wasted. 

Everything I experienced led me to exactly the place I am right now, this present moment. It has made the worst years of my life seem like the world’s most beautiful gift. 

Among the sun, the moon and the stars, I am scrubbed fresh, more prepared to keep going. They hold my hurts for me and they will give them back to me if I need to look at them again. If I don’t, they’ll release them for me for good. They guide me to the wisdom I need, they nudge me down the right path. The mountains anchor me through. They all called me here, after all. They know what they’re doing.

I will keep listening.

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Heartbreak & Loss

just a moment in time.

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On May 22nd 2025, I arrived at my new home in a state almost 2,000 miles away from where I had lived my whole life. I packed up whatever I could fit into my car, strapped in my dog and left like a bat out of hell. 

I have not once regretted that decision but I wont lie, I’m fucking broke. The one thing I had going for me back in my home state was the solid foundation of financial security I had built over the years. I have no doubt in my mind that I will build it again. That isn’t the point.

The point is that I decided not to reinvest in my web domain hosting. I decided I was okay with leaving this blog in the past. In fact, I didn’t want the last few years of my life to be blasted on the internet for anyone new I could meet to see anyway. It was a fresh start after all. 

But there are some things you can’t leave behind. Things you don’t even want to. I hadn’t processed, or even accepted, that I had really lost my baby. I had tried to take it on a few times, sure, and there was even a small period of time this seemed possible. On her due date, I spent the day with Perfect on Paper Guy, her father. It felt healing. I thought we were healing. 

Blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to get into the specifics of that shit show. I don’t feel the need to tell that story.

But here, six months later, I am still rocked by waves of grief over and over and over again. I will think that I have come to a point of peace with it all and then something new will happen and drag me back into the trenches. 

I took my head out of the sand tonight and decided to see what would happen if I logged back into my blog account. I couldn’t. It was gone. It was all gone.

I don’t care about any other post on this blog other than a soul as big as my own. I rarely reread them. But that post is a handful of paragraphs that painstakingly and lovingly encapsulated the worst and purest moments of my entire life. I wrote it less than a week after the surgery feeling like I was going to bleed out physically and emotionally. I’ve reread it a million times and I’ve avoided it just as many too.

I have a rough draft of it but it wasn’t the final one I put out into the world. The only record of her being real. The only tangible thing that I have. They asked me if I wanted an ultrasound picture and I refused it. He didn’t, I wonder if he still has it. I don’t know if I would want to see it if he did. 

She was mine. She was his. But she was mine. 

And now I have nothing. That’s not really true, I actually have a lot. But there are so many moments that all I can see is that I don’t have her. 

I can’t even make the words come out of my mouth to share this experience with anyone I’ve met here. I physically cannot make myself. I can write it on the internet and share it with strangers. But to verbally say it? I just can’t. It’s my Achilles heel. I’m afraid they won’t understand or they’ll act like it shouldn’t be this hard. I never understood it either until it happened to me. So maybe they’ll say I should just move on. Didn’t I move away to start a new life?

When someone dies, you grieve. You grieve them not being present in your life any longer. You celebrate the life they lived. All of the up’s and downs, triumphs and losses. It’s devastating and painful and it can take years and years to move on from. But they lived, they were there. 

How do you grieve someone who never lived? Someone you never got to see. An idea, even. 

I hoard my grief. I carry it with me every day, I sleep next to it at night. I let it roam a little ways away sometimes but I always pull it back. I’m afraid to let it go. 

It’s hard to start a new life when you’re aching for the one that never got to. 

When I was pregnant, I would lay on my back and try to feel if my body had changed, if I could feel her in there. I couldn’t. But I still did, in some way. She consumed my thoughts, all of my energy seemed to be concentrated in my abdomen. Everything from that moment forward was focused solely on her. I was ready to destroy anything in my path that threatened her. 

And then there was nothing.

When I saw that I couldn’t retrieve that one single blog entry, I pulled out my credit card and immediately charged it. I didn’t care about the cost, I didn’t even hesitate. I was sick, nauseated and sweating. I frantically did whatever I could to bring it back. I immediately copied and pasted it into a new document to ensure I’d never lose it again.

But why? Why do I hoard it when it hurts me so deeply? 

It feels wrong. It feels like if I let go of my grief that will be when she truly no longer exists.

Despite my feelings I have now towards the man I shared her with, that was our baby and that second chance is gone forever, we don’t have any more time. Two for one special, him and her.

I have been gripped with fear recently that if I ever found someone new and fell in love again, if I was to have another chance at having a child, it wouldn’t feel like my baby.

I know this is ludicrous. Truly insane person levels of thinking. There is a neverending list of why I should be grateful that I did not have a baby with him. And I am. But sometimes even just the knowledge that I will always be connected to him, that the grief of her will always be intertwined with the threads of him, makes me want to climb all the way up the mountain in my back yard just to fling myself off of it. There are times I am filled with so much rage that I feel I could burn all of them to the ground.

There will never be her without me. There will never be her without him. She fully encompasses both the absolute best and the absolute worst of us. I worry I’ll never truly be free of it, that it will drive me into madness one day. There are times I have truly considered ending my own life over it. Two for one special, me and her.

I wonder if I will ever really understand why this had to happen. Sometimes I feel like I do and then I don’t all over again. All I can do is continue to see the value of my own life and continue to keep living it. It really is good most days. 

I keep stringing those good days together, I have more moments of peace than agony. It’s getting better. This is just a moment in time.

I guess for now I will just write about it and cry and shake until it passes. And then I guess I’ll go eat a bowl of fucking spaghetti or something and go the fuck to sleep.

But at least I get to wake up tomorrow and if I feel like shit, I get to feel like shit looking at a mountain and a shit ton of cactus in perfect weather. Maybe I will post this to my Blog of Seemingly Neverending Pain that I couldn’t afford so I at least get my money’s worth. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I will do one of the new hobbies I have picked up or study the things I have liked a lot recently instead. 

I really have discovered a lot of things that give me purpose in my life. It might not be what I thought it was going to be. But it’s still pretty good. I really only write about my life when it sucks ass. Maybe I will try to write about it when it doesn’t. I do want to get my money’s worth.

Anyway, no two for one special today. Just a party of one. And thats okay.

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Heartbreak & Loss

Evil.

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Once you’ve looked true evil in the face, you’ll never forget it. 

Three years ago, I thought I had seen it on the streets of New York. But there is a difference. Alcohol can bring out evil things in a person. It can turn them into monsters. Drugs can too. They can turn someone into a shell of themselves, lowering their moral compass inch by inch until they look around only to find themselves mired in the filth of their own creation. 

You can pull yourself out of filth. I know because I’ve done it. Dusted myself off, bit by bit, until I recognized myself again. 

The man in New York: I knew and loved him long enough that both his darkness and his light were just as familiar to me as my own. I was never surprised, as sad as that is.

Last year, I met someone new. He seemed kind, loving, sincere. But then he wasn’t. I could never tell which side of him I saw was real. I convinced myself it had to be the good one. The one he presented to everyone else. Evil lurks, insidiously. It can dress itself up. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

Today, I’m sitting on my couch. I’ve been reading. My phone is off, my IPad on airplane mode. I have no direction for my day. I was exhausted when I woke up, I need to rest. 

I feel a moment of shame for thinking I need to rest. I never feel like I’m doing enough. He always did too much, I felt lazy in comparison. Judged for being able to sit still. 

I debate on going back to my novel. My sixth in a week. 

Four months ago, I was moving things into his house when I found the other woman’s clothing. I checked out four books from the library in a daze. I read three in less than twelve hours. I couldn’t keep the questions and fears fully at bay, I had signed out of my lease. I would be homeless in a matter of weeks. I couldn’t move into this house with him. My skin crawled.

Here, on my couch, I shake my head, squeezing my eyes tight to empty my brain. 

I play with my dog. I zone out as she runs after her toy. She hesitates before dropping it nearby for me to throw again. I can feel my eyes have glazed over. She can tell I’m not really there.

‘Fuck you eat shit you fucking skank cunt bitch.’ ‘I wish you were thirty minutes away so I could slice you ear to ear.’ ‘You do the right thing, fucking hang.’

I squeeze my eyes tight and shake my head again. Like if I try hard enough I can rattle these words and all the others out of my head through my ears. I won’t allow them to fester and rot in my brain, sowing themselves so deeply that they play in my own voice instead of his.

It takes me a second to come back. The last bully I need is me. I pick up her toy and throw it again and again until she gets tired.

I feel off today, like my thoughts can’t form themselves fully in my brain. It’s disorienting. Sitting on my floor, I try to make sense of the past year. So much of it was an illusion, some months I don’t remember at all. My brain threw them out with the bathwater.

I’m spiraling. I focus on getting through this second, then this one, this one, this one. I want to lay down and stare at the ceiling until my life is finally over. 

I don’t. I get up off the floor and pull a folding chair out into my yard. I try to read more of my novel. I am confusing the story line with another book I read the day before. I look up at the desert landscape of my new home instead. The hot air blows across my cheeks. A small part of my brain registers that I should be wearing sunscreen.

I feel a fly buzzing by my ear. I must be in the present enough to be annoyed by it. 

I pull the chair back inside and sit back on the couch. I stare at my book and my throat starts to ache, I know what’s coming. I sob, hot fat tears rolling down my face. 

These emotions are confusing. I know I am going to be okay, I know time will heal. I cry so hard and my throat aches so much that, for a moment, I worry that this isn’t true. 

I feel haunted. Like I am looking over my shoulder. I don’t know for what. 

After a few minutes, I blow my nose and take a few deep breaths. I look at myself in the mirror. I take my dog outside. She sniffs around. 

I think back to the day I left. I watch myself sit at the kitchen table as the house gets destroyed. Flipping through the lies, the masks, the roles he played. I think back to how pathetic I was to keep going back. I wonder how I had managed to convince myself this wasn’t who he was. 

It was exactly who he was. I’m the only person who isn’t fooled. Anymore, at least. 

My dog is pulling on her leash, she looks at me. We walk up the steps to go back inside. I don’t bring those thoughts in with me, I shut the front door and lock it. I feel better with them out there, they’ve got more space to roam. 

Today, my boobs hurt, a symptom I haven’t felt since I was pregnant. My body has been cruel to me this month, there is so much it won’t let me forget. On the year anniversary of the first positive test, my stomach bloated and swelled like it had before. I sobbed that day too. Then I sat on my kitchen floor and stared into space for half an hour. 

I felt better after. I always do.

I take note that my period is coming up. I brace myself and then relax. The tape of the operating room doesn’t play, neither does the one from the weeks prior. I am right here. 

Today is going to be a good day. I vacuum, I wipe down the counters. I take a second to watch the horse outside of my window. I smile. What a wonderful place to live. I enjoy my own company immensely. I am lucky.

I am not hungry but I make myself something to eat. If I take care of myself, I am more likely to have good days. While I am doing dishes, I wonder to myself if he thinks I think good things about him. I don’t. I loathe him with every fiber of my being. More than I could ever hate myself.

I let these feelings wash down the drain. I lather my hands with soap. 

My hands are clean.

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Self Reflection

For the Love of God.

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The song Angel Band by Tyler Childers is what I would consider to be my favorite song of all time. I saw him California and I think I blacked out in the third row when he played it live. I tattooed ‘Hallelujah, Now I See’ across my palms.

It’s a song that I’ve played over and over when I’ve been at my lowest, desperately searching for why I should continue living. It’s a song I’ve played in euphoric moments when I realized that was why. It’s the song I wanted to play when I walked down the aisle when Perfect on Paper Guy and I got married. 

I have listened to the last minute of it, over and over, while I internally writhed with rage, anguish, and joy. It encompasses such a broad spectrum of feelings and moments for me that I think it’s etched into my soul at this point. 

Sometimes I get embarrassed to love something someone else made so much. But I think that might be the point of why music or art is made, to provoke the heart and the mind.

I write off and on through phases of my life. Usually at times I feel stuck in my brain. I don’t even know what I am looking for but I’m going in with a flashlight and a shovel to dig it out. I know there’s something, I’ll find it if I keep digging. I’ll find it if I keep making logs of fossils, sediments, if I keep crafting experiments to test hypothesis. 

My subconscious has been my own personal Everest. The diligence I’ve dedicated to climbing it is unmatched. At times, the level of attention to detail I’ve paid to it has driven myself (and everyone around me, I’m sure) into madness. No stone goes unturned. Sometimes there’s nothing, sometimes there is an entire ecosystem thriving under one small rock. 

As a child, I loved flipping rocks to see what was underneath. They are the Midwest’s version of tide pools. If I chill the fuck out, I like doing it as an adult too. 

What is true in the physical is often true in the spiritual. 

I used to be really religious when I was in highschool. I chose to be, it wasn’t forced on me. I found a sense of belonging, structure, and purpose in the church. I pushed it to extremes, as you can guess I would, and I got burnt out. I had held myself to standards that a teenager really had no chance of upholding, not when they’re riddled with hormones and a healthy desire to self destruct. 

My shortcomings and mental battles within myself truly felt like an angel and devil on my shoulder, pushing and pulling at my soul. I thought I could push through if I was just dedicated enough.

When I decided I apparently was not, I gave up. I turned my back on it. I had a lot of shame about this. I think it was the beginning of feeling like I could not trust myself to see something through.

If I loved something so much but I wasn’t good enough for it, I’d bow out. I’d turn my back and walk away. I’d convince myself I never believed in it in the first place. If I wanted something so badly but I couldn’t measure up, I would repress it.

Fifteen years later, I still don’t believe in the Christian idea of God. I say that from a place of complete truth, I’ve overturned all the stones. I do think Christ’s teachings in the Bible hold a lot of merit as a tool when interpreted from a perspective of searching for clarity and purpose in both the physical and spiritual realms. He’s a philosopher, if you will.

I do believe in the idea of a Universal Spirit, a Source, a Higher Power. It is not so much that I feel like it is bigger (and therefore different) than me, as AA would suggest, but more that it is both separate and part of me. My highest self, maybe? Universal consciousness? It is not that much different from ‘God’. But it’s not personified, there’s no rules for its acceptance. It just is. 

Honestly, I think all of these different religious paths come from the same source and just present in whatever way we will find most palatable. But this is all just my opinion on my little blog so don’t come for me with ya pitchforks. 

Whatever you want to call it, I know it when I feel it and I know when I am in tune with it. My vision and my awareness expands. I become a part of everything, I see from the front of my own eyes. I feel and absorb things as they happen. I can feel every emotion and I can express them from my true self. I do not hide from anything: past, present, or future. 

Most of the time I am in a state of tunnel vision, seeing everything from a little farther back, not quite here. I think about things as they happen, label the feelings. But I don’t quite feel them. This is not unbearable and I am a little better at recognizing this now and it might take a few days, but I can push myself out of it. 

At my worst times, I am watching everything from the back of my brain. I feel nothing, I believe nothing, I don’t trust myself or others. My brain is turning it’s wheels, looking for a threat, looking for a solution. Looking for a way out. Analyzing, analyzing, analyzing. But I cannot see any patterns, I cannot put the pieces together. I have spent months in this stage, usually after a traumatic event, and I don’t usually have a lot of memories from those time periods. I am, essentially, an animated corpse. 

A lot of my distrust in myself comes from rotating through these stages, the last two predominantly. The first stage used to happen so little that I thought it was a fluke, a delusion. Mania, even. 

When I cannot succeed, live up to expectations, or be good enough: I will turn my back, repress, and walk away. I will feel ashamed of the moments I had in my true self where I felt joy, love, excitement. Even more so if I expressed them. I feel stupid for believing in them, believing in anything. 

Fear is the only emotion that I cannot tell you what it really feels like. I can tell you what anxiety feels like. I am anxious all the time. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the same thing. Anxiety is looking for solutions, disaster planning, it’s thinking ahead. It’s a manifestation of fear, most likely, but it’s not fear. It’s covering it up.

Fear is subconscious, for me at least. Fear is repressed. Deeply. 

If I am afraid that I will not be good enough, I am weak. I hate both of those things, so I repress them both. If I am afraid that I will not be good enough and therefore I will be left, I hate that even more. I repress it even harder. 

While I am repressing my fear, I am also repressing my other emotions. The love I have for someone, the adoration, the giddiness of being around them, the desire to be secure and loved. My outward expression of love towards someone makes me feel embarrassed, ashamed. I will look like a fool when they leave. I will look like a fool if they hurt me. I will look pathetic when they realize I’m not good enough. I will look pathetic for thinking they were good enough.

I turn my back, repress, and walk away. I have done it so many times. When the fear dissipates, I go back. But I’m not fully there, I’m subconsciously looking for the sign that I need to prepare, pull back, and repress it again. Sometimes I will shut down out of sheer fear of myself, I don’t trust myself to not keep repeating this pattern.

I am forever careening between hopeful and hopeless.

My fathers were the first men in my life to not live up to the idea I had of them. God was the second. I was left, wondering why they never showed up. Why they never pulled their weight and did the things they said they would. 

My fear of never being accepted, never being good enough no matter how hard I tried, has pushed me into a role of being the savior in my own story. I have written my own Bible in the electrical and chemical signals of my nervous system. It is my universal truth. 

“She’s shouting in the aisle

She’s shaking something fierce”

I began questioning the Bible and it’s teachings in my late teens. Can I question and disidentify with my own version in my early thirties? Can I create a new belief system, new commandments, new verses and parables to build on?

“Feels so good to be here

After all these faithful years”

The tattoos on my palms include an eye on each hand. In the center of the eye, and the center of my palm, is a circle that is inked red. This was a tongue in cheek nod to the phenomenon of stigmata, the appearance of bodily marks that correspond to the wounds of Jesus’s crucifixtion. 

I do not believe in the Christian idea of God. I don’t believe in Heaven. And I sure as fuck don’t believe in going to hell when you can experience it right here all on your own. 

However, stigmata is said to be a representation of a very real connection with Christ and that those who experience it are those who wanted that connection so badly that they would put themselves through the trials and tribulations to get there. 

“Just took a walk with Jesus

Just touched his nail-scarred hands”

If we are viewing the connection to Christ through a lens of metaphor for connection to Source, was it a tongue in cheek reference at all? I marked my body, the palms of my hands, with the words and symbolism to encompass everything I believe in. The words I’ve repeated to myself over and over through my own version of hell. I’ve held fast to nothing more than blind faith that I would be reborn, transformed, and full of all encompassing joy on the other side. And I did it with all the joy I could fucking muster.

“Didn’t even bother her

That he ain’t a blue-eyed man”

I believe in the weeping and gnashing of teeth. I believe in the absolute agony of accepting where you are in a moment that feels like it will eat you alive. I believe in the power it takes to not cower and hide your face while it all rages around you. And I believe in the bravery it takes to grit your teeth, turn towards it and stare it down with your god damn eyes open. 

“Hallelujah, jubilee”

I believe in being baptized by water and I believe in being baptized by fire and I believe I have experienced both, multiple times. Each time, I find more clarity, more peace, more joy. I am closer to the core of who I am. 

Every single time, I am reborn. Every single time my capacity for love grows tenfold, and my fear is quelled. At least for awhile, I can see clearly.

“I can hear the angel band”

It’s funny how often fear is mentioned alongside love in the Bible. It’s almost as if they are two sides of the same coin, you can’t have one without the other. 

“I was blind but now I see”

What if fear finally took the backseat? What if I was able to experience a love that is greater than fear?

“And I’ll jump right in amongst them

When I reach the glory land”

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Self Reflection

The Year of Being Wrong.

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When I was a child, I had a crippling fear that everything I had ever done that I was ashamed of would one day come out as a tabloid expose. In my mind, at six years old, I would obviously grow up to be very famous. The paparazzi would dig into my past and eventually I would see my deep dark secrets splashed across all the magazines at my local supermarket. Obviously. 

Thankfully, I don’t think anyone is interested in, “Savannah jumped on a board once to scare out a mole she saw run under it and accidentally squashed it instead.” Or even, “At ten years old, Savannah spent a year terrified that everything she touched would lead to her imminent death!’ 

Even after childhood, I’ve basically had a nonstop printer of Ok! Magazine printing off headlines about how terrible, shameful, and bizarre I am for as long as I can remember. It’s the core of why I started writing about my life. It’s somewhat preemptive to air out all my dirty laundry (before the press gets to it. Obviously.) It helps absolve my shame to understand my life experiences and actions. Even if the driving force behind them at times was, “I was truly an insane person for reasons continuing to be discovered.” 

Writing about my life, however, has doubled the shame complex at times. I have been so public about the thought processing around my life and what has happened. These things evolve and change and the effect they have on my life compounds or lessens as time goes on. I have often reread things I have written and thought, “I don’t necessarily feel that way anymore.” And then shame comes in, “Way to go, bozo, you were wrong!”

This went into overdrive after my last relationship ended. Perfect on paper guy had some not so perfect on paper reactions, I was stuck trying to get over them and eventually I chose to end things with him.

”Savannah leaves another man after thinking he was the one, what a fucking moron!” The tabloids screamed in my head, “Jilted bitch is jilted again! When will she ever learn! Nothing is ever actually going to work out for you!”

I was a laughing stock to the muppet peanut gallery in my own brain. 

Luckily, my brain also has a good PR team. It cranked out new headlines to thin out the barrage of negative reporting. Things like, “Girl who would never have left a toxic situation before ACTUALLY leaves a toxic situation!” “Look out world! Savannah stands up for herself (and didn’t even resort to name calling to do it!)” and my favorite one, “Despite adversity, Savannah continues to believe everything will indeed one day work out!”

But there is still always a whisper in the background saying, “Everyone read how much hope you had, how much stock you put into this. And now you look like a fool! You always look like a fool! You should never express any strong feeling you have because you always end up looking like a full of shit loony!”

Honestly, maybe I do. I wrote a whole blog post about how I shouldn’t always put my whole ass into everything I do and I just kept whole assing it. It’s a quality that I truly love and loathe about myself. Fully in or fully out, I am only ambivalent once I have exhausted all my energy.

There is a fine line to walk in the duality of the things we both loathe and love about ourselves. Depending on how they are applied, they can be an asset or a detriment.

My favorite game to play when I notice I am being overly critical of myself is to take whatever I think someone would say about me (after reminding myself that literally no one really thinks about me that much) and asking myself, “What is the alternative?” 

“Savannah always thinks the guy she is dating is going to be ‘the one’, that he is so special, blah blah.” Okay, so what is the alternative? “Savannah is forever skeptical and on guard with someone she is dating, she never trusts that they are who they say they are.” Fuckin’ yuck, dude. I don’t want that to ever be me. I struggle combating those thoughts enough, there’s no way that I would ever want that to be my full modus operandi. I think I’ll go with my favorite ‘Despite adversity!’ headline instead.

I quit drinking two and a half years ago and the other day I was still spiraling out over all of the ridiculous or horrible things I had ever done. As they flashed through my mind like a reality tv recap, I burst out laughing, “Gollllly, what a wild bitch you were! Aren’t you glad that’s not you now?” 

I’m not going to hate myself forever. Because that’s the thing, right? If that version of me would have loved herself the way I love her now, she probably wouldn’t have done most of the things she’d done. I love her retroactively. I am the sum of all my parts. All of them are welcome (although most of their behaviors will not be tolerated in the present day.) 

That’s another way I challenge my imaginary tabloids: I don’t do so many of the things I used to do. And it’s totally okay if people don’t believe that. I don’t need to live my life constantly proving that I’m not who I used to be. I can just be who I am.

I care what people think of me, sure, but I won’t let it dictate my behavior. I won’t stay in a situation just so I’m not ‘wrong.’ And I won’t allow myself to boil alive in shame I don’t deserve to carry. I’ve worn my hair shirt, I’ve dragged myself over the coals. 

Enough is enough. 

I love that I put my whole ass into what I believe in, even if it is just for a season. Even with my alcoholism, I learned so much about myself and other people. I had a lot of amazing experiences when I was drinking. Eventually, the ones that sucked outweighed the good ones. It was the same with trying to make relationships work that had reached an end. One day, I took my whole ass out and closed the chapter. I had exhausted my energy. It had become a detriment, not an asset. 

I am not afraid of being alone, even when it sucks. And yeah, it really does suck. I’m not going to act like I’m living it up over here. I have a week off work and it could be aired as a documentary on ‘How to be Depressed.’ It’s not interesting, it’s just me eating cheese quesadillas and sleeping for multiple days in a row. Watching ten different tv series and not being able to tell you what a single one was about. Sobbing after every place I went on Christmas Eve because this is not what I thought my life would be like. Raging that I should have been 23 weeks pregnant, glowing with Perfect on Paper guy by my side. Celebrating with our families, my mom, my sisters. 

Instead, I am more alone than ever.

I would rather be alone than be in a situation I can’t remedy. I know when to stop trying. I didn’t know before. 

I always lived my life by the mindset of, “Ready or not! Here I come!” But what is the alternative?

For once, I’m not really pushing myself to feel better right now. I think it’s time to really grieve it all. My baby, my significant relationships, my dads deaths. Who I thought I was, who I thought I would be. I’m allowing myself to be afraid of what’s next. Sometimes you need to know when to hide and when to seek.

I so badly wanted everything to work out this time. Honestly, even just to prove that it could. ‘Former party girl leaves shitty relationship and finds new love, has a baby, blah blah.’ I wanted to prove it to myself, of course. But I also wanted to be a success story to everyone who had watched it unfold, everyone who wanted to see me succeed and everyone who didn’t. I didn’t want to say, “Look who was wrong again!’

I am okay with being wrong. I am okay with being seen as a broken record of ‘Despite adversity, I’m going to keep going.’ I am okay with it all.

Last year, I just wanted to be proud of myself. 

This year, I am.

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