Narrative: The Blog.

• • •

  • For the Love of God.

    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 ideal 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 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”

  • The Year of Being Wrong

    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.

  • a soul as big as my own.

    It’s been seven months since I published a blog post. It’s been four months since I wrote on my thought processes and coping skills I had been working on, two months since I posted a video. For so much of this time, my mind was consumed by inspecting and rewiring all of my previous patterns and mentally cleaning house. I was laser focused on creating a healthy relationship with my new partner and I was over the moon for 90% of it. 

    I went back and read some of the drafts I wrote during the spring and early summer that I had decided not to post. In the end, joy is just not that interesting to write about. It was more interesting to be out there living it and experiencing everything this new life I found had to offer. The majority of writing I did in this time was personal, private poems and love letters to my partner. I have a notebook that’s filled with them, it would probably make a cynic vomit. 

    Of course, there were hard times as we both tried to work through our pasts together. There were even harder ones when we took on things outside of our control like mental health and legal issues I was still dealing with from before. We would come back stronger, more iron clad each time. Until we didn’t. 

    There used to be times I would be driving to work and I would weep because I was so grateful for what we created. 

    On August 11th, we found out we had created even more. Two lines on the seventh test I took (I had convinced myself I was taking them wrong) confirmed that I was pregnant. My boyfriend was at the track racing and since patience has never been my virtue, I rushed over and said, “So guess who’s going to be a dad?” 

    Pregnancy is bizarre. The next morning, after the news had set in, it was like a switch had flipped. I felt like an entirely different person, I was consumed by this little thing that had taken up residence in me. My baby. I honestly just couldnt fucking believe it. I was going to be someone’s Mom? Me? Who the fuck decided that? (Me and my boyfriend, but I digress.)

    But it was true, and I knew it because I kept taking tests much to my boyfriend’s amusement. We tentatively told my mom, his dad and his sister. My best friend. My aunt. I was nervous at first, I prefaced it with “I know it’s early.. but I just know it’ll be okay. It has to be.” I had decided, if it went wrong, I would rather tell people that I had miscarried than have to tell the people closest to me about how I was pregnant.. but then I wasn’t. I knew myself well enough that I wouldn’t, I would isolate and not tell anyone at all. 

    There’s so much weird stigma around telling people you’re pregnant early. It’s bizarrely taboo, even though miscarriages are so common. One in four they constantly remind you. I tried not to get too excited because of this. But the second week after I found out, I said to hell with it. I was going to be a Mom! Me! I deserved it, I had worked so hard. I had put so much effort into my healing and to get where I was and there was nobody better suited to be parents than my partner and I. 

    I downloaded every app, I tracked my little tiny baby’s growth every day. I drew pictures on the dry erase board on our fridge of a ladybug, then a bee. I marveled at the size of blueberries, raspberries. I made a list of baby names, I researched parenting styles, I made a registry. I spent hours trying to decide how we would rearrange our house to make everything fit. I bought a crib. I remember my boyfriend asking, “I hate to say this, but do you think it’s to soon?” And I assured him there was no way it would go that way but even if it did, there was a large return window.

    My partner and I were struggling during this time, it seems inauthentic not to mention it. We had been struggling largely with mental health issues right before we found out and that hadn’t magically gone away. But my entire mindset had changed, I was focused on the big picture. I knew we had nine months to process what we needed to and I felt like the universe had front loaded that in the beginning. Events that had happened forced me to confront emotions I had buried deep towards my fathers and their deaths way deeper than I ever had before. It was excruciating but it was necessary. He was forced to confront his mental health issues even deeper. ‘We have time,’ I kept repeating to myself in the harder moments, “We have time.”

    I said to my boyfriend on the day of the ultrasound (the day I had been counting down to for four weeks and one day!) ‘I have full confidence that everything happens as it should. We are healing what we need to heal before the baby comes, we have time.’

    Before we got out of the car, I took his hand and I said, ‘Let’s go see our baby.’

    I remember laying back on the ultrasound table and feeling oddly numb for a moment I was so excited for. I remember the tech saying, “There’s the yolk sac” and then she didn’t say anything else. I remember the screen flashing ‘6 wks 2 days’. I remember thinking, “There should be more than that there.. it should be measuring bigger than that.’ I remember the tech finishing the ultrasound and saying, ‘We didn’t see any cardiac activity, you’ll have to come back next week to recheck.’

    We left the doctor’s office in silence. I know we talked about other things, did other things, but I don’t remember what. I remember researching any possible outcome from what he had seen. It all pointed to the same thing, this pregnancy was not viable. I remember waking up that night at two am, the shock finally wearing off, clutching my stomach sobbing and begging the baby to grow, willing it’s heart to beat with all of my energy. I remember begging it to come back, ‘Please, please, don’t leave me.’

    ’Everything happens as it should,’ I had said that day. Fuck you! I don’t know shit about fuck, obviously! I desperately tried to take it back. This is not how it should happen!

    We went for a second opinion at a different office. The baby measured even smaller. I knew then, it was over. I didn’t need the next appointment to know where it was headed. I never started bleeding but I woke up that Thursday and I just didnt feel pregnant anymore. It felt like a fever dream, a cruel trick my brain and hormones had played on me. A mean spirited joke that the universe gave me just to rip it away to prove that I was unworthy of ever truly getting what I desperately wanted. 

    My boyfriend and I’s relationship deteriorated even further. The loss of the baby ripped us apart at the seams, revealing our ugliest selves. He lashed out and I retreated inward, we had become unrecognizable from the people we started as. We destroyed everything we had worked so hard on in a matter of days. Even so, the night before the surgery, I sat in our garage and I told the baby everything about him, how good and kind he was. How he wrote ‘daddy loves you’ next to every dry erase doodle on our fridge.

    I started sobbing as I was wheeled back, I sobbed as they put the oxygen mask on me and told me to take deep breaths, the woman who was with me trying to soothe me with kind eyes and rubbing my arm. Right before I went under I thought to my baby in the last moment it was with me, ‘I am so so sorry.’

    I woke up in the dark, alone, curled into myself on my side and my first thought was how the baby, although no longer living or growing, was gone. It was no longer with me and I felt like it had taken everything with it. The life we had built, our dreams and hopes for the future. The shiny new life I had rebuilt out of the ashes of before, it all smoldered again. It was packed up in boxes in the house I had called our home. I left with less than I came with. 

    I used to feel like my new life was surreal, technicolor and bright. Exciting and healing, the safety I felt in it was invaluable. It had all happened as it should. Now, in a different house and alone, how could I have ever believed that? How could I have let myself fall so far? How could I have been so stupid? How could I have let myself live so big knowing that it could still crash and burn?

    I feel like Icarus. I flew too close to the sun. 

    But why shouldn’t we fly as close to the sun as we can? That’s what I had fought for before, right? Before it all went wrong? A life where I could live as big as I wanted, give and receive love without fear, without withholding. A life where I could laugh and be present in in that moment, not feel separate and foreign. A life where I could trust my partner with my joy and my tears, especially the tears. I had almost gotten there, I had! It just went sideways. But why? How? How do I ever get back up again? I already cataloged my story of getting back up, god damnit! Why the fuck did I have to do it again? 

    I swear there was a moment I wanted to burn the whole world to the ground and scream, “When the fuck do I get a win, for fucks sake?!”

    I returned the crib, the clothes I had bought to accommodate my body that changed overnight. I did it silently without letting any thoughts creep in. I unpacked and hid the books I bought on child development in a cabinet I will never have to open. I hid the little baby shoes my best friend brought me in another. I scrolled my phone endlessly, deleting apps and unsubscribing from promotional baby emails. If I stop moving and am unoccupied, I am back in the operating room with tears streaming down my face.

    I loved that baby more than I could have ever imagined and it was gone six weeks later. They tell you not to get too invested, to guard your heart. They borderline shame you for it and I guess this is the reason why. 

    But you know what, fuck that. Fly too close to the sun. There was no cushioning that grief from the second I saw those two lines. There was no going back, just as there’s no going back now. I am grateful, I suppose, that we got the time we did. 

    It may not seem real now, but it was. It was real to me as I sat in what was my back yard at the time during the golden hour in the morning and dreamed of sitting in the same spot a year later with a chubby little four month old baby. It was real when I tilted my face up to the warmth, one hand on my belly, and thought, “This is what it was all for.” It was real when I dreamed of seeing my boyfriend become a dad, something I couldn’t imagine loving him more for. It was real when it brought us together and it was real when it tore us apart, choking on our own grief and too far gone to save the other.

    I said when I started this blog I would write about my experiences so that someone out there might read them and feel less alone. I will say, not much has made me feel less alone through this and statistically one in four of you has felt the same. I hope that if you are reading this and you have been here or currently are, that you get a second chance, if you want it. I know that the next time will not be as innocent and that there will be an undercurrent of fear. I have faith in you, for what it’s worth. We are always stronger than we think. 

    In the throes of it all now, I write this simply as a cathartic release. A love letter to a life that was very real to me, to us. I hope that soul I carried for nine weeks, as big and as real as my own, comes back one day. When they are ready and so are we.

    I have written most of this blog on love in all forms, mainly on the pain that comes with it. This love was different from anything I’d ever known and losing it was even more so. It’s wild, isn’t it, the spectrum of joy and grief that comes from allowing yourself to love and experience love in all forms? 

    But as they say, I’d rather have loved and lost than never have loved at all. 

    I’ll keep flying too close to the sun. We have time.

  • The Return of Color.

    I wondered a while back when I wrote “The Roots” on what it would be like to be interested in someone as a healthy minded person. I had started to dig up why I would repeat the same behaviors in relationships over and over and wondered how I could fix them, how I would know when I was ready. Now, I don’t think I would have ever really known and I don’t think I would have been able to scratch further past the surface without trying again. We don’t really encounter situations in our daily life that trigger the same wounds that intimate relationships do. 

    Reading back “The Roots”, I am proud. I am proud of the work I’ve done and the place I’ve come to. I’m one hundred percent grateful for the journey in its entirety to be where I am now. But to say it’s been a god damn doozy is an understatement. 

    Things finally came to a finite end over a month ago with my ex partner when I filed a protective order against him. I don’t care to speak on the events that led up to this at this time. The point is that it was over and for good. He legally could not speak to me, I was safe. I would wake up in the middle of the night shaking and repeat, “You’re safe, you’re safe. He’s not coming back. You’re safe.” until I fell back asleep. 

    This past November I went on a date with a man. Just a single date, I liked him. I had cataloged all the qualities he had that I valued and referred to him as ‘The Perfect on Paper Guy’ but had cut things off when I knew that, with my ex partner still in active addiction, I wasn’t emotionally available to pursue anything. I had too much respect for him, even then, to continue building a connection I couldn’t properly reciprocate at the time. I didn’t want to drag him through the mess my life was at that moment. 

    The Sunday after I filed the order, I didn’t wake up shaking. Instead I woke up from a dream about ‘The Perfect on Paper Guy’. (We’ll call him POPG for short) I hadn’t thought much about him since I cut things off and since I rarely remembered my dreams at that point, I was intrigued. I wondered if my subconscious was trying to tell me something: I was safe now. I could explore the idea of something new. I reached out and we hung out that night. 

    Dating as a mindful, healing person is a hellscape. Rewarding, challenging, and extremely healing but a fucking hellscape all the same. I am extremely grateful to my friends who have weathered this rollercoaster of emotions with me and listened to my rambling thoughts as I have walked myself through what my brain and body has experienced at every stage. Regulating my nervous system, reconnecting my mind to my body and sifting through what is my heart and what is my guard has been careful and sometimes excruciating work. I’ve had to be viciously honest with myself but also deeply loving to myself at the same time. 

    I had dived deep into attachment theory when I realized that every new time I felt connected to POPG, I could feel a visceral moment of shutting down. My subconscious would take over, flooding me with thoughts and feelings to drive me to detach and push him away.

    Thankfully, with the mindfulness I have practiced to this point and the research into attachment theory, I could see these thoughts for what they were. I could take a step back and disidentify with them, take the time to calm my nervous system, and try again. Every time it has proved to build the connection stronger when I’ve consciously lowered my defenses and been patient with myself. And believe fucking me, I am grateful for his patience with this as well because it had to be extremely confusing and disheartening until I could fully communicate what I thought was happening with me in these moments.

    I did realize after a week of spending time with POPG that I needed to let myself feel and ride the waves of the stages of grief over my ex partner until they settled. I was having a lot of conflicting emotions, a lot of guilt and shame over dating again when I was still quite sad over it all. This process didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would, thank the fucking lord.

    The moment I felt like my face broke the surface of the waters I had been drowning in and I took that first free breath will forever be one of the more poignant moments of my life. I felt the love I wrote on in “The New Way to See” break free again and expand back into my world view in one prismatic, euphoric burst. It was a normal, uneventful moment in reality but I felt like everything in my life went from black and white to vivid color.

    With that new clarity and my head above water, I found more things were coming to the surface. Deeper insight was emerging with each wall that came down. 

    Last summer I bought a motorcycle. I took a class and I was absolutely awful at riding it. This was a challenge to my self esteem but I was able to take it in some jest and I was excited to keep trying. My ex partner and I were practicing riding together and I felt great. Until I dumped it twice in a row. I remember being overcome by so much anxiety in those moments that I could not physically make myself get back on the bike for the rest of the summer. I thought my pride was hurt, I was embarrassed. But going deeper, past the walls, I realize now how much different my reaction was when I dumped the bike in front of my ex partner versus when I did in the class. I could not laugh it off, I was paralyzed.

    A year before this, my ex partner assaulted me when we were drunk in New York. I never really talked about it in depth until this past winter. Afterwards, I began to experience flashbacks and anxiety when I would attempt to dive deeper so I decided to leave it alone. I wasn’t ready, I concluded. Any emotions and feelings around it were locked tight. I was so disassociated during and after the event that I could barely access it in my brain. 

    But I would venture to guess that my true issue with the bike and my ex partner wasn’t necessarily the embarrassment of being bad at something in front of him, but the feeling of weakness that came along with it. Being weak in front of him was absolutely unacceptable to my nervous system. It sent the alarms blaring, “Get up, get up, get up! Stand up tall!”

    In New York, he pushed me to the ground. My face hit a parked car and I landed on the street. I laid there, gazing at the gold reflection of the streetlights on the pavement, I could taste blood as it pooled behind my lips. 

    “How did this happen to me?” I wondered as I Iay there, paralyzed. Then, I felt him grab me and pull me up by my coat, putting me back on my feet and forcing me forward. I spit the blood onto my white fur coat, feeling around in my mouth to make sure my teeth were all still there. 

    Outside of the where we were staying, I sat on the curb. Still frozen, eyes down, I begged him to please leave me alone. Then I watched as his boot reared back and then came forward. He kicked me in the face, full force. I can still feel what the sole of his boot felt like on my skin in perfect detail.

    I went reeling backwards and in slow motion, I felt my spine fill with steel. I was not going to lie there in the street like a pitiful mess. Eyes narrowed, jaw set, back straight, I sat back up and I looked at him dead on. 

    Eyes narrowed, jaw set, back straight. 

    Eyes narrowed, jaw set, back straight.

    Eyes narrowed, jaw set, back straight. 

    The threat is over, he is not coming back. But anytime I feel weak, powerless, vulnerable: my eyes narrow, my jaw sets, my back is straight. I am hyper vigilant. I am ready to defend myself, to discard any threat to my safety. I will not be hurt, I will not be pushed down, and I will not feel sorry for myself. We have already established that weakness and pity has evoked disgust in me since I was a small child. This event and some after, I believe, has increased this tenfold. 

    The really fucking annoying thing about this is that the threat is over. But almost two years later, I am still bracing for it. As I have identified this feeling, I notice it often in many different types of situations. None are true threats but it turns out that I never really left New York, the girl with the iron spine is still there ready to defend the girl lying on the sidewalk. 

    I never wanted to be the person who would bring her old shit into new shit. But I think at this point it is almost impossible not to, we all have baggage we still have to work through. I am realizing now that I spent years with someone that I subconsciously never felt safe around, I never fully relaxed after New York. I never knew true safety until I filed that order. It was always, “What will I have to endure next?” 

    This state of being was normal for me, I never questioned why I was this way. I thought maybe I was just an aggressive person, I could work on that. I had, to a point. I was softer in public, on less high alert and I wasn’t having this reaction as often. But as I said, there are certain things intimate relationships will trigger far more than day to day interactions.

    To return to the present: POPG has a real knack for bringing out things in me that I have kept locked behind defenses. Whether it’s just an inherent quality of his or my own natural reaction to feeling (and accepting) a new state of safety, I’m not sure. I lean towards thinking it’s both. 

    I do know that everytime I am more vulnerable with him, I must be mindful. If I feel my eyes narrow, my jaw set and my back start to straighten: I need to take a moment alone to relax, disidentify with the thoughts that come in, and know that this is my body and mind’s reaction to feeling unsafe in vulnerability. It is my subconscious trying to protect me. I know now with certainty that it has and will pass. I am no longer under threat, after all. 

    It has been well worth enduring the moments of discomfort. It has been worth questioning my thought processes. It has been worth pushing through. It is a gift and it is extremely eye opening to have moments of being truly seen as myself with no walls up. I am becoming comfortable with that, slowly. There are more and more moments of it all the time. It is also a gift to realize the beauty of being able to see someone else the same way. 

    Everytime past trauma clouds my vision, the sun peeks back through and I find myself wholeheartedly present in my True Self again. 

    The pitiful girl lying in the street, the girl with the iron spine, and the girl who lost her ability to see clearly becomes the girl who learned to love herself in weakness, the girl who knows what she fights for, and the girl who sees everything, all at once.

    In my journey since “The Burning” my growth has always been inspired by clawing myself out of the toxic sludge I was mired in. Experiencing a connection with someone who evokes growth and healing by simply just being the person they are blows my fucking mind. I have never in my life wanted to better myself on a deep level simply just because the purity of another person’s soul inspires me to do so. Ready or not, I don’t think it matters in the end. I was ready to take on my own challenges that would come up head on. I was as ready as I was ever going to be. 

    No matter the outcome, I am grateful.

    He wants to help me get back on the bike. Wish me luck!

  • The Men We Weep For.

    When I was nine, 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 addiction her son was wrestling with. Defeated from her fears for him and her fears for me, she took a moment and she wept. 

    When I was sixteen 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 sit down as I blustered around. When I turned around, exasperated, she told me he had died. In my room alone after the funeral, I wept. 

    When I was 21, I was in my first stint at a mental health facility. I begged my step dad to come to family night, to be there for me. My texts went unanswered. I was on the edge of my seat the whole night hoping he’d come through the door. He did not. I convinced myself the whole way home that it didn’t matter. My mother wept. 

    When I was 27, my brother, the son of my stepdad, died. Two days after his mother, both from a drug overdose. My mom told my partner to keep me busy until she could get me to slow down long enough for her to tell me. 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 stepdad, who couldn’t bring himself to face the day. 

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

    When I was thirty, the man who I thought was the love of my life told me that he had been doing cocaine daily. When I reached out to help, he told me he did not love me anymore and to give up. I watched him for the next six months battle this addiction as it spiraled more and more out of control. I begged and bargained with the universe. I screamed out with my eyes bulging, “If you take him, I’ll follow shortly after. Don’t think I’m fucking joking!’ As he got clean and relapsed again I was back, “I hope you don’t think I was fucking kidding!” I did not give up. I pray daily I will not have to bury him too. Over and over again, I weep. 

    These stories might be collectively about the men who are selfish, sick, undeserving of the women who love them so deeply. The women who beg and bargain with the universe, that try every type of love they can to save the men who don’t want anyone to save them. The women who leave and come back, that you think should have a backbone and leave. But it’s not. These women are strong, admirable women. They love deeply and unconditionally. I know because I am one.

    I have watched the men in my life dissolve into disease, I’ve watched the light fade from their eyes. I’ve seen them do things no one should be capable of. I’ve looked back on pictures from happier times and been devastated at the difference. I’ve looked into my partners eyes and realized that I no longer recognized the love of my life.

    The men in this story are and were sick from childhood trauma, untreated mental health and addiction issues, and lack of support.

    We have to change the way we talk about men.

    The men who in a moment’s notice went from the apple in their mothers eye to something society deemed as worthless unless they did everything right. Their inherent worth is said to be reliant on the ability to provide, love, protect. If they do it badly, they are doomed. They’re told they will never change. They have been told they will fail before they even start. They are told they are inherently bad just for being men. 

    We are failing men as a society. We are putting astronomic amounts of pressure on men with no blueprint of how to get there. There are few programs dedicated to men outside of the VA (and don’t even get me fucking started on them). There are few memes littered across social media telling men how worthy they are. There are not many groups or books with mainstream focus on how to just be as a man, or to become the best man you can. Mental health and self help is largely focused on women.

    Men are killing themselves, literally and figuratively, at alarming rates. They are beating their partners and falling into addiction. They are sacrificing their youth, mind, and bodies to war and then getting the door slammed in their faces when they come home. There are millions of instagram accounts and books dedicated to the simple idea of, “Men aren’t shit.”, “Men are narcissists.”, “Men will never change.” As women, can you even fucking imagine if that’s what you were blasted with every single day?

    We condemn men, we hate them, but we expect more constantly. We want more, we beg for more, we need more. For US. But what about them? When’s the last time we asked our men what they truly, deeply need? And cared to really listen?

    Not very many people harm someone else without there being an underlying and festering trauma wound. We know this as women.. if it applies to us. Men are expected to, ‘get the fuck over it, youre a grown man!’ And I say this as someone who has said those very words and has neverending depths of empathy for the men in her life. I fall short when their unprocessed trauma is hurting me. I am short sighted. 

    We have to continue to have empathy for men. We have to be willing to ask why and we have to be willing to listen to the answers. We do not have to be willing to stand by their side, that choice is up to you and your own wellbeing. But we have to be willing to have compassion and love for the men around us.

    We have to be willing to remind men of their inherent worth, simply for existing. Men are worthy of putting the work into themselves, to process trauma, to be heard. Men are worthy of having their needs met and not put in a box of ‘sex, food, sleep.’ Men are complex and they are broken. They have been abused, humiliated, and frightened. They usually are trained not to see it. They are trained to fight back or fuck off. They’re not usually trained in the complexities of what it means to stand up.

    As women we can brush them off, we can get angry, we can see how this has all affected us. We can count the tears we’ve cried over the men in our lives who have hurt us or left us. But we can also keep our hearts open to truly see the men in our lives and how their trauma has shaped them. Compassion does not equal low self worth. It does not mean we have to accept certain treatment. But it is healing to know, sometimes, it’s not really about us.

    Unprocessed trauma in men often comes out in anger, infidelity, and addiction issues. Men are trying to maladaptively soothe themselves constantly. And you know what, if we were honest with ourselves, women are too. We’re all hamster wheeling through life in a sea of unprocessed trauma and we’re destroying ourselves in the process. The difference in most of these situations is society is naturally empathetic to women and their struggles. Men? Grow the fuck up. Be a man.

    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 love them, but we cannot personally change them. But we can believe they can change themselves. 

    And I believe, whole heartedly, that seeing them as human beings worthy of love is the only way to do so. They are not neverending need providers or simple minded morons driven by sex, food, sleep. 

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

    We’ve fought for equal rights. Now let’s go to war again, this time, to level the emotional playing field. Let’s fight for our men to be able to be safe, vulnerable, and comforted by us and by eachother. Let’s fight for more resources for all of us to get off the hamster wheel and deal with the traumas that causes so many maladaptive coping skills, rips apart our families, and destroys our relationships.

    I have lost almost every man of note in my life to addiction. 

    We have to change the way we talk about men.

  • The Repressed Loathing.

    I’ve been on a slight hiatus. To be quite honest, I have an article written that I have sat on for over a week where I dove into a traumatic situation I experienced two years ago that I, quite simply, just wasn’t ready to post. I have made myself very vulnerable on this blog but it was a level I am not ready to release at this time. Maybe soon, I will be. The article is on the levels that the body holds onto trauma that we might not recognize. The body does, indeed, keep the score.

    As I am typing this, my left wrist aches. It does that sometimes. It was sprained once, just sprained. An X-ray showed no broken bones. It only needed to be wrapped in an ace bandage. 

    The last time there was deep emotional turmoil between my ex partner and I, this wrist swelled up with a golfball size lump after I had been shuffling cards. It didn’t go down until I had slept in a brace or kept one on during my off days for a month. It quit hurting at the end of my trip, which in my mind, confirmed it was probably just tendonitis. Maybe it is. It started to ache again three days ago.

    I have been reflecting, unwillingly at times, on certain events that happened recently. Many different ones but sometimes on the emotional outbursts, the rage, and the insults I had hurled at my ex partner. I have felt guilt and shame. If I am changing so much, why would these reactions have come back up? I didn’t even recognize myself in those moments. Except I did, a very old version of myself. If you asked my ex partner, he probably recognizes them from when I would be so drunk that my consciousness wasn’t even present anymore.

    I was changing, but in the process I was pulling out the old. The well hidden, but extremely influential, integrated beliefs I had from my core memories. Unworthiness, unimportance, being unloveable. It showed out in rage but its core is unbridled, desperate fear of those beliefs being affirmed. It is self loathing for who I felt like I was at my core. I disguised my disgust for this vulnerability in anger. It felt like a clawing tool to bring back control and power when I felt I was at my weakest. I’m not the victim if I make you the victim.

    Since I was a small child, I have repressed these feelings to the point we discovered that I didn’t even know why I had them. Since I repeatedly dissociated from them, I didn’t know how to express them. When they did come out, it was unhinged and feral. I was being Dramatic. I was too needy, too vulnerable. Pathetic. Shameful.

    When you don’t dive into the big, it comes out in the small. Perceived slights become tantrums, fits of rage, venom spit at the people you love. If I wasn’t comfortable enough to rage at you like I was with my partner, I would isolate myself completely instead. I can’t be unimportant if I never make myself important. When I felt like this I had an extreme lack of self control, my worst fear of all. I could not continue this way. I feared the outcome if I did. It was only getting darker and more persistent, the depths of my soul were calling for my attention and I was absolutely fucking drowning in the currents.

    It started with sitting on a beach in Santa Monica, California watching the tide go in and out and thinking about how every cell of my being wanted to walk into the waves and drown. The cool rush of the water over my face and the salt on my tongue as I would let the water take me was an intoxicating idea. I could feel the need for it bubbling up in my throat and my vision was turning red. After agonizing for a long while, I picked up the phone and reached out to my dear friend. I didn’t hold back with my vulnerability in pages of messages and when words of comfort were given freely and with no judgement, when I could feel her love and care for me from thousands of miles away: I could breathe again.

    Another time was soon after I got home when I wanted to lash out at my ex partner. I could feel the rage coursing through my veins and I could feel my pupils start to shake. I stopped. Right in my living room as I was pacing, ready to start frothing at the mouth, I stopped. I stopped and breathed and I mentally whipped my head around and stared it down. I looked that rage in the face and we locked eyes. It wasn’t rage at all. Chest heaving, we sat together. We got comfortable. Eventually, I sent it all my love. I accepted it for being there and integrated my insecurity, my self loathing, and my fears into being. Only as they were integrated, not repressed, could they then begin to be released.

    With practice this each time, I have gotten good at staring down the big. But I still struggle with the small. The thought patterns, the longing, the sadness. Constant what if’s, how’s, what’s and why’s buzz around in my mind. The miniature are sneaky. I still push them down and swat them away out of habit. I tell them to knock it off, to leave me alone. Realizing the problem in this, I have tried accepting them and grounding myself constantly in the present moment. Switching tactics, I pictured them scattering like cockroaches when I switched the light on in my mind. Nothing has been successful for long, it has been hard work with little success, I’m fucking exhausted.

    The other day, while finding myself again in a never ending loop of ruminating on a situation, I had a random moment of insight. “What am I seeking from this? What need am I looking to get met in these situations that won’t leave my mind?” I started to talk to myself like I was someone else.

    “You are kind, you are interesting, you work hard. I can see it. I can see how hard you’re trying. You care so deeply, you love so passionately. You take good care of yourself, you take such good care of your home! I love the little star clips you put in your hair. You are funny, you are creative. I appreciate you.”

    Funnily enough, these made me smile. I also felt kind of stupid doing it but sometimes you just have to feel a little stupid, I guess. I don’t know who I think is judging me in my own mind. (Me) But they were meeting the need I was seeking. I wanted to be seen, to be heard, to be admired and cared for. This isn’t vain or attention seeking, it was natural. It’s natural to want to be loved and seen for who you are.

    “I am so sorry that happened to you. I am so sorry you had to go through that. You did deserve more than that.”

    At this point, I stopped where I was doing laundry, put my hands on my knees and I wept. I don’t think I have ever actually shown myself empathy. I acknowledge and I accept the things that happened. “It’s okay! I make the best out of them! Look how far I’ve come! Look at all my fucking life lessons!” I would say to you if you said these things to me, with my eyes wide and my teeth bared in a frantic smile to hide any and all emotional reaction.

    It’s never: “I am so sorry you had to endure this at all.” It’s always: “Okay, this emotion is called ‘sad.’ You got yourself into this situation. How are you going to get yourself out?” To do anything else felt like a pity party. A victim mindset. Being a victim, to me, is the most shameful thing of all. You conquer your shit and you do it valiantly.

    When you’re kicked in the face, you sit back up.

    I have never allowed myself to have any empathy for myself. Deep down, I always thought I had deserved these things. I should have known better. He showed you who he was. Also, I was cruel, cold, unloving at times. “I would leave you too. You were awful to him too.” Is more often the words I would say to myself.

    But it goes deeper than him, doesn’t it? These issues weren’t born from him: they were triggered by him. Just as they have been by everyone before him. Just as they have led to me to keep friends at arms length and not feel like I should lean on them. Somewhere, in my core memories, is a deep feeling that I am not important, lovable, or worthy.

    Before all these moments, I would have told you that I loved myself. And maybe I did, in the capacity I was ready for. More so, I think I was so afraid of looking weak (even to myself) to admit that I, in fact, did not and didn’t even really understand what loving myself meant.

    As I open my mind and I open my heart to healing, I have found a more accurate idea of what it really means. I can see the value in changing my mindset, my coping skills, my internal monologue. I have learned to shine a light and peer down at the core values hidden away and search for a way to truly change them so I can. It started with admitting they were even there. It continues with asking myself the hard questions and being brave enough to still listen when I don’t like the answers.

    I am patient with myself to grow at the rate I need to. But I am changing every day. I said yesterday, “I am not even remotely the person I was a month ago.”

    Funny enough as I’m editing this: my wrist no longer hurts. The reasons for this, I’m sure, will reveal themselves in time.

    This doesn’t look like much from the outside. I often joke that if you looked through my windows it would just be me, sitting and staring into space. Me, reading. Me, crying into a bowl of cereal. Sometimes it’s me laughing at my phone, enjoying the new friendships I have invested in. Sometimes I even leave my house and see them! Most importantly, it’s me reaching out to them when I need someone. I’ve learned when to stop isolating myself from those I love and who love me. Soon, maybe I’ll allow myself to be comforted by friends instead of crying alone. I’m happy that I’m crying at all. There was a time when I could not.

    Sometimes a hiatus is needed, a time to reset, reflect, evaluate, and accept. I know now that having and showing pride, love, and care for myself does not have a checklist I must complete to deserve it. It’s right here, right now on this journey. It starts with accepting it right this very second and then every one that follows. Nothing else would fall in place if I did not. It would all be wasted effort. This is all paramount. This cannot be taken away from me. It’s a core belief.

    Today was the day I whipped around, stared myself in the face and said, “I love you unconditionally too.”

    I am excited to see what tomorrow will be for.

  • The Past, Present, Future, Now.

    After I decided that I was, indeed, going to stick around on this ol’ earth to see what the fuck was going to happen next I woke up the next morning with what I can only think to describe as an ‘emotional hangover’. I drug myself out of bed and started my coffee, let the dog out, and found myself staring into space on my couch. My head hurt, I felt dehydrated, my stomach was in knots, I wanted to vomit. I still felt my mind plagued with thoughts on distaste for my current situation, anger, and loneliness. You might say that I was only choosing to focus on the negatives.

    I’ve been studying a lot recently on how the brain works to process emotions and how it creates thought patterns. Essentially if you consistently live in a certain state, the neural pathways will exist to keep you in that state as it is familiar and what it craves. The whole concept reminds me a lot of addiction, was I addicted to being miserable? I didn’t think so as I could tell you what made me miserable. But was I choosing to be miserable about those things? 

    I have also been studying on the idea of ego and the most intriguing to me was emotional ego. As I sat on my couch feeling like shit, I took a mental step back. I observed those feelings I described in my body, my body’s reactions to the emotions. I let them be for a minute and then consciously removed myself from them. My consciousness is both entwined and seperate from my body. I felt the part of it that was observing the body and the other part that could see the thoughts and the subsequent reactions only for what they were, thoughts on a situation from the past. It is no longer my present moment.

    My present moment was here, on my couch, drinking coffee. I looked around at the different colors in my home, the environment I had so painstakingly crafted. I like it here. The art is meaningful. In fact, how can I forget how loved I am when so much of the things in my home remind me that I am? 

    I choose to ignore it. I choose misery.

    What happens if I choose to only live in the present moment? The right here right now which consistently unfolds into the future? The concept of past, present, and future is truly a perplexing one to think on as neither truly exists. But if the present only exists second to second does it exist either? Even as I typed that present moment is already gone. Are we living in a constant state of both past, present, and future as our seconds unfold into all three states simultaneously?

    I meditated on this concept for a part of my afternoon, probing my memories and my present moments. Trying to truly expand and experience the layers of my own consciousness and how far it went. What were its limits? Where did these thoughts come from? What was the source? Why could I think on all of this and also still have a song from earlier playing in the background of my thoughts?

    I actually fell asleep for a few moments and when I woke up, I felt a very strong sense of peace. Here I was, in the now. The past was not now. It could only affect me if I chose to ruminate on it. The unknown of the future can only affect me if I choose to ruminate on it. But in the present now, what was there to experience other than contentment of my own company?

    I poured myself a nice little glass of soda water and continued a book by Elkhart Tolle that I had been reading off and on on my vacation and very soon it dived into this very concept that I had been exploring in the afternoon. The synchronicities of the universe make no mistakes.

    I spoke with my sister before I left about the idea of ‘letting go of the rope’ in life. There’s a common mindset I find myself in where I feel as if I am on a dock holding onto a rope with all my might that is attached to a ship in the water. As the current tries to take it, I sweat and struggle. I get pulled along inch by inch even as I turn around and heave to continue pulling it backwards. But it keeps forcing me forward. In my own fear, I want to keep it with me and docked where I can see it. But there’s no bigger sense of relief than when you let go of the rope, feel it whip through your hands, stand back, and watch it set sail.

    The letting go of the rope is truly the only time life can set sail. There is no true control but only an ego’s desire to arrogantly decide its and others path. There is no story to unfold but instead a series of just right nows to continuously choose to experience and how.

    I like it, Picasso!

  • The Love of a Father.

    Today is my first full day home from a week-long trip from Portland to Santa Monica. As I arrived at LAX at 7:00 am Friday morning I could feel a sense of anxiety and dread building in the background of my mind and as I continued onto the flight it began to churn bringing with it a sense of deep irritability and discontent. My thoughts were starting to race, my jaw was clenched, and as we touched down in Indianapolis I felt nothing but a deep pit of unhappiness in my soul.

    While I was sad on my trip, I could meditate on my feelings and view them from the outside. I could evaluate my situation and past experiences with an objective lens and think and behave rationally. I could feel the deep peace of my overall self outside of the turmoil.

    Here, it’s all consuming. I’m drowning in it. I hate it here.

    I can’t escape my misery, I’m fully sober. There’s no soothing and numbing from an outside substance. Honestly, it was the most I’ve struggled in a long time. How nice would it be to go to a bar and have a drink and lose myself in a crowd of people talking and laughing? Even just go and not have a drink, just to prey on the energy? But I do have the awareness at least that that would be dangerous territory at the present moment and not worth the risk.

    So how do I incorporate that feeling I had when I was away to when I’m here and all of my issues are presented to face once again?

    I visited these places to see my best friend and my Mamaw. I spent time with more family as well and found it extremely enjoyable. As my Mamaw said during one of our deep conversations on my childhood,

    “I never want you to doubt that you were loved.”

    I think a key I need to focus on is the unconditional love I feel from these people, though far, is still with me. I am still loved.

    My first night home after unpacking and cleaning I was enraged, miserable and I did what I do best: I took to my car and drove. As I was driving I contemplated, if I will be extremely honest, the abstract concept of ending my life. But then I became aware of the distinct feeling that my Real Dad was with me. He was with me and he understood. He ended his life too. He regretted it. He knew the emotions I was feeling, the overwhelmingness of them and he was here to bring comfort and comfort alone.

    I always sought out the presence of my Dad but it makes complete sense that he would step back and allow my Real Dad to be the one to be here for me. He understood better, I was so much like him. The time with my Mamaw opened the door to understand him better and to see him again. I could find the deep down wound in my soul that was missing and grieving him all this time.

    I realized then that he had always been here, he’d just been waiting. He understood why I pushed him away. But the unconditional love a father has for his daughter has never faltered.

    I am loved. Though I feel very alone at this present moment, so much of it is my own making. I fear connection with others because I fear it being taken away. My past experiences have made me very wary of care and love being shown to me. When will they leave? When will they prove that they don’t actually care?

    I cannot become jaded. I have to open my heart to feel loved and to love others in the way I spoke on in ‘The New Way to See’. There’s so much love to be had, to give still. The defense mechanisms I have set up so defiantly over time don’t make that less so or make me less worthy of it. 

    I am ready to give and receive love. I am ready to give and receive joy. I am ready to open myself up to people outside of a blog on the internet or superficial conversations. I am ready to see others in person and experience new things. I am ready to no longer isolate myself from others because I don’t feel, deep down, I’m worthy of them.

    I took a cross stitch from my Mamaw’s house that says, “Give Thanks”. I am thankful for my experiences and the feeling of true unconditional love I experienced on my trip. I’ll think of it when I see it every day.

    I’ll carry that love with me, my father with me, as I face a new day even though I truly don’t want to. He didn’t but I can.

  • The New Way to See.

    I have done mushrooms one time in my life. My partner and I decided to take a metric fuck ton and float down the river. We ate them as we pushed off and, lazily, we sipped on White Claws and enjoyed the summer day. Everything was normal, as it usually was, until a point: As we butted up to the shore, I went to push us off and found I was absolutely mesmerized by the texture of a tree. It was complex, the textures were awe striking. I stared at it for either two seconds or two days, who knows, but then turned back to my partner and exclaimed, “Are we on a fucking Disney ride? Was this made by Disney?!”

    No, it was the White River. My body was probably actively fighting off a giardia infection as I floated down absolutely gobsmacked by the scenery around me. That’s the point, the White River is shit. But in that moment, exaggerated by psilocybin, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. With every bend of the river, I was dreamily pulled through another great expanse of scenery. Everything was gorgeous, meant for me and my partner to experience in all its glory.

    The last time you found me, I was dealing with being in the throes of deep depression. I was struggling to find a way to deal with any of my large emotions from digging up the roots of my trauma responses and I was trying to balance and integrate them into my life. This continued but I have had a lot of seemingly small moments that have brought me closer to that idea of True Self.

    I spent last Sunday at my ex-partner’s house. We had an emotional week with a lot of ups and downs and hard conversations. Neither of us wanted to continue having them, so for a day, we let it be. We spent a day on the couch, him napping on and off, myself reading a book on science’s role in spirituality. At the end of the night, when I had nearly finished my book, I looked up from the pages and right at him. He was where he had been all day, doing the same thing. But I saw him completely differently and then, as you may have noticed is a theme, myself.

    I have always told myself that I couldn’t develop myself as a person with someone else in the mix. Maybe subconsciously, but it is absolutely something I believed. To fully thrive, I had to be alone. In fact, I thought it had been proven over and over. Looking at my partner’s sleeping face like it was the first time again, like it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, made it all come together. I was the one who put that limitation on myself, he had nothing to do with that.

    I thought back to all the times I had pushed him off, his hand outreached to dance at a random moment as I’d roll my eyes. The times he would try to be lighthearted and I would scowl. “He doesn’t get it.” I’d think to myself. What didn’t he get? I had created my own misery by being stuck in my routines and a need for near constant control of our entire lives. While I felt he lacked discipline and stability, which he does, I also lacked an ability to see the need for the lack of it as well.

    I often pull Temperance in our readings. I pull it so much that I barely think on it anymore. But it’s truly more than just finding balance. It’s about mixing two substances, carefully and diligently, until they become a new one. It’s about give and take.

    I used to resent the things I first loved about my partner, the things I used to love about myself. I resented his ability to live in the moment, his lightheartedness and his carefree spirit. When I was drinking, I had these qualities too. He still has them sober but I felt like my mind was a flesh eating disease. My thoughts ate away at my personality until I was left an empty shell of myself. Sober, I was left only with resentment and self consciousness. I couldn’t temper the way I used to be with who I was now.

    I could never let go enough to be happy in very many moments at all. I couldn’t do it alone either, but I blamed him. I feared the idea of letting go after having been out of control for so long. Control was how I kept my sobriety, it’s how I felt like I kept my sense of self. Instead, I kept myself locked in place. I couldn’t grow, thrive, or even laugh how I wanted to anymore. My strength had become my weakness.

    In finding Temperance, I can embrace those things I love about my partner. I can wrap myself in them to find them again in myself. I can let go so we can dance in the kitchen again, make plans on a whim. We can live in the moment. With Temperance, his strengths are not his weakness. He can see the benefits of a plan, of having stability, of staying in once in a while. Together, we can combine to truly find the balance of life. We can find all the joys, the frivolous and the contained, as qualities to admire, not to be resentful of. When they are balanced, the cup doesn’t run over or run dry.

    I do have the ability to thrive while I’m in a relationship. I can focus on myself. I absolutely can, I read the whole book, published a blog, and discussed heavy topics with him right there. I’m going on a whole trip without him. My interests are separate from him. I didn’t need him at all anymore. This used to be terrifying to me.

    Now, the realization that peace is found where I least expected it, even resisted it, has moved me deeply. It dawned on me that I could let him go, I could set him free. Because being in a relationship where you truly love and respect each other is freeing. If it’s not, it’s not right. Holding him in a firm grip, clipping his wings, would never allow that freedom or that trust to grow. He would just be a broken bird, constantly fighting against my stranglehold. We had to choose to be here.

    We had constantly perpetuated a cycle of treating each other badly. We wouldn’t treat the other how we wanted to be treated, leading the other to do the same. What could happen if I actually treated him with respect? If I treated myself the same? If I could show him daily that I do think he deserves to be loved? If I focused on myself first without sacrificing anything? What if I could look at him everyday and see him how I used to? These concepts can coexist. He still has all of the qualities I loved about him to begin with. So do I, if I search for them. We can, and have in the past, released the ones we had that broke us down.

    And even if things don’t follow an idea I have in my mind, it will still be okay. I am a whole person either way. I will still have learned these lessons. I will still love and respect him for who he is. He doesn’t have to earn that. It can just be. Just like the love and respect I have for myself. I can show this to everyone, without romantic attachments tied to it at all. My old, negative, and hateful thought cycles don’t even feel as familiar anymore. Everyone has a reason, a process to their actions. We’re all trying.

    A few days later, I was leaving for work. I had my headphones on and as the music swelled in my ears, I turned from my front walk to start down the street. Suddenly, I was struck by the beauty of it all. The sun filtering through the trees, the subtle changes in color as fall has started to make an appearance. The air was crisp in my lungs as I took a deep breath and made my way forward. In my shitty little neighborhood, on my shitty little street, everything was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

    The complexity of life and the ways it teaches you is a glorious experience. Loving someone, loving others, and loving myself made every moment seem meaningful. Every view I have admired as the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was also one I had seen as an absolute piece of shit. I’ve capsized on the White River when it’s ran high. I’ve looked at my partner and loathed everything about him. I’ve cursed this street as I walk to work in the dreary, cold winter. But sometimes, after a season or two, when you look again: they’re full of promise, full of wonder. I walked to work and continued to admire it. After all, it was a new day.

    Tomorrow it may rain, but just maybe, this time we will have umbrellas.

  • The Current.

    As you might imagine, I spent the past week after my last two posts spiraling into the depths of a deep depression.

    I could not trust my own reality. I could not trust myself. Every thought I had, I questioned. Every memory that kept popping up, I evaluated my mindset in it. How did my own warped perception color the situation? Where else has my past manifested? How much of my relationship ending was at my own hands? How many people have I pushed away? How can I ever trust what is good, what is right, what is truthful from my own perceptions and from others words and actions? The lenses I evaluate my life through are defensive and often (as much as I hate to admit) self serving.

    These past events and the maladaptive coping skills, I discovered, roll into all parts of my life. The same issues persist in my friendships. I keep them at arms length from the beginning because I always expect them to leave. I do not invest my emotions into women as readily as men because I do not expect it will be reciprocated. It has hurt when I do and it is not. I am very guarded. I’m even guarded thinking about it, I’ve realized, because I think this will be one of the hardest challenges for me in my process.

    But anyway, I’ve been going full cuckoo bananas. I haven’t eaten, I haven’t slept. I’ve been lost in my own emotional and mental turmoil. I have been destroyed by feeling like I can’t. I can’t move on, I can’t move forward. I can’t go backwards. I can’t unlearn these things. I feel lost, blindfolded and groping into space to try and find anything to hold onto.

    The night before I went back to work I didn’t fall asleep until six am. I was doing reading after reading of my cards trying to make sense of things. It only made less. I was not trusting myself, my intuition, my own reality before me. How would it? (And by saying they weren’t making sense, I mean they were telling me to REST. And I roared back, “TRY AGAIN” on a loop for hours.)

    After this day, I was so drained there was no way not to sleep. But I woke up at four the next morning already back at it. My thoughts woke me, like a swarm of wasps, already buzzing and stinging. I have been evaluating the resistance I meet in my mind recently. Like a door that’s closed, I feel myself butt up against it. Instead of turning back, I have been opening and seeing what I have hidden behind it. I have often found that it’s a series of doors. Every one that is opened leads to more wasps flying in.

    They say that every bad coping skill was one that used to work for you at some point in time but now no longer does. I avoid the things that make me anxious, I shut them back. I close the door to things I don’t want to acknowledge because they are hurtful, dark, or frightening. I do need to make sure I reopen the doors, but I need to be more cautious with my approach. Eventually, I found myself swarmed, stung, bruised and defeated. I am overwhelming myself. I am burning myself out over analyzing. It’s starting to feel like all the doors are closed for a reason, I am creating my own misery. Maybe I need to take my whole ass out and let the momentum hang suspended.

    That morning, an hour after waking, I attempted to meditate. I wanted to give up, I couldn’t focus. The wasps were relentless with their constant attacks. It was then that I decided to try a new tactic.

    In my mind, I am in front of only one door. As I open it, it leads to nothing. Nothing at all. It’s a black expanse that goes on infinitely. There are no thoughts, no emotions. It just is. As I step through there is no feeling of falling or anything under my feet. I am suspended in the nothing. The door closes, the light from it gone, I am encapsulated. It is peaceful.

    As thoughts find a way in, I imagine a chest. The lid is closed but there is a space for a key. As they arrive, they go from my mind to the box in a fluid motion. I do not need to consciously open it, they meet no resistance to deposit them inside. As they come in, I send them through. I know I can pick through the contents later if I so choose, they are not permanently shut away.

    To keep myself grounded, I visualize myself as a tree. My roots dig deep into the earth, I am steady, I am solid. But I am not stuck, my limbs sweep out to feel the universe. A weeping willow, I am able to adapt and fluctuate with the winds. I shed the leaves I no longer need as they reach their breaking point. They are peacefully cast off to be blown away with the next breeze. I am graceful, strong, wise.

    At another time, these looping thoughts quickly thread together to create a never ending string of pearls. They keep thwacking together, one by one, I can’t stop it. But then I do, I have scissors. I easily snip the ribbon, slicing through the silk. I let the pearls scatter. It doesn’t matter if one rolls away, I do not need to find them.

    I have not found a visualization with my ex partner that doesn’t break my heart. As I start frantically gathering up pearls, I stop, and I send them to the box.

    These visualizations are so detailed because I had to make them so detailed. If I had to open the box, I couldn’t put things in it as easy. I would have to picture myself purposely opening it. If the tree wasn’t a weeping willow it made me feel like my arms were stuck straight out (I don’t know, dude, that’s just how it felt.). If the ribbon wasn’t made of silk, I had trouble cutting through it. Or sawing through it. It had to be a flimsy ribbon cut with scissors. I had to make myself realize that I wasn’t doing any of it wrong because it needed so much detail, it made it what I needed.

    I never really committed to these things because they made me feel stupid sitting in my bed thinking of myself as a tree like I’m in poca-fucking-hontas. But, it was working. In these moments, I felt more in control of my racing thoughts. I felt present in the moment I was in. I could stop a debilitating train of thought if I snipped the ribbon that strung them together or if I locked the stinging thoughts into a box.

    I had been doing mild versions of this before and abandoned them, but that’s okay. I remembered again. That’s the point: I can regroup and refine my approach. It’s okay to lock certain things away if they are not productive to growth, if they are self loathing disguised as self exploration.

    Although as the week went on, I found that the scars I had unwrapped to inspect had thin skin. Although they had healed over, they were not calloused. As things rubbed against them the skin had become raw, irritated. Eventually those wounds fully reopened to reveal a larger wound than before. The pain from them felt new but familiar, it ripped through me like a wildfire. Choking out my logic and sense, I could not visualize to get past the deep rooted feelings of hurt it incited. I found myself twice in a room of my own destruction when the anguish eliminated everything inside of me but the hurt of that child who felt rejected. I couldn’t block her out anymore.

    I am trying to ride the waves as they come in. Trying to stay present and grounded but also riding out when I want to leave my entire life behind. I feel strong, capable and then weak, miserable, and pathetic. I can’t make heads or tails of it. I have regretted even beginning this journey at all. I’ve questioned every decision, questioned my own sanity. I have thrown every last tarot deck I owned against the wall and as the cards ricocheted around the expanse of my home, I screamed, “How am I supposed to get to Death and see The Sun if I cannot make it past The Tower?”

    I truly want to see a way through. I really do. I want to see a balance of my emotions and consistent day to days. But I just don’t right now. And maybe that’s the whole point. I always have a game plan, I’m always ready for action. I always had ways to ‘soothe’ but they were either unhealthy or outright ignoring. Maybe this is just the one time I have to weather the storm, stick it out, and I’ll finally see The Sun. I literally just have to figure it out as I go along.

    Not every day is going to be a good day where I can visualize myself as a god damn weeping willow. Some days are going to be harder. I can learn from the days when I destroyed everything I could touch (including regretfully my Paris Hilton tea kettle) and learn from when I cleaned it up. I can realize when these emotions are coming and not do it again. I just have to keep going. There’s really no other option, I can’t run away from it. Besides, it has to give soon, constant misery is boring as fuck.

    And honestly, in my spiral, I did laundry. I kept my house clean. When I couldn’t force myself to eat, I drank four hundred protein shakes a day. I don’t think I am because, mentally, I want to throw myself off a building but I am still existing and attempting to take care of myself. I have started to eat again and I have slept for more than a couple hours a night. I am at least treading water in between the times I am washed away with the current.

    When I was putting away laundry my only thought was, “this is the worst task I could ever imagine doing in my whole life.” on repeat. But the result was that all of my clothes were clean and ready for the week. When I’m getting dressed for work I don’t think, “Man, I really hated folding these fucking pants, hanging this shirt, and organizing these fuuucking socks.” No, they’re just there. I don’t avoid them because I hated what went into being able to wear them. It’s okay to hate my effort, to feel stupid, to feel like it’s not working. One day it will. When I don’t like how I handle something, I will regroup and refine my approach.

    One day the reward of this time period is going to be similar to having clean clothes. I won’t think about how much I hated what went into it, I won’t avoid it because of the misery I experienced in it.

    It’ll just be there and I’ll wear it.

  • The Mirror.

    One full week after Affair Day, my ex partner and I lost our shit.

    We faced off, chest to chest. I grabbed him by his chin with the tightest grip I could, forced him to look me in my eyes, and then I struck him.

    I hit my partner. I bloodied his lip. I had lost control and the rage had spilled into a place I couldn’t contain anymore. I am extremely ashamed of this. I didn’t know that was inside of me.

    This moment struck a chord. Mirroring each other, we sat and stared for a long while. And then he broke, the words came tumbling out of him. I sat across from him as he bared his soul and began to sob. All of the deep rooted issues, fears, and insecurities finally came to the surface.

    Eventually, I crossed the room and I held him. I held him until he calmed down and then we went our separate ways for the night.

    After this, I could really see him. As a child, a teenager, a young man at war. I could see everything that had hurt him and how it shaped him into who he is today. I could see what motivated him to do what he did. I understood it as it struck a chord with me. I didn’t ask myself why.

    I will not share what he told me as it is indeed his story to tell. These are mine.

    This new feeling of understanding and empathy inspired me to try again so we went to couples counseling. We tried to make it work. This ignited a lot of my introspection. My codependent tendencies would have never been challenged if he was not there to display them in real time. I would have never been shown how I could be toxic too. It took a second to sink in. He was supposed to be the one who was wrong. My perception was skewed, I couldn’t see how we were similar.

    I do strongly believe in peoples ability to change. I believe in my own. I think every single person has the capacity. In him, I had seen it when he got sober shortly after I did. I thought he could do anything he set his mind too but his recent behavior had seeded me with doubt. Even as I tried to make it work, I was living in fear that he would disappoint me again as I shakily tried to recenter my view of him.

    A week or so ago, I came to a place where I had to acknowledge that our paths couldn’t move forward together. Even as I saw the efforts we were making, there was too much of us that had been destroyed along the way. I didn’t trust him to be careful with my heart while also keeping a part for myself, it was all or nothing. My own hurt was suffocating me and the growth I was trying to make. My intuition was telling me to go deeper into myself but I was still looking at him. I was always going to be looking at him.

    So you can imagine it stung when I saw him soothing his hurts in the same old ways just days after I left him. I fled to my car and listened to songs about heartbreak and mentally screamed at him, “I believed in you! You deserve so much better than that!’

    But let’s be real here: It also just outright bottomed me out emotionally to feel like I wasn’t good enough, I had been replaced, and I was way too easy to forget.

    I was moving forward, I was trying to heal. I wanted him to do it too! But if I am really real with myself (as this stupid blog often pushes me to be) I didn’t want him to be with someone else. That wasn’t the plan. I wanted him to do it, and do it alone, so that we could finally have time to heal separately. We could be made pure by our transformations. In the end, we could make our way back home.

    I have to let that go. One, it’s unrealistic and unfair. Two, I had been trying to convince myself I was blazing on a hero’s journey but after experiencing this past week, without seeing him moving on, I probably would have gone back to him. I would have eventually soothed myself with him as he did with others. I am no better. I don’t think I would have made it many days past The Numbing. Removing the option of his comfort forced me to push forward and find comfort in myself, I can’t act like I chose it freely.

    Nevertheless, I had to sit here in my misery for more than a day to be comfortable enough to explore what it was and, in turn, to finally look at myself.

    Believe me, I’ve hated every single second of it. I feel like I’m missing a god damn limb. I look and feel like a shell of who I was. I can’t stand the idea of him getting the comfort I crave from being on someone’s pedestal while I feel like I am going to literally die here in the cold trying to heal myself. I hope you read that in the bratty tone it’s supposed to be.

    But we have chosen our journeys. As I began mine I finally had to ask myself: Why wouldn’t I just give up? He’d hurt me so badly, why do I still want to understand him? Why do I still want his approval if I think I am so much better than him?

    After finishing The Roots., I gained clarity on the patterns and the whys of my own internal monologues and actions. As I uncovered this about myself, it all felt extremely familiar to me. I had heard it before. Then I realized: Of course I could never give up on him! It would have felt like I was giving up on myself because were the same fucking person!

    But Savannah, you were faithful! You never cheated! That’s worse!

    Yeah, and you bet your ass that was my first rebuttal to this realization too. I didn’t cope with things from my past the way he did! I’m not bad like him! But in reality, that only gave me the leg up to be self righteous. I always got to be the wronged party, the worthy and good one, if his attacks were so much worse. As much as it hurt, I enjoyed the power his more obvious hurts gave. If he felt unworthy of me, he would never leave me.

    He went for the kill, but I went for a death by a thousand cuts. I may have not been unfaithful but I was emotionally manipulative. In my constant desire to isolate myself from any perceived threats, I withdrew and hoarded everything he needed to feel safe, loved, and needed.

    To me, sometimes he is the Two of Cups radiating with everything good I see in him. We are unified, we are soulmates. I’ve never loved another more. Reversed, I feel that he has fooled me and is actually a snake, coiled and waiting to strike! He must be the reason for all my disharmony! I run, frightened, until I find myself again where I started: the me who sees him as the Two of Cups.

    I would attach myself to his side, I would glow with the sheer love and desire to be around him. I would shower him with love, praise, and affection. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I would shrink back with no explanation, leaving him cold and rejected. As he mentally spiraled, barely any reassurance or warmth could be given until I brought myself back full circle.

    To him, I was the Queen of Swords. He thought we could take on the world together. I could make everything around him make sense, pointing out the joy around us, remembering the things he could not. He was motivated and inspired by the standard I held us too. Nobody could hold a candle to me, he crowned me as the one he wanted to be by his side when we conquered it all.

    Reversed: We couldn’t. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t remember it right. My standards were destroying him. The flame extinguished, my crown was taken off and thrown carelessly to the side.

    Soon, he’d cradle my tear streaked face, pick it back up and replace it.

    We weren’t getting anywhere. We were always going to be two damaged bozos looking around and shrugging our shoulders while randomly stabbing at each other.

    I have spent years telling him that is is how he thought. Pointing out the patterns in his moods, his relationships prior, trying to get him to just see so he could stop hurting himself, hurting me. Probably should have looked at yourself, bitch.

    That’s the thing, I did question myself, I knew this turmoil inside of me couldn’t be right. But his childhood was so traumatic, mine paled in comparison. I should be mentally sound and able to lead the way, you know, like he told me I was. It was how he saw me. But we both just rambled off the version of our childhood that we had rehearsed, the version with no feelings to it. It was not until his true feelings were revealed that I could identify with him and see my own.

    As we found in The Roots., It only takes one moment to completely augment a child’s perception of their limited reality. It only takes one moment to send their emotions into hiding, to make them see the world as only good and evil, and to base their identity on how others see them so they never feel less than again.

    To dig deeper into the roots: remember that seeing my Real Dad’s girlfriend looking for pity disgusted me. Since being looked at with pity is what had just caused me so much shame, I was revolted by her neediness for it. I internalized that letting my insecurities show made me weak and pathetic. I found comfort in feeling like I was better than her, she couldn’t hurt me as I looked down on her.

    His story is not the same as mine but the themes are similar. Driven by a need to feel better than others, to feel loved and desirable: he looks outward to affirm himself. He seeks out those who will worship him, but he has no connection too so that if rejected, it does not matter. Driven by my need to feel better than others, to feel loved and desirable: I put myself on a pedestal of my own creation. To be looked at and admired, but not touched. My attention is a reward. I do not risk the vulnerability of someone thinking they have a claim to me or to reject it if its offered.

    These absolute shit coping skills, as well as the never ending love/hate cycle, are just defenses we’ve used to protect that child inside of us from ever feeling like they aren’t good enough again. We cannot be hurt if we are emotionally detached or destroying anything that could make us feel small.

    The point I’ve always missed is: It does not matter that I never did any of this intentionally, the resulting damage to him is the same as it was to me.

    We love each other so deeply because we desperately see everything in the other that we want to heal in ourselves. It’s heartbreaking, honestly. No matter how badly we wanted it or how inspired we were by each other, we couldn’t release the defenses around our deepest fears. We couldn’t break the cycles of the extremes we saw each other in. When we were in a position to try, too much had happened. I retreated again.

    In the roots of it all, we were just scared and we just wanted to be loved.

    I cannot go back in time. I cannot fix it. Instead, I have to recognize that I loved him so much despite of the fact that he was a direct mirror of myself. I can love myself the same way. I can forgive myself for hurting him as I forgave him for hurting me.

    I have to integrate the Two of Cups with the fallen crown, the snake with the Queen of Swords. I have to accept them as all parts of a single image. I have to move forward to find a world of balance, a world where good and bad exists in harmony and vulnerability builds trust. After all, this does not just affect our relationship, this is the lens in which we see our entire lives.

    We have said before that I’m the usually the one to start the next phase of our lives. He often follows my lead.

    In my mirror image, I found myself searching to find the meaning behind it all. I dug deep, I labored, I meticulously excavated and turned over every thing I could. I took my time to linger as he is where I felt safe. I examined every memory of him, every touch, every lie. How did we become this? How do we fix it?

    I neared the end of my search, it was time to go home. But then, in darkest parts of the roots, I stumbled upon the child he had hidden away. The child who was scared, the child who reached out only to be slapped away, the child he’s been so valiantly defending. Next to him, was my own. They had been waiting.

    As I pull her out, I hope he follows soon.

  • The Roots.

    I noticed a man today.

    I didn’t notice that he was particularly attractive, though I suppose he was. He wasn’t the usual type that would catch my eye. What piqued my interest was that he seemed so nice. He seemed like a genuine person. He spoke intelligently and his smile was kind.

    I know frickin’ lock up my chastity belt and throw away the key, I’m an animal.

    I didn’t think much on it until later when he crossed my mind again. To put it honestly, I was thrilled some other dude was crossing my mind at all! “Someone new!” My mind immediately lit up and started to reach. And that’s when I had to stop it there.

    It felt quite similar to when my hands would reach for that first shot of whiskey at the end (beginning,cough) of the day. It was an enticing prospect of soothing the hurt I’ve been in. 

    So I’m not ready. Obviously. I knew that when I cried getting ready and cried on my way home from work. Tell me something I dont know, brain.

    But then I did ask myself what I didn’t know. What does it feel like to be interested in someone as a healthy minded person? I always do everything to the extreme. I put my whole ass, both cheeks, in everything I do. This isn’t healthy in relationships.

    It’s all borrowed worry. I still have a lot to heal before I could be a decent partner to someone. I don’t want to shoulder my pain on someone else. I’ve tried that before with other kind men and I chewed them up and spit them back out. I’m sure I left them with their own trauma and myself with buckets of shame.

    Besides, I’m still building my True Self and another person in the mix would only confuse that. I’m too easily swayed. For being such an aggressive person, I need to explore why my backbone becomes jelly in a relationship. Why would I throw myself into someone else when I feel that I am overall a confident person?

    I think the man I noticed is progress. One, because I noticed him at all. And two, because of why. I’ve always gone after the loudest guy in the room. The big personality. If I want to really annoy myself I can probably break it down to both of my Dads were the same way. Boisterous, attention grabbing. They were both alcoholics. One dead before forty, the other before sixty. Cool guys don’t make it to their sixties. Neither were shiny behind closed doors.

    I idolized my Real Dad. I wanted to be just like him. He loved hunting and fishing so I did too. (I was always relieved he never took me on that hunting trip as the concept actually terrified me.) I played basketball because he told me I could be in the WNBA if I wanted! (I made one basket all season). We would play make believe games and find crawfish in the creek. Once, I lost my jelly shoe in the lake and he scuba’d down to find it. I wanted to be just like him, I did everything he did. There was never any doubt in my mind that he loved me. He put me on a pedestal. He might not have shown up a time or two but he showered me with adoration and quality time when he did.

    I think this would have all just been normal parent idolization if it weren’t for the events that happened after.

    My Mom and Dad split up briefly when I was in the third grade. We moved and I was able to catch the bus at my Real Dad’s house. At first it was fine.

    But then he started drinking again. I would come home from school and find him passed out in the backyard. Once I heard a crash as he had passed out in the kitchen where he stood. I stepped in broken glass from the drinks he would drop and be unable to clean up. I never liked vodka because I accidentally drank a screwdriver that had been left on the coffee table. I never told my Mom it was happening and I don’t know why. Maybe I thought she had enough to deal with, maybe I just didn’t think much of it.

    But when she found out, I was ripped out and never went back. I was nine. It was the 4th grade Spring Fling and I was fucking PUMPED. I had my outfit planned out, I knew what I was going to say to the boy I had been crushing on all year. It was going to be my moment.

    And it was. Until my Real Dad came to pick me up. I was talking to a friend from class with my back to the door when I saw him furrow his brow in confusion. When I turned to investigate I found it was my Real Dad stumbling over to me. He was disheveled, eyes glassy. I could smell him. I hate that smell. I turned back to my friend, only to see him backing away, his expression turning to what was unmistakably pity.

    I went to the car where his girlfriend was waiting. I hated that woman. She drove to pick up food and while my Real Dad went inside to pick it up I ripped into her. I screamed at her how much I hated her. It was her fault. She had ruined my entire night for sending him in there. There was something wrong with her! When we returned to her home, I heard her crying to her youngest child on the couch about how she could never make anyone happy. I was pilfering through the food I had refused to eat in the kitchen and my stomach soured. I remember feeling nothing but sheer disgust and hatred for her. I found her pathetic and weak. These are the first all encompassing adult level emotions I can remember feeling.

    Finally, I called my Mom.

    My Real Dad died when I was sixteen. I pretty much just ignored that it happened. I haven’t had any emotions tied to these events other than the Spring Fling and have always felt like an imposter when I would try. I’m sure thats a psychiatrists wet dream. It’s still buried. I can rattle this story off to you, rehearsed like its nothing, until you get to the Spring Fling. My face still crumples in disgust even typing it.

    I’m going to put a big fat Bingo on it being because I could see someone’s perception of me shift in real time when that kid looked at me with pity. It made me feel ashamed of my Real Dad. That was so fucking uncomfortable for me at nine years old that my brain chose to feel nothing instead. I could not mentally handle kicking him off that pedestal. I hated the girlfriend instead. It was easier to face, she meant nothing to me.

    I would even put some merit on that being the core memory of when my obsession with controlling peoples perceptions of me was founded. I didn’t want to be looked at with pity ever again. It made me feel ashamed of me. Since my nine year old brain couldn’t handle the processing of being ashamed of Real Dad, it internalized that two fold onto myself. I would also say that the kid’s reaction was most likely my first sense that something in this situation was deeply wrong, I never hesitated to call my Mom again. I didn’t really like my Real Dad anymore. I convinced myself that pedestal had never existed.

    All of my adolescent relationships were tumultuous. I was desperately trying to be loved. I needed that attention and adoration I was now lacking. When I found it with my first high school boyfriend, I chewed him up and spit him back out. I was horrible to him even though he was so kind to me.

    This all sounds a lot like I was trying to shoulder my pain on someone else. I was using them to soothe the hurts I didn’t even know were there. It’s almost like these patterns have been here my entire life and I couldn’t see them.

    It seems to me that after I removed my Real Dad from his pedestal, I have only been trying desperately to find his replacement. I deeply want someone to idolize and in turn, idolize me the same. But, if someone puts me on the pedestal I want, I expect them to turn around and leave me there. So I have mentally lashed out and made myself hate them before they do. It’s easier to take myself down with dignity than to be removed. I overthink their actions, I read too much meaning into their words. I’m on vigilant duty all the time. In turn, I will ignore the things I shouldn’t to keep them on their own pedestal while simultaneously preparing to push them off it.

    Well shoooooee, turns out I do have abandonment issues!

    It’s time to go from the bottom up, I haven’t processed the deep roots. The vines of these relationship patterns will continue to weave themselves into all aspects of my life until they are dug up, inspected, and planted in new soil to grow somewhere with a fresh start.

    I can learn all these things about myself as I explore the depths of my subconscious but it doesn’t mean I’ve healed them or integrated them. They’re still just on the surface. I’ve only just pulled these feelings and dark thoughts, kicking and screaming, out from the dirt. I know the why. Now I need to know the what the hell to do with it. How do I replant these vines in a way that they won’t continue to grow wild, invading everything and choking out the beauty around them?

    The ability to know that I wasn’t ready to show interest in a new man and breaking the cycle of using someone to soothe my hurts was the first accomplishment. Truly asking myself what I don’t know, pulling out the core memories I have surrounding my Real Dad and being able to see that I’ve internalized them into all of my relationships was the next. Examining the pedestals I’ve put people on, the ones I’ve allowed myself to be on, and my mental gymnastics to simultaneously keep them upright while knocking them down motivates me to pull up the garden completely.

    When spring comes and it’s time to replant, I know they will always grow. They have roots, you see, they’re a part of the garden. It will be up to me to figure out how to prune them back so that the flowers I place around them can turn their face to the sun and thrive.

    We’re fucking getting somewhere, dawg.

  • The Numbing.

    I think as an addict it is basically in the DNA to run from your emotions.

    Numbing, I guess they’d call it. I used to drink to numb.

    Well, I used to drink for anything. I used it as a one size fits all emotional stimulant and suppressor. Obviously that didn’t work. But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

    Today (as I write this) I am One Year, Three Months, and Twenty Days sober.

    Today I feel like a bucket of fucking swamp mud.

    I think my new numbing agent has become Doing. I’m always bopping around doing something. Cleaning, studying, decorating, rearranging, shopping online. I will start one task and snowball into three others. I stop to meditate which should be considered restful but is honestly just Constructive Rest. Everything I do must have a Purpose.

    I dont think this is necessarily bad. I think it becomes bad when my body and mind is screaming at me to STOP. REST. And I can’t make myself do it. Even at night before bed it seems like a crescendo until I command myself ‘and now……Sleep!’

    My affirmations for my days off with no plans are consistently ‘Don’t rush.’ ‘You are not on a schedule.’ ‘You can do whatever you want when you want.’

    Today, after a full pot of coffee, I decided to put up some shelves that my ex partner was supposed to put up for me. I don’t know if you have ever tried to use a drill but in my experience it is a device engineered to make everything look like it would be easy but actually fucks it all up almost instantly. After my fifteenth attempt at drilling the screws to mount the hardware the drill slipped and I rammed my hand painfully into the brass. I threw it down and screamed, ‘You were supposed to do this, you stupid mother fucker!’

    I sat back in tears and took a few heaving breaths, picked up the drill, and then with a Valkyrie cry drilled the screw into the wood with my entire life force behind it. 

    Then I finished the other shelf. Then I did laundry. Then I did more website work. Then I contemplated the exact placement of the shelves. I didn’t know which drill bit was 6mm for the drywall anchors. So I did more laundry. Checked off more to dos. Googled “what does a 6mm drill bit look like”. Back to the website. Inspected the wall to see if I even needed drywall anchors. Laundry. Stared at the wall. Inspected the drill bits. Stared at the wall. Stared at the shelves. The wall. The bits. The shelves. The wall.

    I was getting frantic. I moved my tarot set up to the living room and started looking for a spread to read. I didn’t even know what I wanted but I needed something. I was starting to emotionally capsize as I desperately searched for anything to hold onto.

    And then finally, I just stopped. I just stopped and sat there. I didn’t meditate. I didn’t write. I just sat on my couch and let those emotions finally roll over.

    It was un-fucking-comfortable. I am so… sad. I’m sad. I’m sad that my relationship with my ex partner breathed its final death rattle. I’m sad for everything I had to endure to get there. I’m sad I’m building the life we dreamed of alone. I’m sad for the future I could have had. I’m sad that I’ll never reach out in bed next to me to find him there again. I’m sad that I’m even sad about it. I’m sad that I don’t know what a 6mm drill bit looks like so I can’t finish installing my shelves. He knew.

    This is absolutely a bad case of break up goggles. I am aware that there is a large difference in what you feel and what you know. I know that choosing to let him go was the best choice for me. I know that the path that I am on now is the right one. I know that future would have always had an undercurrent of mistrust and insecurity. I know that I would have reached out at night and wondered if he was thinking of someone else. I know I deserve someone to love me the way I love them. I know I’ll figure out how to put up the shelves on my own.

    But I’m still sad. As I sat there in the uncomfortable, I also know it’s okay for me to sit in the sad. Sit and really feel it spread through my body and my mind. To let it weigh me down. I’m not wallowing in it just because I’m not ‘doing something about it’. This is doing something about it. After all, putting on the breakup goggles for a second is fine as long as I have the ability to take them off just as quickly.

    Plus, the mental image of me sobbing while smiling hysterically saying, “Don’t worry! I know good days are coming! My future is bright!” is decent comedic relief.

    I live in such fear that if I sit and really feel it that I will be dragged into a pit of despair and then I’ll never do anything ever again! I fear that if I have these thoughts I will go backwards straight to him. But that’s simply not true. If I don’t sit with it, I wont heal it. If I don’t allow the thoughts to walk through, I wont let them walk out. There’s no escaping it and I don’t want to. I don’t want to be numb.

    I want to be alive. And this is part of it.

  • The Burning.

    When we think of Spiritual Awakenings there are images that come to mind. Birds chirping, a beautiful but approachable woman (probably the one you saw most recently in an all natural skin care ad) sitting cross legged in a millennial grey room with her eyes closed and a serene smile on her face. Maybe a different woman: long wild hair streaked with grey in long tasseled skirts untangling the secrets of the universe. You might possibly smell patchouli. You think crystals, chakras, and other buzzwords. You might even think of a lost soul kneeling in a church, succumbing to the way of the Lord.

    I’m here to say: It’s not always like that.

    Two months ago I discovered my partner was having an affair.

    To say I went into a rage is an understatement. I truly felt like my soul left my body as I ripped through my life destroying everything I could control. The most vile words I could imagine came out of my mouth as smooth as honey. I viciously ripped everything I could from him piece by piece. I went public with my fury to let the world know how he betrayed me.

    This rage lasted for a full week. I was feral. I was mentally frothing at the mouth. I became unhinged. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep. With clenched teeth and wild eyes, I drove miles in my car trying to separate myself from the hurt in any way that I could. I would grip my steering wheel and scream out in anguish. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

    The point I want you to focus on is that I felt like my soul left my body. In this sheer primal rage my mind was violently ripped from its center. Everything I was and had been was absolutely destroyed by the wildfire of emotions I was experiencing.

    When it had nothing left to destroy the anger finally subsided. I stopped running. With my chest heaving, I turned around to see nothing but charred, smoking, and desolate trees for miles behind me.

    To be quite honest, I didn’t know fuck all what to do with that.

    But the smoke was clearing. I was beginning to have clarity. I made my way through the next few weeks and reflected on the ones prior. I began to notice how… divine it all seemed. I could map the events leading up to Affair Day and what happened afterwards and it all seemed a little too.. perfect. How every single thing that happened moved a chain of events along to a point where everything fell into place.

    I was able to make choices with ease that had been agonized over before.

    In a series of mundane moments that I can’t actually pinpoint to sound poignant and woo woo, I started to have a deep rooted feeling of, “Everything is exactly as it should be. I am exactly where I need to be.”

    But I couldn’t tell you the exact moment I felt more ‘spiritual’.

    I started deeply exploring my mind in the couples therapy my ex partner agreed to do after Affair Day. Our counselor challenged my thought processes and how I interpreted my interactions with the world around me. It began breaking the cycle of what I know now is Codependency. As I beat my self limiting patterns back, my True Self began to emerge.

    With the desire to rebuild my True Self ignited, I stumbled upon a book with exercises on meditation that integrated grounding, breathing, and visualization techniques. Our counselor had mentioned this in my one on one so I decided to start giving it a shot. (You think with all the therapy I have paid for over the years I would have taken this advice before, but I digress.) I started to ground myself multiple times a day. I began to feel more present in the now instead of the later.

    I dug deeper. I meditated on the idea of building self. On who I wanted to be, who I was. I began to open myself up to what I sometimes refer to as Spirit or The Divine. I started reading Tarot again and found the messages I was receiving deeply reflected and affirmed my circumstances. I implemented the advice that was given. I felt led. I felt like the weights I had put on myself over the years were slowly lifting as I trudged along. Soon I found I could run.

    One morning I realized that the constant need for control in my life had faded. I had started to have an understanding of what it felt like to truly trust my ‘intuition’. I am working on trusting myself to hear it.

    I know it will take time. This is just the beginning, I’m told.

    What is Spirit? I don’t know. I’m still defining it for myself. What I can say is that I’m grateful it all happened. It was supposed to. That primal state of rage completely destroyed everything I had defined myself by until that moment. I am not the same person I was. Things don’t look the same, they don’t feel the same. I think of time as before and after.

    None of these things eliminate the hurt of what I experienced. It’s anguish lingers. Those trees I looked behind me to see are still smoking, but the fire stopped there. I have turned my back, my feet are planted forward on solid ground.

    The smell of smoke may still always remind me of the hurts I’ve endured but the warmth of the Sun will remind me why I embraced Death when it was drawn.

    At the end of every funeral there’s a moment when you look around, exhale, and get up to begin moving on.

    This is Hawkmoth Rising.

    Me: The Person

• • •