Category: Heartbreak & Loss

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.

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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

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The Numbing.

The Burning.