Namaste, friend.
17 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
in Journal
I don’t know what to say. You’re my friend, so I worry about you and send you love all the time. With this… all I can do is send you healing love and hope it helps you find what you need to be… alive, if that’s what you choose.
I wish I could take your pain away. I wish I could hold the mirror up to you and show you the beautiful, funny, intelligent woman I see every day. I wish I could take you somplace beautiful and glorious and give you the kind of hope I know you aren’t in possession of.
I wish all these things and more for you.
I’m sorry that you’re afraid and frustrated and angry and confused, and I’m sorry if my idea of helping doesn’t help at all but confuse you more. It was never my intention to hurt you or confuse you or any of those things. Hearing you say “just fucking go away” was hurtful, but I understand the place it comes from, even if you think I don’t. I understand more than you think I do, but you’re not in a place to hear it, and that’s okay.
If you need me, I’m always here. The door is always open. A person can only run for so long until they collapse from exhaustion.
Arias to myself
05 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
in Journal
When the urge hits me to sing, it hits me hard and I just have to do it. I find my little safe place, my room, and I close the door, crank up Indigo Girls, and belt it. Fucking BELT it. Clear out the cobwebs from my throat, remind myself how to breathe, and sing it from that deep dark place that needs to be lit up and demolished.
Indigo Girls have such poetry. Beautiful, dark, painful poetry with a sense of Justice For All and a little touch of Truth. Their harmony is challenging; one is sometimes just a little too low for me, but I love the versatility and of an alto part as much as I love the lilt and feminine of the soprano, which is sometimes just a little too high for me. I love to try them both, sometimes in the same song, just by singing my favorite parts.
Depending on my mood, I will go to either Melissa Etheridge, Barbra Streisand, or I’ll have to dance, which means John Legend or Odds Even, a local group. Tonite I felt Melissa coming on.
Her first, self-titled album is not necessarily my favorite. I was feeling a little… strong. I needed some strong songs to move some stuff. I’ve been trying to make my body stronger and trying to find the real me under all this fluff-n-stuff full of emotional garbage and left-over lives. I know the me I’m supposed to be is standing right here, but I’m trying to figure out who the hell that person is. I know I’m happy, but I’m not used to doing Happy, and I’m not sure what that even looks like, really. I have an idea of what I think Happy should be, but being present and enjoying Happy for what it is is not such an easy nor readily accessible thing for me. I evade. I tuck away. I compartmentalize. It’s easier that way for a while, but then I get a little spiritually and emotionally constipated.
Which brings me back to the music. Music is like a little spiritual enema. Makes you lose your shit sometimes. Melissa Etheridge’s first album moves my shit. She is strong and in-your-face and beautiful and angry and terrified all at the same time. Her music sings about the 20-something inside of me. When I sing it, I go back there.
I’ve talked before about letting the music move through me, feeling it at a vibrational level, not just the music, not just the words, but the notes themselves as vibration. Our bodies respond to music at a deep, deep level. Everything on the planet has it’s own vibration, including each one of us, and as we move through the world, we share our vibration with other people and places and things. Those people places and things then carry a piece of us with them, affecting the world.
Memories and emotions are carried through music. We hear a song, we associate memories with them, and within those memories, an emotion. If the emotion is very strong, we feel it in our bodies somewhere… our neck and shoulders, our stomach, our backs. Maybe physical or emotional pain is associated with the song. When we hear that song, we are either excited or annoyed; the song has affected us at a deep vibrational level.
I discovered a long time ago that if I sang certain songs, they made me feel really really good. Sometimes, when I felt really down about something or I was having a hard time working something out in my head, I would go lock myself away somewhere and sing in my truest voice. Afterward, I would feel better. I started to notice that certain songs in general tended to push my body to a different place. I would become more aware of certain parts of my body when I sang, and if I sang right into that place, it would change for me. Maybe the pain would leave, maybe I would suddenly have an a-ha moment, maybe it just quieted my brain down a little more so I could sleep. Any way it happened, I would vibrate. Like my hands and feet would zizz and I would need to create something. Many times, it’s when I would end up sitting here at my computer typing away, clearing the clutter out my head so I can move on.
So, yeah… Here I am.
Those songs came out when I was 18 years old. I hadn’t discovered them until a few years later, when I was busy finding my sexual self. All those songs on that album are related to that time period, to the woman I spent three years madly in love with, to the self-discovery that came and went with her, to the first time I ever sang one of those songs karaoke.
I was afraid to sing Chrome Plated Heart because it was one of those songs I sing with my true voice, and when you sing with that voice, you open yourself up to pain and the possibility that if you speak it, it will exist again for a second. And it does. The joy of it living out loud is that eventually, it will die. And maybe, if it can die a little right now, eventually it will be dead and gone and not bother me anymore. So when I sing and the pain comes, I sing it all away so I can be free from it.
I went through all the songs I liked tonite, feeling all of them, letting them all work their way through my heart, head and body and move me toward feeling like that strong, beautiful person I know I am but just forgot about. I let go of a little more of those left-over lifetimes. That person is not who I am anymore. Sometimes she embarrasses me. Sometimes I steal a piece of the memory of her to get me through some things. Now that a little more of her is gone, I can be that much more free to be who I am trying to uncover now.
I mold myself with my words, my songs, my breath, my dance, my movement, my hands.
Deer Man says,“Compassion is the milk of experience. Compassion is courage to face and fight with yourself until you are rid of false beliefs. It is the courage to find, acknowledge and love your true self. It is finding your lost heart, realizing your deep love, and giving it to all of creation.”
Being compassionate with yourself can help you move from pain to freedom, give you a sense of rebirth. Deliver your true self from your pain. Uncover your wholeness.
It hurts to sneeze, but that’s good, right?
19 Jun 2010 Leave a Comment
in Journal
Having my coffee, starting off the day with some silence and only kinda lamenting my incredibly sore body. Started working out at the boxing place recently, and it kicked my ass two days in a row. I’m complaining about being sore, but really… I love it. Makes my body feel alive again, helps me feel like we’re connected again.
I was starting to feel gross. This tire around my midsection was starting to make it hard to breathe and bend over and move the way I was used to moving. I didn’t want to dance, I didn’t want to do anything at all. Taking that self-defense class helped inspire me to get off my ass and move. So I joined the boxing place and I’m learning to box and kickbox and such. Did some Pilates yesterday, which is what’s totally making me hurt today. But I’m not complaining. I know that in a few short months, all this extra weight will be mostly gone. I want to lose 20 pounds by the end of October. That’s feasible… five pounds a month is reasonable. I just gotta stick with it. I’m infamous for not sticking with it.
When I was maybe 19, right before I met my first husband, I was a bit of a workout hound. I’d broken up with the Rapist two years before, had another relationship that didn’t work out well, and was in a self-destructive all-or-nothing kind of place. I drank a lot instead of eating a lot, and I had started smoking cigarettes a bit, but By God, I Was Going To Work Out!
I had this job as a desk clerk at a local hotel that had me on a rotating schedule. For two days I would work 7a-3p, then I would have a day off, then work 3p-11p for a couple of days, then a day off, then 11p-7a for a couple of days. I didn’t have much of a social life at that time, so I would wake up in the morning, workout before work, work out after work, then drink. Twice a day? Silliness. But it was me and AC/DC, pounding out the beat in my room. And I went from maybe 125 pounds to maybe 106 over the course of the summer. I was a stick to begin with, but my self-image said I wasn’t.
It took another 15 or 16 years for me to find a good relationship with my body. I would look at myself in the mirror and think… My head doesn’t fit my body, my upper body doesn’t look like it’s connected appropriately to the lower half, my face isn’t my face… I’d stare at myself until I could figure out what energy shift needed to happen to make myself balanced again. Energy work. Lots and lots of energy work and self-therapy. I’d process my shit over and over and over again, taking it to new levels, watching how my inner health changed my outer health.
I found some old pictures of myself recently, back when The Alcoholic and I were first dating… maybe 1996? Showed them to someone who told me they didn’t look like me. Like I had some kind of mask on or something. And really, I did. I hadn’t found my face yet. That was simply the Me I chose to share with everyone else.
So over the last several years, I’ve been packing on the pounds as I try to find the life I was meant to have. In some cases, I didn’t take the time to process my shit, so it stayed on my hips, on my belly, gave me an extra chin. Now I have to carve the real me back out of that pile of goo I’ve let stay. Being sore today reminds me that the body I was given– the healthy, beautiful, strong body I was given– is really truly under there, waiting to be released.
What does it mean to be healthy, beautiful, and strong? What will it mean, once I refind myself in THAT place? When I look at it honestly, I realize that I have only found myself there ONCE. When The Alcoholic and I split up and I was living alone in my little apartment and bellydancing frequently during the week, I saw that person in the mirror. And I recall very vividly saying outloud to myself, “Well! There you are!! Where you been??” Aaaaaaaand that was the last time I saw Me that way.
I want to wear cute little outfits again, sexy things that show off my long legs or my frequently-adored-by-my-husband boobs. I have this long hair that I haven’t had since I was 21, and even though there’s a little grey in it, I’m okay with that. I earned every single goddamned one of them!
I’ve been out of touch with my mystical magical self for a while, too, and that’s something I need to remind myself of. I have spent a long time not doing massage, and although I’ve enjoyed the break from it, I miss it, too. I miss the connection with people, the touch, the changes that come for both of us when the work is complete. I miss the talks about energywork and spiritual things. I need to do that more. The work always starts with me, as they say. I guess it’s time for a refresher course.
The quote on my dry erase board for the last month is from the book A Big New Happy Free Unusual Life by Nina Wise: “Cultivating the art of Happiness is one of the most profound tasks we can attend to in this life.” I want to be Happy in my body again. This summer is the beginning of that, the beginning of Re-membering Who I Really Am, putting myself back together instead of being all… separated.
Separated from my spiritual self, too. Working in healthcare, I’ve discovered, makes spiritual awareness a hard path to walk. Our work lives are surrounded by mistrust, sarcasm, and a kind of jaded outlook that prevent us from seeing the beautiful, magical part of life. Especially in the operating room, where I work.
We are disconnected to a degree from our patients; their entire bodies are covered up except the part we work on, we don’t see their faces, we can’t hold their hands and talk them through it since they are asleep, and we can’t emotionally invest ourselves in them in the short time we see them– and we sure don’t get to see them in follow-up appointments in two weeks or a month or whatever. We see them for the short time they are with us, and they’re gone. The chance of connection there is slim; I’d consider myself lucky if they remembered me at all after they came into the room, that girl all dressed in blue wearing a mask, over by all the shiny and scary instruments, waving a hello. Just a blue ghost in their worlds. And I’d like to be able to share energywork with them during their surgery, except that energywork is too stimulating and could actually create problems for them. Soooo I don’t. I send them love as they drift off to sleep, and (if I can) send them some gentle peace and comfort as they wake up. I can only do what I can do, right? Finding that balance is the challenge.
So. Today I clean house, getting it ready to take on this new me, too. Clean and scrub and organize, and get my brain ready to do the same thing. Gotta clean out the dark corners, clear away the cobwebs and shine the light into the places that haven’t seen it for a while. Gotta get a schedule set for myself and stick to it. Considering painting the bedroom, and making it look like the love nest it’s supposed to be, instead of a place to throw all my shit. Love my place, love my body, love my life.
But after I finish my coffee.
Waaahhhhh….
14 Jun 2010 Leave a Comment
in Journal
I have been trying to find my body again. For a while, I was feeling quite in my body, feeling like I had a handle on what it was capable of, what it was moving toward. Now I feel like a big puddle of sloppiness. I had these awesome abs a couple of years ago from dancing all the time. Now I have a lovely tire there. Me no likey.
It was heartening to hear from my doctor that everything is normal, I’m okay, nothing is wrong. Now I suppose that means I need to just get off my ass and do something to get rid of aforementioned tire. I went and bought some Vitamin D3 since I never get sunshine anymore. I figured out how to do the wrap my hands in the Mexican boxing style, so I can wrap my hands before I lift my little handweights and punch my giant ball. I wish I had a bag, but soon I’ll head back to Punch and see about hitting a bodybag. Blah blah blah… I will I will I will….
Sometimes I feel like it’s an eternal cycle of promising myself and being disappointed in myself and self-flagellation and promising myself and being disappointed…
Something has changed in my energybody. It’s hard to explain. My awareness has changed. Not just my awareness of my surroundings and such, but a pointed awareness of my body and the energy that feeds it has completely shifted and it is as though the body I always knew myself to have has been squished about three inches shorter and a foot wider, and my face is not mine. I see these huge circles, my body doesn’t have energy, and I feel put up on a shelf, like an old game.
I try to dance, and it doesn’t come back to me. I can stand Just So when I look at myself in the mirror, and I can see a shade of myself that was… twenty years ago… and just yesterday. Mostly I just feel like a slug. An uninspired, uninterested slug.
I just needed to bitch. I have nothing interesting to say about it at the moment but It Sucks, and I’m Pissed Off and Annoyed At Myself. That is all. Carry on.
A few bad words, ultimately.
22 May 2010 Leave a Comment
in Journal
I have been a hormonal mess for the last three months or so. Keep thinking I’m pregnant because I’m late and nauseous, and every time… I start, I’m an emotional mess, and I’m a bitch.
I couldn’t decide if it was because I was angry or disappointed or sad because I was relieved, or what. That last one was it. Not the ‘or what’, of course. The relieved part. I just really didn’t want to be pregnant.
I don’t want to give any more of my life away. I want to have the time to love my husband without much distraction. I love my stepdaughter like she were mine because she’s the closest thing I’ll ever have to mine. I knew this when I met her, and I knew it when I lost the baby last year. So I try to pour my love on her the best way I know how, which means we piss each other off, we act like coconspirators, we talk about deep stuff and not so deep stuff. I see myself in her, and it feels good to heal that part of my old self.
I was her age when my asshole rapist boyfriend came into my life. I met him the April at the end of my 8th grade year. Glen was a year ahead of me at another school outside our district. Not far away, really, maybe a ten or fifteen minute drive. He was tall, blonde, brown-eyed, and he had a quiet way about him that said Mystery to me. We used to meet at the skating rink every weekend for double sessions, and we would kiss for looooooooong minutes before I went outside to leave. He had a little Kawasaki 250. Was it red? I don’t remember if it was red or black. My mother hated that motorcycle.
I decided to have sex with him because I thought I knew what love was: poetry, flowers, music, all that romantic stuff. Glen romanced me hard for a 9th/10th grader. I was mesmerized by him. Thought I wanted to spend all my time with him. My friends didn’t like him because he took all my time away. He was jealous of my friends because they had me all week and he only saw me on weekends. That’s what he said, anyway.
I don’t remember when he started getting angry. I suppose if I think hard on it, that river of emotion always ran just under the surface. That whole Bad Boy thing, you know? He told me so many lies, and I believed every single one of them. I have no idea why. They all seemed totally ridiculous to me at some level, but I just totally bought them, each and every one. Must have made it easier for him, being so pliant. I just wanted to be in love. I wanted to have a romance. I’d watched enough old black and whites to see how perfect it could be.
I was so naiive. Stupid. So trusting.
We had sex everywhere we could manage it. For a year and a half, we had unbelieveably frequent sex. It is amazing I never got pregnant, even then. Later, I would be thankful for it, but at that time, I would have been okay with it. My oldest nephew was 5 or so at the time, and I LOVED the babies. I babysat all the time. I wanted one.
I don’t remember when exactly it was. It was kinda chilly out, because I remember wearing a coat or jacket of some kind. Glen seemed to be under the impression, somewhere, somehow, that I had been flirting with someone in his presence or some such thing. We had left wherever we were in his black Gremlin (pristine condition, of course, even though it was a fucking GREMLIN), and driven to the high school parking lot. There was an access driveway kind of thing between the road that went alongside the school and the parking lot, and we went back there frequently to make out. It was kinda secluded, and police didn’t monitor it much.
We sat there in the dark, arguing. I don’t remember what was said. It was just loud and angry, and he had me terrified for the first time that he might hit me. I was starting to get out of the car to get away, and he reached over me and pushed me back and locked the door again. Started up the car and started driving FAST down that access drive screaming at me, “Do you wanna die?” over and over while I sat there screaming and crying and wanting out.
He drove us to a park not far from where I’d lived. He’d gotten silent before he started crying. How did that switch from him terrifying me to me comforting him? How did he do that? How did I believe whatever it was he said? He forced himself on me, pulled my clothes off like I were a doll, and pinned me to the seat so I could hardly breathe, telling me if I ever tried to leave him, he would kill me. If I ever told anyone he threatened me, he would kill me and whomever I told. He was watching me from now on, and I couldn’t go anywhere he said I couldn’t. I had to make excuses.
Every time my friends and I went to the mall, I would hear his motorcycle and see him drive by. Wherever I went, he went. Like a fucking shadow. I had to watch what I said and how I said it. He would know. He always knew. When he touched me, he controlled me. He only held my hand to lead me, put his arm around me to claim me and keep me away from everyone else. He said hateful things to me about being a slut or a whore, how stupid I was, and how no one would ever love me again because now everyone knew I was cheap.
Mostly, he threatened my family. My oldest sister’s kids. If I ever told anyone he fucked me like that, he would hurt those three kids. They made me laugh, they gave me sunshine, and he took it all away from me.
These things happened to me when I was Lala’s age. When I think about that… I wonder how my life would have changed if I’d never gone skating that one night. I almost didn’t go. What if I hadn’t? Would I have grown up and married Sean Reeves, like I had once wanted? Would I have made the same choices? Everything I did after Glen was because of who Glen was to me.
Who he was shaped me and my world. Every self-destructive thing I did, every boyfriend I screwed around or every bottle of peach schnapps or Malibu rum or tequila I drake… all that was because of who he had me believe I was. Worthless. Unloved. Unloveable. Stupid. Trash. Ugly. Flat-chested whore. Skinnyass nothing.
I had some betablockers I started taking when I was 16, the year before we broke up, because I had been getting migraines and it was what they prescribed. Didn’t pay attention to the fact that my blood pressure was already low enough, thank you. ((Here, let’s give her a betablocker and see if she can just spend most of her day sleeping. That should help her not have migraines. Idiots.)) I took them for only a couple of years before I quit taking them. I quit taking them because they didn’t kill me. I wished they had. They just pissed me off instead.
Argument with new boyfriend over something stupid, I got depressed, decided to take several of the betablockers. Yeah, just made me tired and vomit. Lame.
Drinking was easier. I had friends that were 21, and they got me liquor. When I was married to my first husband and turned 21 (in that order), I got my own. Malibu and coke. That way I could be wide awake drunk and depressed instead. Created dramas, had weird mystical experiences I thought were real and meaningful, met people I thought I loved and had crazy wild sex with friends. My version of being a hippie. Planned a life on a farm in the wilds of southeastern Missouri, me and my friends and our little family of love. Naiive. Drunk. Still looking for my happy ending.
Divorced my friends and my husband, decided to stick with women. Fell madly deeply for my first girlfriend and fucked it up because I was shallow and insensitive. I’d discovered just months before she died that I had made a huge monumental mistake and tried to talk to her. Moved to Arkansas for about three months? Tried to get my head on straight. Just needed to leave. I called her the night before I moved home, and we made up. Talked about going camping the next weekend, and said our I love yous when we hung up. Two hours later she was dead in a fire. Two hours. I was drunk or high for most of the next year.
Women didn’t work for me, either. I had enough drama, and even though they loved me deeper on the whole, nothing filled me. Didn’t really belive I deserved to be filled.
Went back to men, got married because I thought I should, and was miserable for the next ten years. A tangled, twisted mess of emotional bullshit that just undid me. All those years of wishing and believing in magic and possibility and blahblahblah…
Nothing gets you out of that shit place but you. Believe in God, believe in a holy gold-encrusted banana tree, whatever. Ultimately, it is you pulling yourself out of that shit. You discover who you really are, you learn the hardest lessons of all: You Are Something. You are here for some goddamned reason, you’ve lived through all this crap and adapted and maneuvered and created a life, even through all this crap. Why the hell is that? Why would you bother?
It’s not like I haven’t laid in bed for days, just willing my heart to stop so I didn’t have to feel this terrible aching lonliness. Just. Stop. Breathing. It won’t hurt. Just go to sleep and don’t wake up. In the beginning, I begged god to please, just let me go to sleep and make this not be happening. Make it a dream. Later, I wanted to just not wake up. Let me live in my dreamspace where I could create things and be safe and have my dead friends with me, holding my hands again.
That boy changed the core of who I was. Did you know he’s married now and has a couple of kids? He lives in that same town with his family. He has a business that caters to the fitness crowd, and he bodybuilds– or at least he used to. I wonder if his wife sees that Glen or if she sees some other Glen. Does he hurt her like he hurt me? Were those children begat of love or anger? Are they scared of him like I was?
Five years ago, I couldn’t see myself here. Five years ago, I thought I’d decided to be the crazy old cat lady at the end of the street, the one the kids were all scared of and who they called a witch. I was going to take lovers until I died and enjoy myself the way I wanted to. Eat my dinner off of my good china because it’s MY CHINA. Walk around nekkid if I wanted to, and say to hell with my neighbors.
Then I met my husband. And my whole entire world changed again for a man… and it was finally good. The first months of our relationship was almost painful for me. Trusting someone the way he was asking me to trust him? Why would I do that, and why coudn’t I NOT do that? I would just cry when he said these beautiful things to me, when he would touch my face and make love to my heart… It was like someone peeled my skin off, I was so raw. But when I let go, my heart was finally free. And he brought me this beautiful little blonde teenager that I just completely fell head over heels in love with. She was mine the day I met her.
So here I am, butting heads with said teenager over everything you butt heads with teenagers over. And I am so afraid she’s going to be in the same place I was. She needs someone to pay attention, someone she can trust and talk to when her own Big Things happen. I want to be that for her, because I never had one, not until now. So if I had a baby, I couldn’t be there for her the way I want. Nor could I really spend time loving my husband the way I want. I don’t want more than this. I’m happy where I am.
So now my cycles are all weird, I think I’m pregnant, am not and am relieved that I’m not. And I feel guilty for feeling relieved because my husband said he wanted a baby and now I don’t want one. He says that he’s happy with whatever I decide I want, but I know he wants one anyway. I’d like to be able to give him everything he wants, but… I can’t give him this. Not without giving a part of myself away again. I want it to just be the three of us, our motley little family. I love us.
Sometimes I hide and don’t talk about things because I don’t understand what I’m feeling or how to express it. I have to roll it around in my head and feel it in my body before I can understand it. I’ve been silent for a while now, watching Lala being Lala, and watching my body going crazy with the hormones, and wondering what the hell I was going to do about anything, IF anything.
All I can do is love her, love my husband, wait for my doctor’s appointment to find out what’s wrong with my cycles, try not to be a bitch every time I’m given the opportunity, and thank Glen for fucking up my life when I was 14 so I could realize happiness at 40.
I still believe in happy endings.
well…. okay then.
06 May 2010 Leave a Comment
in Journal
Sometimes, when I talk to you, I feel like I’m talking to myself. Like talking to myself in the mirror, years apart. Your eyes are my eyes, sad, hiding. I feel that deep stone in your belly, the fear, the darkness of it. I remember, and I’m not sure how I really came out of it. I want to tell you how I fixed it. A gigantic, messy bandage that I just can’t exactly explain.
But ohhhhh… how I want to move you. I want to put you on a raft and sail you out to a beautiful place that can heal you. I want to place wings on you so you can learn to fly away like I did. I want you to find your joy like I did. I’m selfish, I guess. I know how good it can be, and what a relief it is to be out of the darkness, and I want you to have it, too. ((It has to be all about me, doesn’t it?))
I found this thing, this inner peace bullshit? Yeah, I found it through some miracle of something. I know I told this story.
When I was 17, I had been three years in a sexually abusive relationship. He was my first. I thought it was what love was supposed to be like. It wasn’t.
My boyfriend and I had gotten into another fight that ended badly. The following day, I had this desire to go sit in a sanctuary and talk to God. When I was younger, I had been an alcolyte at the Lutheran church I went to, and found it comforting to participate in the ritual candlelighting and being in service of God. After a bad fight like that, a person feels the need to have a few words with God, you know?
We lived, literally, right next door to a church. It wasn’t the church I had gone to, but it was a church, so what did I care? I saw there was a car in the driveway, and called over to see if I could just go sit in the sanctuary. The lady asked if I wanted to talk to a pastor, and I said no, I just wanted to talk to God.
I walked across the small field to the church and went in, straight to the front left pew, where I would have sat if I was an alcolyte. Up on the wall in front was a huge cross. I stared at that cross and started talking. I cried and cried and asked God what was I supposed to do? Please, help me get out of this. I was afraid for my family and my friends– he’d made threats. Help me find the strength. Help me before I’m dead. Help me, please.
And like a breath finally letting go, I was comforted. I felt arms around me, and I heard a voice in my ear clear as day tell me: “Go find me out there.”
What the hell does THAT mean? I didn’t know. I just left. Went home feeling like I could take on bigger demons than this, and called that boy right up and told him to go fuck himself, I’m done. And go ahead and try to show up at my house again, because I know a few people who would like to kick his ass.
Those people who were only in my head, because I didn’t tell a soul for a few years later.
See, now I say a few years later and I feel like I’m doing you a disservice, because you have been silent for years and years and years. Who am I to compare my experience? And then I remember the Possibility I made myself out to be, and can I just tell the goddamned story and stop analyzing every thought of mine to the nth degree??
So. Broken up with the boy, moving on. Each boyfriend I had after that, including my first and second husbands and every woman in between, was an experiment in reclaiming a piece of myself. With each beautiful word of poetry, one reminded me I was woo-able and innocent. With each new orgasm, reminded I was sexy and that I could, for a second, have power over a man. With each secret told, a peice of trust regained. What it meant to love my body, how I could love my body, how I could talk to it and heal it and bend it to MY will.
I read books that spoke to my spirit. I learned to channel. I learned to read runes and do energywork and write spells and do all that pagan stuff. I worshipped Goddess and talked to trees and burned incense and smoked weed and considered past lives as well as my navel.
Am I blissed-out? Fuck, I wish.
Every day gets easier. My body and I have issues. We always have, since Him. I have these tools, these mystical magical ways of telling myself that I am really okay, just breathe and go. Breathe, dammit. You’re here. He didn’t kill you. You survived. Now go play!
But life gets in the way. All the bullshit of living, all the play-acting with people, all the lies and secrets and fear of being seen for the fraud I am gets in the way. And I fall into old patterns of thought, hearing all the things He ever said to me about being shit, about being a slut and a whore and worthless… and my second husband who never laid a hand on me because I was “too much work”, treated as though I was not worthy of his love… I am just utter and complete crap. All that.
Except that I survived, goddamn it. I woke up every day and did the work to get myself up out of bed and try to have a normal life again. So breathe, PeeJay. You’re still here. And it’s going to be okay.
Things change. Or they don’t. Thoughts create energy, energy is power, and what you say Is. Call it karma, call it whatever. What you put out there comes back to you. You will get what is yours. What do you believe is yours? Stop believing all the lies everyone told you. Find your own Truth. It’s your birthright.
The second time I almost “jumped off the bridge”, I hadn’t felt such despair before. It was the worst I’d ever felt my whole life. I was so… empty and hopeless. My arms and heart just ached for the things I was never allowed to have. Desolate. I sat in the middle of the kitchen floor with a huge bottle of sleeping pills, sobbing. I’d totally and completely given myself in to the pain and anguish and decided I was done. No more. I was going the fuck to sleep and being done with this bullshit. Felt like I was leaning over a well, just bellowing deep and heavy sobs into it, letting the last drops of my spirit fall away from me. Explode. Melt. Blow away.
I can’t tell you exactly what happened next. I mean, the thing I remember is going up to the master bedroom where my second husband was sleeping. He was snoring, all through my anguish, the bastard. I was going to give him one chance to fix it, and if he didn’t comfort me, I was going. I remember crawling in bed with him and crying, and that he flung his arm over me, said something, and… I must have fallen asleep or something. Next thing I know, he’s standing next to the bed kinda freaking out over seeing something in the bedroom.
Apparently, my demon came forth in some way. He said that he woke up and saw this huge column of black at the foot of the bed, just off to the side. Said it reached all the way up our ceiling, turned around and faded off. I didn’t see it. But I do know I felt like some major shift had happened for me. My body felt weird. Like I was having a hard time getting used to it… like you do when you’re 13 or so. It was weird. About that time I started having all sorts of weird experiences, but that’s another story. Let’s just say I started drawing and writing a lot again, and in doing so helped focus my energy into getting out of that shitty relationship and into my own life.
I have my own life. I’m finally finally FINALLY happy. Doesn’t mean I’m not afraid. Or sad. Or angry. I am all those things some days. ((And breathe in… out…)) I’m learning to be gentler with myself, though. Every time, it’s like quicksand. One false step, and you’re up to your neck in crap.
I know you feel all this, and you hear me. I know you don’t answer me sometimes because it’s too hard. And that’s okay. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. I’ll just stand here next to you and remind you that someone sees you, and you don’t have to say a thing. I’ll probably talk enough for the both of us, anyway.
Movement
24 Mar 2010 Leave a Comment
in Journal
Sometimes when I talk to people about their stuff, I remember certain things about my OWN stuff that sometimes has me looking through books or my old journals for small connections. Inevitably, I end up wanting to write about where I went… Documentation always seems necessary.
The last week of December, 2002: So I’ve been wondering why it is, exactly, that I’m still pissed off at Her. I’m rewinding the entire story in my head, trying to figure it out, and… I think I’m just embarrassed at being revealed for the fraud I am. I mean yes, in may respects it has been freeing. In another way, I feel trapped by my truth.
I loved her once, or I thought I did. She freaked, I freaked, and we went our ways, still freaked. We tried to be friends, discovered some old shit, thought it was dealth with, then… She thought I was in love with her, and I suppose I didn’t do enough to convince her otherwise. I enjoyed some of her affections, but mostly I enjoyed my free heart in the moment. I wasn’t thinking of anyone else but me. I hurt her heart, and she had a right to be angry.
Looking at myself in this way is not comfortable, but I’d rather do it and face myself raw and grow than be stuck in miserable… everything.
I’ve thought that in many ways, I’ve been retaliating against my husband and traditional relationships. I don’t know why I’m mad at him any more, or if I ever really was. I think I’ve spent most of my life angry at myself for being broken.
For not telling.
For wasting all that time torturing myself and my body, for hating myself and my body, for not telling anyone.
For not telling anyone.
Because I wasn’t strong enough to save myself.
Because I’m afraid of what saving myself means.
My boyfriend didn’t rape me in the sense of knife-to-the-throat or drug-in-my-drink rape, but he raped my body, yes. Then he raped my mind by telling me I would never be loved again, by convincing me of my trampiness, by lying to me with every breath– by telling me how Bad I was.
He changed my idea of love, then raced down an alleyway in the car screaming at me, “Do you want to die??!??” Yes, I did. Because there was nothing left in me to live the way I was. I had to either kill my body or the mind that moved it.
The body was resilient. Drugs? Oh yeah, I was on drugs. I was so fucking depressed. Drank, smoked, fucked like it was the last day of my life. The mind… well… it went its own way. Sometimes it visits me, but mostly it just hangs around in limbo, watching me watch it hang.
I’m so tired of being uncomfortable.
I want my life to…
Work.
To matter.
To fly.
To be joyous.
I want to BE joyous.
But I have to find that…. thing.
October 15, 2004: I am invisible to you, in my other “separate-but-the-same” world. the ache that can only be named emptiness lies there, dead on the ground between us. How can we find a peaceful passing?
I feel this “I Must” pulling at my heart. And it is not a simple must. I must do, I must be, I must create. So that I can spiral out. I am turning, slowly, turning for Home.
