Big Promises To A Little Girl

For many years I have been in therapy. Some of the most beneficial work I have done is with internal family systems. This work entails getting to know the different parts of yourself that show up when you are going about your life. I’ve learned that I have some very fierce protector parts, some angry parts, silly parts, and some very vulnerable parts. The vulnerable parts of me are the youngest parts of me. They are the little girl inside.

In getting to know her I have realized that she is very scared. She thinks and behaves as a child would, except without the protection and supervision of an adult. She makes decisions but hates it and is terrified all the time because no one is showing her how to do it. She is sad and lonely and moody.

What child wouldn’t be? No child should have to be faced with important and grown up situations and decisions. What I learned from my therapists is that this part of me, this inner child who is so vulnerable, is in need of acknowledgment, of protection, guidance, and most of all in need of the truth.

I needed to tell her, and still do, that we are not a child anymore. I needed to let her know that we have grown up. The first time I did this with a therapist, it felt so silly. I was saying out loud, to myself, that I was a grown woman. I recounted all of the things I had done, accomplished, survived, and thrived through. I had to let her know my education, my occupation, my adult decision making, and the fact that I was a mother to children. I know that I was thinking duh…she already knows that…we are one person, right? But I felt something that I had never felt before after saying it all out loud. I felt that part of me relax a little bit.

She had never relaxed a day in her life. I felt it in my body, my mind, and my soul. I could feel for the first time, what my own children must feel from me, safety, comfort, love, trust. It is a very weird sensation and it brought up so much emotion. I was kind of upset (I, as in my grown up, wise self) that I had not known that I needed to do this earlier. I was very sad that this part of me was so stressed, so worried, so fearful all the time. I had let her down so many times in life and I didn’t even know it. I paid no attention to her except to be upset when her fear caused my protector parts to show up and screw up my life somehow. When you aren’t aware who is taking action and where your feelings are coming from, it can be easy to make decisions out of fear that do not actually benefit you.

I sat down with this part of me the other day, and we had a good long talk. I had to let her know that I was aware of things she was thinking and feeling and that I was willing to listen to her but not willing to let her call out our protector parts, or to make decisions based on fear anymore. I am not someone who can look in a mirror and talk to myself. I am a quiet person by nature and I’m easily distracted if I am talking instead of writing or typing. So I wrote her a letter.

In the letter, I let her know that we are about to turn 47 years old. She needed to be reminded that I am a teacher with a master’s degree, a mother of three (awesome) kids, a professional, a homeowner, a friend and someone who is loved and respected by others. I could tell she was a little skeptical so I wrote down things that had happened in our life that we made it through as our wise adult self. I had to show her and prove to her that I was trustworthy.

There were things going on in my life that were out of alignment with what felt right and I needed to address them. I can usually tell who is calling the shots in my life (my wise self or other parts like my inner child or my protector parts) by how those decisions feel over time. I have not been feeling good for a few years in certain aspects of my life. I was putting out little fires all the time around my relationships, work, energy level, physical and mental health. I could not see the thread tying them all together until I really took some time to sit, examine and accept what the state of my life was.

My children were gone for several weeks this summer on various vacations. I had thought months ago when I saw this big open spot on my calendar that I would take advantage of the time and go away myself. I thought I might take a trip or get projects done at home, or take time to catch up with friends. I was excited to have grand thoughts and plans and excited to be able to do whatever I wanted. I was a single woman and my responsibilities were leaving town.

Except that must have scared me in some way because I went and found a man. I took my single self and but her back on the market, where she had vowed she did not want to be. As soon as I started talking to men again, something felt off, but I ignored it. There was a part of me (guess who??) that did not want to be alone. I think I knew that my wise self was not running the show but the part of me that needed something other than being alone was pushing me into the arms of a man, again.

I started spending time with a man who was very nice. He was kind, gentle, thoughtful, sweet, and handsome. Part of me was so soothed by not being alone and by being in a space of getting to know another person and the possibilities of a future with a partner. There was another part of me that was yelling…”I thought we were going to be alone? I thought we were going to go on an adventure or tackle projects or enjoy our freedom?”. It was a very confusing time.

One thing I am is honest. The problem is that I don’t always know the truth fully when I’m trying to be honest. I kept telling this person that I liked spending time with them, because I did, at least part of me did. I also kept telling this person that I was not ready to be in a committed relationship and join lives, because I wasn’t. The entire time with this person felt like tug of war within myself. I was soothed and comforted by being with someone else but then I was upset with myself for allowing myself to spend time with someone knowing that I wanted to be alone. The part of me that was soothed by not being alone was my inner child. She did not trust me to be alone. She always thinks that happiness and protection and comfort and fulfillment have to come from someone else. I don’t blame her, I’ve let her down a lot in life. I didn’t even know she existed and had ignored her for the majority of my life. She had called forth the protectors and they had gotten her what she wanted, a man. Some might say this is the yearning of a child who never had access to her father or his heart, and they are probably right.

The problem was that my wise self knew that this was not our truth. She knows that her dad did the best he could and her broken little girl heart can never be fixed by a man. My wise self knew that my values I had decided on did not involve a man right now. My values were to explore this thread in my life that had made me feel so down, so sick, so tired, so drained, and so lost. My job was to fix my own broken little girl heart not expect someone else to.

So I took a break. I asked for space and I took a retreat. The retreat happened in my own home over the course of three days. I had a book, a candle, a journal and pen, some sage, a smudge stick and a weighted blanket. I told the people in my life that I talked to frequently that I would not be in touch and I gave myself the gift of time and space. It rained a lot for those three days and I was so grateful. I felt like it was symbolic of washing things away. I would discover that I had a lot of washing to do.

The thread that I uncovered that connected everything together was the thread that I did not have self-care. The bond that I had to myself was weak and I allowed others to sever me from my parts at every turn. I could not hear my wise self when she tried to tell me that I was choosing things and people and situations that were out of alignment with my values. I could not hear my inner child when she was afraid and needed to be reminded that I was her person, she didn’t need to go find someone else. My protector parts were scrambling to figure out what fires to put out, which voice to listen to, and I was burning them out.

So here is what I know now that I have taken some space and time to be still and sit with it all:

I learned very early on in life that the world was not safe. I was hurt and I felt alone. I was a child so I did the best I could by creating defenses to protect myself. I always hoped that someone would come save and protect me but in the meantime, I could do things to not hurt so much.

One of my defenses was to be cute, quiet, and agreeable. This worked so well for me in school, in making friends, in my family, and in relationships. I know that it kept me from getting hurt for a long time. It protected me. Until it didn’t. Now this part of me can get me into trouble. It hurts to quiet yourself, to hide yourself, to silence yourself to be loved and accepted. In adulthood, it is dishonest and it causes discord and disease within you. It will start to choke the life out of you. The light of your true self cannot shine if you have to lock it away to please, appease, and agree with others.

Another defense was to always be on offense. I had to be responsible, many would say overly-responsible. I had to anticipate needs, soften blows, keep the waves from the boat, and to never rest or abandon my post. My job was to outthink, outwit, out perform, and outsmart anyone who might sneak a peek at the real me (child me) because I was made to believe that she was a mistake, bad, naughty, and unacceptable as herself. Just by being myself early on, I had earned the reputation of being trouble, and trouble made you a target. For a long time, my protector parts helped me hide the parts of me that others found unacceptable. If my protector parts relaxed, and my true self emerged, those in power over me made sure the punishment was swift and harsh. I learned to anticipate what and who they wanted me to be and to do and be it before there could be any doubt that I was good. No one should live like this. My adrenal glands are shot from the stress of it all. It is unsustainable.

The defense that was related to this but also different was that of doing for others what they should do for themselves. This is part of the overly-responsible role I played. I believed that if a job wasn’t getting done, it was mine to pick up and do. It protected me in that it stopped those I loved from failing, and if they didn’t fail, I wasn’t a failure for loving beneath my worth. This one was the hardest to unpack for me. It required me to challenge everything I had been taught to believe about myself and what I was worth and what I deserved. I had to go back to the beginning and acknowledge that I had deserved everything that I would and do give to my own children as a child. Even though it wasn’t provided for me, I had deserved love, protection, safety, emotional availability, affection, all of the best things children deserve. Nothing in my life had provided me with the knowledge that I was as worthy as anyone else and that it wasn’t my fault that I had not received it. I did not have to work harder, accept less, do for others, and hustle for my worth. Despite my mountain of evidence to the contrary, I had to sit with this truth until I knew it.

You may be thinking that I did this in three days, during a little retreat in my home. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have been working hard every single day of my life for twenty years to come to this truth. I have used therapy, Al-Anon, praying, meditating, journaling, body work, energy work, hypnosis, retreats, workshops, podcasts, books, other people, and God for twenty years to come to this space. I am enough. I always was. I never needed something or someone outside of me to complete me, I just needed to bring myself together, to gather up all the parts of me that were severed and cut off from communication each other. I needed to reintroduce my grown up self to the little girl inside me that had been slaying dragons alone for all these years. I had to take out all of the people and things that kept me from knowing myself fully. I had to drop all of the ties that kept me distracted and disturbed so that I could not hear myself calling out to me. I had to sit, alone, so many times, to know me.

The last month has been so challenging. I have finally gathered up all the little fires into a pit. They are all there where I can see them and now I know that they are all started by me not knowing me. They were all started by me calling forth protectors that no longer work for me when I was scared or around people that could not be for me what I needed them to be. They came forth when I forgot that I was worthy of every good thing and when I thought I had to work extra hard, and hustle for my worth.

This past weekend I spent some time at a friend’s house alone. I spent my mornings on the porch with coffee and my notebooks writing to my little girl inside. I had some things to let her know. I made her promises that I intend to keep so that she and I are never cut off from each other again. I feel for her the fierce love and protection that I feel for my own children and it is time she knew that it is not her job to protect me, to be responsible for me, or to hide out of fear that I won’t love and accept her.

I promised her that she could run along and play because I was now in charge and that there were some things that she didn’t have to do anymore. I promised her that she never had to hide again, not ever. I promised her that I would never ask her to do that again because no one that would ask me to hide parts of me is fit to be in my life. I would tell them goodbye. I promised her that she and I were a complete package and that we did not have to have anyone else with us to be whole and worthy. I promised her that I would not take this special time for the two of us and distract myself with a possible relationship to a man. We didn’t need a man, we needed each other. I had to say goodbye.

I promised her that we would never again give up our heath, safety, time, energy, values or dreams to please and appease someone else. We please ourself first or else we get sick again. This is not selfish, it is self care. When you do not know you are worthy, you spend your time trying to get worth outside of you, and it never feels good because you cannot feel full from the outside. It is like sitting in the middle of a buffet of food and feeding everyone else, except yourself. You will die if all you ever do is feed everyone else and hope they realize that you are hungry too and feed you. Sure, they might throw you a crumb once in a while, but only enough so that you’ll have the energy to keep feeding them.

I promised that I would show up and tell the truth. Even when it hurts others, causes them to have to do work they don’t want to do, or even if it means that people are disappointed in us. I can live with that (this is a new development) because I would rather disappoint everyone around me than ever see the little girl inside of me hurt again. She has been hurt too much for too long. Until I could see that, acknowledge that, and sit with that very uncomfortable truth, I could not bring myself to see that it was my job to protect her. I blamed others for not protecting her, but I’ve been a grown up for twenty eight years now. And I’ve been dodging my responsibility to protect her for that long. That was a harsh truth to face. The only thing harder was asking that little girl part of me to try to trust me again after I had let her down for so long.

There are a million tiny promises that I am making to her but one of the biggest promises is that I am going to let go and cut the strings to all that has kept me stuck in the cycles of my past. I am going to give us the time to be alone, to figure out our new life together as a team. I am going to sit in this as long as I need to until all of those fires that have been hurting us for so long are put out. I am cutting out people who do not see my worth. I am cutting off my part in unhealthy systems. I am cutting out my need to be protected and fulfilled by other people outside of me. I am telling the truth. I am expressing myself. I am protecting me and standing my ground around those who think they can treat me like I don’t know who I am and what I am worth. I am building myself from the inside out. I am letting others feel discomfort instead of taking it on because I think I think that if they are unhappy, they get to target me. I am prioritizing my health, safety, and most of all self care. I finally feel like I have gotten to the root of the fires. I know that my life will be different going into my forty-seventh year. I will finally be living life as a whole person who is unwilling for any reason to doubt her worth.

Thawing Out

I’ve been hearing the term functional freeze in videos a lot lately so I decided to look it up. Something about the phrase sounded all too familiar to me. Being functionally frozen is kind of like being a functioning alcoholic. You get up, go to work, take care of business, cook, clean, be the soccer mom, but psychologically you are frozen. Since the school year ended for me, I have been in a weird space. I have been sitting in front of the television for hours, even on a sunny day. I have been avoiding household chores or only doing them when I could no longer but it off. I have avoided getting together with people unless I had made prior commitments. I was staying up late, sleeping in late, and not knowing what to do with myself.

These can be some of the ways to tell if you are in a frozen state. You have a hard time getting tasks done, being social or taking good physical care of yourself. Your thoughts may be racing but you don’t know why-like you have a million things to do and worry about but you don’t actually do anything.

All I had wanted to do when school was done was plant flowers for my porch, back deck, and garden. It has taken me two full weeks to even buy the flowers. I’ve planted half of them but I am not done. I have not turned on my sprinklers and have only cut my grass once. I just couldn’t do it. I had written out plans for what to buy. I had beautiful gardens and decks pinned on my Pinterest boards. Every time I drove by a green house or garden center, I made myself feel terrible for not getting my flowers yet. I’m thawing.

Why was I frozen though? I want to blame it on the school year and there would be some truth to that. It had been a rough year for me. I struggled with feeling alone and with being unsure of myself. End of the year activity is always frenzied and my personal life was not any better.

My own children had so many things going on. Between the three of them they had 4 vacations in two months. Sports were ending and tryouts for next year were happening. My oldest is moving into the full time working world in the fall and moving where she lives. I am cat sitting my grandcat. My brother was in town for a few weeks with his family and on top of all that I met a nice guy that I like to hang out with.

Everything is well, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t overwhelming. Sometimes when I am overwhelmed but have no choice but to work, cart children off to sports and airports, take care of pets, and meet obligations, I find that I freeze in the only way that no one will know…psychologically.

I realized this last Monday when I finished a day of running around Mackinaw Island with my family (minus all of my children) and had the evening to myself. I had a hotel room in the city and my travel partners had put there kids to bed early and were in for the night. My foot hurt from walking so I walked down to Lake Huron and plopped a chair in the water to soak my feet. It was the first time I had sat outside at dusk, feet in the water, without the distraction of a television or phone. I was so anxious. I could not relax. I was thinking of everything except the present moment. I was listening to other people’s conversations. I was looking at the rocks anxiously trying to find a special one that I didn’t already have. I was nervously watching the waves hoping they didn’t get too hight and get my pants all wet. I had a perfect Michigan sunset on the water and I was missing it.

So when I got home, I set some boundaries around my time and energy. I remembered what I had wanted this summer to be for me, a journey to healthy and to getting to know me better. It was to be my summer of finding and building my community. I hadn’t done any of that. Well I did with my family and I did meet a new person but I had not been healthy in my boundaries. I was staying up late, being distracted by text conversations, and not taking care of me.

On Sunday I sat down and made myself a little routine for my days. I planned the day in two hour increments centered around self care, being productive, and having fun. Today was my first day and I’m feeling the effects already. I woke up at 6 a.m. and had my coffee, read, journaled and meditated. I’ve started planning my curriculum for next year. I ate breakfast and lunch. I got the rest of the things I need to finish planting and setting up an outdoor space. I did somatic yoga, am resetting my chakras, and being creative (taking time to write this). I have already drank a liter of water and feel my body releasing and thawing. I’m using my back massager and allowing myself to feel and express whatever comes up for me.

When I release that anxiety, fear, and upset, I realize that I am so exhausted. My body feels as if it has been through a haunted house without the fun. I have 30 minutes left in my chakra balancing but I may fall asleep, and that is okay. I’m glad to be thawing. Glad to be healing. I hope that I continue to come into the present moment and begin to take good care of me. I hope that I can pay attention to the present moment. I hope that my adrenal glands calm down. I hope I can continue to thaw and that I can enter more and more wholeheartedly into my life. Freezing is a trauma response and therefore I accept it for what it is. I will not fight it but accept it and work with it.

Community

Self-help Has Been Great But I’m Ready For Community

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I have self-helped myself to the highest levels and I feel incomplete. I have been in therapy on and off for 21 years. I have read an amazing amount of self-help and healing books. I have attended workshops and I have self-reflected and found all of my inner parts. I know my defects. I know my strengths. I know my trauma. I know my mental health needs. I know my relationship quirks. I know my worth. I know my rabbit holes and I know my triggers. I know my cup fillers. I know my cup takers. I’ve learned my no and I’ve learned my yes. I know my favorite color. I know how I like my eggs. I know what I want in a partner and who I want to be in this world.

And…I’m lonely as hell.

I’ve self-helped myself into a corner. In my healing, I needed to cut relationships, set boundaries, create safe spaces, and decide on my participation in relation to other people. I did it! And it was all so necessary for me. I could not have learned what I know now about myself in those old spaces and places, with those old behaviors and roles I had within relationships and organizations. I’m so beyond grateful for the time I have spent with myself, on myself, and for myself. It healed me.

I learned to be the person that I had always needed myself to be. I learned to take care of myself first before I took care of other people. I found all of the parts of me that make up the fantastic person that I am. I would not trade all of that for anything. It was the greatest gift I ever allowed myself.

And…I’m ready for the next level.

What is the next level? The voice of the universe is telling me community. I long to commune with people like myself who have found their healing, their true self, and their purpose. I long to have deep conversations and thoughtful gatherings. I want to laugh in safe spaces and cry in them too. I want to be challenged by people who see my greatness and I want to be held by people who can handle me with care. I want to learn new things and also teach what I know. I want to surround myself with people who have the utmost respect for themselves and who know how to live-not exist-LIVE!

I want to dance and feel safe to do that without anyone invading my space or thinking my body is theirs to touch and fantasize about. I want to eat and experience joy in sharing a meal and not hear about calories and body fat and sugar content. I want to trust that everyone I’m with is able to care for themselves and the day or night will not end with me feeling depleted because they needed my money or protection or emotional life support or wisdom. It’s not that I do not enjoy helping people sometimes with money or protection or emotional support or wisdom but that cannot be my community. Where would I get fed? Where would I get filled up? At this point in my life there are few places that I belong where I don’t leave completely drained. My resources are gobbled up by others who are not doing what they need to be doing for themselves. They want what I have but aren’t willing to do the work I have done to arrive here.

I want a community of compassionate people who adventure, who wonder, who wander and who also have intention. There must be people with love, joy, compassion, self-awareness, hope, fierce sense of right and wrong, and with space for me in their life. There must be safe spaces of healed and healing people who are celebrating and crying and communing together bringing their darkness into the light. I want to go there. I’m asking the universe to bring me to my people. I know that community will take me to my next level.

I am open. I am ready. I am willing. Community or bust!

Let's Talk About Healing

I am a member of the twelve step community. I am not an addict or alcoholic but I love addicts and my program of recovery follows the twelve steps just like AA does. We replace the word alcohol with alcoholics because we are recovering from an addiction to thinking that the alcoholic or addict that we love is our responsibility. They are not. They are the responsibility of themselves and their program of recovery.

The Al-Anon program has been my home for over 20 years. Never did I think when I walked in the doors twenty years ago, that I would still be there and that the healing would still be so actively happening in my life. Part of this was that I was young and doing anything for the long term was foreign to me. Part of this was that I had no idea how deeply affected I was by the behavior of alcoholics/addicts and the learned and taught behaviors I inherited.

When I first joined the twelve step community, I heard the steps and when we would talk about the fourth step, people would talk about healing. The fourth step is admitting our shortcomings, our character defects to God, ourselves, and another human being. I was always a good student (well I tried to be) so I went hard. I got a book to guide me and I went deep into what I thought was wrong with me. I wanted to get it all out there and to heal it quick. No mercy. I wrote out all of the terrible things that made me an awful, wrong, and defective person. I talked to a sponsor, I told anyone who would listen, and made sure God knew just who He/She was dealing with. I waited to be fixed, healed, have my shortcomings removed.

I’m not going to lie, things did change and get better for me in certain ways right away. I gained knowledge and skills about alcoholism and how to let go of people and things that weren’t my responsibility. I became more peaceful, more reliable, less frantic and less co-dependent. I didn’t always allow someone else’s choices or words or actions affect me greatly. It was a great relief and I felt so much better when I attended my meetings and practiced my program. I do think it saved my life in that I learned to take myself out of danger. I learned boundaries and I learned about safety.

In meetings I would hear people say that healing or recovery was like peeling back the layers of an onion. I understood that to mean that each time you took a look at yourself in a fourth step, you would heal on a deeper level. It made sense to me that you would start with small things and move on to bigger and bigger things until you got to the core. I kept going in the program not ever really wondering what the core would be like but knowing that it was the goal or the true healing. I wanted to get there.

I’m beginning to realize that the core is a moving target. It is not a place you ever arrive at because you are never the same person. Day after day you grow and change. Day after day you heal, you hurt, you grow, you learn and you never stop. Day after day you have experiences in this world that affect you and others around you and you will have to process it at some point. I was never meant to get to the core, as I thought I would. It isn’t a destination or an ending. It is an idea like a mountain summit where you rest before continuing the climb because the mountain never stops growing.

I am gifted with a sponsor who is a wayfarer. She never stops traveling the mountain of healing and recovery. There is no dust on her hiking shoes, she does her work, and she works her program. The most important lessons that I have learned from her are that life never stops coming at you, no matter how healed you are, no matter how much work you have done, there is always more to do, because life happens. And that life is messy, unfair, wonderful, scary, marvelous, and that it just is. If we want to have a life, we have to accept whatever comes our way.

No one I know is more healed and no one I know deserves a life of ease and joy as much as her. And yet she is still healing. The lessons come, the memories continue, the path gets blocked, the legacy of the affects of alcoholism and loving alcoholics continues. I feel so honored that she trusts me enough to tell me the truth about recovery. That she doesn’t pretend that if you only follow a program, work your steps, and attend your meetings, life will be easy and that you can rest in the notion of finally being healed once and for all. She tells me often that it is like riding a bike, if you want to keep going places on your bike, you have to keep pedaling, you cannot coast forever or your bike won’t go.

I’m at another mountain summit. This last leg of the journey has been tough. I’ll be honest in that this was one of the more challenging climbs that I’ve had in a while. I feel like there were energy sucking lessons all along this path. I feel like I had these views that I would catch a glimpse of but couldn’t make out until I got to the summit. The lessons hurt, in my heart, my soul, my mind, and especially my body on this leg of my journey. I have been physically ill for many months with many different things, letting me know that all is not well in me.

This leg of my journey has been filled with grief. I feel like I’ve reached a part in my healing and recovery journey where I can see more clearly the places I have visited in the past and can only now see and feel how hard it was to be in those spaces having those experiences. I am remembering the people who I loved so much that aren’t traveling with me anymore and I miss them. Many of them didn’t want to travel any higher on the mountain. Some of them weren’t capable and I had to decide whether to stay on that summit or keep traveling. Some of them aren’t alive anymore.

The most grief I feel is when I look back and I can see the version of me that I was when I had reached each summit, and especially the me that wandered around in the valley below not even knowing that there was a mountain to climb. She has my whole heart, that girl down there with no hope, no direction, no idea what a great hiker she would be if only she knew about mountains. I look back now and see my first summit, where I found my voice and my courage and I love that me so much. She was so brave to seek out recovery. She was so brave to leave. She was so brave to ask for help. She was so brave to stay in those recovery rooms. She was so brave to ask for a sponsor. She was so brave to challenge all of her training and forge a new path.

The grief comes as I admire her and acknowledge that she had no idea that none of it was her fault. She was climbing that mountain with a giant bag of inherited generational trauma. Hiking alone is hard, hiking with a big bag of shit that isn’t yours is almost impossible. At every summit, I have chucked rocks that I realize weren’t mine out of that bag. Even in that lightening of my load, there is grief and confusion. How did that get in my bag? And sometimes when I get the answer, it just shows me that many other people that I loved had carried that weight around their entire life too. You grieve when you know that the ones you love have hurt also. Generations of pain and hurt create deeper and deeper valleys that many never get out of. Many didn’t know there were healing mountains to climb, they never had a chance.

I feel like the lesson I have just learned is that it is okay to travel alone. That if someone is slowing down my journey or asking me to wait up, it is okay to say no and leave them. One of the weights in my big bag I inherited or learned is codependence. People pleasing. Not being okay if the people around me aren’t okay. I learned to give my energy, time, attention, focus, love, and self away to others. I learned to shrink to please smaller thinking people. I learned to dim my light for people not used to the sunshine. I learned to comply, to appease, and to invest in others before investing in myself.

This makes traveling up a healing mountain very tiring. It slows me down. The thing I never realized until now is that I did not trust myself to travel alone. I didn’t want to be alone. I thought it was my job to drag everyone I love or who loves me up that mountain with me. I didn’t trust that I would meet new people at the next summit or further up the mountain if I let go of the ones that were slowing me down. I will admit that there is an abundance of people down in the valley of dysfunction. I couldn’t walk a step without running into potential friends or lovers and family down there. The further up the healing mountain I go, the less people I see traveling. It scares me. It makes me wonder if there will come a point where I stop seeing people on the path or at the summits. I yearn for connection so badly but do not want to travel down the mountain to get it.

My decision has been to trust. To look around, really look around for people who are on the mountain with me. They aren’t all gone. Some are just people I am used to traveling with and I forget to be grateful for their love and presence. My children are here and they love me. My recovery friends are here and they love me. My family is here, we may not be at the same summit but they see me and they are proud of me. My pets are happy to travel wherever I go. My co-workers are good people and they challenge and inspire me in my professional journey. There is love and support available to me and I won’t close myself off to it because it didn’t show up in the form I thought it would or in the person I had hoped it would be in. I will be grateful for anyone I encounter on this healing journey.

I am willing to leave this rock called codependency and all the other rocks I have found in my pack this year that weren’t mine to carry here at this summit. They will be left in 2023. I’m going to go forward up the mountain. I feel lost without the weight of these things I am leaving, I got used to their weight and I thought they would always be with me. There is guilt leaving them behind because some people rely on me to have these rocks to be in my life. I will leave them too. The grief will come, maybe now and maybe far from now as I look back, but it will come.

I’ve decided that I do trust myself to travel alone. I have decided that I’m good company and that I enjoy being alone with myself. The mountain is my mountain. The healing is my healing and I’ve decided that I want it no matter what. The never ending onion peel doesn’t scare me like it used to because I am letting go of the fantasy that I’ll reach a point in life where life stops happening and it is just an easy coast everyday. The only place that coasting happens is in the valley or down the mountain and I do not live in the valley anymore. I am not going down the mountain. I have chosen to climb and to heal and so I will keep looking forward, up, toward healing deeper and deeper.

A Few Thoughts On Dating

I’m a 46 year old single woman. I had recently ended a two year long-distance relationship because it was not good for me. I wasn’t going to date. I was just going to be single. I would come home nightly and sit on the couch with my dogs and I was content. Until I wasn’t.

As I sat there night after night, I realized that I never really just dated much. I always had relationships and did not stay single long. I had my first serious boyfriend at 15 and the longest I was single (as in no relationship) was 3 yrs while I was divorcing my first husband (it took years for the divorce to be final). I did not date, I was alone but I was also working three part time jobs, going to college full time and I had a young child.

We need connection. I have struggled since the pandemic and my second divorce with connection. I found myself more distant from the groups and people that I had surrounded myself with before 2020. I met my last boyfriend online and we jumped into a relationship very shortly after meeting. It was long distance but we tried to see each other and talk as much as we could. It felt good not to be alone. Until it didn’t.

So I find myself single and wanting connection. I decided to go on FaceBook dating because you can see if the person is connected to people you know and it felt safer than other sites. Ya’ll it has been a journey. I had a few days off of work because I was sick and I made a bunch of connections on the site. I was typing and talking and I had like fifteen conversations going on. I was enjoying most of them and some were like pulling teeth but when I went back to work and did not have all day to be keeping up with messages, I realized I had over connected (see pic above).

I have ADHD and I can get very excited about something that is new and novel. I will pour all my effort into it and then when it loses it’s shine and becomes a lot of work, I am done with it. So here I am with all these people wanting my time and conversation and I don’t know how to choose who to focus on.

I decided to say yes to a few dates to see if I connected in person with anyone. My first date was after work one day. We met for a drink (I don’t drink) at a local restaurant. The man was nice, good looking, successful, and we had good conversation. He seemed surprised that I was funny and witty and attractive. I was home by 5:30 and counted it as a success. He sent me a text later that said it was a pleasure to meet me. That was nice. We were both busy for the weekend so we did not talk much.

Later the next week he starts texting me and it is a lot of celebrating job successes and talking about connecting with our daughters who are away at college. Then he asks me how I feel about sharing affection. I say that I love affection with the right person when I feel safe. From there he starts asking to see me again. We make a plan to cook a pizza together at another time. That sounded sweet and fun.

His texts start being erratic and sounded like he was forgetting things or just repeating the same thing over and over. He gets a little playful on the phone messages, and I’m not afraid to be playful so I responded. He then calls me, masturbates while on the phone and hangs up when he is done. No text after, no response to a wtf text, nothing. Then sends me something hours later asking if I want to have sex. I cannot explain how yucky that experience was. I’m a grown up and I can handle sexual situations but that was so weird. I think he thinks we have a date tonight even though I told his to go “F” himself because real me do not do things like that. I’m not even opposed to phone sex, if it is mutual and discussed but this was not what happened. I do not want to be seen as a body with no feelings, a blow up doll on the end of your phone line who takes whatever you do or say with no feelings. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

I had another date with a gentleman who is older than me by about 13 years. He sounded very sweet and was a gentleman on the phone. We met at a bar for dinner. We had connected on FaceBook as friends so I had low expectations for romance, I wasn’t expecting any. When we met, he was very talkative and funny. We sat for hours eating and talking. He was very open about his life and his children and marriage. He was in therapy and glad to hear I was also. We had a good time. We have kept in touch by text and I think he would be a great friend to have. I’m being honest with him that I am dating and not only talking to him. We have not met up again, I have been busy and also sick, but he asks to meet up and do normal things like take dogs for a walk. I don’t think I am attracted to him but he has the qualities I would hope for in a man I was attracted to.

The last date I went on was me in the picture at the beginning of the blog post. I met up with a guy that I had connected with from another town near mine. He drove here to take me to dinner. The whole date was a comedy of errors. He got lost and his phone died. The restaurant we planned to eat at had over an hour wait. We ended up eating somewhere neither of us really wanted because we were hungry. He had not planned anything after dinner and I didn’t know what to do either. During dinner he told me that he dropped out of school but was a laborer. He asked me if I liked phone games or gambling and I do not. We were like perfect opposites. I have a master’s degree in education and he hated school, ran the streets. I asked about his friends and he told me they were criminals. I laughed at first but he wasn’t kidding. The red flags were flying but I was more attracted to him as the night went on (see pic above). We ended up kissing for a bit and I had to tell whatever part of me that was attracted to this man, that we had to stop and go home. I cried on the way home because this man was so not meeting the list of qualities I would like in a partner but here I was totally attracted and drawn to him. We have texted a few times since but I know that I should not see him again.

In the meantime, I have had a man call me a player and block me because I told him that I was dating several people at one time (isn’t that what dating is??). I have had men text me like crazy for one day like I’m the most important person in the world to them, and then disappear the next day with no follow up ever. I have been asked for money many times. I have had people not be who they say they are and get caught in the lie. I have met men who just want me to come to their house and cuddle with them (they don’t even know me) and women who want me be friends with them and think about if I’m really attracted to men or if I might want to hook up with them instead.

This is exhausting. I don’t think it is supposed to be like this. I have been out there for less than a month. I cannot keep adding to my collective trauma by letting these strangers into my life, even just a little bit, and having them dump all their weird shit at my feet. I want connection. I want fun. I want to know if this is normal or if dating in middle age is just a shit show for everyone. I want off the bus and I just got on, but if I get off the bus I won’t meet anyone.

I’m keeping a list of qualities I am looking for in a partner. I am writing down lessons I’m learning. I’m trying to keep my heart open and my mind open in spite of having every reason to close up shop at the moment. I find myself thinking about it logically and I cannot understand why I even want to date men. I have had a 0% success rate at having a long term relationship that met my needs and was good and healthy for both people. I think about my history in interacting with men and I have to be honest, it has not been positive. I have been hurt, traumatized, abused, deceived, used, and taken advantage of by so many men in my life, not all men, but the majority. If I had that kind of record with say cats, I would not get another cat. I would just live a cat free life.

My question to myself that I need to get curious about and find the answer to is why? Why do I want a relationship with a man? What am I willing to put myself through to get it? Is it worth it?

If you are in the forty-something dating pool and have any advise, I’ll take it. Please know that you have my deepest empathy for the journey you are on. If you are happily married, tell me why it is worth it? If you are happily single and have no desire for a partner, tell me how you arrived there. I’d love to hear how it is going out there for everyone in middle age, not just the singles. Is anyone having the time of their life?

She's Worth It

Forty-six years. It has taken me forty-six years to begin to know my worth. Somedays I cry from the grief of all the lost time when I did not know, and somedays I cry knowing that at least I am beginning to know instead of living forever not knowing. The grief has been surprising but it shouldn’t be. Of course there is grief, I missed out on so much and I gave the best parts of me away to everyone else.

I know that I come on here all the time with revelations about myself and they have all been true and enlightening. They were stepping stones to a true knowing. I knew I was getting closer all the time but I could not get there. This year, and all the years leading up to this year, have been full of the work of self discovery. What makes this year different is that I have some of the pieces that were missing that I did not even know existed.

For example, I got evaluated for ADHD this summer. I had been made aware of the possibility that I may have it by my new therapist. She suggested it one day as I rambled on and cried about how I couldn’t find my checkbook that I needed to pay my tax preparer. Of course not being able to find my checkbook meant that I had to search the house, which meant that I had to go through every other random thing in the house that I piled away, procrastinated about, or ignored. The shame spiral began and the overwhelm triggered the end of the world catastrophizing she was witnessing.

I laughed at the suggestion because I had no idea how ADHD presented in women and girls and I did not consider myself hyper-active, in fact I would sell my right kidney for an ounce of extra energy most days. The more I read, the more it fit me, and the more I was able to see a piece of me that was hidden all of these years.

The appointment to be evaluated would take a while, three months. While waiting I started to feel more anxious and also more at home in myself than ever before. I was reading and learning more about ADHD and it was explaining some of the things that I had felt shame for all of my life. Turns out there was a reason I was always late. I had time blindness. Turns out being organized is very difficult for me. Turns out that hyper-focusing on things for a bit and then totally losing interest is normal in an ADHD brain. Turns out that even feeling a disproportionate amount of shame around normal human mistakes is also part of ADHD.

No one, not one person around me would have described me as having ADHD as an adult. I have created systems for everything. I mask like a champion and I know that I have to work harder than most to appear put together. It is exhausting. Finding out that my brain lacks dopamine was a game changer. It changed how I looked at myself and at who I was and what I did.

I suddenly felt really proud of myself for doing so well all of this time at a disadvantage. I suddenly had an empathy for myself where self-loathing used to live. I suddenly realized that it was possible that life didn’t have to be as hard as it has been.

My son has a learning disability and I have done so much learning about how different brains can learn or how they be physically and physiologically built differently than what we consider the norm. I have spent years explaining to him that it’s not that he isn’t smart, it’s just that he is smart in non-socially accepted ways. His brain is actually a fascinating place to visit and gives him gifts of creativity and logic that others do not possess but he can feel less than because a standard test tells him that he is behind. My job has been to educate myself and him, and our family about just how wonderful he is and how smart his brain is even if it isn’t in a conventional way. I’ve never met anyone who works harder in a world not built for him.

The journey I have taken with my son prepared me to see myself in a very different light when I was suddenly the one with the different brain. I felt so proud of myself for figuring out how to do school in a world where girls weren’t looked at as possibly having ADHD, especially the inattentive type like I have. No one noticed that it was hard for me. No one spent hours taking me to testing, finding me a tutor, giving me pep talks or giving me a medication that may help me focus. No one taught me life hacks or explained brain chemistry to me. I just created systems to get through. I got pretty good at it. I even learned to cope with the constant jokes about me being messy or disorganized or late.

If I could go back in time and meet that little girl who struggled so much with no answers or help, I would scoop her up, look her in her face and tell her that she is brave. I would tell her that she is standing on two boxes and still can’t see over the fence but it isn’t her fault. I would tell her that there is nothing wrong with her, it’s just a little thing about her brain that works a little differently, and that it might even be a little gift sometimes to have a brain that isn’t like the others. I would tell her about the great things that she would accomplish in spite of all of this (let’s add in the fact that we over came a great amount of trauma as well). I’m fucking proud of her.

I never thought I was worth much. I thought I was broken, damaged goods. I really did. I didn’t want to feel that way. I wanted to believe what my church school told me all those years, that God loved me no matter what and that all people were worthy, but I never did. Not ever. I accepted less than I deserved all the time. When you feel worthless, you give to others what you wish you had because it feels like that is how it works. I don’t know how to explain it, but I know I lived it.

If there was a problem, it was probably my fault. If a relationship wasn’t working, I probably needed to give more, be more, do more. If I was unhappy, I was ungrateful for what I had. It never occurred to me that I deserved more from my partner. There was no standard, I snatched up breadcrumbs like a hungry duck, never ever thinking that I deserved a whole bakery. I really believed I was a mess, a broken mess and that I should be grateful to anyone willing to spend time with this hot mess express.

Well things are changing. I am changing. I’ve got new glasses and I cannot believe how I never saw my beautiful self before. Not beautiful as in pretty, I’ve felt pretty before, but beautiful like amazing. I see my amazingness. I see how beautiful my life is and I realize that I made this. I created this beautiful life. In spite of all of the challenges. My children are beautiful people and I did that. My house is full of love and laughter and tears and hard conversations and I did that. I have four spoiled rotten pets who all crash out on the couch next to me every night and I brought them here. I have a great job doing something that I love and I made that happen. I have recovery from being affected by the disease of addiction and I worked so hard for that. I have self-knowledge and self-love because I found therapist after therapist all these years and did ALL the work to arrive at this beautiful place.

I used to think that being divorced twice was proof that I was worthless, that I couldn’t make things work in life and love. Now I realize that I am so loved and so brave and so full of experience in the relationship department. The other day I got out all of the rings that men have given me and put them on just to have a visual reminder that several people have loved me enough to buy an expensive outward symbol to show me that love and commitment. It was silly at first but it did help me to realize that even if those relationships weren’t perfect or forever, they were real. I know that I worked heard in those relationships, so damn hard. Choosing to leave those relationships when the pain was too much was self-love. Choosing to open my heart and try again and again in the face of perceived failure, that was brave. I deserve all of the love and effort and support and affection I have poured into others all of these years. Even if I do not ever get if from a partner, I deserve to give it to myself.

I’ve just recently chosen to end a relationship and be alone. I realized that I was once again happily accepting breadcrumbs and breaking my own heart because I forgot I deserve the whole bakery. It is so hard to choose yourself when those old feelings of worthlessness still live in your cells. They whisper to you that you will never have what you dream about. They remind you that you have to work harder than others and accept anything back as good enough. I’ve once again decided that it is worth the risk to be alone. I have a lot to learn about the new me. The me that I am now seeing, that was hidden from me. The brave, loving, wonderful, patient, creative, and strong me that I couldn’t see is standing before me. I have a date with her. I want to take her to the doctor and see if I can get her the loving care and treatment that she has needed for so long. I want to take her out to do all of her favorite things. I want to spend time holding her while she cries about how hard this has all been, because it has been so hard. I want to sing to her, hold her tight, and I want to show her until she knows from her head to her toes that she is worthy. She always was.

The Mental Load

If you have been reading my posts or checking in with me in person, you might have gathered that I have been on the struggle bus. I recently described it to some friends as feeling like Charlie Brown with a rain cloud following me wherever I go. I do not want to be in eternal rain cloud land but wherever I go, there it is. Thankfully this isn’t my first rain cloud rodeo and I know that rain clouds don’t last forever, I cannot control when the cloud comes or goes, and the cloud always shows up to teach me something.

This was not an average year for me. I started over at a new job. No matter how seasoned I feel in my profession, starting over at a new place is always stressful. It is work to learn a new building, new culture, new procedures, new curriculum, and navigate new relationships. I’m very glad I chose this new job, but there is no getting around the learning curve of the first year. It added a pile onto my already full mental load. My two youngest entered middle school and both did cross country, track and travel soccer. My oldest had her last year of college and graduated in May and just moved into a new apartment to start her internship. Did I mention that there was a deadly school shooting on my daughter’s college campus not far from where she lived? Our family’s emotional needs were HIGH this year.

In an article in Psychology Today, the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Reseach says that “In recent years, sociologists have attempted to study another aspect of women’s household workload: the mental work of keeping a family running. You can think of it as the brain power that goes into running a household such as remembering to stop for a gallon of milk on the way home, keeping track of the registration deadline for a kid’s activity, or supporting children’s emotional ups and downs.” (2021). We are learning that a majority of this work can fall to women in a married household. Well when you are the household because you are divorced, you get it all. The nature of my job is to be a caregiver of many children and their families, so the last part about supporting emotional ups and downs is multiplied many times over for me. I’d love to say that I check my job duties at the door but I do not, I cannot.

I have a few other special qualities that make the mental load of life feel like a Charlie Brown rain cloud at times. I am particularly sensitive to judgement, criticism, and negativity because of my trauma history. My brain is hard wired for protection and I have an uncanny ability to hear tone, remember words, and make connections between words and actions. If you comment on people’s larger bodies all the time in a negative way, I understand that you think less of me because my body is large. You don’t have to say it to me, I can feel it. If you have nothing nice to say around me, I will assume that you are unhappy with me and that I need to change something in our dynamic so that you will be more positive. My brain will always think it is my fault, my job and add it to my to do list: my mental load. I really have to be in a healthy space, be attuned to my body and very connected to myself to be able to interact in a healthy way with many people.

I am being tested soon to see if I have ADHD. This was not on my radar until this year when I started seeing a new therapist. She brought it up as a possibility and gave me a preliminary screener. I scored a 95% on the test and that mean I likely have a pretty good case of ADHD. This might mean that there is a medical reason for my inability to cope with my mental load at times. It is not a moral failure, it is a brain malfunction. I don’t know how to feel about this yet. I have so many feelings about it, but one of the biggest feelings is relief because on the top of my mental load to do list was always to figure out how to cope with my mental load. I was always failing. Turns out there may be good reason I fail and I might be able to cross that off my list soon.

Speaking of crossing things off the mental load list, I have been doing just that for the last few weeks. A talk with my therapist helped me understand that I can take steps to decrease my mental load just by looking around my home. Anything that I walk by and have to add it to my to do list can be adding to my mental load. I did not understand this at first so I made a list. I started in my closet. There were so many clothes hanging in there that required thought. Why did those jeans still have a tag on them? Oh right I was going to keep them in case I lost 10 lbs because then they might fit. That reminds me, I should lose 10 lbs. That reminds me I should get that treadmill set up in the basement so I can workout to try to fit in those jeans. That reminds me, you can’t just workout, you have to diet, do I have the right groceries to diet? You can see the mental load mountain building and that was just one pair of jeans.

The more I looked the more the mountain grew. I had craft projects I had been meaning to finish from 8 years ago. I had papers that hadn’t been filed or shredded in years. I had toys in the garage from when my children were little that they never played with anymore. When I thought about one single thing, say a craft project, it was a string that led to a deeper tangle every time. If I wanted to finish making a sign I had bought supplies for I had to get out the vinyl and the Cricut machine. I haven’t used the machine in a while and it needs a software update. Now they have changed how the program works and I have to relearn that. I don’t have enough of the vinyl color I wanted so I’ve got to run to the craft store. At the craft store I see they are having a yarn sale, that reminds me that I have that blanket to finish, what specific color of brown was that yarn? This looks close enough so I buy it, get it home and it is not the right color. Now I have two unfinished projects and yarn to take back, but who am I kidding, I won’t and I’ll just add it to the mountain of yarn I have that reminds me that I never have time to knit anymore.

Mountain of yarn

My mission for the last few weeks was to clear the things that take me down the rabbit hole of the mental load. I took papers to be shredded, I am renting a dumpster to throw away all the things that we do not need anymore. I am finishing jobs that can easily be finished and I am hiring people to do the ones that I do not have the skill or capacity to do myself. It has been so difficult but it feels so good. I feel the strings attached to all the things being cut as I throw out the root. Those jeans that took me down the rabbit hole are now at the resale shop waiting for a new owner. Why keep something that gives me two new jobs. If something doesn’t fit, I can get rid of it instead of giving myself the job of diet and exercise. I can choose to diet and exercise if I want to but I really don’t need another job right at the moment.

I’m cleaning up relationships also. I am taking time to untangle myself from other people. That means that I need to know if being around you feels good or if being around you adds to my mental load. If being around you makes me feel like I need to fix me, I need to figure out why. If being around you drains me or fills me, I need to figure out why. I’m cutting all those strings that lead me to mental load mountains and it is hard. It is lonely. It will be worth it. Sometimes it is as simple as just recognizing the mental load associated with that person. My children have an immense mental load and I gladly take it on (but do sometimes complain about it-hint: travel soccer) because they are my people. They bring joy and love along with their needs. My pets add to my load but they also bring me companionship and humor. I’ve heard that the secret to relationships is boundaries. Learning those is part of the mental load I am willing to take on because the end result will be peace.

The bottom line for me is that my cloud is shrinking. First I became aware of the cloud, then I talked about the cloud with people who could help me with it. Then I accepted the cloud, made friends with it almost. I had to sit in the rain and feel how it felt to be in it. Now I am learning what to do about the cloud and the rain. I’m changing what I can and that is all I can do. Someone just rang my doorbell and I answered it in my bathrobe at 2pm. It was a friend and her family just wanting to say hello. I’m sure I looked like I had been battling the rain cloud to them, because I had, but they were a little ray of sun that let me know that the clouds will clear, the sun will shine, and I can take control of my mental load so that it doesn’t control me.

The Middle Age

Middle age is so weird. It is bizarre. I don’t think it helps that I’m doing things against the system of our culture, but even if I weren’t, middle age is bonkers. I never gave one thought to middle age until I landed here. I thought about youth and being young, and I thought about being old and dying. To me it feels like pregnancy. Everyone talks about trying to get pregnant and announcing pregnancy and then talk turns to birth and after pregnancy but not much is talked about during those long nine months. The times that I was pregnant, I was so concerned about how long it took in the middle! It was a long and lonely stretch that was filled with so many personal challenges and adventure for me, but was mostly an inward journey, not something everyone else was interested in or a part of. I’m feeling this way right now in mid-life.

My life up until my early forties was a whirlwind. I look at that time in my life now and it exhausts me just thinking about it. College, house, marriage, child, traumatic divorce, work full time in my chosen career, more college, remarriage, more children, travel, leaving my chosen career to be a stay at home mom, death of my first spouse, therapy, Al-Anon, friendships, mom play dates, gain weight, lose weight, three different houses, go back to work, divorce number two, putting a child through college, etc. It was eventful to say the least. I could write a book for each thing I wrote and I have been the main character in all the stories. If I were to read those books, I would understand why that main character might want a break, a slowing down, a rest, a sinking into the middle age. The reality is that I’m really struggling and it is not a graceful transition.

My second marriage ended in a very mature, non-dramatic, and peaceful divorce. We knew we would be better apart and we wanted to be good parents and partners after we separated. The plans were made, the transitions happened and life went on. Our oldest was in college and youngest finishing elementary school. I stayed in the family home and he moved to a home within biking distance. We would share custody of the kids on a weekly basis. In the beginning, I felt a sense of excitement and freedom. I had whole weeks free, which hadn’t happened since before I had my first child. I stayed late at work, went out with friends, had dates, went shopping, or just watched television. It was new, it was weird, but it was exciting.

A few years have passed and I do enjoy my alone time, but the reality that I am missing out on seeing my children half of their time on earth has set in. That is tough and sometimes the ache for them is tremendous. I have the same ache for my oldest who is now a college graduate and who lives away from home full time. I knew that ache was coming because I have heard about empty nest syndrome for a while now, but having the double ache, I wasn’t prepared. It’s like trying to bandage a wound but every week, it is ripped open again. The twins are in middle school now and I can feel the shift toward their peers and I know that time with them will start slipping faster and I have tremendous grief over it. I don’t want to slow it or stop it, I’m just not sure how to grieve it. I’m feeling it as much as I can, but it does hit hard sometimes. I get resentful of things that take their time from me like travel soccer or track meets. I love watching them do what they love with their peers, but it puts me on the sidelines where I am a spectator of their life and not a participant. I was surprised by my feelings around that. I hear other parents talk about sports and things and they are so happy to do it, so glad to have their kids involved and busy, it makes me feel selfish and jaded that I get mad about how much time it takes from us. I know each year will take more and I’m going to have to deal with my feelings around that.

When I was very little, I was painfully shy. I was quiet and obedient. Somewhere along the line, I learned that in order to get attention, I had to be the opposite of that, so I became very outgoing and some might say rebellious. It’s always been a puzzle to me how I could have been both. I’m reading the book “Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking” by Susan Cain right now. She talks about how being an extrovert is the prized quality in our society and how most people feel they need to strive to be an extrovert even if it is not their true nature to climb the social or career ladder. She talks about how we can get lost in that false identity until something happens that wakes us back up to the truth of who we are naturally. I can see now, that the pandemic was that for me. I never felt so much relief as when I didn’t have to be an extrovert any longer. I didn’t have to go out, I didn’t have to entertain, I didn’t have to say yes to invites, I didn’t have to do all the social stuff at work. I enjoyed the solitude of the shut down. It was such a relief to be told to stay home, to be told to cozy up in my house with my family, to stop socializing. Now that restrictions are lifted and those expectations are back, I’ve been really struggling. I’m lonely at times and I miss some of the dizzying busyness that was life pre-covid, but in my heart I know that it is just because I was in the stream of normal American life, extroverted busyness. It felt good to be considered normal and I knew what was expected of me. Even if it was exhausting, I was meeting expectations. Now I feel like I’m doing everything wrong. It feels right to me personally, but society casts doubt in my mind, and social media makes me feel weird and lacking. I want to be on my couch drinking coffee until 3 pm on a Saturday, not getting up at 6am to drive three hours to a soccer game that is over in one hour. I want to go out to dinner with one or two people and have deep conversations instead of meeting 15 people at the bar to drink and get wild. I want to clean my house just so I can sit on the couch and enjoy it being clean, rather than cleaning it up so I can invite people over to mess it up. I want to sit on my porch and watch the birds instead of attending the concert downtown with hundreds of others. I feel like a hermit. I’m lonely and I’m also very content and satisfied. The part that is lonely is that most people I know are in the pursuit of extroversion and seeking excitement outside of themselves. The hard part of being an introvert is that we are hard to meet. Even if we do meet another introvert out there in the world, we probably won’t know it because when we are “out there” we mask our introversion and become extroverts for the night. No one is going to tell you at a party that their ideal friend date would be knitting while watching a movie with someone. That is not an acceptable thing to say in the exciting world of extroverts.

I’m dating someone. We’ve actually been together for almost two years this July. Dating in middle age is also weird. When I was younger, I was looking for a partner to move in with, get married to, have children with and live happily ever after. Well I’ve done that, twice. Turns out that happily ever after is not as easy as it sounds. I have the home, I have the career, I have the kids, I have a life. I don’t need a partner for all of that (except a great co-parent which I have). Turns out, you can go it alone. When I first started dating again, I needed to know that I was alive, attractive, and that I was wanted. Turns out, all were true. Online dating is a story for another time, but I did meet with and connect with people on there. This is were I met my person. We started talking and met up in person shortly after. We connected in a deep way very early on and wanted to keep seeing each other. So we did and we do. He lives about 2 1/2 hours from me. We have houses, jobs, friends, and lives outside of each other. We come together when we can and we are apart when we can’t. It is very difficult to have a relationship that is so out of the norm. It generally works for us, but it doesn’t look like what I was taught was the way it worked (house, marriage, kids, together forever in the same home). We just spent a week together after being apart for over a month and a half. It was weird, wonderful, difficult, and lovely. We know that is is not normal and we sometimes laugh about it and we sometimes are sad about it. I don’t have a road map for this kind of relationship. I don’t know anyone doing it like this. So many times I feel lost, weird, and confused about it all. Do I want to see him more because that is what I’m supposed to want? Do I want us to live closer or together because that is what I’m supposed to want or is it just easier, would it take less effort? Do I need someone to be there with me to live with and have a shared life of spending everyday together or do I want my own space and time? Is it even okay to want that as a middle aged woman? Isn’t the goal to find your person? If that isn’t my goal, what am I even doing? What I do know is that I am loved by him. I know that I love him well. I know that we have a reciprocal relationship that works for us, for now. Dating at 45 is weird, and I chose to do it in the weirdest way as far as society goes. It would be easier to do it more traditionally but I don’t think it would be what I need right now.

I’ve never felt more me and also my body has never felt more foreign to me. I was looking for pictures for this post and realized that I have stopped taking glamorous selfies of myself. Back just a few years ago, I was always snapping pics of me when I thought I was having a good hair day or felt cute. I don’t feel that way anymore. I cannot remember the last time I looked in the mirror and thought, damn she’s cute or that is a banging outfit. I didn’t realize I was at this point until today. I opened this blog and realized that I looked nothing like the pictures I had originally posted. My hair is short, thick, and going gray. My face is much less slender and I often do not wear makeup. My clothes are functional but I do not wear them to show off my body, more likely that I’m hiding it behind something big and boring. You will rarely catch me wearing high heels and will now find me in supportive shoes that help my sore feet. I used to love wearing shorts and dresses in summer but now I don’t like to wear shorts (they get swallowed up by my thighs) and dresses require shorts underneath (for the thigh rubbing) and don’t feel sexy or free anymore. Tank tops show my large arms and rolls of skin spilling over my bra in all places. Pulling my hair back is necessary for the internal temperature that is almost never below very hot in my body, but It makes my very round face feel like a bobblehead. Jeans are a cruel device no longer made for my comfort but made to stretch over my legs and hips only to require a belt at the top (which thanks to high rise trends is now just below my boobs-not where a belt belongs). Shirts are shorter, shorts are beyond short, sweat pants are thicker and warmer (did I mention I’m always hot?), and my favorite way to hide my body- the hooded sweatshirt, started being cropped. The clothes aside, I don’t know how to do this middle age body business. I decided to stop fighting the losing battle of gray hair and now I don’t know who I am when I see myself. Light hair?! I’ve never had light hair. Not to mention it is now curly after three kids, and as thick as ever. I don’t know, I just don’t know. What I do know is that either society has conditioned me to feel bad about this stage of my physical appearance or I’m really not putting for the effort needed but I kind of don’t want to. I spent my life depending on the male gaze, to be validated for my looks, to be complimented on my hair or my clothes, and feeling like an old gray haired-witch that lives in the woods and wears robes, feels a little freeing. Sigh. Middle age body image and beauty standards are difficult.

All of this was a very long way of saying that I have no idea what I am doing or who I am. I’m not sure what I want, how I feel, or how I want to be. The only thing I can do is show up each day and get through. I can reflect on how doing certain things makes me feel and then decide if I continue to do them or not. I can look in the mirror and accept the person looking back or decide to make changes. It’s really personal and lonely. Kind of like those nine months of pregnancy when your whole body and your whole mindset, and your whole being changes, but everyone just wants to know what the end will be. I’m in the middle. I have no idea. It is strange and wonderful, and beautiful and so hard. If you are on the journey of middle age-”hi”-glad you are here, and we could chat about it or just knit on the couch and watch a movie. If you are young, be nice to middle agers, this is a strange time. If you are older, help please!! Tell me I won’t be a raging inferno of heat and insecurity forever!!

Entering the Darkness

Winter Of The Heart

These pages have been frozen and this site unopened since June. I was hiding, hibernating, wintering, healing, surviving. Call it what you want but I am out of sync with the world. It was a strange feeling to be wintering in the summer, to be wintering for longer than the season, but no matter the season, this is where I have been residing.

It has taken all of my energy to just live. I know that most people feel that way because our society has created an unsustainable grind culture, and I feel that as well. My experience is deeper, though, and if you have ever done personal healing work, you will know the exhaustion of wintering as few others do.

Some, including me, have wondered if I’m just depressed. The answer is yes, I am depressed, and I am in treatment for that, but this is different. This is surgery. This is cutting down deep to the hidden things while you are awake and living and breathing. It is opening your chest cavity up and leaving it open for an extended period of time to extract the black cancer of trauma and pain that has lived and entangled itself in you for all of your life.

You show up at work with a heavy coat of armor covering your big open wound. You arrive to soccer practice and cheer even though every breath hurts. You cook the dinners, buy the things, smile, laugh, and love with your chest wide open. No one knows that just living and breathing takes great effort. It is a hidden wound.

The truth is, you don’t want people to know. What a tender, tender wound. How could you risk anyone knowing and taking advantage of your wide openness? Those who know have to be trusted with your very life. There are a few and what a relief to take off your armor and have someone gently embrace you knowing how to tenderly hold you, wounds and all.

I’m caring for myself, loving myself, learning myself. I’m navigating my way through this extraction of darkness as best I can. I’ve not been shy or quiet about my troubles and pain and my healing on here. Writing is a therapy for me and sharing is a hope for me. I hope that sharing brings light into the dark places that we are afraid to talk about. I certainly do not like when near or total strangers know my deep, dark, personal thoughts but I heard in recovery that secrets and sickness grow in dark places and that they heal in the light. My hope is that someone reading this will see light where before there was only darkness. My hope is also that you never feel sorry for me and this struggle or treat me with fragility because I shared. If you are not the one that sees me in person without my armor on, then we carry on as usual because I have a life to live.

I struggle so much with that paradox of sharing my heart and then protecting it at all costs. It is a strange place to be, but I also learned in recovery that it is possible to let down your walls and share your story in a safe place, then put on your armor to go out into the wild, terrible world. So while I sit in this chair, in front of this screen, I imagine a sacred space between me and you, were it is safe to share and believe that my sharing my experience may help you in this intimate energy I’m creating. I’m happy to talk about what I write in a planned intimate setting with someone, but it is hard when I am spilling my coffee carrying 7 bags into work and someone says they read my post. I feel exposed. I feel vulnerable. I feel like I did something wrong. I don’t know how to do both, share and then accept feedback in person, but I’ll continue because discomfort is part of vulnerability.

So I’m in eternal winter, and I’m resisting the urge to label it as wrong or unhealthy or something that needs to be fixed. I’m in the middle of transitioning therapists and it has been such a positive experience. I am reaching so far into the darkness and exposing it to the light. It is the deepest work I have done to date and I’m incredibly emotional about it. I am healing my heart. I am healing my inner child. I am healing my past. I am changing who I get to be. I know that my healing will send ripples out into the universe. It will change my children. It will change my family. It will change my friends and my sweet love. It will change my co-workers and students. It will change everything.

I’m eternally grateful for the fire keepers who have kept me warm in this harsh winter. I’m grateful for my Al-Anon program that feeds my soul and feeds my bravery, and is always a safe place to land. I am grateful for grace, forgiveness, grocery pick up and robot vacuums. I am beyond grateful for professional therapists who do no harm and guide me through this. And I’m grateful for an understanding partner who listens with an open heart full of love for me.

If this post has touched your heart and you want to talk to me about it, send me a message or a comment, and we can set up a time to connect. You can leave a heart in the comment section to let me know that the light is being shone in the the darkness. If you see me with 7 bags and spilling coffee or pulling in hot at the soccer game, keep it to yourself. I’m not bearing my soul in the wild world-no way-it’s not safe out there.

The High Cost of Fuel

Just like gas prices, the energy demands on a person have never been higher.

The school year is over and it is summer break for me as a teacher. I have no other way to explain how I feel except that I am out of gas, energetically speaking. The tank is empty. As life would have it, I was also literally out of fuel on the last day of school. I had to fill up my tank. I had heard that Costco had the cheapest gas prices so I went there. It still cost me over $100 to fill up my tank. I don’t know that I’ve ever paid over $100 for a full tank of gas before. It was a little shocking and made me think twice about where I would drive and how far I would go with these prices.

My answer, for the most part, has been to give it a rest. I have been giving my car a rest and not driving many places, and I have been giving myself a rest by not doing many things. It has been a little less than a week since I’ve not been working and I still feel empty. Today, as I was drinking coffee and trying to figure out how to fuel up to get done what I wanted and needed to get done today I realized that I’m not sure how to fuel up.

This year at work, I had never worked so hard for so long on a nearly empty tank. I’m not sure I ever filled up. It was like every night I put just enough fuel in to get me through the next day. I didn’t have a quarter of a tank let alone a half or full tank. The energy I was putting out did not equal the energy I was putting back in. I honestly tried but I didn’t have that ability to put more in my tank than what felt like a few dollars a day.

I know that some can relate with the gas prices as they are right now. Some people will tell you, hurry up and fill up now while gas is under $5/gallon but you only have $10 to put in the tank that day. The day you get paid the prices have risen and you get less for your money. It is a cycle and you can’t get out because you only have enough to survive.

I’ve been in the pace of living paycheck to paycheck and the stress is overwhelming. You feel like you will never get ahead and that you can never take a break to breathe or fuel/save up. It is just the daily grind of getting just enough. That is how I felt energetically this year. Does it matter who is to blame for the prices of fuel being so high? Is there one thing in particular that is causing it? To be honest, I’m too tired to find out about why gas prices are too high right now. If I’m honest, I know it is probably many factors and one of them is that big systems profit and individuals suffer. Well, don’t I know how that feels being a teacher? The system will require all that I have to give and more without any thought to how it affects me personally.

One of my survival instincts is to go along to get along. I want to be good, perfect, give my all, and help no matter what. I think it can be a very good quality to have. I have a lot of care and concern for others and want to help them. I can get caught up in this way of living, and working, at my own expense. I will give you gas from my tank because you tell me you need it. I will give it to your family because they need it too. I will give it to the next person because well, I’ve got a quarter of a tank and you tell me your fuel light its on. Surely I have the heart to give from my stores for you. As long as I have a drop or a fume left, I feel I have an obligation to share it with you if you need it.

This year, there was no shortage of me giving of myself thinking others needed my time, energy, problem solving skills, help, and support more than I did. I passed out my fuel all willy nilly. I put $5 in the tank every night just to give out $9 in gas to everyone else. I was running on fumes daily and acting like I had a full tank for the taking. I wanted to blame everyone else for this problem. I wanted someone to notice and say that it wasn’t fair and offer to fill me up with fuel. The problem was I was surrounded by so many who were also on empty and had no ability to fill anyone up. Also, it isn’t supposed to work that way.

The problem is actually in my thinking. The way that I think is learned trauma induced codependency, over-responsibility to others, and weak boundaries. Many would not think that this is a problem, mostly because it is of great benefit to them if I continue living my life this way. I’m Costco on sale. I have super low prices on fuel, in fact, I’m losing myself by not charging enough for my time, energy, or expertise. Is that anyone else’s fault? Maybe. Can I control anyone else? Can I change an entire broken system? Can I change a world that expects me to be the cheapest place in town for fuel? No.

I did realize last week that I can only control me. I set my prices. I’m in charge of my fuel tank, my energy reserves. I recognize that I am on empty at the moment. I am realizing that there is no quick trip to repair how I have lived this year. There is no quick fill up and even if there was, I don’t have the means to fill up all at once right now. I am going to work on accepting my energy level as it is right now. I am going to work on accepting what happened and what I allowed this year, personally and professionally. I am going to work on resting even when that is in direct opposition to what I want to do and what the world seems to be doing at the beginning of summer. I am going to really look at my fuel prices and the value of what I have to offer versus what I charge or give away for free. I am going to take a hard look at what energy I save for those I love most. They (myself included) deserve the best of me, not what is left over.

My first thought is to go straight into major changes and big moves. I do not, however, have the energy for big moves and major changes. I need to start with the things in my ability and energy level that I can change. The first is to think of boundaries I need around my tank. I must exercise my “no” muscle. That includes doing more work or committing to more work than I have energy for. It includes asking for help. I need to surround myself with people who are able to fill their own tanks and not those walking around with siphons ready to attach themselves to my tank. I need to ignore the ridiculous notion that just because it is summer I have to be busy and do all of the summer things or I’m wasting my “summer off”.

Looking to the future, I need to decide how will I protect my energy no matter who is around me and how badly they need fuel. I need to realize that giving away what I need for myself isn’t loving to anyone. I need to realize that a big organization will gladly suck an individual dry to keep itself running and decide how much I let them take from me before I say no more.

My prices will be going up on my energy. Not because I don’t care but because I do. I care about myself. If I don’t care about me, no one will. I have to look for the things and people who help fill my tank up without also giving what they don’t have. Resourced people are hard to find these days but I want to be one of them. I want to put out the closed sign when I’m running low and not put the open sign back up until I have ample reserve.

So if you see me this summer, staring at a sunset, putting my feet in the water, drinking coffee or reading a book, leave me alone. Do not ask me to stop doing those mundane, easy, beautiful things in service of you or a system. Mind your business. I am filling up. I am toning my muscles. I am getting larger and better. If I tell you no, it is out of love, self love. We all need to respect that more. If you ask me to drive a long way, you better have fuel where I’m headed because gas prices are too high right now for empty trips. Miss me with your urgency or your desperation. I am on E and my low fuel light is on. I’m aware that there is no finger to point except at myself, so I have personal work to do. Yelling at the system won’t help, but refusing to take my normal place in the system does have an impact. This won’t be easy, I’m asking for grace. May you have it too.

Surviving or Living?

What do I do when I slip back into survival mode instead of living?

I have been recovering from codependency, loving addicts and alcoholics, and my past for the past 18 years. I’m not talking little bits of self care like bubble baths and face masks. I’m talking wake up everyday and do the hard work of recovery. I have been looking at my life and myself with rigorous honesty. I have attended recovery meetings for family and friends of alcoholics weekly. I have turned my will and my life over to a Higher Power that I spent years learning to trust and believe in. I have read books, went on retreats, have seen numerous therapists, journaled and prayed for 18 years.

I have looked back on, examined, relived, and healed many parts of my past that were traumatic. I have learned to say no and I have learned to walk away when something or someone is not good for me anymore. I have loved, grieved, cried, gotten honest and faced and did all of the hard things placed in front of me.

I have crawled through glass to get to a place where I am not surviving, I am living. It was worth every bit of hard work, every cut and scrape. Living is beautiful. Feeling is brutiful (brutal and beautiful). Loving is sacred and a gift. Leaving is honoring the truth.

The past few months I find myself in a backslide into survival. I’m not eating well. I’m not exercising. I’m not keeping up with the house. I am not seeing friends or doing things that I love. I cannot sit down without my eyes crossing and my body drifting to sleep. I don’t have the energy for anything. My weekends and evenings are spent trying to stay on top of household tasks. People ask me for things and I promptly forget to do them. I can’t think critically or creatively and words escape me when I need them.

I’m not going to live this way, it is not in fact living. I’m killing myself for something that would not return the favor. I’m being sucked back into a life I left and a way of living that nearly broke me. Give, give, give. Take it over and over and over again no matter the damage it does to your heart and soul. Believe the promises that it won’t always be this way and keep the hope alive that someday will come before you break. I don’t know what to do just yet but I know I have to choose me. I have to choose health. I cannot tell you how disappointed I feel in myself that I find myself here after all of the work I’ve done. That is life, no one is exempt from it, but you can make choices that put you first.

I cannot remember the last time I felt happy, rested, fulfilled and respected but I know I have. Once you have felt that in your life, you cannot go back to a place where it is absent and be content. I will do what it takes. I will trust my Higher Power to lead my path even though it might take me in a direction that I do not understand yet. Pain is a great motivator. I know when it shows up in my life that I have to pay attention to it because it comes with a lesson. Lessons do not go away, they circle around and around until they are mastered. I only get this one life. I will not just survive it.

Anxious?...Me?

You can run but you cannot hide from yourself. I have been reading about relationships and attachment styles for years. I never could describe my attachment style, maybe because I didn’t want to admit it. I wanted to be a securely attached person, meaning that I had a healthy attachment to others. I wanted to believe that I could rise above what I used to be and be something else. Hmmmm where have I done this before? Oh yes, I remember, when I refused to believe that alcohol and drugs and loving alcoholics and drug addicts had had a profound impact on my life. That also worked out well for me.

So yesterday I was planning my day out and trying to connect with someone that I hadn’t seen in a bit. There was a misunderstanding about what that meet up would look like and when it would happen. I reacted badly. I took it very personal and felt rejected, unimportant and confused. I went down a rabbit hole of feeling like a fool, rejected, angry, not good enough, and like there was no hope for my relationships and I was doomed to be alone, partnerless, friendless, and familyless. It was a pretty extreme reaction and I was surprised by it.

I see a therapist and we recently talked through some of the losses I have endured in my life. Losses of relationship, friendship, mentorship are very upsetting. I have had my share and I haven’t always had time, energy or the safe space to process my feelings about it. Two years ago I had gone to a retreat with a counselor I had been seeing remotely for a few years. He lived in California but was coming here to do a retreat with clients that he saw remotely. It was a wonderful retreat and I had learned so much from it about feeling my feelings, letting my body process the energy inside and use or release it. I had learned to own my power to create my own life and I had felt a great sense of empowerment and also being held in safety while I explored painful truths and memories.

Two weeks later during my remote session with this counselor, he started talking about some pretty weird things and just didn’t seem right to me. He was talking about feeling like he was one with Jesus and that he could make things happen because he was directly connected to God. I felt very weird about it because we never talked about religion in sessions and he seemed to have a strange energy about it and strange look in his eyes. That week would prove to me that my perceptions were correct and he became mentally unwell. He started leaving me voicemails calling me names from the bible and telling me to join him in his kingdom. I didn’t know what to do. I could tell he was not okay, his clothing was dirty and his hair wild. He was sending me videos of him speaking in tongues and wandering the streets of California.

The person that I had trusted with my mental health and healing for the last three years was having a mental breakdown. It was almost beyond my comprehension. I felt care and concern for him because he had helped me so much over the last few years, but I could not help him because of distance and also because I had learned from him that I needed to protect myself from his unacceptable behavior. It was an extremely triggering event for me. I had trusted this person with my innermost sensitivities and traumas and he had used them against me when he became ill.

That felt like my marriage to Ryan. He knew my innermost weaknesses and sensitive spots and would use them to manipulate me so he could continue in his addiction. The person that I had attached my life to could no longer be trusted.

That felt like my relationship to my father. He was the one that was supposed to be my rock, my support, my most secure relationship, but he was unable to be that for me. As a child I did not trust that relationship and it continues to this day.

There are others, many other examples of this pattern in my life. I have a difficult time trusting and having healthy relationships with people, especially but not limited to men. The picture above names many of the things that can send me down a rabbit hole of all too familiar feelings of betrayal, loss, fear, ANXIETY, and doubt. My instinct is to then practice behaviors that feel like protection. I might lash out or yell. I might use guilt to manipulate you into doing what I want so the feeling of anxiety will go away. I may cut you off or close my heart to you. I may turn all of that inward and start to doubt my worth, to try to talk myself into accepting unacceptable behavior, try to attach to another person to prove that I am worthy of love.

I’m not going to lie, it was ugly yesterday. I was in a dark space. I practiced unhealthy behaviors in that relationship, I did silly things to distract myself, I ate too much, I spoke to myself very unkindly in my own head, and I was probably manipulative in my communication and judgemental. I did not feel good. And…I also did some things right. I did something physical that would benefit me, I cleaned my laundry room with fury. I made a list of things I needed to do to take care of me and the family and I did the ones I could. I let myself cry. I realized that my reaction was over the top and I let the person know that I knew that and was going to work through it. I talked with a trusted friend. I journaled. I gave myself space to process that this is all connected. That my perception that someone didn’t want to see me was connected to this character trait in me of anxious attachment. That any one of the scenarios in the picture above has the ability to knock me down the rabbit hole. It is my job to know that I do this and to let people in relationship with me know that I do this. Not in a shameful way because I cannot help the relationships I have had that created this in me. It was a learned behavior since birth. It isn’t anyone’s fault but it is my responsibility.

I always hope that my lived experiences and awarenesses can help others. My anxiousness tells me that no one cares and that it is ridiculous to share these things out in the world, but my deep knowing tells me that we are only as sick as our secrets. I don’t want to be sick and I don’t want others to suffer because they think they are alone. So I’m putting this out into the universe with the hope that one person reads it and feels less alone, anxious, crazy or hopeless. Be well.

The Disappointing Mother

I laid in the sun on my deck today. I was listening to Brene Brown and Glennon Doyle talk on Brene’s podcast Unlocking Us. Glennon was talking about her book Untamed. I have read the book several times and plan to order the workbook when it comes out. It is a beautiful book that helped me be brave this year.

This year I decided that I was going to untame myself. What does that mean? It means that I decided to listen to the wild part of me that knew there was more to life than I was living. It means that I was no longer going to do what all of my training in life had led me to believe was the right thing to do.

I decided to disappoint everyone in my life to honor myself and my knowing. My marriage was over. I had to move on. I could not live in it anymore. I was going to break up my family, disappoint my children and our extended family and friends who thought that we were all so good.

Glennon touches on so many things in untamed that resonated with me. When I first read the book, I was still denying my knowing. I was trying so hard to fit into the box I had outgrown and I wasn’t ready to give up. I felt the knowing that I couldn’t stay but I wanted it to be wrong. I had a good life. If anyone were to look at me, at my family, they would say “How could she be unhappy, how could she want more?”.

My training on how to be a woman and how to be a mother told me to shove that restlessness, unhappiness down and to be grateful. My training told me to swallow my wants and needs for the comfort of my children and family. So I swallowed and swallowed and I suffered. At one point in Glennon’s book, she talks about rationalizing that she was staying in her marriage for her children, but that she wouldn’t want her marriage for her children. I felt that so deep in my heart. I wanted to show my children that their needs are important even if they don’t make sense to the outside world or their partner.

At some point in Untamed, Glennon says that she had to learn to disappoint everyone else before she would ever disappoint herself again, and her words are guiding me through my life right now. I am making decisions everyday that disappoint other people because I am proving to myself that I will honor my own wants and needs first.

There are days that my old training makes me feel so guilty for breaking up my family and changing my children’s lives forever. Days when I try to convince myself that I should have just kept my knowing buried because I miss my kids and not seeing them everyday is hard. When I watch them pack their stuff to leave me for a week, I feel like a failure as a mother. I know it isn’t true, deep down, in the place of knowing, but I hear the whispers of my training as a woman telling me that a good mother would have just sucked it up for her kids to have a stable home.

I tell myself often that I am teaching them to be true to themselves and to choose what is best for them, no matter how it disappoints others. I am teaching them that. They are watching me navigate my life, like I always have, bravely, wildly, and always knowing that there is so much out there for me that is beyond my wildest dreams if I am willing to follow my heart.

On mother’s day I am giving myself permission to disappoint others. I am giving myself permission to be wild and to untame myself from the training I have endured that taught me that to mother is to be a martyr. I am embracing whole-hearted, brave, honest living and I hope my children are watching me. I hope they notice my smile, my lightness, my frequent laughter and dance parties. I hope they see that honoring yourself allows your spirit to soar and frees others around you to soar too.

In a year when I have disappointed many, I am proud to say that I did not disappoint myself. I may have scared the heck out of myself, but I’ve also gained a reverence for my bravery. Glennon says that “a woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter” and I’m glad to say I am a responsible parent-maybe a disappointing one, but certainly responsible.

Thoughts on Teaching

I hit a wall this week. I was exhausted, burned out, and thinking that I chose the wrong profession. I started thinking that there must be a job out there that is easier, softer, less intense. I was so drained of energy that all I could think to do was sit in my meditation chair and stare off into space. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed ease in my life. I craved something easier, gentler than teaching. So I texted someone that I know has been stressed at work also and posed the question, do you ever think that there is an easier way? Did we choose something too difficult to do with our lives? Are we making life harder than it has to be?

I sent this person an example of an email that I had gotten that had referred to me as a saint for dealing with the things I was dealing with in my job. I had taken this email to mean that I was doing more than most people would tolerate and that I was being taken advantage of. I saw it as a red flag.

The person I had sent this to wrote back with a different perspective, that yes it could mean that I’m taking more crap than most people would and that that would be a bad thing, but that it could also mean that I’m patient and good at managing the things I choose to tolerate and that would be a good thing. Those words were powerful to me and immediately changed my attitude.

What I realized is that I could find an easier, softer way in life, but that it would not align with my values. I am just not an easier, softer way person when it comes to certain things. One of those things is teaching. It is my chosen career and I am good at it. I am passionate about helping children learn how to do life. I am passionate and enthusiastic about helping children learn how to think and learn, and how to do life. I have a master’s degree in early childhood education. I have been trained to see the whole child in the context of their mind, body, soul, their family system, and their community. I have the belief that children are capable, intelligent, creative, strong, feeling, sensitive, and autonomous souls.

My view from the beginning of my education career was to just support children. I never thought that my job was to impart great wisdom upon them or to indoctrinate them into thinking or behaving in certain ways. I always thought my role was to be the guide. I was the one with the flashlight shining away at things and letting them decide what they saw, what was important to them and what they wanted to look at closer. I never believed that children needed to be broken and led, saved and delivered, or recreated into something better. It is not easy to be in the profession of teaching when you are an idealist and not a realist. It is beyond easy to get caught in the spiral of overwhelm when dealing with children and families in the real world.

Don’t get me wrong, I see reality. I see it every day and some of it breaks my heart. I know that students as young as kindergarteners are facing poverty, addiction issues, abuse, neglect, crushing parent expectations, racism, classism, food insecurity, housing difficulties, transportation issues, isolation, societal pressure, and this year, fears about the health and safety of themselves and their loved ones. I see it, believe me, I see it. I feel it and it is crushing at times. It can make a grown adult want to throw up their hands in defeat and say it is too much, let alone five year old children.

What I have learned in my 10 plus years of teaching is that it is not my place to judge or save anyone. Not my students, not their parents or families, not other teachers and especially not myself. Not judging helps me to stay out of the savior space and helps me stay in the space of teacher. What that means to me is that I have a job to do. The job is to teach children. Not just letters and the sounds they make (but that is sooooo important too) but to teach them how to be themselves. Their beautiful, whole, lovely, powerful, intelligent, weird, difficult and amazing selves.

The easier and softer way would be to see all children as needy and to see myself as the giver of information. I would walk in daily with an agenda to teach content and stand and deliver. If something would arise that is not related to my information delivery or the meeting of my daily schedule, I would quickly extinguish it, punish it away, or ignore it and move on with my agenda. I would have a “not my problem” attitude or a judgmental attitude that allows me to feel superior and believe that these children are just bad and their situations are hopeless. That would allow me to come in daily, impart my content knowledge, file my papers and call it a day. I might say that those that want to learn will learn and those that don’t, it’s their choice. Every person has had an experience with this teacher, we usually don’t connect with this teacher and often comment that they should just retire and do something else.

Another easier, softer way would be to just stop teaching. I’ve done this. I stopped teaching for 8 years in a public school setting. I did this for a variety of reasons but the biggest reason was because my husband had a demanding job, I had a demanding job, and we had a demanding family life. Something had to give. What I realized during my time off from teaching in a public school setting is that I am a teacher. It is in my heart and soul. I cannot escape it and having a classroom with four walls and a sign on the door declaring it mine, is not what makes me a teacher.

I found that what makes me a teacher is my desire to grow. My desire to wonder. My desire to explore and experiment and to try and fail. My creativity, my organization, my connectedness with people and nature and animals. I am always learning and sharing my experiences. I want to be a part of someone else’s wonderings, their questions, their experiments, their tries and failures, their struggles and growth, their creativity and their making connections. It is exhilarating to be along side someone as they explore the world and test their limits. It is uplifting to share an energy space with someone who is finding out their capabilities, their limits and their innate goodness and connectedness. I found myself learning along side grocery store clerks, people in recovery, people in the library, people in my home and family. I found places to work where I got to help people connect to the natural world and I never felt more alive or inspired than watching that happen as I provided the guidance or the opportunity. As it happened over and over again, I realized that learning isn’t up to me, but providing the safe space for it to happen is.

This is not the easier, softer way. This requires me to be the safe space. I provide energy and opportunity for learning and growth to happen. I get to have plans and goals but I do not get to control how others grow and how they trust or don’t trust me. I get immediate feedback from the children in my room if they don’t feel safe and if they can sense that I am not accepting of their reality. It would be easy for me to demand that a child be ready to write a three letter word and to punish them for screaming at the child next them for taking the seat they wanted. It would be considered by some to be soft to allow that tantrum to happen and to not demand that that child straighten up, act right and get to work. I have my moments when I do not have the ability to allow the tantrum and I am not resourced enough to deal with it when it comes up, that is the human in me. I cannot give from an empty cup. Maybe I didn’t get a good night’s sleep or get a good breakfast. Maybe I heard someone comment about how loud my classroom was and question my ability to control my students. Maybe I’ve got a lot on my own mind with my own personal struggles and I cannot make the time to explore one more thing. When this happens, I give myself grace, do the best I can, and try again the next day.

My goal though, as a teacher, is to be the person who has time for the meltdown. To be the person who honors that part of the child who needs to be heard when their seat is taken. I want to be the teacher that knows that there is a lesson in it for the children and for me. There are lessons everywhere and if this is what arises in the moment, there is a lesson that is important, maybe more important that CVC words. On my best days, I let the child scream it out, stomp their feet and say that it isn’t fair and that they wanted that seat so bad. Why? Because I never allowed myself to yell and scream and say I wanted and needed something as a child. It wasn’t safe. I wasn’t safe because the adults in my life at home and at school did not have the time or space to honor my needs, to see me and my wants and needs as important, and they needed me to shut up and do what I was told. I never allowed myself to trust another human being with my upset, my rage, my fear, my frustration, or my neediness. Guess who has had a difficult time living life as a whole, real, imperfect person? Guess who disappoints herself over and over again in life because she doesn’t want to be seen as a pain in the butt or intrude on anyone else’s plans? Guess who plays small because she was never allowed to be big and whole and full and messy? Guess who swallows her wants, needs, insecurities, and passions because she thinks there isn’t room in her life, in her relationships, and in her career for them?

ME-it’s me! Me! Me! And it was killing me.

So to be the teacher I want to be, the one that aligns with my values and my deep knowing, I don’t get to take the easier, softer way most of the time. I sit with children on the floor as they scream, thrash, cry and kick in their ugly, big feelings. I let them know that their big feelings are real, allowed, and don’t scare me. I let them know that I am not too big to remember what it feels like when someone steals your chair or your spot in line. I also let them know that there are lessons to be learned when someone steals our chair or our spot in line and that I am willing to take the time to explore their big feelings about it without shaming them for having those big feelings. It takes so much time and effort. It is loud and messy and hard to handle, but that we can handle it.

My job is to be the adult in the room. The one that creates the safe space. In order to do that, I have had to do a lot of work myself. I have had to work with therapists who could help me grow up that little girl inside me that never got to be herself. I had to trust them in order to allow her to be reached, heard, and healed. I had to learn how to see her and what she had gone through as a child who was not allowed to be herself, feel and have her feelings and opinions, her creativity nurtured, her inconvenient truths, needs and desires heard and met. I meet her there now. I give her what she needs if I can and I allow her to scream and yell and learn in her own way. It is loud and messy and certainly not convenient. It has allowed me to see how damaging it is to children when we force them to sit down, shut up, obey and be good. How damaging it was to me.

So on days when I come home exhausted from breakdown after breakdown in my classroom, from interruption after interruption, from near constant needs being brought to my attention, it is easy for me to feel like I am doing something wrong, that my room is run amok with unruly children with crippling neediness and uncontrolled behavior problems. It is important for me to remember that this is the path I chose, not because it was the easy path, but because it was the path that would allow me to do what I do best. Teach. To create spaces where children get to feel safe enough to be fully themselves and to know that the adult in the classroom can handle how complicated, messy, ugly, beautiful, and difficult it is to meet them where they are in the moment. It is a huge responsibility and I have to have done my work in order to handle it. I have to take good loving care of myself. I have to get sleep, move my body, and eat good food. I have to take care of myself spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally. I have to seek help and support on my healing journey and surround myself with like-minded people who may not be doing life the easy way, but are doing life according to their personal values, so they can remind me that some things are worth the work, the effort, and the patience required to do it. I am hopefully teaching a new generation of children that they are worth it. That there is no thing in their world too small or big for me to care about and give attention to. That they matter, all of them matters, even the hard and inconvenient stuff.

I hope that I never stop teaching and that I never stop learning. I hope that this story inspires you, like it did me, to look at your life and see what aligns with your values and what you are willing to give your efforts to for the good of the world and others. I hope that you can see that some things are hard, and they will always be hard, but that they are worth the effort. I hope that you know that there will be days when you feel like you made a wrong choice and that it is too hard. That doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong. It is just a struggle that day. Take that day and rest, reach out to a friend who will support you, eat, listen to a meditation on self-compassion, and fill up your cup. Start again in the morning, knowing that life isn’t easy and following your path isn’t easy, but you can do it.

Pieces of Me

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my energy and who and what I give it to. This pandemic has been awful for many reasons but it has given me a chance to challenge what and who I have deemed important in my life. I have had a chance to evaluate where my energy goes and to make some decisions about that.

Last March, when I was told to go home and not come to work, not to send my children to school, and to stay home, I sighed a huge sigh of relief. I had been burning the candle at all ends and I was exhausted. Being told to stay home and do nothing was a permission slip I didn’t know how badly I needed until I got it.

I had been working full time, taking two online graduate degree classes, parenting two children at home and one away at college, and really working hard at creating the kind of relationship I wanted with my husband. I said yes to every meeting, opportunity and extra thing with work because I had been out of the workforce for a long time and didn’t think I could say no because the new person has to say yes to be liked. My kids were in sports and our time was spent doing that most weekends and many week nights. My plate was full and everytime I took a bite, another mound of food was plopped down on my plate. I just kept eating because I was afraid to say that I wasn’t hungry. How do you take a sledgehammer to the life you actively worked to create but is killing you?

Well I didn’t have to. The global pandemic did it for me. Sports, work, school, socializing, and even leaving my house were no longer on the table. I couldn’t do any of it. All of the things that were keeping me busy and demanding my time and attention were gone. Aside from the absolute fear of getting corona virus, I was so relieved. I was excited to be able to think straight enough to finish my two projects for my grad school classes. I could cook a meal for my family and have time to sit down and enjoy it instead of grabbing food before or after practices. I could clean my house, read a book, and finally be free of all the distractions that kept me from having the relationships I wanted with the people in my house.

I realized how many pieces of me I had given away to things outside of me. So much energy going out and not a lot coming back in. I know that was the case because I was so tired and so relieved when it all stopped. I realized that I had a chance to think about it all and gather up my pieces.

I started with the easy stuff, like gathering up the time I had spent driving to and from work and to and from practices and I used it to do things like read or knit or paint or write. I gathered up my energy that was being consumed by a full time teaching job and while I wasn’t doing it, I thought about how I could do it better and smarter. I gave myself permission to imagine teaching in entirely different ways. I imagined teaching my students in a wide open space under a tent or in park or forest. What would I teach them? What content could be thrown away and replaced with real life experience? What have to’s and must do’s are just a waste of time and how could I teach if I didn’t have those restrictions on my time and energy. I remembered that I teach because I love knowing that I am inspiring young people to think for themselves, to solve problems, and how to be a person in a world of other people. To be kind, compassionate, passionate, and regulated. I began to get excited about the things we could do differently if all of our expectations were removed.

For so long, I had allowed the excuse of being busy and distracted to accept less than I wanted in relationships. We were all too busy to put in the effort required. We were too busy to connect, too busy to make the time and effort, too busy to change. When the world stopped, instead of taking advantage of all of this time to connect, to make time, to put in effort and to change, we didn’t. It made me beyond sad to know that the external excuses were a mask for internal unhappiness and inability to grow and change together. I was unable to fully process this truth for a few months but was glad to have the clarity. So much of my energy and so many of my pieces were wrapped up in that aspect of my life that I almost didn’t know who I was without it. When I started gathering them up one at a time, it all felt awful. It felt like taking apart something I thought was going to be so beautiful but just didn’t work. There would be no perfect puzzle, no complete picture. Just my pieces that were no longer needed and I didn’t know what to do with them. In fact I felt like many of those pieces were going to be left there on the floor because they were not who I wanted to be, not who I was going to be.

While I continue to be grateful for the pause and the chance to reevaluate my life, I would like for this pandemic to be over. It is beyond my comprehension that over 500,000 people have died so far and we are not finished. I am also beyond grateful that I did not lose anyone close to me as of now. The grief I feel for those I didn’t even know is heavy enough.

As I continue on in this new year I am learning so much about my pieces. There are happy, loving pieces like in the picture above. And there are sad, lonely, grief-stricken and exhausted pieces of me as pictured below. I can feel both at the same time and it is hard. One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that it serves me well to be very protective of my pieces. They are me. They are who I am. If I give them all away, I am not whole. I’m beginning to see that I don’t need to give anything away at all, in fact I shouldn’t give my pieces away. I should keep them and keep building my picture of what Carie looks like whole. I can show my pieces to others and let them experience me whole (or as whole as I am at this point) but not give anything away. What does that mean?? I’m struggling to understand it myself but I have some ideas.

Me feeling sad, sad, lonely, grief-stricken and exhausted .

What if I got the wrong message in life and that no one is meant to give themselves away at all? I have been trying to come to grips with the idea that I only need to allow people to see my pieces, not have them. That they can get a glimpse and decide what they think of me in pieces, but also as a whole whose pieces fit together. For example, I might want you to think that I am a hard worker, so in the past, I would have given you my hard worker piece, and hid away the piece of me that gets tired, needs a break, needs help, and just isn’t going to do certain things because I am lazy. Well if I only show you that one piece of me and hide the other, you will think I’m a great employee or great worker, but my part that I’m hiding is going to get sick of being forced to hide. I will burn out because I’m not allowed to be all pieces of me, just the one I show you or give you that shows you I’m a hard worker. I will spend my time out of your sight unable to get dressed, letting my house be a mess, light bulbs will go unchanged, and mundane tasks go undone because I only have the energy to put into the piece you can see. My hidden part rages when you aren’t looking or can’t see.

This year I have tried to be real and whole. I have said no at work. I have asked for help. I have allowed more of my whole picture to be seen so that I don’t have to hide that part of me that cannot attend not one more meeting at the end of a hard week. I don’t have to hide that I love to work hard but I also need to rest and recharge and sometimes only put in half effort. I feel better, like I can be all of me and not be ashamed of the part of me that just doesn’t have it in me to give 100% to my job every single day. I feel like I can imagine somethings that are new and different and not put so much energy in things that I don’t believe are worth my energy and effort.

Another example is with people that I love. I am learning that I do not have to give to them only the pieces that they like and hide the other parts. For example, my kids love fun and responsible mom who does everything for them, keeps their lunches packed, does all the cleaning, and still has time and energy to plan fun trips or adventures. I would hide the part of me that could hardly keep up, didn’t care if they ate snack cakes for lunch as long as I didn’t have to pack it, and the one that was too tired to adventure and plan. This led to unrealistic expectations from my kids about me. I could not live up to it forever and I am now not living that way. I took back the perfect mom piece and transformed it with a real mom piece. She works full time and needs them to pack their own lunches. She sometimes spends hours in front of a television on a beautiful Saturday morning because it has been a long, draining week and she needs to rest instead of plan an adventure. She also dances in the kitchen when she does the dishes and cooks because that fills up her cup and she doesn’t want to hide her joy from her kids. I’m no longer giving away a shiny piece of me for my kids to consume without ever seeing my rusty pieces too. Now they are seeing two pieces of my large puzzle that all have their place. Everyone likes shiny pieces, but they aren’t real. Trying to be a perfect mom is not sustainable and in reality, it isn’t the truth. Why would I hide my imperfect parts from my own children? They need to see all of me so that they know it is okay to be shiny and rusty and that it gives the whole picture depth and dimension.

I feel like I’ve went down a deep existential rabbit hole with this one, but it is where my mind and thoughts have been. It feels bad to give away your shiny pieces and hide your rusty or imperfect pieces. It will destroy you. It is also lying to others when you only show your best pieces and and not let them know the entire you. I am getting very particular about who gets to see my puzzle. I have started showing pieces that are shiny but attached to rusty and imperfect pieces to people and in all honesty, many don’t like it. They prefered my offering of shiny attached to nothing pieces that weren’t really me. So my audience is shrinking but my puzzle is growing. I put a lot of time into learning my pieces and what I want them to look like and how I want them to fit together so that I can love and appreciate the beautiful creation of me. It won’t be for everyone, but I don’t want to be for everyone if I can’t be all of me.

Random Ramblings of a Woman

Freedom

I want and crave it so much. I am learning to give it to myself. Freedom from expectations. Freedom from should have’s and could have’s. I want freedom from the ties that bind me to unhealthy relationships. I want freedom from the ties of traditional thinking. I want freedom from the way it has always been. I want freedom to dream new ways of being and for new ways for everything to be. The freedom to be imperfect and the freedom to learn as I go. I want and need the freedom to be any size, shape, and condition I need to be at the moment in my body and my mind. I need to be able to be all of me. Even the parts that people don’t like, I won’t hide them anymore. I want to say my favorite color is black and not purple and that doesn’t make me a vampire or emo or dark. I just love black. It is the most beautiful. I taught my youngest daughter that it was okay to declare that but didn’t allow myself to declare it-until now. I want to be an imperfect parent and be allowed grace for that. I want the freedom to not be perfect sometimes. I want to skip a meeting, be late on a deadline, and not kill myself trying to look like I always have it together. FREEDOM. I want to change my mind. I want to not wear makeup. I want to learn from my mistakes. I want to be out adventuring and exploring even though it can get scary. I want to throw my heart into the arena even though so many will step on it and not see its goodness. And then I want to cry about that and still know that I am strong. I want to be a weirdo. I am a weirdo. I like most weirdos as long as they are not hurtful.

Fat

I just want to let myself be fat for now. I want to be completely unbothered by it. I want to acknowledge that the only part of me that cares is the part of me that wants you to think I look good or attractive or healthy. I do not feel unhealthy. I could maybe be a little bit more active as in strength training and endurance but as far as being active, I am. I go hiking. I go swimming. I go bike riding. I play sports with my kids. I cook, clean, work, dance, and am able to do anything I want to do. My body is thriving. I do not have high blood pressure, diabetes, pain, or anything that tells me I need to change my body, except a number on a scale and a chart called a BMI. I don’t smoke, drink, or overconsume caffeine. I eat balanced meals and I don’t restrict my choices. I like chocolate but I don’t eat it for lunch. I like fast food but only for those days when we need food fast. I am a good cook and I eat my vegetables (most of them). I love fruit and I love salad. I am relatively strong and I move a lot. Can we just stop telling people that skinny is healthy? I know some skinny people that are living on a fifth of vodka, oreos, and cheetos. They have high blood pressure, no endurance and rotting teeth. If you put the two of us side by side and asked the public who was healthier, most would pick the skinny person. Skinny equals healthy right? Enough about that. I love myself and I feel pretty good. I’ll loose weight if I want to but this weight has come for a reason. Stress, hormone and bodily changes, trauma response, and actually listening to and feeding my body. I used to eat a snickers and drink a mountain dew for lunch after I smoked a cigarette or two. Now I eat a salad and drink water. I weigh more now because I actually feed myself three meals a day.

Mouthy and Bossy

I’m tired of being quiet and suffering in silence. I’m getting mouthy and bossy in my old age and I love it. I have a long way to go because I have been trained so well to be nice and quiet. I am starting to speak up, to question, and to let people just deal with it. I don’t want to hide my real feelings just to spare yours. I am done with that. Glennon Doyle writes in “Untamed” that she will disappoint everyone one else before she ever disappoints herself again. I have taken it as my goal. Me over you. Not that I don’t love you and care what you have to say, but if I need to disappoint myself and dishonor myself for you to be happy or accepting of me, I don’t need you. If you would have me do that to myself, you do not honor and love me either. So we might get into it once in a while. I might stand up for myself and say things that you don’t want to hear. I won’t tolerate people that prefer me to be small and quiet and not have an opinion. I want to be the boss of my life and I want to say what I want to say, how I want to say it. I’m not mean, but I will say what I mean. I think that eventually, people will feel safe around me because I will be direct and they won’t need to wonder where they stand.

Energy

I have really been trying to pay attention to who and what I give my energy to. I find that some people and some things are really worth the energy expelled because they give it right back. Most of the time I feel this way about my children, my pets, and my close friends. I am always looking for people who can match my energy. Not that we always need to match energy, but that we balance out in the energy exchange. There is give and take but I never feel like you are sucking the life out of me. I am so tired of energy drainers. Those people and things that attach themselves to your energy flow and take it for themselves. For these people and things, there is never enough. They will take and take, living off of you like a parasite and they will not notice or care that you are getting weaker. They are here for themselves. You feel good to them and they are not worried about how you feel. I took so long to learn this about people and things. I thought all interactions were give and take, and that if you gave enough, it would soon be your turn to take. It has been a hard lesson to have given and given and then when it was time for me to withdraw, the account was empty and there was nothing there for me to have. Work can be this way if I am not careful with my giving. Friendships can be this way if I am not careful with my choices of who I spend my time with. Family can be this way if you do not have boundaries and agreements. I get so confused sometimes when I’m bursting with energy and there seems to be so many around that want to be with me and around me but when I need a refuel or a kind word, or a bit of attention the rooms are empty, the texts are unread or not responded to or the plans are canceled. I used to blame myself for being needy. Now I know that I just mistook energy attachers for real connection and relationship. I mistook fair weather friends for ride or die friends. I mistook attention and excitement for care and concern. It’s okay. Some lessons can only be learned through repeated experience. The lesson I’ve taken from all of this is to protect my energy. I need to watch and wait for people to show how they will show up for me in life. Will they be in that room when it is darkness instead of sunshine? Will they think of me when I can’t be who they were hoping I would be? Will they provide the energy sometimes when I need a rest or do they just show up when I have it to give?

Thanks for letting me ramble. I had a lot going on upstairs this morning and I’m glad to have a space to think it out through writing. Life is so wild. I never could have planned for any of this but I love it so. Love to all of you, especially me ;)

I Made A Trip To The Hardware Store For Bread

In my defense, I thought I was going to the bakery. I was wrong.

I recently wrote about capacity. Capacity is someone’s ability to do anything really, but the focus of my writing was someone’s capacity to give and receive love. There are people in this world that have a 10 gallon hats worth of capacity for love, empathy, understanding, and comfort. There are people in this world with a 1 gallon hat capacity for love, empathy, understanding, and comfort. Neither is wrong or bad but it is good to know your own capacity and that of others. This can help you set your expectations of the other person correctly. You cannot know that a person is a one gallon person and expect 10 gallon love from them, it isn’t fair to either of you..

Tonight I got a lesson, a hard lesson, in capacity. It hurt. Ouch. Because even if you understand capacity and what your capacity is, you can be mistaken about someone else’s capacity and it can hurt. I’m an optimistic person and I think positively about most people unless I have a good reason not to. Many times I just assume someone is a ten gallon person unless they have shown me they are not. I trust people until I have reason not to. It really hurts me sometimes but I cannot imagine going through life the opposite way. Especially as a teacher, mother, friend, it serves me well to believe that anyone could be anything they want to be. I may have been born a one gallon capacity person but life has worn me by experiences that have carved me ten gallons deep. I believe that anyone can be worn deeper and deeper by life or by willingness. Sometimes I confuse comfort with capacity. Just because I’m comfortable with you doesn’t mean you have the capacity I might expect.

When I turned to a friend tonight, I was very specific about what I needed. I explained it clearly and asked if they could meet me in the space I needed to be met in. I needed to let my guard down, be irrational, be vulnerable and have them feed me certain words I knew I needed to hear. It was a weird but simple request. They accepted. I picked up the phone and let myself go to a place I only show to a very select few people in my life. They are my bakeries that I know will always have fresh bread for me. They can meet me in the ten gallon depths. I wasn’t positive that this person was a ten gallon friend and I didn’t know if they were a bakery, but I had basically written a script for them to follow so that they could bake the bread even if they weren’t sure how. I literally gave them the words that I needed to hear back and told them when to say them to me.

Painfully, there was no bread. No bakery. No ten gallon depths. Instead of a warm bakery I suddenly found myself in a cold hardware store full of hammers, saws, and sharp, hard objects. Opinions I didn’t ask for were given. Harsh words about getting over it and moving on and being happy were said. Judgement of my state of vulnerability, grief, and emotional state followed. The listening I had asked for was cut short with questioning and the words of comfort I had requested were never said. Ouch.

My first reaction was to sit in shock, but then for some strange reason, I started to try to explain myself. I would not recommend taking this path if you should ever find yourself in the hardware store when you thought you were entering a bakery. Hardware store people do not understand bread, they just don’t. Next time, I hope that I will simply say “Oopsie, I suddenly find myself in a hardware store and I was looking for bread, I have to leave now.” Learn from my pain. Sitting on the phone trying to explain your heart to someone who can’t hear you is abusive to yourself. I forgive myself for participating longer than I should have, I was just very surprised. I don’t open myself to many people and my very small group has some ten gallon people in it. I guess I didn’t realize that this person was not capable. I’m sure I hurt both of us with the assumption that they were.

I can see how difficult it would be to find yourself in a situation where someone you know and care about is crying and hurting and needing something from you and you don’t know how to fix it. I had not asked to be fixed, to be clear, I had asked to be listened to and to be given words that I provided, but that isn’t what was interpreted by this person. They felt like they needed to fix it, to make it better, and to offer advice and opinion that wasn’t needed. Wires were crossed and it was very uncomfortable, yucky, and it hurt. We won’t continue to be friends after this. Not out of anger or revenge or anything other than self-preservation. I cannot be in relationship with people who cannot see me, hear me, or meet me in the ten gallon depths. We can say hello at the grocery store, we can like each other’s dog pics on Facebook, and we can wish each other well in the future, but we cannot be friends.

It is a privilege and an honor to be invited into someone’s inner world, into their depths. It is a sacred space where people are allowed to be vulnerable, irrational, deeply hurt, contradictory, and to be given space to be perfectly imperfect and human. It is a space where grief lives alongside love, where reality gets mixed up with the ghosts of the past and you need someone on the outside to just pull you back with a kind word. Shame is not allowed in this sacred space. Judgement is not allowed in this sacred space. Advise is not needed in this sacred space. What is needed is love, understanding, and presence. Sometimes you just have to let someone fall apart and lay next to them and say nothing except “I’m here. I don’t understand it, it scares me, I don’t have any answers, but I’m not going anywhere.”

I must confess that I got the hardware store/bread example from Al-Anon recovery groups. There is a reading or a saying that says going to an alcoholic and expecting them to meet your needs is like going to the hardware store for bread. You aren’t going to get what you need, they aren’t capable. So we can punish the alcoholic for not being able to meet our needs and shame them for their lack of capacity, or we can move on and find the people out there that can meet our needs. It is mean to stay in a relationship with someone and expect them to give you things that they cannot.

The journey to find out who is capable is hard. Sometimes you are pleasantly surprised by someone’s capacity and depth and sometimes you find yourself in the hardware store with no bread to be found. There is grief in going home empty handed and there is hurt if you found yourself on the receiving end of opinion, judgment, and harshness when you bear your soul to someone. Walk away, have a good cry, say ouch, call a ten gallon person and have a good laugh about your surprise hardware store visit. The one thing my ten gallon friend reminded me of tonight is that just because someone is incapable of giving us what we want, it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with us. I shouldn’t feel bad for baring my soul and allowing someone in, I should not feel bad that I needed something or that I needed to fall apart.

Some people want you to be different because you make them uncomfortable. They would prefer you to suck it up, get over it, be happy so that they can be more comfortable around you. Do not listen to that bullshit. That is what people who don’t ever go below the surface say to people who frequently swim in the depths. I used to be scared of deep water too, of life and it’s pain and depths, contradictions and unfathomable complications. I’ve done my work. I’ve put on my oxygen tanks and I’ve trusted myself enough to dive deep into all of my pain and hurt and trauma and heartbreak. I’ve watched things coming in the distance that looked like sharks and I wanted to swim as fast as I could to the surface and never look back, but I didn’t. I stayed and sometimes it was a shark, with big fucking teeth that scared the hell out of me, but I stood there and faced it. I stayed down there long enough to learn what is a shark and what is just a parrotfish that looks like a shark in the distance but up close is just a big beautiful fish. It is frighteningly beautiful in the depths and there is nothing down there that is going to make you comfortable, you just get used to the uncertainty and realize that that is what makes life beautiful.

So if you find yourself in a hardware store when you really needed bread, leave. You do not have to spend long time comforting the hardware store person for not having what you need or shame them or convince them that they should look into stocking bread. Just leave that store, it is not your store. Get your butt back in your car and drive to the bakery. The place that you know will have bread. Go there.

If you think you might be a hardware store and you think you would rather be in the bread business, do your work. You can start with these little gems of advice:

When someone is crying in your presence, shut up. Do not talk. If you cannot bring yourself to comfort them with a hug or if you cannot just say that you don’t know what to do but that you are there for them, then at least just shut up and don’t try to stop the crying just so you can feel comfortable.

When someone warns you that they are going to show you something difficult, personal, and painful take a deep breath or two, shut your mouth, and practice saying these words in your head “I am here. This sounds painful and difficult and personal, thank you for sharing that with me. I don’t know what to do or say but I’m here.” If you can’t say those things, let them know that you don’t have the capacity right now and that maybe they should not share.

When someone is grieving, you do not get to tell them how to do that. Yes, I can post a montage of pictures of myself with my ex-husband on social media and say that I miss him on the day that he died. I can choose to remember the part of him that loved me deeply, just like I loved him deeply. That does not mean that I forgot all of the pain, the hurt, the traumatic experiences that I had with him. It means that grief, divorce, addiction, abuse, love and loss are fucking messy and complicated. You do not have to understand my journey to honor that I’m on it. You can be confused by it but understand that I am not. I’ve done my work.

Never tell someone to get over it, move on, and just be happy. Not when it comes to their life experiences. You tell someone to get over it, move on, and just be happy when they ordered no onions on their burger and the cook gets it wrong and they have to pick the onions off the burger. If you have not experienced the deeply personal, tragic, painful life experience that this person who is confiding in you has, do not ask them to kindly get over it so that you can feel better around them. If you cannot handle them, they kindly exit their life and do both of you a favor. Insisting that a person get over something and assuming that there is something wrong with them if they cannot is mean. Expecting someone to be happy all the time is denying that person their full humanity.

When someone isn’t handling something the way that you would, again, close your mouth. You need to sit back and let that person have the dignity to make their own mistakes, their own choices, and go through their own pain. Do you really think you know what is best for someone else? Do you really understand the complexity of their life? Do you really not trust them to do what is best for themselves? If you have not been asked specifically for advice do not give it. If you have been asked specifically for advise you can practice saying “I’m not you and I don’t know what I would do in that situation, but I know you will figure it out.” The only exception I have for this is if someone’s life is in danger. Feel free to tell them to get out and offer to help.

Last, if you find yourself face to face with someone who came to you thinking you were a bakery and you realize that you are a hardware store with no bread, do not be personally offended when that person has to leave because you don’t have what they need. There are plenty of people in the world that need hammers and saws and the things you have to offer. It doesn’t mean that you should change what you have to offer (though my local hardware store does have bread and donuts) but don’t chase after someone trying to sell them a hammer, trying to convince them to stay in your store and get what they don’t need and didn’t ask for. Point them in the direction of a bakery and let them go.

I’m physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted. I’m a person with a large capacity to hold others and their truth, pain, and sorrow. I was looking for someone to show my own depths to, only wanting a few comforting words to tell me that the shadows I was seeing in the depths weren’t sharks, just parrotfish that wouldn’t hurt me. I picked the wrong person tonight. It hurt. I won’t do that again with that person but I won’t let it change me and desire to be met in the depths. I will let them go in love and I will remember that all is not lost. Just a couple of humans being human and hurting each other, it’s what we do. My reminder to myself is that I can meet myself in the depths. I can go there with my Higher Power and my wise self and tell myself those words I had so wanted to hear. So I’m off to have my own back, to comfort myself, and to tell myself that I was brave for trying.

Take good care out there.

Compassion in Dark Times

Being gentle with yourself can be the hardest thing to do when things get dark. Do it anyway.

This is the time of year for me when things get dark. Outside it is literally gray and dark and cold most of the time. Inside it is equally dark and gray most years for me. January/February will not ever be the same for me and I have to accept that. My cells in my body will not allow me to forget the darkness of these last few days of January leading into February. There is a heaviness, a grief, a weight that sits on me and pulls me down no matter where I am or what I am doing. This year, the dark feels darker, the grief feels deeper, the weight feels heavier.

On January 30, 2011, my ex-husband and father of my oldest child passed away suddenly. He was 35 years old. It has been ten years. It still feels unreal. I can be knocked back to that place in my mother’s home getting that phone call in a heartbeat. I can never forget telling my child. I won’t ever forget either. It changed us forever. It changed so many people forever. It was tragic. It still is.

Over the years I have had different ways of coping with the grief of that day. Many years I was distracted and I ignored the heaviness. Other years I was undone with grief, barely able to function. Some years I celebrated him and our love and our child with deep gratitude and happiness along with feeling the loss. This year, it feels heavy. Maybe because it has been ten years. Maybe because I’m going through personal loss and a rearrangement of my life. Maybe because our world feels hostile and cold. Maybe because death surrounds me on a daily basis with insane amounts of life lost due to a global pandemic. Maybe because what used to be everyday, routine decisions feel risky. Maybe because some of the people who would routinely love on me and support me can’t be around me for our own protections.

This is tough. I want hugs from my people more than I want to eat sometimes and I cannot hug them. I want to sit in the presence of people who love, support and lift me up and that isn’t available to me right now. This pandemic is so isolating and is depriving me of some of my very basic human needs. Yes I have the love and support of my immidiate family-but this is their wound too. This is their pain and grief as well. It would be unreasonable of me to burden my children with my grief. Their hugs and love and support are appreciated and needed but this is a bigger job than that. Physical touch and being in the presence of people with strength, love, hope, and good solid energy is healing. It can lighten your grief, it can make you feel held, it can fill up your cup. Missing out on that for the last 10 months has been devestating. I hug my people. I love on my friends. I enjoy sitting close with my friends and sharing conversations standing in a close circle with co-workers in hallway. I miss seeing smiles and standing close enough to someone to feel their energy or reach out and grab their hand.

The layers of grief this year have to be processed. They have to be felt or it builds up inside and comes out wonky. What does that mean? It means if I don’t cry for the loss of physical touch, I might start spending all my nights watching internet videos to feel connected to something, but not sleeping, which would be a more loving thing to do. If I don’t scream out in anger when I feel mad, I might lose my patience with my children or my students because it is sitting just below the surface, I never let myself process it. I’ve found the safest place to yell into the void is in the car or the beach (when no one else is there). I cry everywhere and I cry often. I am crying as I write at times because writing is a release, for me a way to process what is happening.

This global pandemic has taken away from me many of my coping strategies. It is important for me to grieve that too and to find new ways of dealing in this new reality. Going to Al-Anon meetings is one of my most important self-care actions. I love the hugs, the deep sharing, the courage, and the holding of hands in a circle at the end. There is magic in it. For long periods of time, we have had to meet online. If we are able to meet in person it is six feet away from any other person, no hugs, no seeing smiles because they are covered by masks, and no circle of hands at the end. I miss it so much.

I used to get a massage once a month. It helped me release all of the things I was storing as tension in my body and to experience safe, therapeutic touch. I haven’t gotten a massage in over a year. I bought myself a little machine that can massage your back and neck and I use it often. It is great but it is not a substitute for a person’s healing touch. I made a personal decision not to expose myself to another outside appointment after deciding that getting my hair done was more important to me. It may seem like a silly loss, but I grieve it just the same.

Going out to dinner with a good friend or a group of friends used to be a welcome outlet for times when the world got too heavy. We would eat, drink, and be merry. I miss laughing and feeling free over the hum of a restaurant full of people. Sometimes that collective energy reminds us of our connectedness with others and how a collective energy can be intoxicating and life-giving. Sometimes that breaking of bread breaks us open enough to share what is in our heart and on our minds with others who can love and support us. We are missing out on that right now. Sitting at a restaurant for hours with friends right now carries with it a risk of endangering the people we love, and that kind of takes the fun out of it.

So what do I do now that these and so many other things I used to do for self-care and to ease my burdens are gone? I have to get creative. I have to reach deep in the well of self-compassion, for myself and deep in the well of compassion for others. Self-compassion for me can take on many forms but really what I need to ask myself all the time is, what is the most loving thing I can do for myself and then do that. What are loving things I can do for myself? Everyday is different but here are some examples.

Taking a nap when I’m tired

Calling a friend or a mentor

Exercise or gentle movement

Reading a book, snuggled in a blanket, sitting by the fire

Going out in nature, especially the forest or the beach for me

Reading something uplifting

Knitting

Drawing or painting

Walking the dog

Listening to a meditation, a podcast or solfeggio frequencies

Dancing to loud music

Looking at beautiful things (in real life or on the internet)

Taking a bath or a hot shower

Journaling or writing

Letting myself have a good cry or screaming into the void

Giving myself a big hug or wrapping myself up in a warm blanket

Writing myself a kind note and encouraging myself with words I would use for a friend that was struggling

Seeing my therapist regularly

Attending a weekly recovery meeting

Sitting under my light therapy lamp

Petting the dog or cats

Not visiting Facebook or social media if it makes me feel less than or steals my peace

If you sit down right now and make a list of all of the things in this moment that are stressing you out or causing you grief or contributing to your upset, you might be surprised at how long the list is. January may not be your time of darkness for the same reasons as mine, but it may be dark just the same. If you really sat down in the darkness, would you know how to take care of yourself there? Do you avoid the darkness, your darkness, because you don’t think you will survive it if you let yourself feel it? Do you not think you have the time? I understand. I have been in all of those spaces and had all of the excuses and all of the avoidant strategies. It did not save me from feeling my grief. It comes every year and honestly most days to visit me. I used to slam the door, pretend it wasn’t there and find ways to numb it or distract myself from it. It waited for me. Really. It just built up time after time until it nearly broke me and I had no choice but to face it. It was as bad as I thought it would be. It hurt so bad. It was white hot pain. The only thing that shocked me in the end is that it didn’t kill me. I lived and I still do. I survived it and I still do. I felt it and I processed it and I still do. I am capable of so much more than I believe I am. I am so much stronger than I let myself believe, and you are too.

Compassion is a super power. It is stronger than grief. It is stronger than anger. It is even stronger than loneliness. It can come from others but most importantly it can come from yourself. Do not withhold this power from yourself. It can fill your cup, warm your heart, and ease your soul. I am being tested this year in my self-compassion generosity. I am being challenged to get creative with it and to allow time for it, to make it my top priority. It is not easy and I need reminders to do it (thank you to my therapist and Al-anon sponsor) but, when I practice it, my darkness gets lighter. In a world where I can feel hopeless and isolated (especially right now) it helps to know that I have my own back. Even in my darkest, most heavy places, I have a soft spot to land. That soft spot is me. It is my self-compassion. Today that looks like tears, writing, cozy clothes, gentle movement, writing, knitting, a nap, and feeding my body food without judgement. It looks like sharing my darkness with others so that they know they are not alone, and that they can survive any darkness if they are willing to show up for themselves. So, so much love for all of you. Hold yourself tight, it won’t always be dark.

Capacity

Capacity is your ability to participate in a given situation. Everyone has a different capacity and it helps to acknowledge that.

I had no idea I would need to know how many billiard balls my toilet could flush when I ventured out into the world for a new one.

Life never ceases to surprise me with lessons. When I took this photo of a toilet at Home Depot, I did it for a laugh. I thought the marketing was hilarious and wanted to share with a friend. Why do I need a toilet to flush seven billiard balls? Is this what is happening in bathrooms across America? Y’all need to lay off the pizza and beer. I had literally never thought about the capacity of a toilet to hold and flush billiard balls, but now I know. The one down the line only flushed a bucket of golf balls. Was that better? I don’t know. The one I ended up buying did not make such bold claims but fit my needs.

A topic that keeps coming up in my life, and therapy sessions, is capacity. How much am I or someone else really capable of? It has come up consistently for the last year to six months of my life. I have needed to get real about what others are capable of in relationship with me. I had to get real about what I was capable of too. What was my capacity? What was the other person’s capacity? And then the hard part, was I willing to forgive that person for not being what I needed and move on without judgement and anger? Would I want to be released from a situation that I did not have the capacity for without judgement or anger?

So back to toilets, how do I know what I need? Billiard balls, golf balls, and how in the heck do I know what is better for me? Well my answer might be by trial and error through experience but that isn’t how the toilet buying process works. It is how life works though. You try things on. You experiment and you learn. I have come to a point in my life where I am grateful for all of my 43 years of life and the experiences that have taught me my capacity. I am eternally grateful for those who have been part of teaching me what other people are capable of by being in some type of relationship with me. I am also eternally grateful for all of the books, podcasts, mentors, recovery programs, therapists, and self-help books that have helped me learn about this topic.

When I was younger, I took someone’s inability to meet me as a rejection, a slight, a betrayal, or a personal attack. I thought people who did not meet my efforts were lazy and mean and I thought people who expected more of me were unreasonable and crazy. I have a standard of perfectionism for myself and I expected perfection from others. If anyone didn’t like it, we were going to fight, or I might declare you an enemy with a forever grudge about how you treated me. If you expected more of me than I had to give, even at my most perfectionist state, I took that as a message that I was not good enough and tucked that shame deep inside to eat my insides up later.

Almost always I thought it was my fault, either way. If I was failing, I better get better, grow quickly, heal, and become something or someone that could meet your needs and standards. If you were failing me, I was going to work on it for the both of us. I would lower my standards, curse myself for having such high standards, put myself and my needs lower and lower so that you could touch the bar, all the while dying inside. I was driving one day and heard T.D. Jakes on the radio. He is not someone I listen to but it was back in the day of XM radio with the Oprah station. He was on there talking about capacity. He is from Texas and was comparing people’s ability to love in terms of cowboy hats. He said that there were one gallon or regular hats, and ten gallon hats. He went on to say that if you are a ten gallon hat person who was in relationship with a one gallon hat person, you could not expect to be loved how you love. A one gallon hat person does not have to capacity to love beyond their one gallon. It isn’t their fault, it is just how they are made, they are one gallon people. It was your job to notice each person’s hat and to know what to expect. If you were a ten gallon hat lover, you needed to look for another ten gallon hat lover or accept the reality of a one gallon love without resentment. It wasn’t fair to punish someone only capable of one gallon love for not being a ten gallon love. And of course people can change and grow into new sizes of hats, but you have to know the truth of who you are dealing with.

I don’t know if I am always a ten gallon hat person but I do know that I have been growing hat sizes for seventeen years now and I know I am not a one gallon love person. I have been working on my capacity for many years and also life has carved me and forced me into capacities I never wanted but now benefit from. There is a saying that your capacity to feel joy is matched by your capacity to endure pain. I agree and I have not had a pain free life. There are things that have carved spaces in my heart and soul that broke me open to more pain than I thought I could survive. I did survive and I survive still. I have no choice but to stop and notice the sun on my face because there were years I spend in cold darkness. I have no choice but to gasp at a beautiful sunset or beauty because I have seen ugly, nasty, terrible things. I cannot pass a baby, dog or cute animal without pausing to bask in their innocence because I have missed out on innocence time and time again. My capacity runs deep because life has carved paths in my heart.

So much of my life has been spent exploring myself and my experiences. I do not run from experiences, I want to hold them up to see what they have to teach me. I want to grow and I want to understand the things I have not understood before. I want new glasses to see more deeply everytime my vision changes or I’m experiencing a different view. I thought that books could teach me and that therapists had the answers and they did, but I didn’t like the answer. I was my greatest teacher. I had the responsibility to choose learning, to choose love, and to grow. It was my responsibility to grow into my capacity. It was my job to be aware of when I was being a one gallon person and a ten gallon person. It was my job to be honest about how I felt in relationship with others, especially if I felt I was showing up in a ten gallon capacity and they were meeting me with one gallon. I spent years lying to myself. The first lie that I told and believed was that I was a one gallon lover (not talking sexual love here though sex is included in loving, not every relationship has that component to it). I thought that I had to do more, be more, give more or lie about what I was capable of. I was afraid of my capacity. I had been so hurt by loving so hard and so completely.

The second lie that I believed was that I could be satisfied with a one gallon love in all my relationships. That it was okay that I did not have ten gallon people in my life. That if I could add up all my one gallon relationships, it would be enough all together. It just didn’t work. I have a space in my soul that yearns for a deep, fulfilling ten gallon love. To be matched in my efforts, my capacity, my passion, my honesty, my empathy, my understanding, and my desire. I want nothing more than for someone to be able to travel down those well worn paths in my heart created by life and loss and pain, and for them to know how those paths feel because they have traveled their own for so long. I don’t need this person to be a romantic partner, just a fellow ten gallon lover. I just need to know that there are more of us. That we have each others backs and that we understand the depths of our capacity.

I’ve met a few ten gallon people on my journey. I am forever grateful for their presence in my life. I am at home in their presence and I feel deeply seen and heard by them. I feel filled up with their presence and their energy. There is something magical that happens when you feel safe and held by someone and they feel held by you. Energy flows, ideas flow, creativity blooms, and you both leave better than you were before you spent time together. I only wish there were more ten gallon people wandering around this world so that I wouldn’t feel so weird in the world.

The last thing thing that I have learned about capacity lately is that you cannot punish people for not having the capacity you wished they had. Iyanla Vanzant always says that you cannot tell people how to love you. You can only accept the love they are able to give and choose your level of participation in that love. Such wise words and so hard to do. I have spent many years of my life dragging unwilling participants through growth they didn’t want to experience. I have spent so much money on books I want people to read so that they can change and be more like me. I have spent so many years fishing for depth in shallow waters and cursing it all the time. I have carried resentments for years over feeling disappointed by people being who they are and doing what they do. I could not accept them for who they were or what they were capable of. I also couldn’t just walk away and not participate. I felt like I could create my own little army of ten gallon people by forcing all of my one gallon people to stretch and grow by force. It was incredibly painful for all of us. I can’t take it back or make it better but I can change going forward.

I can choose my level of participation in relationships with people based on our capacities. If I know that you are a one gallon person, I can have appropriate levels of interaction and I can stop expecting you to meet me in the ten gallon depths. I can be grateful to be able to participate in our relationship at a one gallon level or even in a ten to one gallon capacity without resentment that I may be giving more. I can only do this if I acknowledge some uncomfortable truths. That you cannot fulfill me in the way I seek to be fulfilled, but that you are worth being in relationship with at the appropriate level. When I need ten gallon love and ten gallon relationship I need to seek out my ten gallon people. If I don’t have any, then I need to meet myself there and give myself what I need. I hold out hope always that my life will continue to attract more ten gallon folks to meet me in the depths. The other spirit capable of meeting you in your depths in anything you consider a Higher Power. That spirit is so beyond ten gallons that you never have to guess if you will leave unmet or unfulfilled. I go there often to be met in the depths and to know that I am never alone, whether I am wearing a ten or one gallon hat, I am loved, accepted and never asked to be anything other than what I am.

Sunday Prayer

A Personal Prayer Offered To My Higher Power

Sharing my heart during these dark times seems like the right thing to do. Be gentle dear ones.

Dear Goddess,

Please be with me today. Help me to just be, to live in each breath and to feel each moment.

Help me to focus with gratitude on what shows up for me today and keep me from wanting what is not available. Help me to embrace the truth and to rid myself of wishful or deceitful thinking.

Be with me as I keep my heart open, even when it wants to close. Help me to receive all of the goodness and love that is available to me today.

Help me to accept any hurts or violations of boundary and let my hurt tell me what needs to be done.

Help me to know my truth and not to allow anyone to talk me out of it with slick words or masked intentions.

Help me to inhabit my body as a fully awake woman who is able to handle and process any sensations that arise because I am the decider of my actions. My feelings and my body do not control me, they just inform me.

Be with me when old habits call like an old, comfy sweater to lure me away from new habits and adventures. There will be other sources of comfort on this journey and the old ones won’t fit anymore. Help me to have patience and calm while the way is made clear and new comforts are prepared.

Help me to never feel shame for the love I have in my heart that bubbles up and bursts out of me and onto others. It is not too much, it is not meant to be kept inside. It is a gift, not a weakness to love and to share it is brave. Holding it in is what scared people do. I don’t have to be scared and sharing my heart with safe people is the most important thing I can do right now.

Be with me as I tackle responsibilities that make me doubt my strength and abilities. Never, ever have I failed to survived anything that has tested me. Please have my back and remind me when I forget, that I am a badass.

Lastly, please look after the hearts of those I love. My people keep me sane, strong, and humble. I need them and I want them safe and loved. Let us all be an example of living with in open heart, a humble heart, full of love even when the world tells us to close it, to protect it and to fear.

Help me to embody a fully alive, brave, strong, empathetic, and love filled woman today. Help me to play, rest, work, create, and to love my people and myself well.

Amen