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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes It's Your Path, No It Won't Be Easy!

When the way is clear but the path is difficult, keep going.

image credit: Bartley Terrill

The picture above is me hiking back up a clear path from a waterfall in North Carolina. We had found a roadside waterfall that was marked in our tour book and thought it would be a quick hike for a big reward, the waterfall. When we got there, the path was marked and it was clear we were in the right place. You could hear the waterfall but not see it. The path looked short enough but it went down steeply. We decided to do it. It was not easy. It was muddy and steep and a little scary at times. At the bottom, was a beautiful waterfall that I enjoyed very much. Then I had to climb back up that path and it was even harder going back up, but I did it.

Going down

This image of a difficult path came to me today. It is a Sunday afternoon and I am already exhausted thinking about the week ahead. I’m still exhausted from the week before. I’m on my path, and I know it is the path I am supposed to be on, but it is not easy.

This summer, I felt nudged to look for a full time teaching job. I applied for three and the third one offered me a job. I prayed about it, I talked with friends and family and mentors about it, and I felt really strongly that this was the path I was supposed to take. I had been a stay at home mom for eight years and had been working part time the last three of those eight years. I was always home, I always attended school parties and meetings, I always picked my kids up from school and always was able to be home if they were sick and needed me. All of that was about to change and I wasn’t sure it was going to work out.

I have a character defect that if I feel led to a path and I decide to take it, I want it to be easy. I want to be rewarded for taking the right path. I want the universe to keep reminding me that I’m doing the right thing by making my path and my journey clear and smooth. Never in the history of me following my path has anything EVER worked out this way, but dang it, I want it to. And I am disappointed and confused and frustrated every time the path is difficult. I don’t know where I ever learned this type of thinking, that everything was supposed to be right when you do right, but I am always wrong.

Here is an example. I decided years ago to disrupt the pattern in my life of living with someone in active addiction. I wanted the path before me to be lit up like the yellow brick road, filled with gifts and smooth travel. I was doing a good and noble thing, I was about to change my life for the better, I was changing my daughter’s life for the better too-bonus points! Wrong. While I did not have to live with an active addict on a daily basis I now had the challenge of salvaging my house from a bankruptcy, figuring out how to put gas in my car to get to my three part time jobs and my full time student teaching, figuring out who would watch my child while I had to do all of that work and homework, etc. I had to challenge every belief I had that caused me to marry, live with and have a child with someone in active addiction in the first place. I had to make time for my Al-Anon meetings and time for therapists. It actually would have been easier to stay and live how I had been living, not safer but easier.

Another example, I decided to get my master’s degree the year that I was getting married to my husband Bartley. We planned a destination wedding for about 30 people, moved myself and my six year old to a new school, a new city and a new house. The next year we decided that we wanted to add onto our family. What could be a more beautiful path?? I cried so much on that path that it was more like a river than a path. We found out that we were having two babies instead of one, I was teaching full time but so sick and exhausted from the pregnancy that it was hard to function. My graduate classes were in the write your thesis stage and my pregnancy brain was not allowing me to do my normal brilliant thinking. My ex-husband died suddenly in January that year and I had to navigate supporting my child through losing her father, finishing a master’s thesis, preparing my classroom for a long-term sub, gestational diabetes, and being unable to sleep or function normally because of the size of my pregnant body. I made it through. I got my master’s degree, navigated the grief journey of myself and my child, birthed twins, and managed to stay married, on my recovery journey, and sane (relatively speaking). I spent so many days and nights crying at the sheer height of the obstacles in front of me on my path, not understanding how on earth it would be possible for me to continue on the path. It was not easy, it was not simple, and yes-it was the path I was supposed to take-it was my life journey for the time.

Once again I am in the middle of a path that seems impossible. I am teaching full time in a new school district. My oldest child went off to college and one month into the semester, our dog got hit by a car and died. I was devastated. He was just a puppy and he was my little shadow. My classroom was challenging because I had started late, and that is always a challenge for everybody. It takes longer to bond as a class and I had less time to get my mind, classroom, and goals together than if I had known all along what grade and school I would be at. I felt behind in every way from learning how to send an email to not knowing how to make copies (I needed a number and didn’t yet have a number), to knowing all of the acronyms used in school notes and at meetings.

I found out that my teaching license (that I hadn’t needed the last 8 years) was going to expire in June and I had to take two college classes to get enough credits to renew it in time. So now I am taking two online graduate level courses and my new teacher brain is not allowing me to be my normally smart thinking self. I got a 65% on my last assignment I turned in. Ugh. We are doing home improvement projects that are taking time and energy and decision making and it has not been easy. We are navigating having a child in college, two eight year olds that are in sports and very active with friends and activities, job travel and stress for my husband, and deciding how to break old patterns in our life that we have decided don’t serve us anymore. I cry and sleep more than I would like to admit. I feel overwhelmed from the minute I wake up until I go to sleep everyday. I want to quit. I want to quit this stupid path that I know is mine and is right, but it is hard. Why? Because I don’t trust myself and I don’t trust God.

That is what it all boils down to. I think that because it is hard, maybe it is a mistake. I think that the right path should be easy and that if it isn’t easy, it must not be right. I forget about all of the HARD journeys I have been on that were so right for me and yet so difficult that I didn’t think I would make it through. I don’t trust that I’ll have the strength, the energy, the determination, and the faith to get through it. That means I think that it all rests in me and I forget that in my life, I’m supposed to be believing that a Higher Power has my back. That She will guide me and give me what I need to get through anything when I need it. I struggle with life and I struggle with faith. I doubt my strength and ability and I doubt God’s too. I actually get lost in the path and forget what I’m on it for, what is the destination? The path I’m on right now is moving toward financial independence and security, professional fulfillment, and on contributing my gifts to society by impacting children’s lives at the youngest school ages. My path is toward healing and growing and breaking old patterns. My path is toward becoming more authentically me and less trauma impacted and trauma reactive and doing what is easy not what is right and true.

So I’m going to cry, take some Advil, drink another cup of coffee and write another crappy assignment for my classes. I’m going to half-ass house work, do the bare minimum laundry to get through the week and ignore my desire to take a nap. I’m going to ask someone else to grocery shop for me, skip exercises, and probably shop for a dog online while I should be preparing for my week ahead at work. I’m doing the best I can. It is hard. My path is steeper, muddier, and longer than I thought it would be when it started. I forget that I’m walking toward the life I want and that when I get there, the view will be awesome. I’ll forget the mud and the scrapes along the way (for the most part) and it will be worth it…right?

The Gift of Hope

I recently had a gathering with a few friends and we talked about hope. It was a much needed talk for me because I had lost sight of hope for a bit and needed to remind myself that it is always available to me. I’m so grateful for the word hope and for being surrounded by people and resources in my life that remind me of it.

When I was in my mid to late twenties, I was in a place of no hope. I literally thought that there was no hope for me, my husband, my daughter, or any hope that our lives would change for the better. We were in the depths of living with addiction and the chaos that surrounds it. I was experiencing the life I had tried so hard to avoid and I was ashamed, confused, and defeated. I had no tools to deal with what I was experiencing except for the tools I had learned in childhood to deal with my dad’s drinking. Those were survival tools for sure but they were not the tools of hope.

A very dear person in my life suggested that I try a twelve step program for me, to help me deal with living with an alcoholic/addict. It was one of the only things that had been suggested to me that was different than the controlling, manipulating, fighting, giving up, crying, screaming, leaving, returning, etc, that I had been trying. I went and on the very first night I left with the tiniest seed of hope planted deep inside my heart that I could learn a new way of life for me.

I had the tiniest feeling of hope that I could deal with the disease of addiction in a different way that didn’t mean survival but meant living well. I had met people that night that smiled, that laughed, that hugged, and that loved and I hadn’t done any of those things in a long time. Hope was planted in my heart.

Over the years, I kept attending and I kept growing the hope in my heart. My hope kept changing though, in ways that hurt my heart. I started in my first few years with a hope that my husband would stop drinking and drugging and that we would become a family in recovery. My hope was attached to his sobriety and it was smashed to pieces every time he used again. My hope was that I would be enough, that our child would be enough, that our love for him would be enough to defeat his addictions. It was exhausting getting up every morning and lighting that little flame of hope inside me when it had been drowned the night before by drinking, drugs, a hospital stay, another rehab stint that didn’t work, or another move in with a relative for our safety. It was like lighting a piece of wood on fire that you just dragged out of the lake, took forever, had to have intense amounts of false hope doused on it before it would even catch fire, and then just smoked all day and stung my eyes because it was crappy wet hope anyway.

I finally learned that if I was going to have any real hope at all, that it had to be in myself and my own recovery. I could not continue to tie my hope to someone else’s life and expect them to make my life better with their actions. I had to do the bettering. I had to take control of the only thing that was in my power to control, my life. My hope now rested in me. It scared the crap out of me. I didn’t trust myself, I was a failure. I had landed myself smack in the middle of the life I swore I would never live. I would never tolerate addiction in my life, I would never allow my children to be affected.

I had sat in a bathtub with my toddler child while my husband, in a drunken, drug induced rage, punched at the locked door, cut our phone line, and was beating at the handle trying to get to us. He was screaming that he would take our child and run away with her so that I would never see her again. My life was out of control. I was in danger and I had put my child in danger by choosing to hope that my husband would get better. I failed. You would think that any hope I had in my husband would have died that day, but it didn’t. Denial is a sneaky little bugger, and I continued to put myself in danger for a while, just hoping that this time, he would mean what he said.

I finally gave up my hope in him. I remember the day. He came into my work with a group of people who were taking him off to rehab. He said something to me that was an attempt to give me hope and I felt nothing. I wanted him to leave and I wanted to be done hoping. My heart could not take another attempt at hope with him. After he left, I wrote a long letter to God. I explained that I was giving my husband to him. That I could no longer hope, I could no longer help, and I could no longer live with him. I wished him well. I hoped for his recovery, but I was separating my hope for me, from him. I never went back again. We divorced.

When my ex-husband died years later, I really was devastated. I had never lost hope that he would recover. I never lost hope in him. But I had long severed the hope that I would only be okay if he was okay. I had long stopped the hope that we would be okay together. I had stayed in my twelve step recovery group and had learned to hope in myself., to hope in my God who was in charge of my life, and not in any one human being besides myself. The night of his funeral, I went to a meeting, and as I spoke, I realized that my worst fear had happened and that I still had to live. I still had hope for me, hope for my child, that we could live, even though the one we cared for so much had died. Once again, it was tiny, the smallest flame of hope there is without burning out-but it was there.

So many times in my life, my hope has gotten so confusing. I forget that the only hope that I can have is in myself and my higher power. I think that my hope is tied to people, jobs, experiences, titles, money, security, goodness, success, etc. It is a lie. I have to remember that the only hope that can burn in me is in myself. I cannot tie it to anything outside of me or it will get extinguished at every turn. I have no control over other people, their choices, their feelings, their life, and tying my flame of hope to them is dangerous. It is an invitation into darkness.

I am in the process right now of untangling my lines of hope that I attached to some things outside of myself. It is a natural part of life, it is part of living as an imperfect human who wants to hope in others, who wants to hope in things outside, who wants to rest in something other than themselves. Maybe someday I’ll learn the lesson that I can only rest in me, and in my higher power, but I’m slow at learning many things. I have more power than I think to survive tragedy, to stand up for myself, and to have hope for the future. I just need to look back a little in my life to be reminded of how it felt to have my hope tied up in someone else, to give my power away, and to think that I would die if they made the wrong choices. The real truth is that we are all responsible for ourselves. And that person that you think you will die if you lose, you won’t, you’ll have to live through it. They will die and you will move forward guided by that tiny little flame in your heart, your hope in yourself.

Thank you to to people in my twelve step program who show up and tell me always of their hope in themselves, of their hope in the program, and of their hope in God. It is how I knew I could do it then, and how I am doing it now. I may not be facing a tragedy like I have survived in my past, but every little loss is a reminder that I am still here despite the loss. That I must always move forward and search for my flame of hope. It is a comfort to know that my flame is mine and that no one can blow it out with their words, their choices, their life decisions, or their desire to blow out my hope. It lies deep in me and I can look within at any time and cut the ties that I may have hooked my hope to, or any ties that others may have thrown onto my hope candle to try to make me responsible for their hope. So I’m cutting, I’m cleaning, I’m grieving, I’m stoking my fire within, and I’m resting in the knowledge that if I hold on to me and my hope, that pain will end, and I will be okay.

The Gift of Beans

How one little dog changed my life forever.

March 3, 2018 we were supposed to go skiing. The weather turned warm and our trip was cancelled. I suggested we take a trip to Grand Rapids to PetSmart where a cute dog I had seen online was supposed to be ready to be adopted. My husband and kids agreed to my surprise and off we went.

The whole way there we talked about how we might not get the dog. He might not be right for us, they might not pick us for his owners, etc. We were all cautious. We had not had a dog in three years. Our last dog had passed away from illness and we were in no hurry to own another with our busy lives.

Well we got to PetSmart and they told us that Beans wouldn’t be coming to the event. I was heartbroken. I told them how far we drove and wondered if we could meet up with the owner while we were there? They told us the owner was way back up in Newaygo Michigan but would meet us at the rescue if we were willing to drive. For some reason, I was willing to do whatever it took to meet Beans.

When Beans arrived he bolted out of the truck and took off to smell all the smells with vigor. He was a brownish orange fluffy fox of a dog. His owner was blunt about his quirks and his needs. We loved him immediately but wanted to be sure. We took him home with the stipulation that we could bring him back if it didn’t work out at home.

The minute we brought Beans into our home, life changed forever. He was a force of energy. He was high strung, always wanted to play, destroyed balls, gutted stuffed animals, ate squeakers, and barked his fool head off at anything and everything.

We had to hide our shoes, toys, food, anything that he could chew and eat he would. We had to put up a gate to keep him downstairs so we could watch him at all times. We would attack your feet if they were under a blanket and you moved them while he was sleeping on them. He could and would jump from the ground up to your face out of excitement and use your belly as a spring board on the way up. He had nervous stomach days where he would just barf all day. We hated these days for the clean up but loved these days because it slowed him down a little and he wanted to cuddle because he didn’t feel well.

Beans could eat a raw hide bone in an hour. He would get the zoomies and run around the house growling and sliding. This would almost always end in some turds on the carpet before you could catch him, his excitement stirring up everything. We hung a bell from our sliding door for him to ring when he needed to go outside. He soon figured out that this was a way to get all needs met and rang it incessantly. So much so that the kids started tying it up so he couldn’t ring it-but he showed us by then peeing on our blankets.

We could not take Beans to crowded places because he would bark and lunge at everyone and everything. On walks he pulled and pulled the entire time, never letting up. He would lunge and bark at any passing car, kid on a bike, or squirrel. He would lose his mind barking if we encountered another dog and did not really ever get the hang of sniffing butts and greeting like a normal dog. He was the boss, but he was also terrified.

He was the best snuggle buddy. He insisted on being on me if I sat or laid down. He would push his way in between me and a good book, a computer, or even sometimes my dinner. Beans was pushy. Demanding.

So if this little brownish orange fluffy fox of dog sounds like a royal pain in the butt to you, you would be correct. And he was the best thing that ever happened to me. When I went to tell our oldest, who is away at college, that Beans had died, she said these words…”Mom, Beans breathed life into our family. He made our life fun and interesting. We were in a rut as a family and didn’t even know it until we got Beans.” Truer words could not have been spoken.

After his passing, I started thinking about what he meant to me. Here is what I’ve learned. When you love someone (dog or human or whatever) you love all of them. You love and accept the amazing parts that make you feel good like good snuggles and belly laughs and you love the pain in the butt parts of them like zoomie poops and torn up shoes. Seems like an obvious thing but it was something I needed to relearn.

Beans came from a not so great environment. The woman we got him from had rescued him for a less than ideal situation. He had trauma and therefore had quirks and needs that a normal dog might not have. He needed to be contained and leashed at all times. He was nervous, he was needy, he had stomach issues, he was not trusting and he was scared a lot. He was aggressive with his love and attention. He was too much for some people. We got a letter from the city that he was too loud and couldn’t be left in the backyard unattended because he was bothering the neighbors with his loud barking. He had a hard time relaxing.

Turns out I’m a lot like Beans. My traumas make me quirky. I can’t be in just any old home. I require things like an alcohol free home, quiet time to myself to feel and process, reminders that my needs are important and that it is okay to say no. I am not for everyone and I require patience and safety to relax and love.

I used to try to hide who I was and deny what my trauma had inflicted upon me. I didn’t want to be weird or have weird needs. I just did without, tried to fit into any situation that would have me so that I could just appear normal and hope that I wasn’t too much trouble for anyone. It was exhausting and inauthentic. No one really knew me and love was surface level because I was hiding my unique, weird needs caused by trauma.

Beans helped me to have the experience of loving a wildly quirky traumatized dog with my whole heart. To do whatever it takes to adapt and adjust to their needs not out of obligation but out of pure love. And it was hard work. He took a lot of energy, attention, and care. In return he loved us wildly. He kissed faces, presented toys, begged for treats, became uncontrollably excited at the prospect of a walk, and let me know he felt safe with my by relaxing, snuggling, and sleeping on me without a care in the world. The reward outweighed the cost all day long. Was it easy? No.

When you agree to love someone with trauma, your life will not be easy. You commit to doing whatever it takes to keep them safe and to care for them and their unique needs. You agree to sometimes be in the foxhole of their pain with them and to alter your life to accommodate their sensitivities. And they are 100% worth it. Family means that you have each other’s back no matter what. That you will take care of each other even when it is a pain in the butt. You know each other intimately and will do things for each other that no one else would do, because of love and commitment. You are willing to be inconvenienced, to accommodate, and to adjust. Yesterday I had to take the cat in to the ER vet and sit in the same room that I had to say goodbye to Beans in. It was hard, but she is my family and I can do hard things for her. She is okay, just an eye infection. I’ll pay the emergency bill, I let her scratch and bite me while I try to put drops in her eyes. She is a little wild rescued barn cat that also has my whole heart. It is as it should be.

I am 100% worth it whatever it takes. Now I know that to love me is a privilege even with my quirks. The pay off is my love. If you aren’t getting the pay off, you aren’t loving me. Thanks Beans. Now I know.

Rest in peace you beautiful boy!

Who Are You Letting Cut Your Trees?

Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing. - Lori Buchanan

July was a MONTH.

When I say I was being tested, I mean it. It was exam month and there were some very strange tests. One of the most revealing tests was the cutting of my trees. Not figuratively cutting my trees but the actual physical cutting of my trees in my yard.

I was floating in my pool on my unicorn float when I looked over and noticed that a whole branch of my favorite tree was cut off. I said out loud “What the hell happened to my tree?” My eight year old daughter replied “Oh yeah, the neighbor told daddy the other day that she trimmed our tree and was that okay?”

Was that okay? My brain exploded. I am an adult and I have the understanding that if you have a tree in your yard that hangs into another person’s yard, that they are allowed to trim it so that it doesn’t interfere with their mowing or if it is damaging their property. This was not that. A whole limb was missing that was completely on my property, facing my house. I love my trees and I love them to be as wild and natural as they need to be within reason. This is my weeping cherry tree that blooms with the most delicate pink blossoms in the spring and brings me joy and delight beyond words. Cut, naked, vulnerable now to disease and insects.

The next morning I get a message that the neighbor on the other side of me wants to cut the bottom branches of my pine tree and chop another tree in my yard down. My husband gave permission to cut the bottom limbs before asking me and I was upset. Like I said, I like my trees to be natural and wild. Pine trees don’t always have needles on their bottom branches but there is no need to cut them off. The other pine tree they wanted to cut down only has needles on it’s top 25 percent but it is still a living tree. I have no desire to cut it down. I was so distraught and upset that I just told them I had no desire to cut it down but if they felt they had to, go for it. I felt defeated and pushed but I did tell them that I at least appreciated the text since my other trees were just cut without my permission. They wrote back that they would wait on cutting the tree down for a bit. I cried.

I could not understand what the hell was happening. Never in my life had I ever looked at my neighbors landscaping, flowers or trees and decided that I could tell them what to do with it or just do what I wanted and tell them they were welcome that I took care of it for them.

The next day I left on a camping trip with my friend. We had 4 hours in the car to talk about life. I talked about my trees, about my recent experiences with relationships in my life and the tests I felt I was facing. It was becoming clear.

BOUNDARIES

My trees, my property. My decisions, my life. My beliefs, my business. My no, back off. My space, get out. Your opinion, not needed.

The people in my life were ignoring, plowing through, disregarding, and disrespecting my boundaries and me. The trees were the simplest form of this boundary violation but also the easiest for me to grasp. It is harder to see emotional, spiritual, and psychological violations, but they were all happening in my life in July.

Physical violations that I could see were adding up though. My friend and I did a lot of hiking and started to notice that many people just walked right into our space and expected us to move. The first few times we were like, “oh, sorry” and moved over. Then we started to look at each other and notice that we were not even being seen. That people were physically plowing into us, just like cutting down my trees. I started saying out loud “Stop cutting my trees!” whenever I felt violated. It became my boundary call.

One evening we were at a restaurant eating dinner. There was a group of obnoxious drunk men sitting together near the entrance/exit. They were loud, inappropriate, and condescending to the waitress. She played along, as waitresses often have to in that situation, but they were gross.

When we got up to leave they all started harassing me about my Michigan State shirt that I was wearing. Normally I would laugh and joke like the waitress had to but not tonight. I’d had enough. I did not smile, I did not joke and I did not stay silent. Instead I just kept saying loudly “I wear what I want!” until I was out of their heckling zone. Step one of reinforcing my boundaries and letting them be known and heard.

Step two would be letting my neighbor know that there would be no cutting of trees on my property without MY permission.

Step three would be cutting off a relationship that was causing me trauma, emotional upset, and harming me spiritually. The person that I had to cut off was very dear to me and someone I had trusted deeply. This person had been a trusted companion on my journey of self-love, healing trauma, and spiritual re-connection. This step would hurt in execution but be very damaging if not completed. This person became unsafe to me. It became a situation where words and actions didn’t add up, commitments were not kept, agreements were broken, boundaries were disregarded and spiritual connection was used as a weapon. This person’s behavior was erratic and disturbing and despite numerous attempts at me asking that it not be brought to me, they continued to drop it at my doorstep.

The worst kind of hurt is one where your vulnerabilities and trust are used against you in order for the other person to justify their behavior, manipulate you into doing what would be best for them, or to try to make you doubt your trust in yourself. A close second to that hurt is when they ask you to explain how they hurt you so that they can “understand what they are doing wrong”. If you don’t know that cutting someone else’s tree down is wrong, hearing me say it isn’t going to help you, just re-injure me. When someone spends a month telling you that what you are doing is hurting them and to stop and go away and you in fact do not stop or go away, you cannot be upset when that person does not want to sit down and chat with you about why they are hurt. It is like chopping, chopping, chopping the tree while it weeps-then sitting on its fallen branches with sawdust on your face and in your hair, asking the tree why it is weeping.

I do not tolerate this in my life. Not anymore. Not after this July. If you have been told by me repeatedly that what you are doing is hurting me and you are still wielding your ax, do not expect me to stand there and let you keep chopping anymore. Do not expect tearful begging for you to change or my understanding of your good intentions for trying to cut at me. Just know that boundaries are going up without explanation. That my yard, my life, my trees, my spirituality, my emotions, my needs and desires are my business and unless you have been invited into my yard, my life, spirituality, by ME, you will be met with a boundary.

Finally, I want to thank my neighbors and my relationships, and my Higher Power for this lesson. I hated it. I cried, a lot. I lost sleep, gained weight, and lost a friend. In the end, I know I will lose more. What I am gaining is maturity, self-love, health, and trust in a power greater than me to bring into my life the opportunities to do life differently. I have gained understanding of who I want in my yard, who is there because they just want to celebrate it for it’s wild, natural beauty, and who wants to come in with an ax behind their back trying to change it. My voice that stands up for me got a lot of exercise and is now louder, stronger, and more resolute. I’m hurting but I am grateful. I have never felt stronger, more clear, or more connected to myself and my God of my understanding.

I hope my sharing this helps you find your voice, your no, and your strength. If it upsets you or makes you start to question whether or not you will be welcome in my yard, save us both the trouble and check behind you for an ax before you even make the trip, because I won’t hesitate to check before letting you in.

Be Well.

The Test

My last post was about being willing to go to any length for myself, my growth, my recovery, my health. I should have known that throwing that out into the universe would bring forth The Test but I always forget that that is how it works. So now I’m in it. The test of my word. Did I mean what I promised to myself? Can I stay strong when it all falls apart? Will I abandon myself and all that I’ve learned and experienced?

The answer is I don’t know. But I’m sure as hell going to fight and try. Here is a letter to myself that you may need to hear also:

Dear Carie,

We are doing some hard things. We are facing some dark challenges and a lot of change. I know that it seems scary and I know that you are absolutely terrified at times. But I’m here. I’m not leaving. I’m here to comfort you, protect you and love you.

We can do hard things together. We have done them before and we will do them again. We will be hand in hand, together, forever facing whatever we need to face to heal and grow.

We have done everything we can for others and now is the time to do for us. We will create safety, we will create healthy connection, we will do whatever it takes to take good loving care of Carie.

Love,

Yourself

For anyone reading this and wondering, what is going on in her life? What is she facing? What is happening? It’s okay to wonder but the truth is it doesn’t matter. The challenges we face internally may not be relevant to your outside life. Most people are fighting battles in their life that you will never know about. They are private. They are sacred. They are vulnerable spaces of internal healing. What matters is not the details but the fact that we share how we cope. That we share our hurt, pain, and healing. Some things are too close to be public, because not everyone in the public is safe with our hurt and pain.

Stay safe out there people. Find someone to hold you when it all falls apart, even if it is just a stronger version of you.

Be well

Carie

Willing To Go To Any Length?

“If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it-then you are ready to take certain steps.” -The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous pg 58

I am on a journey. I’m not sure where I am going but I know the direction is forward. My journey started 16 years ago when I entered the rooms of Al-Anon. Al-Anon is group for families and friends of alcoholics. At the time I was living with someone who was drinking too much and it was having a detrimental effect on me and my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. Joining Al-Anon gave me support, knowledge, compassion, and strength. It gave me a relationship with a Higher Power that I had long lost and it gave me a place in a community with no other agenda other than supporting one another through life. All of our lives had been affected by someone else’s drinking or addiction. We knew what it was like. There was safety in it, there was comfort in it, there was anonymity in it and I needed all of those things.

Through my years in Al-Anon I have realized that what brought me there was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to the affects of alcoholism on my life as a whole. It was a thread of my life since I was born and long before as I suspect that it has run in my family lines for generations. I don’t have proof of this and am not pointing fingers at anyone down the line, but there are behaviors present in families affected by addiction and boy do we have them.

My suspicion is that I marinated in a good stew of drama in my mama’s belly. Not to blame my mother, she had no more control over her life circumstances than I did when I was growing my own child in me surrounded by dysfunction and not even knowing life could be different. I don’t have blame in my heart, but compassion for all of us affected by generations of living with the affects of addiction, alcoholism, or patterns of behavior shaped by them.

So I’ve been chipping away slowly at this mountain of pain, some mine, some left over from previous generations, and some dumped on me by a society that promotes drinking and vice and shames those living out the effects of it all. When I arrived at Al-Anon I was just willing to show up. I wanted to feel better, but honestly, just tell me how to get someone to quit drinking so I could get on with my happily ever after dream. I was exhausted and not really in the mood for working on me. I didn’t know at the time that me was the only person I was allowed to work on. My plan was to work on everyone who was upsetting me.

So controlling, manipulating, stonewalling, withholding, punishing, and/or being a complete pushover were the only skills I had. I thought they would deliver results if I just kept at them with great gusto. As it turns out, none of these work (if you already knew this then thanks for not letting me in on this info 16 years ago). What they will do for you is destroy relationships, chop away at dignity and respect, and leave you exhausted and mentally, emotionally, and spiritually bankrupt.

Al-anon led me to a community that did not scold me for using these old trick in my bag, for as long as I needed to. They used them too and when we got together, we talked about how much it hurt and how could we learn to do it differently. There was no judgement because we all knew how hard it was to learn a new way of life in the midst of great chaos and generations of learned behaviors. It was my safe haven.

I used to go to AA meetings to learn more about the disease of alcoholism. AA meetings start with a reading of How It Works from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. This is where the quote above came from “willing to go to any lengths…” and when I first heard it, it struck me hard. I knew hearing it that we were all in the fight for our lives and that we were going to have to battle for it. I’m so glad I learned this early on and that I heard it with the severity that I believe the founders meant for it to have. This was life or death.

I have chosen life. At all cost, and believe me the costs have been great. I am willing, at all times, to do whatever it takes. I’m fighting for me. ME! ME! I’m worth losing everything else for. I will go to any length for myself.

Do I sound selfish? I don’t care. The most loving thing I can do for myself and anyone I love is to take the best care of myself as humanly possible. When I am my best self, I can show up for you as a big giant ball of love and goodness ready to scoop you up and spill my goodness over onto you. When I am practicing self care and healthy boundaries, and self-love I am unstoppable. Who wouldn’t want that for me? I’ll tell you who, those who do not wish to be awakened from their sleep that keeps them in the unconscious behavior patterns they survive on. That’s okay. Just know that I won’t be stopping for you and your comfort, I cannot. I have seen what others in recovery and in healing have and I want it for myself. I am willing to go to any length.

I attended a retreat this weekend that took great bravery to get to. I showed up not knowing what to expect, who would be there, or how it would impact me. I trusted the facilitator. I knew what this person had awareness, love, peace, connection with God, healing and the ability to feel and connect in a deep way with others, and I was willing to go to any length to have those things for myself. I know that great change takes big brave acts of faith. I went and I participated to the full extent of my abilities. I pushed through fear, pain, tears, anxiety, upset, trauma wounds, and on the other side was love, community, connection, acceptance, healing and self-awareness. I’m so glad I went. My life will not be the same.

The picture above is me on the deck the first night before dinner. I’m a mess on the inside wondering if I made the right decision, if I had what it takes to do the work, and doubting my faith in myself and the people I was there with. But I could also hear the words in my head that I heard 16 years ago that struck me right in the heart…willing to do whatever it takes…and I stayed. In return, I reached a new level of healing in my life and found a new layer of myself that had been hidden away and pushed aside by the affects of addiction and trauma on me. Every bit of it was worth it and I look forward to more, hopefully this fall, on this lake, in this house, where I found more of me and people to support me in my search.