Thawing Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She's Worth It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anxious?...Me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Disappointing Mother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pieces of Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random Ramblings of a Woman

Freedom

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

Fat

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

Mouthy and Bossy

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

Energy

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

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

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!

Getting On The Roller Coaster

“Life is like a roller coaster. It has its ups and downs but it is your choice to scream or enjoy the ride.”

— Author unknown

I am a screamer. When it comes to roller coasters I scream. I swear. I hit. I stop breathing, and I hate them. The picture above is me with my daughter, Maiah, last week at Cedar Point. It was the last ride of the day for me. My daughter made me promise that I would ride at least one big roller coaster with her. She picked The Gatekeeper. She told me it had a great view of the water and that it was pretty low key and that she thought I would like it. This is what it looks like:

https://youtu.be/pkOqi7Du3Og

Nice view of the water, huh? I was too busy pleading for my life and hyperventilating to notice it. I could not breathe properly again for another thirty minutes or more after the ride ended. I was so proud of myself for doing it and for living to tell the tale, but I learned something about myself.

When I was in the eighth grade I went to Cedar Point for the first time and rode a real roller coaster. I hated it. Never wanted to do it again. I tried again in my early twenties. Hated it. Tried again in my forties and I really hated it. There is no convincing my body and my nervous system that we are not going to die on the ride. On smaller coasters I can put my hands up and laugh when I’m not dropping to my death, but as soon as that stomach drop happens my breathing stops and I take a death grip to the rail.

I have always hated this about myself. I wanted to seek out thrills. I wanted to do coasters, jump out of planes, rush down a ski hill, or even watch a horror movie without feeling like I was going to die. I felt like a wimp, a lightweight, or a wuss. I felt like there was something wrong with me, like I didn’t like to have fun. Everyone else seemed to be having fun. I was in a nervous system shutdown with an adrenaline hangover. My adrenal glands actually ache and feel tender to the touch.

This year I learned that I can appreciate my body for trying to protect me. That it works so well that I cannot even override it with promises of fun and excitement. I’m grateful that my body so badly wants me to live. And it doesn’t mean that I cannot ride roller coasters, go skydiving, watch a horror movie, or do anything that scares the crap out of me. I can do it anyway. I can accept that in the process my body will fight like hell to protect me and love it for doing so. And afterward, I may need to relearn how to breath and be back in the safe world, and that is okay too. I am able to do that.

I always look for the lesson in seemingly random events. Turns out my life has been taking me up a track and I’m now at the top. My life is headed for some real ups, downs, turns, and even some upside down moments. Things are changing. When the coaster takes off from the track there will be no stopping it. I don’t know how long it will go and what the course looks like. I’m dropping my baby off at college on Sunday, a new school year is starting, I’m thinking about the future in my career and all sports and school craziness starts soon. I know that my body will react. It will try to shut down and protect and I’ll do some eye closing, I’ll stop breathing, I’ll scream and hit, maybe even try to get off the ride, but I’ll have no choice but to ride it out. When it stops, I’ll have to remember how to breathe again. I’ll have to remember to be grateful to my body and my nervous system for always trying to protect me instead of shaming it for being too over reactive or over protective. I’ll have to remember to be proud of myself for being scared and doing it anyway. I’ll have to remember to savor the moments when I’m not falling and holding on for dear life and that those are the times to throw my hands up and give a laugh and enjoy the view. I have to remember that my adrenaline hangover is real and that I need to rest, be kind to myself, and to release that from my body as much as I can when I am able.

I’ll take your encouraging words, your hand holding, your hugs, your good vibes, your understanding, and your refusal to let me unbuckle and jump mid-ride as I proceed through this year of change for my family. It helps to ride the roller coaster with a friend, especially a friend who doesn’t mind my screaming, swearing, and inability to open my eyes at times. A friend who understands that I want to have fun, I really do, but that my body is a fine tuned self-preservation machine that lets me know when there is danger also and doesn’t hesitate to let me know.

If you are on your own roller coaster and you aren’t feeling like throwing your head back and laughing just know that I’m right there with you, death grip on the rail, barely breathing but brave, and so are you.

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.

Giving Joyfully

If not given in joy, is it even a gift?

I have spent many years in sessions and in recovery trying to find my inner child, trying to heal from past trauma, and trying to grow up. I have read books, listened to tapes, been in therapy, gone to meetings, and done a whole lot of journaling searching for her. I knew a lot of things in my head but they were not translating to my body and to my heart.

Recently, in sessions with a coach, I have been catching glimpses of my inner child. It sounds so silly to talk about myself like I am two different people, but it is true, I am. You are too. There is the part of you that you show the world (or you think you do) that is grown up. Grown ups get stuff done, they compromise, they are responsible, they take care of things, and they handle grown up stuff. I’m sure you all relate to that.

Your inner child is the part of you that resents those responsibilities, doesn’t want to do stuff, gets scared, wants her way, and pouts when she doesn’t. She might convince you to eat that whole bag of chips and stay up until 2 a.m. watching Hoarders not thinking about the fact that you have to get up for work the next day and fit into your work pants. She might convince you that you are always the victim and that people are so very mean and unfair all the time. She is a child, this is how she thinks (I’m speaking of my inner child here, but I’m sure yours is equally pouty and selfish).

My inner child is a stinker. That is how I thought of her. She was here to frustrate me and to distract me from sleep and convince me to do things that I would have to pay for later. She seemed hell bent on complicating my life and hurting my relationships. But I was supposed to find her, to love her, to heal her. So I would give in and stay up late, slack on responsibility, eat the ice cream, and not do the work. I would let her be mad and pout and throw fits. I was supposed to pay attention to her, right? I would give to her resentfully. I would give to her limitlessly. I would give to her without joy, but with reluctance and obligation.

If you are a parent or have ever been around children you know that they can see through you in an instant. They know when they are being appeased, they know when they are being lied to, and they know when you are telling them one thing but doing another. In other words, they see the truth and point it out to you. Have you ever heard a child call to their parents and say “watch me, watch me!” and the parent glances up for a second and then back at their phone? Children will not stand for this half attention. They will come and pester until they have your full attention. You cannot fool them with your half glance.

This is the dance my inner child and I have been doing for the last 16 years. I go around adulting all the time, looking important, acting busy, and getting stuff done. She yells “look at me, look at me!” and I glance up and then back at my important adulting. She knows I’m not really all there so she throws a fit. I am tired from adulting so I give in and hand control over to her. We end up on the couch at 2 a.m. watching crap television, eating junk food, neglecting relationships and responsibilities and running wild. I wake up the next day for my adulting and am angry that my inner child ran wild and free last night (my gift to her) and now I want to punish her, or ignore her, or just be resentful of her.

It is not working. It is like me giving my children the game “Hungry Hungry Hippos” because they want it and I want them to have it so they will be happy, but every time they play it I curse the game making gods for making such a loud and obnoxious toy that disturbs me to my soul and walk around with a chip on my shoulder and a curse on my lips every time they play it. This will end badly for all. It was not a gift joyfully given.

If you haven’t realized by know, I’ve been in a lot of turmoil. I couldn’t figure out how to do what I knew I should be doing, loving my inner child, loving the part of me that pouts and is loud, and makes less than responsible choices, and that needs and wants things from me, that I cannot figure out how to give without resentment. So I’ve been asking for help.

The help comes in the form of a coach/therapist that I see twice a week. We do a lot of getting quiet. Listening. Feeling. Making it safe for my inner child to show up and let me know and feel her. If you have never done any of this work, or seen a coach or therapist, this may sound a little ridiculous or cheesy. The best way that I can explain it is like when you are out in nature and you want to see wildlife. Maybe a bird or a deer or a chipmunk. You cannot just burst into the woods and demand that nature show up for you. You have to sit, get quiet, create space, become safe to the animals before they will show up and allow themselves to be in your presence. I have to create a safe, calm space where my inner child can emerge and do her thing, while I watch and observe.

The more quiet and calm and safe I got, the more she showed me. What I learned is that she is deeply, deeply hurt. She is lonely beyond belief, and she feels the burden of adult responsibilities and trauma like a yoke around her neck. She wants to be held and comforted but doesn’t trust anyone to do it. She knows too well that it will be seen as weakness and used against her, probably by me. It took great energy to sit in these feelings without justifying my behaviors, without judging myself, and without trying to tell her it couldn’t be as bad as she thinks. We do this to children. We don’t want to witness their pain, especially if it comes from us, so we minimize their feelings. I didn’t want to face her and her pain, but with help, I did.

The longer I could sit and not judge or minimize or punish her for having her feelings and her pain, the more she trusted me and came forward. I started to get a picture of who she was and I really liked her. In fact I loved her. She was wild, honest, funny, stubborn, feisty, and loving. I started to see her as someone I needed to honor and protect, not repress or let run wild with no adult supervision. I started wanting other people to meet her, so I would allow her to be seen in protected, safe spaces with people I trusted with her. Sometimes it didn’t work out so well and I had to decide how I was going to protect her and not allow my frustration at not being seen or accepted to push her down or deny her. Just like parenting, it has been joyfully exhausting.

Enter the kitten.

We were camping at a friend’s property and there was an abandoned barn kitten. This was a tiny kitten that would not make it on her own if left. My inner child screamed at me to take it home. I ignored her. I told her that there were allergies in the house, it was horrible timing, people might get mad at the intrusion and inconvenience. I left without the kitten. I broke my inner child’s heart.

I went home and did some real work at sensing my inner child, and my inner critical parent. The critical parent in me judged my inner child as silly and selfish for wanting that kitten. Didn’t she know that our husband was allergic, we had a dog who had never been around cats but chased anything that moved in the yard, we had a graduation party to put on and no time for feeding a sick baby kitten? I had to squash the idea. I had to break her heart. How could I be so inconvenienced by her?

Then while sitting with her, I decided to put aside all my judgments and all my excuses and just listen to her heart. She needed me to prove to her that I could give to her in a joyful way just because she was worth it. She NEEDED that from me, because I had never demonstrated that to her before. I had given to her, yes, resentfully, full of judgement and punishment after the fact. She needed to be listened to. Her heart full of love and compassion needed to be seen, validated, and supported in a loving, joyful way.

I expressed this to my husband and we agreed that I would go get the kitten and give her a chance at life. I picked her up on a rainy night just before the busiest week of my life. My adult responsibilities were to wrap up my work for the school year, bake for end of year parties for my children, finish all work to put on a graduation party, finish the soccer season and baseball season and track season for my own children, host out of town guests, attend my therapy sessions, etc. How could I give this to her? It was ridiculous.

Pursuing someone’s heart makes you do ridiculous things. And you don’t care that they are ridiculous. You just want to show that person that you love them so much that you would do ANYTHING for them. It doesn’t matter if it is ridiculous, or convenient, really difficult, you do it. You do it joyfully and with great enthusiasm. I wanted to give my inner child something she had never had, a big giant sign of love with no strings attached. No punishment or payment to be collected later. Not this time. This gift was free, given out of pure love.

I had to decide (adult me) to NEVER burden my inner child with my hardships over this decision. Was I tired at 1 a.m. when I was feeding the kitten, you betcha. Was I stressed trying to figure out how I was going to fit in the feedings and snuggles every three hours when I had to be at work and soccer and baseball, you betcha. Was I annoyed and frustrated when others were judgmental and vocal about my decision to take in the cat, 100%. But I handled it. I did not once take my frustrations out on my inner child. I remembered my commitment to give her this experience of rescuing a baby kitten and nursing it to health with great joy and no punishment.

I allowed her, and still allow her to fully enjoy every moment she has with this darling kitten. The wonder at every movement and milestone, to celebrate each new thing. I allow her to fall asleep when she snuggles with her kitten, and I allow her to play. I close her ears to the judgement of others and remind her that I am fully on board and am enjoying her delight every minute of the day. She trusts me too much now for me to destroy it. I could not be happier than when I am allowing her to come forth without fear and love on that kitten.

The result has been that my own children are able to come forth and love this kitten (and of course our dog Beans too) with great joy and wholeheartedness. The giggles and squeals abound and our home is joyful like it has not been in a while. We are unapologetically in love with this kitten. We are open heartedly loving her with everything we have, even knowing that we cannot keep her forever. We are not holding back and it is beautiful.

There are some things that you cannot learn unless you do them. I’m so glad I decided to stop trying to learn about my inner child and just decided to meet her and love her and give to her, in a real way, what she has always needed from me. She has needed action, protection, love and appreciation. She has needed me to see her big, wild, beautiful heart and to let her express it while I protect her from judgement.

There was no way to learn this without jumping in and doing it. It has been difficult to keep my judgmental, fearful, and wounded self in check so that I do not bring my adult problems to my inner child. But with help, I have done it. And I think my life just changed 100% for the better because of it.

This little kitten was a gift, given joyfully from God (or the Universe) to me. I have taken it and given it joyfully to my inner child and in return, the experience has joyfully blessed my home. Our hearts may break when it is time for her to leave us, but it is only because they are so beautifully open to our love for her right now. It is the only way to love and give, joyfully with an open heart.

Joy to you my friends. May you have the courage to love something completely without holding back.

This is Smokey. I had to take her everywhere with me in the beginning. She was in my car and I looked over and she had her face up in the sun like this. My heart melted knowing I had given her that gift and in return, I felt the sun shining down on my face too, and giggled at the pure joy and warmth of it.

Darkness and Confusion

Embracing the darkness and confusion in my life is hard but I’m doing it.

The hard truth is that life can be dark and very confusing. I always thought I had to stay positive, keep my chin up, and make it better. Well that is exhausting and it doesn’t work. So I’m learning to embrace the darkness, the uncertainty, and the confusion. The road to this space has been long and it is still a work in progress but it is good.

We are taught early on that the dark is scary. I remember being so afraid of our basement, closets, and attic space as a child because they were dark. I would avoid them, especially at night and was afraid to go in them alone. I really thought something in there was going to get me.

I spend so much of my adult life avoiding the dark as well. I didn’t want to face my problems, look at my own faults, investigate or sit with the ugly and uncomfortable parts of my life. Nope, I was just going to fix it all and make it positive and light. I was willing to do anything necessary to force myself and others to be bright, cheerful, light, and positive. If it was dark, it was my enemy. I was always fighting.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the reason I was so afraid of the dark was because I didn’t trust. I didn’t trust that other people could be good even in the dark. I didn’t trust that I would be as protected in the dark as I thought I was in the light. And most of all, I didn’t trust my own strength to protect and guide myself through the darkness and confusion. I lived in white knuckle fear of anything that didn’t feel good and safe.

I can honestly say that I have been dragged kicking and screaming through intense darkness and confusion, and darn it all if I didn’t live. It is really hard to keep a belief going when you have mounting evidence to the contrary. I had not in fact died when I traveled through the darkest times in my life. I even discovered a strength and a beauty in that darkness that I never would have found had my life been all light and clear.

An example of this is living through a marriage to an addict. It was so dark, so confusing, and so character building. I made so many mistakes just trying to keep the darkness at bay. I enabled, I was mean, I slammed doors, I had zero compassion, and I betrayed myself. I accepted unacceptable behavior because I thought it would keep away the darkness, I didn’t know it was the darkness. Betraying myself was my darkest experience.

In that experience I learned that the only way out of the darkness and confusion is through it. As I traveled, I gathered a support system in the Al-Anon program. I gathered a strength I didn’t know I had. You know what, that isn’t true. I knew I was strong but I didn’t know I had the right to act out my strength to protect myself. I learned from strong women how to set up boundaries and to enforce them in service of myself. I learned I was worth protecting.

The darkness was where I found a Higher Power . I always believed in God, but I thought God lived in the light and that if I was in the dark, it was my own fault, like I had betrayed God or something. When I was in the dark, I reached out, not even knowing what God meant to me, but knowing that I could’t do it by myself. In those early dark days, I could not relate to the God I grew up with in the church. God couldn’t be a male for me then, I couldn’t trust men at that point in my life. So God to me in those early days was the sunset, the birds singing, the seasons changing. I went to nature to find God because it was the only thing I trusted.

That God was so good to me. Slowly leading me out of dark spaces, letting some light into my life. Lifting the confusion and giving me moments of clarity and direction. I imagined wrapping up my baby girl in a blanket of love and protection every time she wasn’t physically with me and praying that she be returned to me safely, and she always was. The evidence was mounting that this protection could be trusted.

In those dark and confusing times, we also had so much beauty. There was a rawness and a realness to our days that brought strength and love forward. I knew I was being led and protected. I knew I was also leading and protecting. When you are struggling and people reach out to help you, you see the best in people. You see community and you see compassion. And in suffering you realize that we are all in the darkness at different times and sometimes you help and sometimes you ask for help. It is our humanity.

I have been feeling a darkness and a confusion lately. There is darkness visiting me and people that I love. I have confusion and I have fear. There are times that I think it is too much for us all to handle and I want to just be transported to the light. But then I remember that nature has dark and light and they are about equal. It cannot be light all of the time. Darkness has to have its time and it doesn’t have to be bad.

I now know that I can trust myself in the darkness. That I will protect myself there and that I am guided and loved by a God that has my back even in the darkness, maybe even more so there. I no longer feel alone in the darkness, in fact I know that some of you are there too and that we will find the light again. And when we get to the light we will be changed because we have been in the dark. We will see the light differently. We will be stronger because we have traveled through darkness and confusion.

I know from experience that lessons are learned in the darkness. Boundaries set, strength found and often more will be revealed that will take us toward clarity and light. I have to go through a lot of anger, rage, sadness, upset, and sometimes depression in the dark. I’m not wrong or bad for feeling any of those things. I might feel differently as the journey goes on and more is revealed but I will not shame myself for how I feel in the dark.

Today I’m releasing some of my darkness onto this page, along with some of my light. I can be both. So can you. I used to hope I could out run the darkness and enter a phase of life that was only light. That was a fantasy and there is no out running darkness. Today I can embrace the dark knowing that it comes to mold me, shape me, teach me. I can enter it protected by a Higher Power who has a view of the bigger picture and never leaves me alone in the dark. Some times I’m in the dark because I need to rest. I can trust that darkness is visiting me and that the light will come too. And that there will be this dance of dark and light for the rest of my life, and it will be good.

Getting Lost

Sometimes I Get Lost. It's Okay. I Always Find My Way Back Eventually.

I haven't written on this blog since April. It makes me sad because this blog was a promise to myself that I would write. Not write in my journal, not write in private, but write out loud. I got lost. I felt the need to protect and stay closed. That is okay. It happens sometimes. So, I'm writing today not because I have nothing else to do, not because I have something amazing to say, but because I am loving and honoring myself. 

This picture above is me. Only mascara on me. Gray roots showing me. Freckles, soooo many freckles me. Weigh more now than I ever have when I wasn't pregnant me. Sometimes I find her hard to look at. She isn't what I thought we would be. I imagined her thin, without gray hair, and since a child I wished for my freckles to fade over time instead of taking over my body with a vengeance. The truth is that I look tired a lot. I have a double chin and my belly makes my yoga pants roll down without my permission. If I let it go, I would have a full head of gray hair and probably a full mustache (the struggle is real, ladies!) It takes a lot for me to look in the mirror each day and to not judge the person I am against who I thought I would be. Sometimes I want to hide. So I posted it. Not fishing for compliments but to show myself the truth, and that even though I do not look like I wish, I am beautiful and there is no one else like me. 

I'm on this self-love journey and it is not easy. Learning to love and accept me without judgement just feels weird. If I stop judging me won't I let myself go? Won't I turn into a chubby, tired, gray haired lady in yoga pants? Oh wait-that is who I am now-even with all the judgement. See, it didn't stop me from being any of the things I feared, in fact, I'm positive that it contributed greatly. Judging myself makes me feel bad, feeling bad makes me want to eat chocolate, chips, and chicken wings. Judging myself makes me feel like I'm supposed to be fixing myself and that keeps me up at night. Then I look tired-I am tired! Judging myself saps the joy out of my life because I don't deserve the good stuff until...until I lose the weight, wax the stache, hide the gray, etc. 

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'm tired of this way of living. I'm tired of thinking I need to change to enjoy life. That I need to judge to motivate. It isn't working. Not for my relationship for myself or for my relationships with others. ALL of this applies to my relationships with others too. I cannot withhold until. I cannot force change. I cannot punish to improve. Ugh...this is not how I thought it all worked. 

Love. Love is the answer. Love and acceptance. I accept that today it has taken me countless hours of coffee and sitting to be ready to face the day. I accept that the clothes I will put on today have a size written in them that makes me feel less than, but I can still think my butt looks smokin' in them. I can rock my gray roots and know that they will go away tomorrow, but that I'm not any better tomorrow than today. I can accept that I'm going to give all that I can give today and that it is enough. Even if it is just writing a blog post, getting two kids to an appointment, and finally finding a frickin' Fed Ex store that can write me a receipt in this small town. 

The last four months I have been struggling. Hiding. Grasping, avoiding, learning, trying, confronting, then hiding again. All of that is okay. What is not okay is denying myself the promise that I made to myself to write. To write out loud, no matter what comes out. To connect with the world and the people in it by telling my truth. Thanks for reading. 

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist will answer you: I am here to live out loud." - Emile Zola

A Sacred Letter To Myself

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver

I wrote a while ago about a trip I took to Malibu and how it was a spiritual awakening for me. I would love to update the story and say that everything since then has been just as magical and that I am on the path being skyrocketed into a new life. It is not so. I am on a path, but it is covered with long overgrown weeds, rough terrain, and sometimes reluctant travel partners. It rains and snows on this path and sometimes I'm not really traveling at all. 

This weekend there was a crazy ice/snow storm that hit my town. Travel was not advised. I took this mostly to heart and haven't been out much over the last few days. I've spent my time watching television with my family, sharing meals, relaxing, journaling, and reading. I continued deeper into a book I started reading by Dr. Tererai Trent called "The Awakened Woman". Dr. Trent writes about sacred dreams, sacred writing, and sacred community among women. She encourages you to do an exercise at the end of each chapter with a ritual. I wrote my sacred dream last night. I will do the ritual later and I also have a feeling it won't be the last or only time I write a sacred dream. Part of the book that hits me the most is how she talks about sharing our story. It is how we grow and how we help others to think about their sacred dreams. 

I found myself sitting in my chair, writing in my journal and reading my books this morning and I felt the pull between my sacred dream and my fear. I decided to write myself a letter. I'm sharing it here so that you can use it if you need it. Take what you like and leave the rest. 

April 16, 2018

Girl, 

What are you waiting for? Life is not guaranteed and time is always passing! Get in there-make the life you want. Create it! Demand it! Know that it is achievable. No more sadness, you have spent too many years in sadness. No more depression and feeling stuck, down, and defeated. You have experienced a different way and you can have it again. 

Know your power. Feel that deep divine feminine energy within you and demand that it be recognized. Demand that it be seen, heard, and honored. 

No, you don't know everything, but you for damn sure know a lot. You have experienced so much and you have so much to give to the world. Believe in yourself. Look at what you have already done in your forty short years on this Earth. 

Malibu was your life. It happened. You felt it. You lived it. You experienced it and you helped create it. Do it here. Do it now in your life. No one is going to do it for you. If your fellow travelers do not want to travel with you than you must be willing to go it alone. There is not a way for you to live in the old space, you have already left it. Don't leave anyone behind in anger or resentment, just know that not traveling this road is not an option for you. Go forward knowing you are moving toward the life you are meant to live. The one that felt so good to be in. 

Go girl! Stop thinking and start doing. Yes there are hurts and feelings and ties to the old road that pull you constantly. Yes you are scared. Yes this road is new and unfamiliar and you aren't sure you know where you are going or where it will take you. DO IT ANYWAY! 

Sleep. Rest. Eat well. Take good care of your body. Move and build strength. Pray. Ask for help and support. Do not leave your backpack of tools, you will need them on this journey, take them with you. Be willing to fight for the life you need. The life you know you can have because you felt it, you experienced it. Be willing to do whatever it takes because there is no other choice. 

You weren't meant to stay in place. You were meant to change and travel new places. You lived the lives you had up to this point well. You did the best you could and look at the places you went that you never even dreamed of. You let them all go when it was time and it is time again. Where to? Who knows? 

Take a deep breath. Line up your village. Hold on to the strong hands of those who have traveled this road and who know the way. I know you are scared but you have to trust. The train has left the station and you are tired from running alongside it trying to decide if you should get on or not, if it was even the right train. Honey, it is your train, it has left the station, get on. You cannot push it back to the station and ask it to wait till you are ready. Get on the train. Enjoy the trip. Let yourself dream about the destination. Invite others on the journey. 

You have what it takes. You are a big, powerful, beautiful, strong woman. Go make your life what you want it to be! 

Yes, I Marched On the Anniversary of the Women's March

No, I don't need to explain to you why. 

On the anniversary of the Women's March, I was not in my home town. I was not able to march with my people and I was a little bummed about it. I happened to be in another state, and a relative reached out and asked me if I wanted to march at their state capitol. I wasn't sure if I would make it because I was unsure of my schedule, but it worked out that I was free. I packed up the kids and went. 

I haven't had a chance to post about it but I have been reading the online comments left by people responding to news articles in my hometown about our local march. Here is what I noticed...people are demanding to know why we are marching. They are demanding that we explain ourselves. They are attacking women for their language choices, their outfit choices, and for bringing their husbands or children along. And I also notice that people seem to think that their opinions and judgments matter to the women who marched. 

Here's the thing...we aren't asking for permission to march. We aren't asking for your approval, your opinion or your thoughts. I personally don't care what you think of my marching. I could care less if you like the words I choose or the sign I hold. I don't need your permission to have an opinion and I don't need your agreement with my views. 

Last year, I felt differently. It was my first march, my first protest or demonstration as an adult woman and I was nervous. I wan't so sure of myself. I wanted everyone to know why and I wanted their approval. I had just started letting some of my opinions be known. I had just started writing online. I had just started to wonder what it was I did and didn't agree with instead of just going with the flow to keep the peace all the time. 

A lot has happened in a year. I've come to realize that I don't have to please anyone but me. I don't have to explain my thoughts, feelings, or actions to anyone. The only person that I had to please and explain myself to was myself. So no, dude on twitter, I don't need your opinion on my views. You can give them, it is public, but I'm not going to take them to heart. You see, what I've learned this year is that I'm pretty good at judging what is good for me, what I need to do, when I need to fight, what I will allow, and what I will speak out against. And the kicker, I don't have to ask ANYONE else what they think of that. 

Now, some of you, especially the men reading this, will probably say "DUH!" of course you don't need permission from anyone. This is not the experience I have had growing up as a woman in my world. Everyone thought they could exert control over me, my thoughts, my decisions, my time, my beliefs, etc. That has been my experience. I was taught by experience to sacrifice what I wanted and needed to please others. I was taught to be small and quiet and agreeable to be liked and loved and accepted. Was it right? No. But it was my experience. 

So doing it differently is an act of courage and bravery for me. I am breaking an old pattern, I am forging a new path, and it feels amazing and freeing to say, "I don't care one bit what you think of my decisions, beliefs, and choices." and to mean it. I didn't ask and I don't need to know. As always, you can share, after all, this is public. Just know that I am a whole, strong, confident woman who decides for herself what is right for her. 

Driving myself, and my children downtown to a capitol of an unfamiliar city and joining a march for something I believe in was an act of bravery. I did share my beliefs and thoughts with my children in the most truthful way that they could understand. And truth be told, I didn't even have to do that. Because I know that what my children and I experienced that day was an act of love. It was an act of community and an act of bravery that one can feel without explanation. Walking peacefully among so many different types of people, singing, yelling words of love, compassion, acceptance, and empathy was an experience of relationship with others, strangers in fact. But it was intimate. It was powerful. It was truthful. My children saw so many different people, dressed differently or hardly dressed at all, different colors, religions, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, native American women in traditional dress, burning sage, singing, and banging a drum, and not once were they scared. Not once did they feel unsafe or uncomfortable. Bored, maybe (they wanted ice cream-they are six) but never uncomfortable. Accepted. Strangers in a strange town, marching among strangers and we felt loved. 

I am beyond grateful for the experience and for the woman who reached out to welcome me into this experience. I am beyond grateful that I don't need to justify my reasons or my beliefs or my opinions so that people will find me acceptable to them. I'm beyond grateful for my children to have experienced such an uplifting, brave, community event. I feel empowered and I feel powerful. If you have had a similar experience of community, or bravery, or self-empowerment, tell me about it in the comments, I'd love to know about it.  

Making Space For Sadness

Healing through feeling.

This is a picture of me. It is not my favorite picture but it is a picture of real life. I sent this picture to my friend Cathy last January asking if it was normal to be crying while waiting for your take out order at Noodles and Co. She of course told me that it was not normal but that she was sorry I was sad. She is a good friend. She lets me be sad. This sadness however. had gone on for far too long and I was crying at the most inappropriate times. I had been talking to my friends and family a lot about my symptoms and I decided to see a doctor for depression. The truth was that I couldn't stop crying. 

I was diagnosed with depression and put on a mood stabilizer. Whoo hoo no more sadness and inappropriate crying right? Well, sort of. I believe that unexpressed emotions can lead to a depression. The feelings don't go away, they just fester and build. In my case resulting in a lack of wanting to get out of pajamas, do anything I used to like doing, and crying all the time. Taking a pill to stabilize my mood is good for helping me to be able to get up and function daily, but it in no way takes away my feelings. 

My challenge this year was to learn to let feelings flow through me and to feel them without getting trapped in them. Seriously SO HARD! I was used to shutting down the feelings when they got intense because I was afraid that I wouldn't survive the pain. So short term gain, long term loss. I was building a 40 year volcano of sadness, upset, fear, loss that erupted without me being able to stop it or control it or handle it. 

With some help and guidance I am learning to let what I feel in the moment be. I am learning to make space for my feelings. Today it was sadness. Today it enveloped me like a cloud. Why? Many reasons but it doesn't matter. I don't have to know why for it to show up. It was here whether or not I could figure out why. So first I wanted to run and deny it. I thought about taking the kids somewhere fun for the day, but when I went to go offer it, I saw how content they all were just playing around the house and I let that idea go. It is not fair for me to force my family to outrun my emotions with me. 

So then I decided that I could get busy with some sort of work. I have been putting off sanding and painting my kitchen cabinets, perfect. I got out my sandpaper and started in to work. I actually did feel good about this work I got done today but it did not take the sadness away. I decided that I had to accept that the sadness was here to stay for today. I had to face it, accept it, make space to feel it, to be with it. This is not an easy thing to do when you are a mom. It is hard to get the space to cry without having your children worry about you. So I let myself be sad around my kids without crying. This just looked like me being quiet. Telling them I wasn't in the mood to do certain things or just saying I was feeling kind of down or sad but not sure why. 

I met up with some friends tonight and one of them shared about the sadness they were feeling around the holidays, missing a loved one who was no longer with them. That was all it took for my sadness flood gates to open. I cried for about an hour and a half. In the safety of trusted, loving friends. No one needed to know why I was feeling so sad and could not stop crying, for they were feeling the sadness too. There was no need to explain. Sometimes you just need to know you are not alone. So we all held space for our collective sadness. Each of us having different sources of sadness, but still accepting it all without judgement or competition. 

On my way home, I cried more and more. I could not stop. I'm crying as I write this now. Is there something wrong with me? I'll admit sometimes I wonder. Is this normal? I don't know. Do I enjoy sitting in sadness and crying, not even sure of the reasons for it? No. Nor do I like stuffing, pretending, and putting off the inevitable explosion of emotion that will come if I do. I used to think self-care was finding a quick way to cheer myself up. I no longer think that at all. Now I think that good self care is to love myself through the sadness. To not force myself to know all the reasons why. To be okay just letting it flow out of me, knowing that I am accepting reality, dealing with and feeling my feelings. 

Other people who do not practice the feeling of feelings, will not like this. You will make them uncomfortable. They will say things like "smile, things can't be that bad" , "hey let's go get a drink and cheer you up, let loose" or "look at all you have to be happy about, how can you be sad when you have all of this". Ignore that crap. It is just a way of getting you to stop a behavior that makes them uncomfortable. They are not your concern, you are. Feel whatever you need to feel and maybe wait until you are in the company of safe people, who can handle your emotions, do you let loose completely. Or in the company of yourself, who can let you cry or feel without being critical and making you think things like you are wrong or selfish or dramatic. 

This won't last forever. I won't die in my feelings. I just need to be sad today. I might need to be sad tomorrow. I don't know. I just know that denying it will just postpone and intensify it. It might turn into anger toward someone or something if I try to stuff it down, and I don't want that. So tonight, I'm letting it out here on the page. I'm letting it run down my cheeks. I'm going to let it wrap itself around me and make space for it to go to bed with me tonight. It will have it's time, it's space, it's acknowledgement and then it will move on when it is done with me. And I will be okay afterword. In fact I will be better than okay, I will be free of that emotion until the next one because I let it flow through me without trying to control it, stop it. or stuff it for later. And every time I can let this sadness flow through me, it heals me from all the years I didn't know how to do it. All the more reason to make the space and invite the sadness in. 

Be well. 

Planting My Flag

Sometimes you have to declare something, put your faith in it and just go with it. That is what happened with 2017 for me. I had declared "The Year Of Carie" at some point when my picture was published in a city calendar. I decided that this was the year that I was going to do things differently. I was going to say yes to writing, I was going to say yes to photo contests, new opportunities at work, and anything that felt right for me. 

2017 was filled with major ups and downs for me. I started the year in January with a major depression that left me unable to function properly. I had to get help for that. I had started with a new therapist, trying to heal my traumas, and learn somatic experiencing. It has changed my life. I learned to feel, to heal, to experience all feelings and sensations and emotions and to not shut down, but stay open. I have come further in one year of that therapy than in ten plus years of talk therapy. I am thankful, so grateful.  

I opened myself up to new opportunities at work. It has been rewarding. I get to do work with young children and their parents, school aged children learning new things in nature, and now I have the opportunity to bring nature into a classroom setting. For the first time in my life I feel like I have a job that takes a lot, but also gives me a lot. I get to learn new things, be around people excited to be working there, and see nature's beauty while I'm working. I feel very supported in trying new things and I know I'm never alone, I always have support. 

I've learned to say no to things that don't feel good in my life and that don't serve me. It has been a tough muscle to flex. I was a yes person. I hate to disappoint others or not meet their expectations. To say no to something that I know is going to upset someone else is so hard for me to do. But this year I decided that I could no longer sacrifice my own self, my own time, my own feelings, my own needs in order to meet someone else's. I'm learning that the best thing I can do for myself is to meet my needs fully before taking on any other demands on me. Otherwise I resent the expectations and stress on me. I don't want to be that person anymore. 

With the election of our president in 2017, I discovered that I am an activist at heart. He awoke in me a fighter. I could no longer sit by and say that I didn't want to discuss politics. From the minute he became a serious candidate, I could not even watch him on television. I would have a physical reaction. He as all too familiar to me. A bully. A liar. A master manipulator. I felt it down to my toes and do to this day. I could not hold in my feelings, my comments, my opinions, my knowledge of interaction with similar men in my own life. It wasn't even a choice for me to "give him a chance", it felt too dangerous to me and for once I decided to listen. His policies don't generally stand to hurt me as a white woman who is not poor (aside from the fact that he attacks women and likes to tell them what they can do with their bodies). His tax policy will probably benefit me. I don't use Obamacare. I'm not an immigrant or black. I don't care one damn bit about tax breaks, more choices for healthcare, or borders if it means that my gain will come from pushing down others. I don't want a single thing from him except for him to leave so I don't have to look at him or listen to him and be exposed to his disturbing energy anymore. I cannot imagine how it feels to be an immigrant in this country, or a black man, a poor man, a disabled person, a parent with a sick child, or a woman of color in this country. I'm trying to learn as much as I can about all of their experiences because they are the ones being dismissed, disregarded, or discriminated against. Until they are free, none of us is free. If there is anything for me to be grateful for this year it is that Donald Trump's behavior and words stirred up my trauma and I've been able to channel it to be more compassionate, more understanding, more accepting, and more willing to fight for what I know is right in my heart. 

2017 will be a touchstone year for me, I can tell. I know I am different and will never be the same. So what on Earth could 2018 hold for me? I have no idea. No one ever knows what the future holds, but here is what I do know:

I'm planting my flag. The flag on the mountain of me. Big, giant, full me. All of me. The year of Carie was about figuring out who the heck I even was. This year I know a little bit and I intend to know a lot more as I go on in life. I intend to continue to open myself, to feel my feelings, to meet my needs, to say yes to what feels good and right for me and no to what doesn't. I intend to heal, to feel, and to grow. I no longer want to hide parts of me that you might not like, that isn't how it works. I am complex, I am large, I am full of passion and creativity, needs and wants. I have big, fat, hard won opinions and feelings on things that have come with my own experiences and from listening to the experiences of others. I am beautiful and precious, and full of joy and love. I share myself with people who can see me, hear me, know me, accept me and be safe for me. In the words of a friend, only good will come from this. 

I don't have a title for this coming year. I don't feel the need to call it anything except my life. My life from here on out. Flag planted on top of the complex woman I now claim as myself. Not hiding. Not shape shifting. Just doing her best every dang day to show up fully herself, for herself and no one else. I'm beyond grateful for the Year Of Carie, I had no idea when I declared it how it would come to pass. I had no idea the people and opportunities and challenges that would come to help reveal her to me. I could NOT have done this year without help and support and challenges to help test me. I'll end with a quote I found for a friend when her first born son arrived almost 13 years ago and she gave him the middle name "Whitman" when I had no idea how much I would need these words in my own life ...

"I am larger, better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness." Walt Whitman