Community

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

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

And…I’m lonely as hell.

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

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

And…I’m ready for the next level.

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

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

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

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

Let's Talk About Healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entering the Darkness

Winter Of The Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ;)

Willing To Go To Any Length?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I Believe In Destiny

I can't say I understand it, but I believe

About 6 or more years ago I made a vision board. I had heard about vision boards on television and in magazines. I decided what the heck. I think I had just read "The Secret" and I wanted to create my own reality. I wanted and needed to have dreams. 

I gathered all my Oprah and AAA magazines and made my board. I had a variety of things on there like cute shoes, home decor color schemes, quotes that rang true to me and a few travel destinations. I also had a picture of what I imagined my inner child to be. She wore a swim suit, a swim floatie around her waist, had on rain boots, sunglasses and wild hair. I felt her in my soul but I didn't really know her yet. She was on my board. Some of the things I put on were just because they appealed to me visually. A guy riding a low tricycle with a fish kite on top?? I don't know. I liked the fun lunacy of it. Elephants were on my board, I love them. I love their maternal instincts, that the females stick together and that they mourn their dead.

My vision board has been hanging in my bedroom for a good long time. Every now and again I look to see if I've accomplished anything. I've started to search for and honor my inner child, and yes she is a beautiful, wild, fun mess. I've been looking for my strong tribe of women, like the elephants have, and I'm in the process of redecorating/remodeling my house. So yeah, I was getting some things done. The board was a good reminder of some of the goals I had. 

Last week though, I experienced destiny. To me destiny is when against all logic, you are exactly where you are supposed to be, when you are supposed to be there, with no control over it on your part. I went to Malibu California.  I did not pick this destination. It was picked for me. I was looking for some healing. By events outside my control, the person I was reaching out to for help and healing, moved to Los Angeles, California. We had agreed to meet in Malibu for the work. 

Having never been to Malibu or Los Angeles, I went online to get my bearing about where I would be staying and what was in the area. I was looking at beaches near the rental homes I was looking at and kept coming across the same picture. It was a white sign for the Paradise Cove beach in Malibu. I kept thinking that this sign looked familiar to me, I had seen it before. Weird, I thought. 

When I went up to my bedroom later that night, I saw it. It was on my vision board. That same sign that I kept seeing online was right there where it had been for the last six years. DESTINY! All of the universe conspired to get me to Malibu! Up until this point I had my doubts about traveling for this healing work. I was scared, I knew it would be expensive, I was in the middle of a house remodel and an extremely busy life. Was I ready? Was it the right time? Was it the right place with the right people? 

All of those questions and fears were answered when I saw that picture waiting there for me. It was a reassurance to me that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, who I was supposed to be, getting the help I needed to get with the people where were meant to help me. I believed in it and I believed in me. It was so exciting and comforting to feel this confirmation. 

Getting myself to California and doing the work that I wanted and needed to do was not easy. I wanted to run, quit, turn back, and doubt. In the back of my mind though was this picture. Of my vision board, in my bedroom in Michigan, made by my 6 or more years ago self. She didn't know this would happen, but she was courageous enough to believe it might. If she could believe back then, I could believe now and I would. 

To say that going to Malibu was life changing for me would be an understatement. It was one of the best things I've ever done and some of the hardest healing work I've ever done. The words "spiritual awakening" come to mind when I go back there in my mind. A coming home to me, to my life, to my true self, and to faith is what I gained. I'm so grateful for taking the risk, for following the signs along the way and for trusting myself, my path, and those set forth on it to guide me.

Like I said above, I believe in destiny. I don't understand it, I don't know how it all works, but I have experienced it, over and over in my life, in more powerful ways each time. Seeing the sign in real life, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, feet in the sand, gathering rocks and shells, eating a very overpriced but gigantic fish and chips with my person, I was home. I've already started a new board, this one is online and it is big. I'm excited to see where I go from here. Happy travels friends! 

Seven Year Anniversary Of Your Death

There is no escaping grief

In Memory of Ryan Peter Jezak

This picture of a bird was taken by our daughter just about a month after you passed away. I found it today on our computer. I never realized I had it. I don't look at pictures from that time often. It's too hard. 

Seven years have passed. Is it easier? I don't know. It is always just different. The cells of my body remember this day and no matter what I do to prepare or ignore or forget, they jump up and down and demand my attention. It is less raw, time has passed. I've learned some tools to deal with these feelings and it helps. 

What I cannot figure out what to do with is the flashbacks to this day. The phone call, telling our child, the wailing, the drive home because I was at my mother's when I got the call, the next few days consoling our devastated child. I felt utterly inadequate as a mother because there was no taking the pain away for her. Just the sitting in it. The daily showing up and consoling.  I was not afforded grief in those early days, I was in all out mama bear mode. Not only did I have our child to comfort but I was growing two babies in my body. Giving up and giving into grief was not an option. Maybe it will fade in time, maybe there is a tool I've yet to learn. 

The grief has been spread out over these past seven years. It is probably for the best, honestly. We couldn't all fall apart at once. We talk about you, she knows so many things about you, about us, about how much she was loved and the challenges we went through. The years since you have gone have been filled with some things I don't like, relationships I would change if I could, situations I wish were different, misunderstandings, and complicated grief by all touched by your life and death. But so much good has happened too. 

Our child is amazing. She is funny, smart, beautiful, has nice toes (inside joke), is creative, a great friend, and a profound thinker. She has an empathy in her that is only gained by tragedy. She still loves Chinese food, how could she not, hitting up the Mandarin House with us since she was a baby. She looks like me but she has your eyes and dance moves. 

If I could go back in time, I would change how I handled things-I'm sure you would too. But it isn't an option. I have folders in my brain like always, the bad, the ugly, the angry, the regret, but my beautiful and good folders grow every year as I am able to separate from my hurt and pain and remember the beautiful person you were and the beautiful love we shared that led to our baby girl being born. Yes we were young, yes we had some really bad and immature ideas about what love and marriage looked like, yes addiction derailed our lives. We did the best we could. I don't regret it. I've learned so much from the adventure of having you in my life. 

Rest in peace. Be with us in spirit as we continue on. Watch over our baby girl. 

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. 

I Thought I Deserved It

And no one ever told me I didn't. 

A few days ago I was busy getting dinner cleaned up so that I could get to a meet up with some friends. I took a minute as a was getting ready to go and I saw this Facebook post from my cousin, Maddy Mueller, that stopped me in my trackshttps://www.facebook.com/maddy.p.mueller/posts/168.... I responded first as a Mama Bear, because it is who I am. I let her know that I was there for her, she is family to me and even if she wasn't, Mama Bears protect the cubs. Then I thought of my own child heading off to college soon and I felt fear and anger. Then came the memories.

This post, this one little post, broke my heart in all the good and bad ways possible. "Not her!" was a thought I had over and over. It was her first semester of college at most people's dream school. "Not her family!" was another thought. I imagine her mother and father and want to scream "No! Not your precious baby!" They had cared for and protected her so well for all those years, and some guy comes around and just takes it all. I felt a rage I cannot explain. What on Earth makes anyone think that they have a right to just come in and take what they want without asking? To harm, violate, traumatize another human for what? The audacity to think that you can and that you won't be punished. Boiling anger is what I felt.

My next thoughts were that I had no words to offer my own daughter that will be heading off to college in a few years. I couldn't tell her the things that were commonly said to girls when I was growing up. Cover your drink, don't get too drunk, don't go places alone, dress modestly, don't flirt too much, don't leave your friends. What I know is that she could do all of these things and still fall victim to sexual assault. The message I should have been hearing my whole childhood is that my body belongs to me and no one gets to do anything to it without permission. Another message I could have heard and been more clear about is that both people need to give CLEAR consent and that if one or both of you has been drinking, is sleeping, or even if one of you forgot to cover your drink, went somewhere alone, wore a revealing, sexy dress and acted flirtatious, unless you clearly discussed whether or not sex or touching would be okay with both of you, it shouldn't be happening. Not only shouldn't it be happening but if it is or it did and you never gave explicit permission, it is a crime. I failed to get that message growing up.

I had no idea when I was at a gathering of friends the summer between eighth and ninth grade that I would have my first encounter with a sexual predator. It was the most innocent of gatherings with people that I often hung around with. We had had several gatherings of friends over the summer, boys and girls, and we did things like play games, tell jokes, and just hang out. This particular party there were a few boys there that hadn't been before but I knew them from school and liked them. It started as all the others had, junk food, games, giggling, teasing,and just having fun. I found myself in the basement with a few people sitting on the couch. Two people got up to go to another room and it left me there with one of the boys new to the party. He grabbed me, pinned me down, grabbed at my genitals and looked right at me and said "You like it don't you?". I said "No!" and tried to get away but he held me there a minute longer and said "Yes you do." People started coming back into the room and he let me go. I was in shock. I said nothing. I stayed there at the party and acted as if nothing happened. How could I tell my innocent, carefree friends what our other friend just did to me? They all really liked him. I had liked him too before that day. He spend the rest of the party acting like nothing happened until he could glare at me when no one else was looking, almost threatening me. I never told a soul. I went to a small school with him for the next four years and always acted like it never happened.

What I remember most about that day, was as soon as it happened, being angry at him for touching me without permission and holding me so I couldn't get away, but also that as soon as he let go I started asking myself, "What did I do to deserve that?". "Was I flirting?" "Were my shorts too short?" And never once did I think to tell the adults in that house or to tell my friends or to tell my parents when I got home. I thought I would get in trouble and not be allowed to hang out with my friends anymore. I had no idea that what he did to me was a crime. That he could get in trouble for what he did to me. I thought I deserved it. I have carried that around with me, never saying his name to anyone, never asking him to pay any of the consequences for what he did to me, just holding the shame every time I saw his face in the halls, in class, at the lunch table, at the football games.

Reading Maddy's post, I became so upset thinking about how we women carry the shame, we women spend the hours in hospitals, in courtrooms, crying on bathroom floors. We worry about pregnancy, disease, reputation, and if we will ever, ever feel safe when a man, even a man we love, touches us? For the man who touched me without my permission at 12, he is off living his life without ever having faced one single consequence, I can't even bring myself to write his name here, even though part of me really wants too. Why did I think I deserved it?

My heart broke in a good way two times the night I read this post. First it broke open with joy to read that Maddy was strong enough to post her experience for others to learn from. Standing there in her hospital gown, at her most vulnerable, yet knowing that she didn't deserve it. Knowing that it was a crime and knowing that she could do all she could to bring him to justice. My heart radiated pride and happiness knowing that she would not live the shame the way I did. She would not swallow and carry the blame her whole life, she would put it back where it belongs, on the predator. I offered to be by her side through any of it because I've done some hard things in courtrooms and it helps to have many bodies by your side.

My heart broke open again later that night when I realized how sad I was for the little girl, and even the big girl inside me that never knew she hadn't deserved it. Not at 12, not at 15, not at 18, not at 22, or 25. She never deserved any of it. She just didn't know. She thought something was wrong with her, no one ever told her there wasn't. Not one of these men has ever had their name on a police report with me listed as victim and most are off living their merry life as husbands, fathers, workers and being thought of as "good guys". I guess in the end, I don't care about them at all. I care about me. I care that my heart was buried in shame, hurt, trauma, violation, denial, anger all these years and the saddest part of all, that I really thought I did something to deserve that. The good pouring through my soul right now is the knowledge that I didn't do anything, not one single thing wrong. I was betrayed. I was hurt. I was not to blame. It is a deep and beautiful salve for a long aching soul. 

Maddy, thank you. You sharing your story, that beautiful act of bravery, triggered a healing in me. I know you will understand me when I say, I know this is just the beginning and that I will work on this forever, but letting the shame out into the light, I know it cannot survive for long. I used to think that someone taking your body, using it for their own without any regard for you, was the ultimate betrayal. It is. But so is the voice in your own head that questions what you did to deserve it. That is the one that hurts the most, because society taught us to do that to ourselves, and THAT is the wound that never gets to heal because it is in your own mind, it goes with you wherever you are. There is no safe space from it. And society reinforces it time and time again. Thank you for the reminder that wounds heal when they are exposed to air and light and the truth.

"Give what you have. To someone it may be better than you dare to think." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Author: Carie Ann Terrill