The Beginning

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

I think my unraveling started in earnest the year I turned forty. I didn’t realize it at the time. In fact, I’m pretty sure I would have completely chickened out if I had known what was in store. I had a life that looked beautiful and successful on the outside, with all of the shiny proof of my accomplishment. I had everything I thought I wanted: a successful career, an attractive husband, financial security, a sailboat. But I wasn’t entirely happy, and my marriage wasn’t exactly on the strongest of foundations. I convinced myself that my unresolved childhood trauma was the culprit and set out to fix myself with Lifespan Integration therapy. My husband was very supportive of this notion.

I spent the first nine years of my life in an isolated religious hippy commune. This was a place of strange paradox. Many of the members were very talented artists and musicians, and would put on elaborate entertainments for the kids. There was an air of magic and fairy tale, with jugglers and costumes and tumblers. There were beautiful summer days when everyone would be in the gardens together and musicians would stroll around playing and everyone would sing together while they worked. It was a beautiful and idyllic picture of harmony and communal love. The other reality was a rigid and disciplinarian patriarchal culture that did nothing to protect children from abuse. Ideals that insisted that we live off the land and shun modern medicine resulted in hunger and parasites that kept me awake at night. The combination of my extreme nearsightedness and lack of electricity resulted in me being plagued with headaches and repeatedly catching my hair on fire. The rules were rigid and discipline was harsh and frequent. Leaving at the age of nine was even more traumatic, as I had no relevant social skills and failed to integrate into normal society in a healthy way. And so, at the wise and mature age of forty, I decided it was time to take this mess of a childhood to a professional. 

I spent a year in intensive therapy, working to heal my wounds, and gradually learning to trust my instincts and intuition. It was hard and beautiful work. I felt as if I was being unraveled and knitted back together as a more authentic version of me. I was able to begin letting go of a lifetime of armor and defenses. I found my scared and angry little girl self and I loved her fiercely. It was raw and gritty and it cracked my heart open in a way I had never experienced before. Unfortunately, this new me could no longer deny the glaring dysfunction of my marriage. I sought therapy to fix myself so I could have both: my marriage and a healthy relationship with myself. Imagine my shock and dismay at learning that they were mutually exclusive. In the beautiful words of Glennon Doyle, “If you have to choose between saving your marriage or your soul, save your soul.” I tried very hard to save that marriage, but in the end I chose me.

I left that shiny dysfunctional life. I left my job of sixteen years. I left Washington and drove 1600 miles to start a new life in Arizona. It was the bravest and most painful thing I had ever done.  I spent three months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I became a medical nomad and began traveling. I lived in Hawaii for a year. It truly was the beginning of a new life, but not the one I imagined. I can certainly paint a picture of adventure and amazing accomplishments. I can tell a story of triumph and rebirth. That is the story my social media tells. And it is partly true. But my experience is that real growth and transformation is messy and ugly and terrifying as well as beautiful and holy.

That is what I want to share: the raw, ugly, messy, and beautiful journey in progress. I want everyone who is going through their own awakening to know they aren’t alone in their moments of doubt and terror that sometimes cause us to numb out with beer and Game Of Thrones. So I’m not just going to tell the pretty half of this story. I’m going to tell it all: the stumbles, the detours into fear and addiction, the astounding, soul deep determination to keep going. The fierce grace of being asked to let go of who I thought I was and what I thought I wanted.  And then being asked again, and again. To continue working until all that is false and inauthentic is completely dismantled. It is terrifying. I don’t know where this path leads. I don’t really know what is beneath a lifetime of conditioning to fit in at all costs.  I just know that I would rather have truth than pretty and shiny.