Author: girafflegs

Over the years I have struggled with various addictions. This is not at all surprising considering my childhood and adolescence. My sister once wrote a beautiful essay about the innocence of addiction. How it is really just an unskilled effort to feel ok. Her beautiful words inspired me to write this.

Addiction

I see you huddled over there hiding your face. You don’t think you deserve a place at this table, but you are mistaken. I see your posture of shame. The way you hide behind your dark hair and dark clothes, wrapped in shadow. The way you cringe and try to avoid notice. You believe that you are bad, and deserve to be rejected and despised. You believe that you are wrong and shameful and worthy only of ridicule and banishment. But I see past your heavy cloak of self loathing. I see what you cannot.

I see your tender broken heart. I see your grief and sorrow and loneliness. I see your pain and hollow empty regret. The jagged wounds torn into you by loss and betrayal, and the longing for peace. I see your innocent search for happiness and joy. A desperate seeking for a respite from pain and suffering. An exhausted collapse into anything that can offer temporary relief.

I see you, Sweetie. Come into my arms and rest your head upon my shoulder. You belong here. I honor your wounds and yearning for healing. Howl out your bitter disappointment and outrage at the ways you have been mistreated. Let your darkness boil and rage with the gale force of your anguish. You belong here. Your darkness belongs here. Do not feel ashamed of your truth.

You are a part of me. You belong here. I love you.

 

I wrote this a year and a half ago while I was still processing the end of my marriage. My aunt had just died unexpectedly, and I was shocked by how much I still wanted to turn to him for comfort.

Bereft

I know many things. I know our marriage was broken. I know we had lost the ability to repair it, if in truth we ever possessed that skill. I know that neither of us were happy any longer in the life we had built together. And for me, the pressure to grow and change and move had become intolerable, as the walls of my cocoon became painfully restrictive and stifling. I wanted both: my freedom to grow and evolve, and you, but I know I made the best decision for myself when I chose to leave. It has been a year and a half since I made that choice. Part of me believes I’m not supposed to use words like ‘still’ and ‘by now’, as this implies a resistance to what I’m presently experiencing. For I still miss you. Terribly, painfully. I thought I would be over you by now. A line from a recent book resonates: “We are left in lack of him.” Yes. I am in lack of you. Still.

I feel bereft, empty, and alone. I miss you. Not who you were at the end: cold, withdrawn and distant. Unreachable. But the you from happier times. The you I so desperately wanted you to be. My dearest friend and companion. My best and most treasured friend. That beautiful man I was so proud to be with, so pleased to be wife to. I miss our life together. I miss the comfort and security of being successfully bonded to another in romantic love. I miss the sailboat. I miss our trips, our adventures, and our reputation as the dream couple. The beautiful pair that were so happy and successful. And most agonizingly of all, I miss the future I thought we would have together.

The apparent ease and speed with which you replaced me left me feeling broken, abandoned, rejected, and discarded. Unwanted. Unloved. Unmourned.  And I will probably never know what was in your heart. What you felt and thought about the end of our marriage. We both had built such huge and impenetrable walls by then. There is so much I regret. So much I wish I had known sooner, or seen clearer, or handled differently. Not that I believe a different outcome could have been possible, but I wish I had been more honest with you about who I was and what I wanted, and I wish the same from you. But perhaps the inevitable outcome needs be no more complex than what I just wrote. Had we been able to do those things, we would have had a different relationship.

The grief has become more acute recently, possibly due to a loss in the family. I want to grieve. I want to mourn skillfully and wisely. I want to be a river, allowing the feelings and emotions to flow as they will. But I don’t really know how to do that. I have moments when I feel I am able to allow and feel my sorrow and loss. But then I retreat into binge eating and television, or video games, or other less benign escapes. I feel as if my life is in stasis. I don’t feel like I’m living. The beautiful, amazing, and powerful life I envisioned when I left has yet to manifest. I spend my free time alone, isolated and lonely, but unable to muster the will to do what I need to change that. In many ways I see the beautiful opportunity before me to use my solitude and free time to work on my healing and evolution. And it’s not as if I’m not doing that, in addition to the TV and gaming. But I fear that I’m not “getting better”. That I’m not really living. I’m just existing. Waiting. Waiting for something to change. Waiting for something to happen. For the sorrow to lift. For my energy to return. For a new love to come along and heal my broken heart and bring joy back into my life. And I am afraid. Afraid this will never change. I will never feel better. I will never be happy again.

This is what my sorrow has to say today. It will have something different to say tomorrow, or perhaps next week. In the meantime, I remember the wisdom that guides me: Trust. This is not a mistake.

 

I wrote this a couple of years ago, after beginning Lifespan Integration therapy. It is shocking to read it now and see how I asked for everything I have experienced. What an intense, painful, and glorious process of undoing.

Raw

I am raw, exposed, abraded.  My flesh laid bare, every breath of air as grating as coarse sand.  The shell of armor I have built to protect myself is falling away.  But my protection has also been my prison. It has kept me locked up, cut off and separate.  Alone.  Amidst the crumbled armor, a timid face peers, shy and unsure. Is it safe? Who am I without the protection of my armor? I can feel, now that the shell has cracked and fallen away. I can feel hope and strength and glorious anticipation. Not the brittle strength of control and fear, but the graceful strength of authenticity and vulnerability, of honesty and acceptance. Finally, acceptance. The strength that comes from being open, willing, and eager to be what I am meant to be: Free. Whole. Alive.

I am unraveled. The string pulled until there is only a tangle on the floor. What is left? The raw material for a rebirth. I am remade, whole and complete. Where there were holes and tattered edges and loose trailing threads, I am knitted back together, all of my parts and pieces melded together in beautiful harmony. I am not cruel or harsh or cold. That has fallen away, needed no longer. I am wide open. Open to love and joy and adventure, but also open to pain and grief and uncertainty. Because I cannot embrace life partially. I cannot choose only the light and try to banish and ignore the dark.  To do so is to live crippled by fear, stuck in a twilight of false security and complacency. I am willing to embrace the dark and the light together for this is the only path to true wholeness, true being.

I am willing to feel. The love, the joy, the pain; fear and grief and uncertainty.  I am open to the pain so that I may also be open to the joy. I am willing to risk loss and heartbreak to experience great love and connection.  I am willing to risk change and the unknown to experience new adventures. I am free. I am open. I am willing.

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.