One Word 365: Looking Back, to Look Forward

This has sat in my drafts for five months. I can't point to any particular reason why it never got published here in this space. I'm posting it now. It's just as true today as it was when I wrote it last December. 

For the last three years I've had a word for the year. It's been my touchstone, a daily reminder, a daily challenge. It's been a sign post for decisions and a catalyst for personal growth. The last two years I've gotten to the end of the year and felt my word let go to make room for a new word for the new year. This year it seems to be taking it's sweet time. I feel as though I closed my eyes for just a moment in September. Now as I open them again I see December - which at the moment looks a lot like September. It's unseasonably warm and rainy for it to actually be the middle of December. 

My heart is still catching up on the whirlwind of these past couple months. It wasn't my whirlwind as much as it was my husband's. That cyclone caught me up and spun me around. I thought it derailed me. I thought it took all the growth of this year of become and destroyed it. I was wrong. As much as it wasn't what I wanted, it was what my heart needed. I thought I had lost myself, that all of the beauty I was beginning to see in myself was lost. I thought that all the ways that I had started to step into who my bones know that I'm destined to be had been buried in the wilderness again. 

In 2013, my word was hush. A word I didn't want. I didn't want the implication that went along with it. The implication that there was this deep wail of grief that needed to be heard. I wouldn't want to do that year over again. Without that hush, learning to embrace silence, to sit and allow grief to well up so that it could be seen and held by arms stronger than mine, I couldn't have stepped into this last year of become. I would never have joined Be or Story 101. I couldn't have believed in myself enough to have even tried. Without learning how to hush and be hushed I wouldn't have sat in the silent grief these past several weeks. Without that silence I wouldn't have heard the whispers from my bones that told me I wasn't through yet. Yet before I could hush, I had to choose.

I spent all of 2012 making choices. For a girl who had never made a choice for herself, who hadn't expressed and owned an opinion of her own until her 20s, choose was a daunting word. But oh the freedom it brought. The growth that it sparked. I'm still living out the lessons that my year of choices taught me. Choose empowered me to begin to live my life.

On the cusp of 2015, my bones are once again whispering to me. It's going to take everything that I've learned through these past three years, these past three words to even consider the word that I know is mine to grow with and grow into this coming year. Spirit is asking am I willing to become? Will I allow my fears to be hushed? Will I choose to follow where I feel led?

In 2015, it's time to learn how to believe. To hold onto hope, to promises, to faith - to shift another layer of my heart from surviving to thriving. To believe that I can tell a different story with my life. To believe that life can and will and is getting better. 

Leaning into My In-Betweens

I was ranting at my therapist yesterday about this in-between place in my healing. I want a framework for this next piece of my healing - just like I wanted a framework for the pieces that came before. Between workbooks and several 12 step groups, I found those frameworks and was able to adapt them to be the guide I was looking for in my processing. Now I'm gearing up for a new phase. And just like every other phase of my life this far, I'm complaining that it's not getting here fast enough, that I don't have the right tools for this next piece. My therapist ever so gently called me out that once again I was getting ahead of myself. He reminded me that we're still mapping out what I'm working on, and until that is laid out, I don't even know what tools I need.

How often though is this my pattern, not just in healing by in how I approach life? I have a dream and a general idea of how I'm going to get there. I can see the step I'm on, and maybe even the next several down the road. Because I can see it, I get impatient. I start to push myself into places that I'm not quite ready to step into. Sometimes that push is exactly what I need and while I might flounder around for a little while, I do end up catching my feet under me. But then there are the times when no matter what I do, I can't get my footing. I drown. I claw my way back onto the step I'd been on before my great leap. Too often I back down at that point, decide that nope this wasn't the step for me to take and not only that but my entire dream was just that, a dream. I camp out on that step, making a home in a place that was meant to be temporary.

The contradiction of it all is I'm anxious to get to where I'm going. To prove that I can do what my parents didn't and heal from my woundedness without passing it on to others. I don't want to stand still and wait in this space for the next step to become clear and firm. I kick and scream, muddying the waters until I can't see even this step. I lose myself in my frustration of what comes next and forget to breathe in the space I am in.

I have these next six weeks, while my therapist is out of the country to allow this next piece to continue to form. I could spend them kicking and screaming at how I don't have tools and how this is unfair. I've definitely made that choice in the past. I would still eventually get to my next step, exhausted, needing rest, defiant.

I have another choice here. One born out of what this year of become has taught me. I can sit in this space, quiet my racing desperate need to not still be entangled in my past, and see. I can see into this place. See the next step that is still forming in front of me without having to jump on it. I can see deeper into myself, dig deeper into my own why.  I can choose to live this process in a way that brings life to my heart.

I can choose to stay in this moment even though it's uncomfortable. Even though I know that I have this new piece, this shift in my focus that is just brushing against my outstretched fingertips, I don't have to DO anything with it yet. My entire psyche is tuned to function in the tension between two opposing truths. It allowed me to survive, and now, it can help me to thrive. I can hold the truth that this space I'm in doesn't fit me any more and that the next space where I need to go isn't ready for me yet. I can lean into my in-between with intention, with purpose, allowing it to shape me, prepare me for this next shift.

Story Sessions Write In: Simpler Times

Written at a Story Sessions Write In this morning. Our prompt, courtesy of Jamie Bagley, one of the amazing Story Coaches was to write a letter to yourself remembering simpler times. 

Dear me right now,

Yes you, the one who just cringed at this prompt because you've never known a simpler time. It's okay. There is room for your messiness, the overwhelmed chaos that seems to have always churned in your heart. I see your tears, those longings spilling down your face as once more grief hits you - these is no simpler time for you.

There were no carefree days of childhood or wild self discovery in college. The story, your story up until now is one that have been anything by simple. That reality, it doesn't have to define you. It doesn't have to shape how you respond.

You have moments when your heart rests, your spirit soars. Moments between the fights of chasing the sunsets with the man you love and who loves you. Arms spread wide to catch every last ribbon of colour.

You have moments - perched up at that tall corner table, coffee in hand as you hold the words and hearts of others. Moments of being fully present and alive knowing that this is part of the beauty rising out of your ashes.

Your simpler times - you create them for yourself. Stealing away yet again to sit on the rocks by the river, capturing peace with words and lens and paint. Storing it up, treasuring how it teaches you, reminds you that even if you haven't lived it yet, there is more to your story.

Your simpler times are coming dear one. There will be springs in this desert for your dry bones. There is a door of Hope that leads you out of this valley of death. Your day is coming. It won't always be this nightmare journey of loss stacked on top of loss til your heart crumbles under the weight.

Hold on precious one. Your moments of simpler times and quieter heart, they too are stacking up. Building a framework that supports your mending heart. A scaffold that currently only allows glimpses of the beauty and simplicity being created.

There's a difference you know between external simplicity and peace. Yes simplicity can be a doorway to peace, but it's not THE one door. Trust your intuition. She is leading you where you need to go. It isn't simplicity, yet there is a rhythm all your own that balances the internal and external chaos. It works for you - don't belittle your rhythm because it isn't anyone else's. Learn your dance. Allow the music to sweep you into and guide you through this whirlwind of a dance. It looks different, but your stomping feet are doing what they were created for.

I know you can't look back with fondness and looking forward only brings fear. Watching your feet makes you stumble. So throw your head back, raise your face to the burning hot sky and dance.

It is enough. You are enough. And this, this is your time.

Love,
your 30 minutes into the future self.

Leaving Prison Behind

The rush of anger

Tastes like pennies

Bright shiny copper disks

Submerged in vinegar

The suddenness of fear

Sounds like breaking glass

Brightness spilled across the floor

Vinegar running into cracks and crevices

The beauty of exploration

Of entering into something new

Halted by the torrent of words

Slamming into a young heart

Layers of dust mark

Where exploration once lived

Beauty retreated 

A never-ending list of doing

Dreams languished
Locked in her prison cell

Where to go from here
Where is up from this haunted place?

Palm imprinted
With clutched freedom

Breezes tempt
One foot in front of the other

Walking into something new

Loving My Fears

Over the past month and a half I've allowed my carved out writing time to get whittled away. Some of it was necessary, my restless anxiety drove me as I worried and sweated my way through my parents coming to visit. I needed exercise and activity, art journalling and photography.

All those doing things kept me out of trouble. I didn't eat my feelings, or go back to self-injury. I didn't have that one glass of wine to take the edge off that spirals into a daily practice.

Now it's time to bring life back into a place of balance. For words to be spilled not only in texts and journals, but in book outlines, blog posts, and chapters. I'm reminded that I have the choice here. I can choose to make myself sit here and write, giving my editor permission to take a coffee break.

Even when I do carve time out for me to write, I choose all the distractions. Resistance doesn't get to win this war though. So I'm showing up, to sit down and to write damn it. To write until my words flow again. To write one word and then the next. And if all my words are about how damned impossible it feels to write words, then so be it.

The deeper my writing goes, the quieter I get. In part because deep things tend to need whispers, not roars. But the bigger part is that I'm scared. I keep seeing over and over this year how fear runs my life. It's not rational. It's understandable. And I'm learning to love myself because I believe that love is the antidote for my fear. Love that keeps showing up, that affirms, instead of passing judgement. Love that chooses to stay, to sit with the fear, allowing it to be heard yet again. Love that returns time and again to the empty page, the blinking cursor. Love that holds fear's hand for as long as is necessary.

It means that even in this place of fighting for my words, I am choosing to not fight against my fear. My fear is a part of who I am. I don't like it, I wish that it wasn't there, but fighting it hasn't worked. I'm choosing acceptance of what I cannot change. I cannot change that I was raised in a world where I was taught to fear everyone and every thing. I cannot change that I have C-PTSD and along with that comes anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and worry about my safety.

What I can change here is my response to fear.  I can breathe love and acceptance into my bones - love from others, love from myself. And one day I know that all that love will have absorbed some of those fears.

When Impatience Becomes My Friend

Same song, umpteenth verse. I sit down to write, and fight to put one word after the next. Crafting any kind of sentence is torture. (and then my inner editor harps yet again about how I write in a passive tone, with too many gerunds and when am I going to step up to the plate and write something good "blah blah blah")
The two combine and equal too many pieces of half finished writing. Story plots scattered in multiple files, 15 unfinished (read: barely started) blog posts. This is the point at which it would be easy for me to quit. To declare that I'm not a writer and walk away from it all. But I'm not going to do that.

One of my major character defects is my impatience with myself. There's little compassion or grace for this to be a journey - whether that this is healing and recovery or coming alive or finding myself and my voice as a creative. My frustration with myself, with my limits sets me up for failure every stinking time. But I don't stay there.

That same impatience that steals my words, fuels my judgements, is the same drive that keeps me moving forward. That impatience, when it's not running my life, it turns into being driven, in a positive way. It means I show up yet again to write, to put one painstaking word after the next on the page. Impatience doesn't allow those story plots and fragments to get lost in my file system. It continues to pull them up, to stare at them, to write 50 words that are complete and utter shit because that impatience it motivates me.

Impatience tells me that this is not all that there is. This is not all that I will ever be. Impatience reminds me that I'm worth fighting for.

Five Minute Friday: Lost

Linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker for Five Minute Friday. We take five minutes to write and share our raw, unfiltered words on the given prompt. Come join us. 

I have this association with lost - lost years, lost love, lost time, lost words. A negative litany dragging me into this downward spiral. There have been losses. Heart-shattering-change-my-life losses. But those aren't the losses I want to write about.

I want to write about the good losses. About losing the lies that have held me back from embracing my words. I am not who I used to be because I am shedding this identity that no longer fits me, an identity that was never meant to be mine in the first place. I'm losing mistrust, shame, guilt, loneliness. Things that held me down, held me back. There is beauty in these losses.

As I meander my way through this year of become I'm seeing the pattern woven amongst the things that call to my heart, the things that are coming alive - they are all things I once thought lost. Things I had given up as lost. They weren't lost, just waiting. Waiting for the stars to align so that I could embrace them and in doing so embrace myself.

Real Talk Tuesday: I Give Myself Permission

Growing up we often told each other that it was easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. It was true and not true. In my world, half the time I got in trouble for asking for permission in the first place. Permission has always been something external, this mystic power that authority figures held over me. There is fear here as I consider what it would mean to take that power back, to allow myself to be the one who grants permission in my own life.

What if though permission wasn't about power and control? Just because I've always known it as that, doesn't mean that it has to continue to mean that in my life now. What if permission could be a gift, a mercy, a treasure that I welcomed into my life? I'm learning to see permission as a doorway, one which leads me further into hope and healing.

It is in that spirit that I wrote this letter to myself:

Dearest Me,

You have fought against the rules and restrictions of others, battled to find the right way, the way that brings acceptance and belonging. I give you permission to stop. You're allowed to go your own way because you already belong. There is already acceptance of you here.

Acceptance of your humanity - in all of it's glory and mess. You have permission to get it wrong. To react badly. To not always map everything out with multiple contingency plans, just in case. You have permission to get it right. To respond with brilliance. To point others towards wholeness. To feel settled and comfortable in your own skin.

You have permission to stop apologizing. Your existence is no longer something that needs to be forgiven.
You have permission to struggle, to have bad days that stretch into bad weeks, which stack up into awful months. You're allowed to ask for help on those bad days, to admit that you cannot do this all on your own. That doing the laundry or the dishes or cooking one more meal is more than you can handle. You have permission to have good days. Glorious days. Days when you skip and dance and twirl and laugh. Days when you accomplish it all with energy and joy to spare.

Your performing for others, for God - those days can be over now dear one. You can let those chains fall off your shoulders. Who you are is beautiful, right here, right now and you have permission to celebrate that, to struggle with it, to wrestle with it until it is a truth worn deep in your bones.

You don't need my permission, but you have it. It's a gift. There are no strings here waiting to trip you up, to tangle you in impossible expectations. There is no fine print, no gotcha.

I am here, cheering you on, as you live out your story. A story that doesn't get wrapped up in 30 minutes with a neat bow covering up the messy bits. You have permission to own your story, to shout it from the rooftops, to whisper it in trembling bravery. Your cage is unlocked and you have the only key. That key is your permission to leave this cage of fear and lies. You no longer have to live here.

You have permission to be loved, cherished, accepted.

Love,
Me

Linking up with Marvia Davidson for Real Talk Tuesday. Come join us. :) 

There is Good Here Too.

My words feel like they are stuttering along with my heart. I want to hurry time, to get to the good part that I can see just over this next hill.  I'm convinced that the sunset will have colours just a little more brilliant, that the dew will sparkle on the flowers and that the road will smooth out ahead of me. My heart could easily settle back into straining and fighting to get ahead. My mind wants to deem this place as not good enough yet.

Except I'm realizing that this IS the good part. It's the beginning of so much good and I want to savour every last piece of it. It has been years in the making, more like my whole life in the making. I don't want to miss any of it, not even the ache in my feet or the burning in my muscles as I climb one more hill.

This beginning is my blood and tears woven together with a brave I never knew I possessed.

I know how to write about the hard things. The things that wreck me, that leave me feeling raw and brave when I push publish, or place the ribbon and close my journal. There are too many stories of being wrecked that I could write. That I need to write.

Yet as this year progresses, there are new stories that I'm living. Stories with hope, with light, with creativity. Stories where dreams no longer turn into nightmares or futile fantasy. I don't know yet how to write about the good things.

I want to cradle the good to my chest, to cuddle it and own it as mine. It's taken thirty years, but I'm finally glad that I wake up every morning. In many ways, I'm holding my breath still, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for this glorious wonder at enjoying living and investing in myself to disappear. This feels like a rainbow on a grey sky. There's more rain coming, the storm isn't done and there will be yet more mud by the time the rain stops for good. But right now, there's a rainbow - colours blazing out faint in places, but blazing with all their glory that there is good here too.

Because I'm still learning about this, I want to pose some questions:

How do you handle the mix of good and bad? Do you tend to lean more to one side or the other? How do you relish the good moments, knowing that there will still be hard times ahead?

What's Next?

Five months into become, with Be finished and on the last week of Story 101, I'm wondering now what? I've gained some incredible tools this year. I'm owning the truth of my creative, artist heart, exploring in both words and photographs what is means to be vibrant and alive. There are projects, yes projects, plural in the works. Other than the times I've been ill, I've said yes to exercise 5-6 days a week, every week this year. I'm learning to honour my body and care for it. I have not begun to finish unpacking everything that I've learned so far this year. I can only imagine what the next 7 months are going to look like.

Heck I'm even asking "what's next" from a positive place, rather than dreading the next thing, certain it too will make life even more difficult. I know that I thrive on structure as long as I have freedom to pick and choose within that structure. The budget is not going to support more e-Courses for now, despite there being a couple that are tempting.

There isn't a road map for this part of the journey. I want one. I struggle to trust that I'm not wasting my time when I don't have that structure in place showing me where I'm headed. Yet, everything so far this year has happened without my planning it all out. Never in a million years did I dream that I'd be in the place that I am now. It's not been my plans that have gotten me here, it's been my yes. My yes to the tugging of my heart. My yes to making myself a priority in my life. I've jumped in brave and scared. It has been amazing.

Maybe I don't need to know what's next. What I need to do is to continue the road that I started this year, to say yes to the things that bring life to me, whatever shape or form they show up in. Here's to being brave and stepping forward without someone else's framework to hold me up.

Becoming Me, Even With My In-laws

There's nothing quite like getting together with some of my in-laws to spark my insecurities. I don't think that they quite know what to do with me. They are good dysfunctional people, and I come from a different world. We don't see eye to eye on just about anything, so topics of conversation tend to be quite limited.

Because it's strained to have conversations about anything other than the weather and gardening, I tend to walk away from these occasions wondering why I bother showing up. My negative self-talk pops it's ugly head up, informing me that this is just more proof that I don't belong anywhere, that I'm such a misfit, that nobody care about me, that I don't matter. The last several times I've vowed that this would be my last family get-together. My heart cannot take being ignored and dismissed one more time.

I wasn't going to go today. I had decided last night that I would make other plans my priority. I woke up this morning for my Story 101 meeting. Having that space where I was seen and heard mattered. I still walk away from every meeting second-guessing myself, but it's not stopping me from showing up and sharing. I'm learning to trust that my voice matters beyond just mattering to me. That maybe I have something to offer other than my brokenness.

As I was talking through whether to go to this thing with my in-laws or not, I realized that I could be the adult that I'm becoming. I could show up, make polite conversation, or at least listen. I could bring my camera and use that as a way to reframe the experience of being with a group of people that I don't get along with. I could find beauty even there.

It wasn't awful, it wasn't pleasant. But I handled it differently. I had been seen and valued already that morning. I scheduled to go to coffee with a friend afterwards so that I could be seen and heard again. Today I realized that I could make different choices with this too. I don't have to continue to hide at these functions or not show up at all. There are ways that my heart and my voice can be protected without it being toxic or negative.

Piece by piece I'm learning. I'm learning that when I invest in the places and relationships where I am valued, I am less devastated by the places where I'm not seen or heard. I'm learning that I have a choice other than not showing up. I'm learning how to be true to me, even in the most uncomfortable situations.

When I'm My Best Self

The idea for this came out of my having a bad day. The judgements in my head have been spinning out of control and the tapes of the past are trying to drown out my own voice. This is why I wrote it all out, all the ugly truths of who I can be.

In writing about my worst self, the words at first came fast and furious. All these horrible things about myself. Yet as I kept writing I started to hear my voice again. My voice telling me who I am when I am my best self.

When I'm My Best Self

My best self is kind

gentle, compassionate

She values herself

beauty and scars, growth and tantrums, 

She sees good in others

extending kindness, mercy, grace, and love,

She is light

shining in darkness, holding out hope, standing, dancing, a beacon

She is brave

unashamed, whispering truths and roaring at injustice, 

She is creative

outside the box, breathing in colour, living in words

She is tenacious

relentless in pursuit of wholeness

She is organized

Thriving on routine and structure, carefully planning, balanced

She has empathy

seeing, feeling, believing the pain of others, holding their hearts and stories in hers

She is humanity at it's best

Loving herself and others well, being true to herself

When I'm My Worst Self

There are these tapes in my head. The ones that play 24/7. When they were recorded they sounded like other people, but now, I get them confused with my own voice. One of the tools that I have in learning to value myself is to write what's true. At the moment, what feels true is only true when I am my worst self. I'm not always this person. But sometimes I am - usually when I'm hurting, angry, anxious, lonely, or tired. I've worn myself out, trying to challenge these tapes head on. It hasn't worked. What has worked is accepting what piece of truth they may offer and allowing the rest to go. Funny thing is, what truth I find in these tapes is generally true only when I am at my worst.

I'm tired of only seeing these things about myself, so I thought I'd write them out. All the pieces of my worst traits or my best traits turned destructive. My hope in writing this is not to bash myself over the head, but to make room for me to write When I'm My Best Self.

When I'm My Worst Self

My worst self is petty

Nit-picking, anal retentive, obsessed with detail

She is harsh

Judging , comparing, evaluating, cold and distant

She lacks empathy

Without mercy, perfectionist, grace-less

She holds herself as separate

Different, other-than, sometimes superior, usually inferior, less-than

She sees herself as childish

Needy, desperate, whiny, weak, lacking

She feels desperate

Grasping,  impatient, merciless, insane

She is selfish

Seeing only her pain, her past, her dysfunction, her problems

She is undisciplined

Lazy, scattered, disorganized, lacking in her follow through

She lives in terror

Scared, worried, nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop

She is humanity at it's worst

Vindictive, small-minded, bringing death to herself and others

The Next Right Choice

One of the many clichés in recovery is to make the next right choice. It's served me well over the past three years. When I don't know what my next step is, or which issue to tackle next, when I haven't known what to do about the enormity of the dysfunction that I still live in because of my past - I don't have to have all of the answers, heck I don't have to have ANY of the answers. I need to make the next right choice.

It's not this pressure of perfectionism, oh I have to get it right. It's that I know I could choose to sit down and write, or I could go stare in the fridge and dream about what my next meal will be. My right choice is the one that leads me towards life, towards wholeness. It helps too, when I mess up, when I decide that I'm going to not just plan my next meal, I'm going to eat it right now too, even though I'm not hungry. It helps because I don't have to beat myself up, I can make my next right choice - to own my slip, to own that I chose medicating over feeling, and to release myself from my own judgement. I take my consequence and I make the next right choice.

Those choices add up, over and over until I'm now in this place where I no longer tie my worth to my weight. Where I like and even love who I am becoming - this introverted creative, full of scathingly brilliant ideas, who thrives on routine and is learning to live outside of the rules and the boxes. Where I can look in the mirror and see things that I like about myself, instead of only seeing what I hate. This place is one where I'm finally grateful to be alive, grateful that my best efforts to not live didn't succeed.

The past several months a recurring theme has been showing up - this theme of "I don't belong". It's not new. There were too many other things on my plate. It sucks, walking around feeling like a junior high girl left on the outside of every group. There's a lot of pain that says that it's true. There's pain that says that people would want me, value me if I was skinny. There's pain that says no one cares, you aren't unique, your words don't matter. There's pain that says I need to isolate, run away, withdraw, give up. I could do those things. I could believe all the things that my pain says. Much of what I'm feeling is based in the past. Because when I was a junior high girl, I didn't belong. I didn't fit in. I wasn't valued or cared about by my peer group. I was left out, repeatedly. Just because it was true back then doesn't mean that it's true in the present.

I've spent several days having to make my next right choice in this. Choosing to text a friend, choosing to tell my safe people how I feel, asking those closest to me to tell me one more time that I'm valued, that I matter to them, that I belong. It feels needy. It's also necessary. Some days I can hear my pain and validate what used to be true. Some days I can even list ways that it isn't true now. But some days, all I can do is add fuel to the fire and those are the days that my next right choice tells me to pick up the phone and ask for help.

This isn't going to just go away. My learning to like myself has taken years of hard work and choices. This is going to take time and choices too. It's not that I need to get rid of lies or stop believing them. My pain from then needs to be felt, to be written through, to be held and heard so it can then be released. In the process of doing that, my right choice then becomes reaching out when pain's voice drowns out my own.

Who knows, maybe three years from now I'll look back and see that I have learned to feel secure in my friendships, that I can trust that I am wanted, see that I'm valued, and feel included. Until that day, I'll keep making my next right choice.

Because vs Become

Because allows me to stay where I am, justified in remaining stagnant.
Excusing my behaviours, attitudes, choices
It wraps my heart in the past, choking me on what never was.

Because robs me of my choices now,
It keeps me behind my glass wall
And allows lies to continue framing what I experience.

Become allows me to fall forward, trusting that I don't have to remain where I've always been.

Opening my heart to the possibilities of what could be

It invites me to choose, to explore, to embrace failing

Become re-frames my past as the beginning of the story, not the end

It makes space for the messy and giving up control

Accepting that what was does not have to dictate what will always be. 

Become allows me to put roots down deep and lean into the hard work

The work of growing where I was planted

Of hearing the colours of Spirit on the wind

Reminding me that I need the rain as much as I need the sun. 

A Plural Life in a Singular World

You don’t end up as a poly-fragmented multiple without severe, prolonged, horrifying trauma before the age of 7. I know this. All the literature agrees, well all the literature that acknowledges multiplicity as real, as possible. I laugh at the idea that something that I live can be debated still as to whether it even exists.

It’s always existed for me. I split before conscious memory, long before narrative memory. I will never get to know why. There is no story that I can tell, no threads to weave together into a tapestry that explains why when I was a preschooler I already had 5 distinct separate personalities. My abusers refuse to acknowledge the harm they did to me and I do not yet have the strength to force a confrontation. It’s around the age of 4 that I have conscious narrative memories. That is where my stories start - the first time that he thought I was demon-possessed and decided to cast it out of me. The first time that a friend wanted to play a game with me - a game that I've learned to label for what it was - sexual molestation and object rape.

There’s the story of the bullying, the name calling, the being pushed down on the playground. Of being excluded, always, forever left out. These are stories that I could tell, that I need to tell - and every story, every incident shattered me further. My words feel too small, too insignificant to do justice to the harm done to my very being in the name of God, love and family. I don’t have a before. All that I have is the abuse and the aftermath.

I can’t tell you the story, the first story where I learned that because I was a girl I was less than, I was evil. I can’t tell you the story because it was in every interaction with my father. I saw it every time he belittled my mother. I was taught it every time that the story of Adam and Eve was told. It was Eve’s fault, she destroyed the perfect world God had made. I have a three year old part inside who’s name is Eve. We only found her a year ago - locked in an internal hell, perpetually being punished for being a girl, for being sin, for being totally depraved to the very core of her being. Christianity taught me that. My good private Baptist school taught me that. My current church teaches me that. It’s taught every time a man gets up to speak and a woman doesn't. It’s taught every time a man is put into a leadership position over a woman. It’s taught in ways that are driven into the depths of women’s souls.

To stay in my church right now is telling Eve, this precious piece of us, two separate messages. Because we rescued her from that hell - both her and the young boy that was created to torment her for all eternity. We rescued them and have been teaching them both that they are more than that story from so long ago. We are teaching them that they each are beautiful and worthy and loved. But when I stay, I'm telling Eve that there’s a piece of that old story that tormented her for so long that is true. She is different, less than, over-looked and unseen because she is a girl. I can’t stay in a place that tells this beautiful piece of my heart that she is evil.

I must leave, and I don’t know where to go. It’s only been in the last 4 weeks that the internal structure that has kept us trapped in a cycle of torment and obligation about our faith has stopped. It’s shifting, changing once again as we take this next step to healing. This is my hard thing - my internal world, that is more real to me, more a part of me than anything else on this earth and this next step in my healing, finding a church that doesn't add garbage into my still open wounds. I want to live open and honest as me, as us. I don’t want to be the poster child for healthy multiplicity. Most multiples who heal choose integration into one whole self. That’s not an option for us. We've never known a life without each other’s company, opinions, voices, and our internal landscape. It’s not easy to live as a plural person in a singular world. We are always checking our tenses, terrified we said too much, that we spoke as a harmonious collective instead of a solo voice. It’s the secret that doesn't get talked about - not with the family, not with most of my friends, not in the places that I minister. There just doesn't seem to be room for all of me.

Yet all of me is here, we exist - and the more that we write, the more the struggle to stay singular seems worthless. And we’re scared. Scared people will run away like they have in the past. Scared people won’t engage with us as we are. Scared that we will turn into this sideshow freak. Scared to write this, even more scared to post it. We've been kicked out of things before for being plural and owning it. Our biggest fear though is that we’ll be ignored. The one thing I cannot bear is silence.

There’s no tidy neat bow to wrap this up with. I hate that this is an on-going writing, something that continues to surface. This healing from abuse is painful. Living in the aftermath is even worse. Maybe that’s why my eye keeps being drawn to trees growing out of rock faces. Trees that are thriving, and growing in the most difficult and beautiful of places. Maybe my eye sees what my heart doesn't dare hope for yet - that there is beauty here, growing out of these hard places.

Unwrapping My Grave Cloths

Every time it happens, every single stinking time that I go to battle for another piece of my soul, another piece of myself, of my faith, I'm caught off guard. This battle takes more and more from me. Each round, each fight, each piece of this war leaves me more weary and raw than I was before.

I think the forgetting is necessary. If I remembered in detail what this looked like, I would never strap my armour back on and step up to the line. I've been thinking about resurrection, about how that looks now that I'm facing another round of this battle against my past ruling my present and dictating my future.

I don't connect emotionally to Jesus' resurrection. Intellectually I'm grateful for it, emotionally I wander around it. In having the freedom to pursue my faith for myself, free of the restrictions of the past, everything comes into question. My relationship with the Divine is secure enough to withstand this process. I'm not going to "lose my faith." In fact it's quite the opposite. I'm on a journey to find what it looks like for me.  I'm grateful that I don't feel guilt around my struggle. It's not something that I quite know how to talk about yet. What I have been taught about Easter weekend sounds like abuse and gets all tangled up in the past. My therapist made a comment today that I can't connect with the resurrection after Jesus' death because that's not my story. There was no three days later, no miraculous intervention. I was tortured, destroyed, and who I was died. There was no resurrection. There's only this battle to unearth each piece of me and bring it with trembling to the One who breathes life back into these dead bones of mine.

It's in this that my heart is captured by Lazarus' resurrection. It was messy. It wasn't a pristine empty tomb. He emerged as commanded, alive, but still entombed in his grave wrappings. Wrappings stained with oils, spices, and bodily decomposition. His body once wrapped by love that showed up as grief. His body now unwrapped by love that showed up as joy.

I am Lazarus. What was once dead in me has come alive. I am still bound though in so many places by these grave wrappings. It's a process of peeling them away, first from my face so that I can breathe and take the water and food offered to me by the hands of others. One layer at a time, one part at a time, I am being unwrapped. Sometimes I forget that, when all I can smell is my death wrappings that still cling to my body. I get impatient, desperate, frantic to be free. I was wrapped deliberately, intentionally, my unwrapping must be the same.

It's not an easy process, to be unwrapped. It's not a process that has a cultural parallel. It's different, strange, unfamiliar. There isn't a road map for this part of the journey. It is as unique as the individual being unwrapped. There's a duality to it. A necessary standing still to be unwrapped by the hands of Love. A fighting to reclaim what has been tainted and stolen. It's freedom for my rule-bound soul - and terrifying at the same time. I want a clear path through this. I want people who have walked before me on this journey. I want, I want, I want. Yet my soul is learning to trust that what I need will be provided, even when I cannot know what that need is or how it could be met.

Resurrection

It rarely looks like I expect it to look. It never comes in the timing I anticipate. It usually shows up still wrapped in grave cloths. It always sends ripples through my life that I didn't foresee.

This unearthing of my voice has brought some unexpected, unanticipated friends with it. Lies that kept it buried have been fighting furiously this week to reclaim their stolen prize. Because I'm seeing, no matter what those lies say that yes, my voice, my words, they are a prize.  They have value. {oh that's a scary sentence to write.} It's true though. If I have value, then so does my deepest expression of myself.

I've learned over the past several years to accept that I have value and worth. Others that I trust serve as my mirror showing me a person that is otherwise hidden from my view. Three years ago this looked like an impossible journey. Yet this past year for the first time I celebrated my birthday because I wanted to be celebrated.  I didn't apologize for being born or make plans to end my life. I didn't tell people who wished me a happy birthday to go thank my Mother because I had nothing to do with my birth and if anyone had asked me, I wouldn't have wanted to be born.

I fought. For three years I fought. Every excavation of myself brought pain and lies with it. Every time I didn't run, didn't medicate, I felt like my world had collapsed on me. I built muscle. I learned how to fight back effectively, I learned to not let my fear or my doubt make my choices for me. I learned how to hush, to allow myself to be comforted and supported. And now, now I'm learning to become. I'm coming alive in ways that I never dreamed possible.

So this battle, the battle that I've fought all week to write, to push past the resistance, the lies, the messages that come from my pain and from the pit of hell - this battle has been utterly worth it. It's a battle that I knew how to fight. I have those tools. I have people to walk with me, to encourage me on the days when I felt ready to give up and give in. I have a knowing deep inside that this is me becoming who I am called to be.

This upcoming week, Holy Week, I'm looking to see what lies about my voice and my value need to be put to death. I'm looking for the shame, the judgements, the self-loathing, the anxiety that need to go. This culminating week of Lent, my heart is more ready than it has ever been for those things that hold me back, that tie me down to die so that the woman I am called to be, created to be, destined {eep} to be can be resurrected.

Fighting For My Voice

I haven't wanted to write these past couple days. There is resistance when I sit down, whether it's a blank page or a blank screen. This resistance is showing up right on time. Usually the third week, the third month, the third year is when my resistance shows up in full force. The ever-present depression rears her head again, in an attempt to take over my life yet again. The fights with my husband increase. The fights within myself increase. My anxiety spikes and the urge to act out, to gain relief becomes a drum beating in the back of my brain.

This is my third week with Story 101. Hello resistance. Hello self-judgement. Hello feelings of worthlessness. I didn't miss you. I really don't want you back and yet here you are, again. It's the same cycle -and yet it's not.  It's not destructive in the ways it used to be. I have tools now that help me to not spin out of control when you all come back to visit. I have a community of people around me who continue to tell me the truth, softly and with power. They remind me that I am not alone, I am not other. I have an ever-growing list of ways to feed my soul, and feed this person that I am becoming.  I am learning to choose life for myself instead of mere survival.

I'm going to write. I'm going to use "I" too much. I'm going to be not specific enough, too short in length and all the other judgements you want to hurl at me today. I'm still going to write. This time, you don't win. I know where this resistance comes from.  I know I'm scared.  There are all these new pieces in my life - pieces that are allowing me to continue to become this healthy, vibrant, wild, creative woman that I know is who I'm called to be. I've spent the last year letting go of codependent habits and behaviours to make room for this woman to grow.

There is room now for next steps, scary steps.  Steps towards my health - physically and emotionally. The resistance is a shield, pushing back against my fear. Oh I'm afraid. Afraid to be healthy. Afraid of the process.  Afraid of these steps and the world that is opening up in front of me. I spent so long living out the worst-case scenario that my assumption is still that anything good has another shoe that is going to drop on my head. That's not true any more. It wasn't true back then either.  Good and bad both exist in a complex dance - but that dance is not one of cause and effect. Good things no longer cause bad things to happen.  The truth is that they never did.

Today I'm writing because every voice in my head is screaming for me to hide, to run, to not go there. I know that I'm as ready as I need to be. I know that this is where I've been lead.  This is the right time, my time to learn to fight for my voice. I choose me. I choose my words. I choose to share them. I am no longer trapped, silently screaming.

Beauty From Hard Places

There's a theme showing up over and over as I wander through nature.  My eye is drawn to several things time and again. Pine cones, new buds, water, the interplay of light and shadows. These are all important.  There are things here for me to hear and see. My mind wanders over the thoughts and images, seeing new life - it's fragile beauty. It's tenacity. The trusting brave that winter is over. It reminds me that growth takes time. First grow the new shoots and then come the buds. It will be months before the full beauty of the blossoms is seen.

There's another thing that my eye is drawn to - trees growing out of rocks. Life from harsh environment. Life and beauty in these hard spaces. The roots have to dig deep to anchor the tree, to dig under the rock, to dig even into the rock. It's a message my heart needs, and one that I don't always want to see.

I know too well the struggle of growing in those hard places. Fighting all the time for the basic essentials that I need to survive. I've spent so long begging for a transplant - and in some ways I got one when I moved to be with my husband. But that transplant wasn't to a beautiful garden where all my needs are magically taken care of.  It was to a different type of hard place, new rocks mixed in with the old ones.

It's easy for my soul to scream to the heavens that this is not abundant life. My screams are answered with these trees growing out of cliff faces and on rocky river shores. They are answered with new life mixed in with the left over dead growth from winter. They are answered with bare branches that are teeming with tiny new buds.

There is life here in this hard place.  There can be growth here, now.  It will take time. It will take tenacity. It will take trust. And one day there will be the stirrings of beauty, not somewhere else, but here in the middle of the rocks.