I Showed Up

I showed up
Shaking in my brave
No masks
not even make up to hide behind

I showed up
Uncertain of acceptance
Arms barred
scars showing

I showed up
Trembling tearful words
Honest, authentic
me

I showed up
Heart in my eyes
Brokenness and wholeness
Walking together into that room

I showed up
Breathing through panic
Triggered by past baggage
Ready to bolt

I showed up
And it was okay
My heart was heard
My words accepted
My story not scorned

I showed up
to women shaking in their brave
to real spilling down cheeks
to shared journeys

Tonight I showed up
Tomorrow I will do it again.

Thin White Lines

trigger warning: self-injury/suicide

Thin white lines
Memories etched in skin
Untold stories

The very first
Marking my wrist
Desperate hope
Please let me die

Interruption
Hastily covered arms
Pressure eased
Mind clear

The second
blurs into all the rest
hundreds of lines
hundreds of times

Elusive relief
Cruel comfort
Proof of life
Release for pain

The very last
forgotten
unnoticed
fading away

White lines
Speaking wordless stories
Voicing long ago pain

Reclaiming my Beauty

Once upon a time I executed a perfect pirouette and felt myself beautiful...until my body type was shamed as "not right" for a ballerina. Those shaming moments that came time and again beat down my sense of my own beauty. A sense that already came far too infrequently and already carried baggage with it.

The first sexual assault on my child body was when my body's beauty became used for someone else's exaltation of power and control. I was four years old and no longer innocent.  The pattern continued, one perpetrator after the next, using my beauty for their pleasure.  Beauty became something that needed to be hidden.  Every time I started to reclaim my own beauty there was another perpetrator stealing what belonged to me.

In my pain I harmed my body.  Cutting it hundreds of times in a vain attempt to purge the evil in me. I hid my body and my beauty.  I buried it with clothes and when that didn't work, I buried it with fat.  Now I could shame my body, to tell it how disappointed I was, how it had failed me in this too, that I now could never be beautiful again.  There will always be scars and stretch marks - my life story written on my skin.
I believed that I had destroyed any beauty that was left in my body.  I desecrated it and now what's left served only as a mockery of what could have been, of what was intended to be.

Over the last three years, I have journeyed with my body.  For a long time I've referred to it as "my ugly".  It wasn't mine.  It doesn't look like me.  As I've learned to let go of some of my self-hate and the false blame, my relationship with my body has come front and centre. I could see that who I was might be beautiful, but the skin it was housed in was deemed ugly and not suitable. My awakening heart wanted to feel beautiful, to be beautiful and I resigned myself that it would never happen.

I began belly dancing about a month ago.  After that first lesson I walked out sore, alive, and more connected to myself than I had ever felt.  I felt like a woman.  Each lesson connects me more and more to my body.  Every time I practice I see glimpses of how right now, in this moment there is beauty in my body.  Beauty in the movement.  Movement that comes from MY body.

As I learn to dance again, I'm learning that my beauty matters.  Deeply.  In times past when I felt my own beauty I was authentically and unashamedly myself. Feeling my own beauty, embracing it grounds me in my body and in the moment.  Time seems to hold it's breath as my essence twirls in celebration.  I owe my body an apology for the abuse I heaped on her and compassion for the abuse that was inflicted on her by others.

I cannot change what has come before.  However, I can learn how to see myself right now as beautiful.

Another Step Out of Crisis

For 22 years of my life I existed in a constant state of crisis.  It was all about survival. There wasn't room for anything else.  Every moment of every day was poised on the edge of the unknown - would I walk away this time unscathed?  Would my words be thrown back in my face?  Could I somehow have correctly predicted his mood and matched my behaviour accordingly? Did I dot every i and cross every t so that nothing was out of place?

It was hell.  I'm sure I'll continue to write about those years - there is so much there to heal from, so many pieces that still are untold, unheard, unseen.  I also don't know how to write about spiritual torture.  I don't know how to tell the stories where prayer was supposed to heal my body and when it didn't I was to blame.  I don't know how to tell the stories where I was sat down in a circle of people who claimed to love me while my father commanded the demons to leave my body and wouldn't stop until I was throwing up from sobbing so much.  I don't want to tell those stories.  I don't want people to know how every time these things happened pieces of who I was split off, sent to live in an internal hell in a vain attempt to be good enough and to separate out the memories of the torture that our soul was being subjected to in the name of love and being raised in the faith.

I'm still recovering memories and powerful emotional echoes from the years before the memories.  I'm still learning about pieces of myself that have been lost along the way.  Parts locked away, holding onto memories and feelings so that our sanity could survive.

I spent so long always in crisis, everything was do or die. I'm still learning that I don't have to run away or fight back.  I can simply be. I can exist and in this moment there is nothing that can harm me.  I don't have to protect myself or those that I love.  I can sit here and watch my candles bring pinpricks of light into the middle of the darkness.  I can trust the process, the messy-snot-everywhere ugly crying and the quiet stillness.  I can trust that the Divine has my shattered heart cupped in their hands - this Divinity that understands the mystery of being I and we at the same time.  I can trust them to mend my broken pieces of self with seams of gold.  It's just going to take more time.

Biting Back My Words

I'm biting back my words.  I'm shying away from writing the hard truths, the pieces that desperately need expressing right now.  I ended up writing an email to one of my sisters tonight.  There are so many things stirred up.

I feel invisible.  It always seems to go that I either share myself as this broken damaged emotional mess or as the strong competent "I survived that shit" leader.  Both are me.  Neither are the whole truth.  I want to scream all the horrid truths that I've internalized about myself to the world.  I want to carve them into my body as an ever present reminder.  I wonder if that urge will ever go away.  It's been 3 years and 364 days since I last self-injured.  And right now I miss it, crave the false release it will give me.  I crave the false comfort it offers and the lies that I can wrap myself in to numb my heart from the depth of my pain.

I hold fast to the belief that if people really knew me they'd run for the hills.  I feel, no I know that I'm branded by all the abuses done to me, convinced that everything about me screams "victim" and "easy target". It's all lies, but they are lies that at least part of my heart still believes, still holds onto and still wraps around herself as a false sense of security.

Meredith Andrews does a song, Pieces, and the first verse feels like where I'm at tonight:

It's a complex puzzle you call your life
It's an uphill climb, it's a constant fight
And it wears you down
Feeling like you're alone, like you don't belong
And you won't be loved if you don't measure up
And you wear your scars
Like they're who you are

I am so sick of the lies I believe.  It's hard to see them as lies.  It was true.  I was alone.  I was abused by those who were meant to protect and love me.  That abuse was swept under the rug and I was told that I needed to be a better daughter.  Called out on being bitter and rebellious. No shit Sherlock. That's kind of what happens when I come to you for help and all you can offer is that I need to forgive him.  Then you sent me back there.  Time and again.  God I'm angry.

How do you learn to belong anywhere, to anyone when you're raised cut off from the world?  No media, no unapproved friends, and every move in tightly controlled.  I only belonged when I fit someone else's labels and niche that they had carved out for me.   Even now in my marriage I'm only starting to carve my own niche, having given up on being who my in-laws needed me to be, and who my husband thought I should be.
It's only been in the last year that I've started to be loved for me.  It's taken therapy and hard work. It's taken letting people see me.  It's taken my husband starting recovery for himself and his crap.  And yet the flip side is that for years I've known somehow, somewhere buried deep down that God doesn't give a shit about my trying to measure up.  He loves me - wildly.  It's hard to hold onto that.  The truth is getting stronger.  I tend to lose sight of it when I start the next round of healing and that's where I am right now. I know the way God loves me is like this whirling crazy dance full of colours - and I'm not connected to it.  It's held separate so that I can feel the pain that needs to come out.  It feels like walking back to the beginning.

And my scars...yeah I wear them like they still get to define me.  I spent 12 years cutting and the last 4 staring at my scars as they slowly fade to white lines.  It's not just those scars though, all the invisible scars define me even more.  Yet I know that God has scars too, and His scars, His scars mean that I'm Beloved.

These are some of the words that I'm biting back, that I've locked away, to only allow to spill out when I'm too tired to filter anymore.

Rest in who He is, He knows how to make your pieces fit - Meredith Andrews, Pieces 

Ash Wednesday - Fasting From Shame

I haven't fasted in years.  Fasting has been a dirty word, one filled with disgust, shame, and guilt.  Disgust because all that I've seen of it has been from the place of worshipping a vending machine god.  Insert proper spiritual practice, make your selection and down falls your chosen blessing.  Like all vending machines, occasionally the blessing gets stuck and you have to insert more spiritual practices.

I feel deep shame around fasting.  Maybe because it was used as a punishment as a child.  Maybe because only the "holiest" of Christians fasted.  Maybe because it was required.  I don't know where all the shame comes from - but the idea of fasting, of intentionally putting something down to make time and space for God to whisper.  That idea stirs my desire to run, to hide, to cower.  My view of God is still so warped, especially when it attaches to any kind of spiritual discipline that I grew up with.  Too quickly it spirals into feeling guilted for not reading enough Scripture, for not attending enough services, for not serving in children's ministry.

It feels like just about everything connected to my faith it tinged with shame and guilt.  It's not how I want it to be.  When I get away from religious behaviours, I find freedom and connection with the Divine.  In churches, in Bible studies, in public prayer, in Scripture reading I find terror.  It would be easier in so many ways to walk away, to throw my hands up in the air and give up.  It's exhausting, painful work to keep facing the fear and sharing the shame.

For today I'm choosing to be honest.  I'm choosing to not heap judgement and condemnation on myself for where I am at in this journey.  Today I choose to honour my journey, to honour my pain and the raw places by lifting off the veils.  Today I sit in the ashes of my faith, surrounded by flickering embers and weep for my little girl self.  The one who believes she is evil because she is a woman.  It was a woman who caused a man to stumble and people have been tripping over her ever since.

I weep for the scars, the white lines that continue to stand witness to my pain and the damage inflicted on my soul.  I weep for an identity that was shattered before it was formed, and for the years I've spent scrambling to find, to hold all the pieces together.  It wasn't fair, it isn't fair and my heart screams at the injustice of it all.

Here is my shame, it is threaded through so much of my heart.  How do I fast from it, when I feel shame that I exist?  I don't know.  There's less shame than there used to be and maybe for today, for this time that is enough.  For today I hold my head up, tears streaming down my face and declare that I am enough.