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. 

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.

The Truth About My Depression

The truth is that I'm drowning. Every where I look in the big world there is pain and destruction. Every where I look in my own life, I see pain and destruction. I'm trying to hide from it all, to protect my own sanity. This is one of the two months of the year that I tend to have a major depressive episode. The rest of the time, the depression is a constant hum in the background, sapping my energy, forcing me to choose what three things I will accomplish that day. Anything more than that is no longer realistic. To hear that someone else has lost the war, it makes me wonder if I should just give up now. This hiding from the overwhelm leaves me isolated, back under my tree, peering out at a place where I know I'd be welcomed, but my feet have turned into roots and my voice has fled.

The mocking voices inside start up again - taunting me with my hopes that someone will see me. What's the point of any of this? Their questions are knife cuts, designed to make me give up. It switches to accusations - how dare you ask to be seen by anyone, don't you know that you are broken and needy and they are beautiful and strong? They don't have time for you. How dare you think to divert any of their energies to your pathetic self? You're the one who can't get her shit together. You have the tools, suck it the fuck up and do it yourself. Then you can ask to be seen. Your value has always been based on what you do. No one really cares who you are, unless it shows up in what you do for them.

It all spirals to the point that I don't know where to ask for support. It feels overly dramatic. I'm afraid that people will start rebuking the Devil and casting "depression" out of me. Because that was one of the consistent responses I've gotten before. These mocking voices, they are my voices - mine and those internalized from the abuses of others. I cannot bear to be told that something that happens inside me is evil. It's taken years for me to see, to learn, to trust that I am not fundamentally evil simply because I am a woman. My depression is tied up in my trauma history, but it also provides havoc of it's own.

The truth is also that I have support. I have a therapist who has stuck with me these past three years as I've fought to find me, to learn compassion for myself, to tell the stories that I need to tell from the past. I have incredible friends who are there for me. Who give of their time and themselves. Who provide a safe place for my anger and frustrations. Who cry the tears I can't always cry for myself. Who understand all too well what it looks like to fight this illness, because they fight it for themselves.

I have more of a voice now, than I have ever had. Even when it's too hard for me to speak up, I still belong. I'm seen and loved for who I am, even when it's all I can do to show up. I have other voices in my life, in my head. Ones that speak kindness. That tell me that I am brave. That remind me that I'm allowed to have a dark day. Voices that remind me that I have all the permission. That speak light and hope into my darkness. For this day, it is enough.

Stories From the Past: Scars

Trigger warning: self-injury and suicide

There are hundreds of scars criss-crossing my body. Faded reminders of the pain from the not so distant past. I have hated these visible reminders of how bad it really was. But I still mourn as they fade and sink into the background of my skin. They are markers of my life. Twelve years of pain documented on my body.

I can still see the very first scars. The ones made with a broken bottle shard sitting under a tree near the highway. That first time, I wanted to die. Wanting to die, trying to die, those weren't new things for me. I'd already tried several other ways with obviously no success. This would be it, the ultimate escape. Back then, death was the only option I could see for getting free from the life I was trapped in.

Broken bottle shards do not make for good cutting tools. I cried because it wasn't sharp enough and then had to hide what I was doing when a classmate showed up uninvited. The burning stinging pain in my wrists got me through the rest of that week. It opened a whole new world of coping to me.

It spiralled out of control until I had to cut to make it through the day. It got harder and harder to hide, to excuse away. When I was arrested two years later they had to document any injuries on my body. I had almost 40 current self-inflicted wounds covering my arms. I wish I could say that I got the help I needed and that the self-injury stopped then. Instead I got creative. I found other ways that didn't leave a mark that could be seen by others. I continued to cut and it once again took over my life when I got a place of my own.

I'd love to say that I would have stopped on my own, but that wouldn't be the truth. I needed an external consequence that was serious enough to motivate me to stop. I still almost didn't make it. One day at a time added up to years. Four years, four months, and twenty-one days.

I wish I could say that I don't miss it. Some days that pull is still there. I don't know that it will ever go away. On the days that the pull is too strong, I trace the scars and remember. Remember the pain that drove me to cut for relief. Remember the self-hatred that demanded I punish myself for existing. Remember the lies that if I could bleed enough then maybe I wouldn't be evil. Remember that I have other tools now than this one and that I deserve gentle care from myself, rather than more scars.

Notes Along the Journey: On Hiding, Fear, and Vulnerability

I'm trying something new. Attempting to allow my brokenness to be seen and honoured, without devolving into living out of that space where I can only see myself as "broken girl".  My heart is filled with emotions that I can't quite connect to. I see them as a swarm of bees. They might give me honey; it's more likely I'll get stung half to death.

The aftermath of my parent's visit is daunting. Between the grief and the hard realizations I don't want to get out of bed ever again. I'm a little kid who is hiding under the table, hoping someone will come find me because I don't know that I'm allowed to stop hiding. I don't know yet that I can take my own hand and leave my hiding places behind. This is so damn scary. I don't acknowledge that for myself nearly enough. Sharing myself, getting vulnerable, it's a BIG deal.

In sharing myself, in being vulnerable, I'm breaking every rule, spoken and unspoken from my growing up years. Every fear comes back to being seen, to someone finding out. Keep silent, keep still, don't draw attention to yourself because then someone might question what's going on and investigate the family.

I forget to give myself grace in this process. I forget the fear that I was born into. The many ways that fear has shaped and moulded who I am. It's been a constant drumming in my blood. Even after I left and was handed freedom. I'm still learning to live out that freedom.

And living out that freedom, it starts with connecting to that swarm of bees. Because those are MY feelings and my feelings, they matter. It matters that I'm grieving the lack of warmth and connection with my Mom. It matters that I'm angry at being required to show love to someone who has shattered me with years of abuse. It matters that I'm triggered and scared still that I will turn around and find them here still. Those feelings, they matter. They aren't pesky flies that need to be shooed away.

I want to throw myself back into day to day life, to pick up where I left off before their visit. I can't seem to do that. It's all I can do to crawl out of bed and survive through another day. It's all I can do to choose the next right thing, to take one step forward and not focus on the bathrooms that still haven't been cleaned, the piles of art journalling things all over the floor, the stacks of books that I want to read, but just haven't had the focus to settle in with, the dishes stacked and piled competing with the plants for counter-space. Because my next right thing for this moment is to give myself all the permission to sit here and write. It is enough. The other things, those will get done, but in this moment, I don't need to hide my feelings behind cleaning.

Stories From the Past: A Beginning

I'm linking up with Marvia Davidson's Real Talk Tuesday talking about truth. This is my truth. 

I couldn't settle to sleep, so I stayed up all night reading Every Shattered Thing by Elora Ramirez. If you haven't read this book, you need to. It wrecked me. Because while I've never been a victim of human trafficking, I have a good friend who is. This shit is real. It happens. And the lucky ones escape.

My words are tumbling around in my brain, as I fight tears. Because this story, it reminded me of something I'd forgotten. It reminded me of how bad the abuse was. About how it really is a big deal. I forget that. I forget now that it isn't happening every day. Now that I don't live my life in terror. Now that I don't have to worry about my room being searched or being caught doing something that would dishonour the family.

I've buried my stories. The fear and terror. The shattering of my soul. I've told them, detached, clinical. Listing the details as though they were nothing. Because they were normal. But Stephanie's story, it reminds me that it's not normal. Her desperation, her tenuous grasp on hope, it reminds me of my own. I forget how far I've come. I minimize the healing that still needs to happen. It's easier that way. It's easier to shrug it off. It's easier to live my life half-connected, but that's no life at all. It's this washed out watercolour existence, that has more colour than my life ever contained so I think this is living.

I'm still surviving. In too many places and too many ways. I'm surviving. I'm still hiding. Hiding my words here, hiding my face, my passions, my dreams. I'm hiding the nightmares and sleepless nights. I'm hiding the daily pain, the constant reminders of medical treatment and care that I was denied.

I don't tell. I still don't tell. I feel like I've written this post a million times here already, and somehow I need to keep writing it. I need to keep telling myself the truth, because really that's what this is about. It's about truth. My truth. I forgot what it was like to find stolen moments of time. Time to myself, hidden away from the parents. The lies upon lies that I told praying that he wouldn't catch me in it, that he wouldn't take away the tiny pieces of freedom that I had earned.

I understand what it is to be property. My value was in the work I could do around the house, the free babysitting, the way that I bolstered his image as a good father - and when I didn't bolster his image then came the rages. The screaming words hurled at my soul - the ones that I don't have to hear ringing in my ears any more because I wear them, carry them in my bones. They weigh me down and keep me trapped.

fat, lazy, rebellious, witch, liar, bitch, slut, disappointment, demon-possessed, why can't you be better, why can't you be like so and so...on and on, his words defining me, shaping me. Demanding respect, demanding love, demanding affection, demanding unquestioning, unthinking obedience. Demanding, pushing, pulling, tearing at my skin.

And I feel the numb set back in, the fog settling back down, sinking deep into my bones. I feel myself start to float away from these memories, back into myself, back into the present because what's back there is too much, too hard, too painful.

It isn't enough though that I survived it, that I was given a place, a home to escape to. I owe it to myself to heal, to come alive, to be the person that he was desperate to destroy. I don't know how. I don't know how to unlock these stories. I still don't know how to tell. Yet I'm convinced and reminded yet again that I have to tell them, in halting words and imperfect details. I have to tell them so that maybe my soul will stop shattering with every anniversary, phone call, visit, sleepless night, flashback, memory, and trigger. I don't know how to heal from this. There isn't a manual. But I'm determined to try.

Ugly Truths: A Rant and A Confession

I feel like the red-headed bastard child. The one that is tolerated, but no one actually bothers to converse with. The child being permitted just this once to sit at the table with the grown ups, the real women. 

I've chosen not to have children. It's not that we can't, we don't know, we've never even tried. I spent most of my relationship with my husband long-distance until 6 months before we got married. I wanted time for the two of us to live in the same country, the same time zone before we became responsible for a tiny human. Only now it's been 5 years and I'm still saying no - because of his addiction, because of mine. Because when I don't get enough sleep, I physically cannot function. Old mostly managed health problems flare to the surface under stress, sleep loss, poor eating habits - all the things that come with a newborn. Because I still can't see a doctor for a women's exam due to the flashbacks and triggers that set me back in my healing for weeks. Because I won't subject a child to his emotional neglect and abuse. Because of a million reasons all of which boil down to this - I can't be a responsible mother yet. 

I'm angry. I'm angry because I know I'm making the right choice for me, for my marriage. I know it deep in my bones that this is a not now. I'm angry because there only seems to be room for SAHMs in the church. Career moms feel excluded. Single friends feel excluded. I feel excluded, looked down on - because in the very needed push to affirm those women who have made the choice to stay home with their children there has been another message sent. One that says we will only see you when you produce a child. That declares that motherhood is the highest calling of a woman and what God has designed us to do. For those of us who either by choice or by circumstances outside of our control do not have children  - not only do we have to deal with the social and societal ramifications of that choice, we're told that you will never truly understand God's love for you, that your calling and life choices are second best, and that you can't love anyone unconditionally. 

People tell me it must be nice to have so much free time. The bold ones when they find out that I'm not a mother and I don't work ask "so what do you do all day?" I'm usually so taken aback by the accusation that I mumble something incoherent to justify why I'm not working, not parenting, not doing something with my life that you can deem as valuable before escaping the conversation. 

Here's the real answer: I invest in me and the people around me. I fight to deprogram my brain from all the lies and false teachings and brainwashing that I endured for 22 years. I fight to stay sober, to live my life un-medicated and to not just feel my feelings, but to honour them even when I've thrown up yet again from crying the tears that couldn't be cried then.

 Everybody loves to point out that I'm free now, that I've made so much progress in my healing, that I'm so strong. It takes a hell of a lot of work day in and day out to be me. To show up in a world that I do not understand. I've had to learn new cultures - first when I left home and discovered a whole new world that was radically different than what I'd be taught to fear about it. Then when I moved from Canada to the USA - and to a very conservative side of the state. I don't understand this world I find myself in. It makes no sense. I fight to hold onto who I am, when I'm constantly swimming against the current. 

I spend my days working, wrestling with trauma. Mine, others. My phone rings, chirps, beeps with messages of pain and panic from women who feel unseen, unheard. Women who are fighting to live, fighting the lies of their pasts, fighting to not medicate, to live one day at a time. 

I get it. I'm fat. I'm socially awkward. I don't have the right clothes. I loathe small talk and getting to know you ice breakers. I no longer cover my scarred arms and that makes you uncomfortable. My story of being abused in the Church, by the Church makes you look at how you parent, raising ugly hidden questions you'd rather not see. 

I go to these events that are supposedly for all women. I watch you fawn over each other's perfect outfits, make-up and hair dos. I listen through speakers that assume that we are all wives and mothers, all white conservatives. I hear about events and opportunities - none of which fit my schedule, all of which require extra money that I do not have. You spread a little Jesus over the top, to go with your matching napkins and table centrepieces. I walk away feeling unseen, unheard, and unwelcome. 

And yet, I'm showing up again, protecting that small ember of hope that this time will be different. This time it's something I'm passionate about. This time, maybe there will be women there who are willing to be real, authentic and look past all the things I'm not to see who I am. To see my heart and my passion for women to heal and no longer be bound by the chains that have been wrapped so tightly that they are choking to death. I'm summoning every last scrap of brave that I have and putting all the tools I've learned in the last 8 years into my bag to take with me because I believe that one day, one of these times I will look around that room and see you. 

I will see your heart trying not to spill out of your eyes because your husband is addicted to porn and you have done everything you can to make yourself be enough for him. All the perfect clothes, and make up, are you trying to fill that ache inside of not being enough for the man who vowed to love, honour and cherish you. I will see you, the frazzled nerves from it being a miracle that you made it there and didn't forget a child at home because your husband is deployed yet again and the only way you have to cope with the loneliness and the fear is to form your life around your children. I will see that behind all your stories about your daughter is the remembered years of interviews and inspections, invasive questions and dashed hopes as you struggled through the adoption process. I will see the loneliness that hides behind your too cheerful chattering words. Your voice begging to be heard; your heart begging to be nurtured.

I show up hoping that today is the day I can see you and realize that none of us feel enough at these events but we show up, holding onto hope that we will be seen. 

Sobbing on the Kitchen Floor

It's one of those seasons again.
The ones where I'm his yo-yo,
never certain which way his fingers will flick me.

Will I go hurling towards the floor yet again?
Will this be the hit that shatters my heart,
or will it only be a dent, a scratching of paint?
Or will he stop half way down, and jerk me in a circle,
weaving me in intricate patterns and knots?

He filters what is told to others,
making me the bad guy,
the unreasonable wife,
the too-fragile one,
the ball-buster.

My words become his justification
to continue to toy with my heart -
 my words,
yanked out of context,
 thrown back in my face,
slightly twisted,
 just a little bent.

He's learning to pull me close,
to hold me in his hand without having to hurl me back to the floor.
It's a learning though,
and my heart, MY heart bears
the consequences and scars of his progress.
I didn't think there was room on my heart for more scars.
Somehow he found the few unmarked places
and stabbed me clean through.

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

Allowing The Process or Living Life Without Boxes

In healing and recovery we talk often about how this is a journey, a process. There isn't a final "I have arrived" point. Living one day at a time is a mantra in living life without addiction. I only have today, this moment, this choice - medicate or feel.

It came up today in my writing group that this creative journey doesn't have a one and done. There isn't a way to pass. It infuriates me. It digs deep into mix of my perfectionism. I want to have a tantrum because I want for something, anything in my life that I can point to, that is tangible and real, that society says has value. Mother's Day brought up all of the feelings - that I'm not doing anything worthwhile with my life. It's crap. I know it's crap. On my saner days, I can value myself and the choices that I continue to make to walk forward in healing, in becoming human.

This digging into the heart of why I don't/won't/can't value my process circles back around to childhood. To a world where the only degrees that counted were in Math, Science, and Engineering. (or if we chose full time music). It was a world where there wasn't room for my creativity, for my way of seeing the world. There wasn't room for me. What counted, what mattered were the grades I got, the tangible accomplishments that I could point at and say "there, see I have value".

There's still his metric in my head, this way of measuring what counts. Yeah society and culture don't help, but they aren't the root of my insanity around this. The root is that I still want, maybe even need my father's approval of my life, my choices. I want to be as valued as my sibling who is parenting children and working part time from home in an acceptable profession. I want to be seen damn it. I want him to see me. I strove all my life to get his approval or to convince myself that his approval didn't matter to me. My comfort with being the black sheep of the family, the "bad" daughter came from allowing his view to still define my worth.

Now I'm finding me for myself. I'm lost. I want a metric to tell me that I've arrived, or at least what arrival could look like. I want a different box, one with windows in the sides, but still a box because there has always been one. Even though I've left his box behind, I only searched to find a box less constrictive than the one I left behind. My box is getting soggy and crumpled. It's got holes in it now. I'm holding onto my tantrum because that allows me to clutch the failing walls tighter around my heart. This tantrum is the only thing holding my box together now.

I want the world outside my box - and I'm scared. Scared of what it would be like to live without a box, without needing something external to point towards that proves my value. Scared that letting go of this box is simply embracing a slightly bigger box. Scared that I'm not ready to live in a world bigger than the one that I've learned to inhabit these past 8 years. It's time. Time to let his rules and his values go just a little bit more. Time to stop clutching my box walls. Time to open my hands to receive something new.

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.

Easter

Easter is not an easy holiday. It is gritty and raw. Every year I gain a new piece of why there is only pain and a rawness in my soul. Here's this year's piece:


For two days you ask me to journey deep into the darkest recesses of my soul. Just as I settle into the wonder and the weeping, you show up. Emotional whiplash. I'm not ready to rejoice.  There is more here in the dark. More that needs to be felt for, discovered, grieved over before it can be unearthed. I'm not ready for resurrection.

The light is too bright for the rawness that is my ravaged heart. I find myself face down, eyes streaming, begging to go back to the darkness. The work you were doing in those hidden places, it mattered. Now the light has chased away my shadows, the fleeting pieces of my jagged edges. I've lost them, yet again. These snatches of untold story that were starting to unfold. The sudden light has shoved me into painful unseeing once more.

I'm not ready to rejoice, to sing songs of relief and gladness. I'm still back in the remembering. My eyes had adjusted to seeing the beauty and nuances of the darkness. I cannot grieve for you one day only to turn around and embrace with whole-hearted ecstasy this supernatural gift. This fleeting gift of your presence here. Far too soon you will leave and retreat to this glorious world outside time that you left for only a short while. Your transient life makes me retreat back into my darkness, alone, but for the half light of a spirit, your spirit that allows my weary soul to dimly see the next step along my road.

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.

My Soul Cries Out

Relief, release
an easing of this pain
this pain of becoming
unearthing the festering wounds
inflicted on my soul by those who claimed to love me

Relief, release
from the lies ever taunting
the memories constant haunting
the words etched into
my very bones

dried up, dried out
dead bones
my bones
bleached in the desert wasteland
that has been my life

dried up, dried out
dead bones
is there really new life for my bones?

I want a do over
My soul screams that you own me at least that God
You created me
You gave me life
You let them snatch it away
one word, one blow, one touch
at a time

It's haunting me the things done in your name
Your powerful holy almighty name
The one that makes evil flee
The one that brings these dead bones
my dead bones back to life

Life - do I even want it?
It's all been sorrow, all been pain
Do I want new life
breathed into me?
For all your power I was still broken
I don't have hope to believe

Believe a different ending for the story that I know
Believe a different truth than the lies that I was told
Believe a different love the one that claims to set me free
Believe a different life - one of resurrection, of hopes no longer dashed
Where evil has not won

Because the story of those bones,
the story of my bones
didn't end in that desert wilderness
There was a word and a breath
A wind and a stirring

I don't have to stay here
in this valley of the dead

I don't have to weep here
for the life I never led

It's a long walk out of this valley
this place where my soul died
I am tired and weary
It was easier to be dried up on the desert floor
There was comfort there,
lying with the dead
This coming back to life - it hurts
dear God how it hurts

And so my soul cries
release and relief

*from a writing prompt for Be

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

10 minute writing prompt [unedited]

Words - held, captive, waiting to be chosen, waiting to be free. They want to be chosen, tasted, sprinkled over and savoured. Right now they wait, hoping, surrounded by others in the same place. Secret jealousies and secret fears. Oh to be seen, to stand out, to be called out and known - the anticipation and the fear. The longing to be explored, to become, to have all the colours and shades of yourself exposed in safe places by the Master word-smith. The cutting apart was painful. It's been comforting to be here in this container. But now, now I want to flu.  I want a world of my own to play a part in.

Of course I see the parallel - that how I so closely identify with the words' longing is really my own - my anticipation, my need, my fear.

I know God is working - it's too much and not enough all at the same time.  It's comfortably uncomfortable - I want to read the words from the end of the book. I want to hurry hurry hurry - yet I remember the pain of the cutting away. I remember the fear of this new place and shape and I plead for Him to be gentle and slow.


prompt from a Story 101 call 

Unrealistic Expectations and Perfectionism

{It feels like I spend a lot of time talking around my past, or referring to it in a general way. I was reminded yet again that talking about the specifics matter. It's a struggle, because there are so many specifics that either I don't remember or else I don't have access to those memories yet. I have ALL THE FEELINGS, but very few specifics.  It's frustrating for me and feels very backwards in my healing to not have the facts and details that seem to be there for everyone else.}

I learned perfectionism as a way of life. The expectation of my as a child and especially as a teenager was that I would be perfect.  I would have perfect grades, keep my room perfectly neat, and would do everything in my life to the point of perfection - and until I reached that point, I would keep trying and improving. This meant that a 98% wasn't good enough.  The focus was on what had I gotten wrong. I rarely heard good job, or well done. When I did, there was also a but attached.  Good Job but you still need to work on.... or Well done except for... My best was never good enough.

Of course in the middle of this, the standard for what was perfection from my behaviour constantly shifted.  One day it was enough that I had tried and given it my whole heart.  The next day, doing the exact same thing with the same effort and focus, I was told that trying didn't count.  What counted was results.  Effort without results was worthless. It was crazy-making to live in that world.

I was naive when I left to start life on my own.  I thought that I would be free of that perfectionism and unrealistic expectations now that I was no longer under my father's thumb. I didn't realize that after 22 years, it was engrained into every fibre of my being.  It goes with me wherever I go.

This learning to let go of being perfect and embracing my humanity is a process. There are places now where I don't expect perfection of myself {yes housework and cooking I'm looking at you right now}. I don't expect myself to be perfect in my writing.  I can accept that I am flawed and loved.  That's huge.

I was surprised this week when another unrealistic expectation reared it's ugly head.  I still expect that one day I will be fully healed - that I can be the person I was "supposed to be" if all the abuse hadn't have happened, and my personality hadn't split into hundreds of pieces.  Ouch. I'm still holding this expectation, this idea, this false hope that one day I won't have the scars, visible and invisible from what all happened.  This false hope keeps me from the grief work.  It creates a barrier in my healing. I know there's redemption and I'm counting on it.  But my idea of what that looks like is going to need to shift.

This side of death, there won't be a day when my past won't be part of my story. Really that's what this is about. I don't want to have lived what I lived.  I don't want to be this strong because I survived hell. I don't want to be able to empathize with every type of trauma because I experienced it all.  I don't want to be stuck in this label of "the woman formerly known as a victim". Yes I'm aware that there is a balance that has to happen here.  But I'm realizing that I've been holding onto a faulty picture of what healing looks like.

My therapist pointed out to me multiple places where I currently have influence in people's lives because of the abuses. I get it, I do get it. I just don't want it. I don't want for this to be my life. I look around and wonder if this was always God's plan or if we're on plan M by now. My unrealistic expectation is that in doing the healing work I will get a do-over. That somehow, I'll magically catch up to my peers, that I'll stop being so unique with such a difficult life story.

There will be more balance - every May I mark my Freedom Day and that number is only going to go up, not down. One day the years that I've been free from abuse will be greater than the number of years I spent being abused. I don't want to pin everything in my life on that though. I need a new idea, a different idea of what healed looks like for me. One that isn't just theory. It's all part of my word for the year still. To become, there must be these shifts in my thoughts and attitudes. Here's to shedding one more layer of flawed expectation and learning to embrace what is, even though it hurts.

Dark Days

{Good Lord this post sounds melodramatic. It's not meant to be. It's honest. As honest as I know how to be right now. I'll be back to a more balanced place in a little while. Too often I don't acknowledge my own dark days. I'm trying that here, with this.}

Some days my broken gets too big. It eclipses every thing else in my life. I sink down, mesmerized with my own pain, sucked into the aching hole of my own private dark places. When I say some days, I mean at least once a week. Introspection is a good thing.  At times I go overboard and know myself a little too well. I forget to look around. I've spent long years believing I was other and alone. I was told to get over my broken, to see that others suffer more than I can imagine.

I've heard the platitudes and comparisons with a little Jesus sprinkled on to make those who offer such filth feel righteous. They ring in my mind, in my memories.  Some are etched in my soul. Other still block my ears and blind my eyes, tricking me into believing that what was is still now.

My voice is panicked, defiant, and silently screaming. There is no objectivity. Things that I know are right for me are called back into question once more. I back into the corner, desperate for protection, needing permission to choose for myself, to function, to breathe.

This is the fallout I hate. I hate my brokenness at times. I hate the way it dominates everything, that THIS, this is what I know. It's all I know. Trauma and recovery. I wish I could rip my heart out of my chest, to find some way to let all the darkness pour out of me once and for all. Darkness I never invited, never wanted, never deserved yet that darkness haunts me, torments me, taints me.

I lost the first 22 years of my life to abuse and I've spent the last 8 finding myself and healing from all the damage. I don't know anything else. The only beauty that I possess comes from ashes. Most days I embrace the mystery along with the pain - the mystery of why this was allowed in my life.  The mystery of the purpose that it may one day serve. The mystery of abuse done in the name of a holy merciful God.

On these types of days, I loath the mystery. I demand answers. My heart's voice screams "why?!" until it's hoarse. There are still no answers. No more of a response now than there was back then. My pain swallows me and everything I know, all that I have learned is once more lost in the howls of a soul in agony.

How long will you forget me, Lord? Forever? How long will you look the other way when I am in need? How long must I be hiding daily anguish in my heart? How long shall my enemy have the upper hand?Answer me, O Lord my God; give me light in my darkness lest I die.  

Psalm 13:1-3

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.