Rhythms and Cycles

This post brought you to courtesy of reading The Artist's Rule by Christine Valters Paintner as part of Story Session's Story 201 e-course. 

I've spent years searching for balance. That one magic point where my house stays clean, I stay sane, the budget is honoured, and my creativity flourishes. I've yet to find it and now I'm becoming grateful that I never found balance. If I had, I would have tried to turn it into a performance metric, one more thing to unsuccessfully strive towards. One more way to feed the lies of not being enough, of being a drain on my husband.

There isn't one point of balance. There are many. It's not this mystic magical place where I make it all happen, but rather it's slowing down to sink deep into the season, to honour the cycle of my life, my season, my month, my week, my day. The idea has been creeping into my awareness through nature walks. My spirit sensing the truth, seeing that everything around us was created with a rhythm and each piece is necessary for nature to thrive.

I've been reading Paintner's The Artist's Rule and soaking in the ideas of not searching for a balance point, but instead of honouring the season that I am in. I recognize that right now that's hard because my inner artist and my inner monk are in two different seasons. I'm not sure yet how to bridge the two. My Artist is in Spring - coming fully alive, bubbling with new ideas and new life. My Monk is in late Autumn, shedding beliefs and lies that keep us from the rest and faith that nourishes us. I'm not certain how to live in two season at the same time.

Recognition though is the first step. I'm choosing to sink deep into the awareness of my seasons, to honour them and not force Spring to be Summer before it's time, or to run back to Summer because Autumn is painful.

As a monk and artist, I want to rise and fall like the ebb and flow of the ocean. I want to shed parts of myself in autumn, to go deeply inward in winter, to blossom into spring, and to shine forth and be radiant in summer. I want to live my life in healing rhythms that honor the lmits of my body, the pleasures of rest, and the delights of play. +Christine Valters Paintner, The Artist's Rule

Interfaith Marriage: Stepping Beyond Just The Two of Us

Once more the uncertainty of my husband's spiritual journey is coming front and centre for me. It's that time of year when community groups and Bible studies and activities that we haven't had since he came out to me this summer resume. I want to support him. For him to know he has the freedom to choose what is right for where he is at and require him to hide his de-conversion.

Selfishly I hate that this is going to be one more thing that I do alone now. In reading some of the experiences of other spouses whose partners have de-converted, they often express that it gave them the freedom to explore their own faith in ways they hadn't previously. I love that for them. I'm the opposite. I was already exploring. I was the one who started, who gave him permission. While my journey has led me closer to my own spirituality, his has led him further away. I feel lonely in my faith. I'm still searching for what community could look like for me in my own walk and doing it alone is both liberating and terrifying.

As we walk out into this more public season of sharing what has changed over the summer, I'm afraid of the responses that we'll get. I'm afraid people will tell me that they are praying for him. Which, hey I'm all for prayer, but if that's the only support you are willing to give him or I, the only response that you have, then please keep it to yourself. Too often it feels like a dismissal of him as a person and my very real struggle. Ask how you can pray for us, listen to our feelings, or do non-religious things with us as couples.

I worry about the pressure, all the what if people say this or that. And yeah I'll deal with it, but I wish I could give people a primer on what not to say. Most Christians I know don't like to talk about what happens when someone's faith beliefs change. There's a lot of fear there. I get it. I grew up being terrified of hell with this angry Deity who killed people for making the wrong choices. There's much of this that I don't have answers for myself, so please don't feed my fear. Don't prey on it or pressure me to make him come back to church or God or faith. Don't ask me to explain his choices. Go talk to him. But when you do, please see him as a person, not a lost sheep that must be herded back into the fold. Or a child who's throwing a fit and needs to be tolerated, or punished depending on your parenting style.

In the same way, please don't be shocked when you hear that my prayer request is not for his salvation or his return to faith. I am not responsible to spend the next 20 years praying him back into the "family of God". I'm responsible to live my faith for myself. I need support and I need people willing to connect with my faith journey, because that's no longer built into my marriage. Sure we can talk about it, but he and I are reading from two completely different books these days, so common ground when it comes to faith is not something we have. I've said it before  and I'm going to keep saying it. This is lonely for me. It breaks my heart to show up by myself in faith circles where he used to attend with me. I have my own journey through this - and for right now, it doesn't involve re-converting him.

What it does involve is learning to be authentic with myself and with others. It means messy posts like this one and tears over coffee. It means ranting in my therapist's office. I have a tonne of questions. Don't we have enough challenges to overcome in this marriage without also navigating this? I don't expect people to have answers. I'm not even sure that I need answers as much as I need people who are willing to sit with me in the middle of the questions.

Up until now this has been easier. I've had time and space to begin to adjust to not sharing faith beliefs with my husband, to being on separate pages, to no longer assuming that we are approaching spirituality from the same relative starting point. Now it's time to wade out a little deeper, to share this journey with my community. I'm nervous. I'm counting down the weeks until we start up again. I figure knowing what I don't want is a stepping stone to being able to articulate what I do want.

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.

Notes Along The Journey: August

I keep wanting to be someone that I'm not yet. I want to be through this stage of healing where everything is about how hard it is to get through the day. Where all of my energy goes towards the things that help me to maintain my sanity. I want to have the emotional energy to invest in my world, to educate myself, to step beyond this story of trauma and recovery. To get to that place where who I am is healthy.

It infuriates me that I'm not there yet. It sickens me how self-absorbed my world is much of the time. And this isn't me going on a rant against myself. This isn't some passive aggressive victim plea for you to build me up. This is the truth. The truth of where I am right now. I'm in the middle. The in-between. And I've written about it before and I'm going to have to keep writing about it.

Writing about the struggle to not give in to the old ways that allowed me to survive. Yet also not using energy I don't have to uselessly fight things that take time to change. It's living in this place of accepting the now without losing hope for the not yet that I'm moving towards.

This week has been a week of being reminded of how bad it was last August. I don't want to confess how many seasons of Stargate Atlantis I've watched (three and a half) or how little I've accomplished from my to-do list for the week (none of it). But this is my reality. For today. I can beat myself up for it. Which I have been doing, at least a little bit. Even to type this I had to wrap my wrists up so that the pain from the weather changes doesn't keep me from being able to use my hands. I'd love to know why my joints ache like this. I struggle to not feel betrayed by my body and wonder if this is my body punishing me for all the ways I didn't care for it until this past year. I don't have answers. And if you've been reading here for any length of time, you know how much I hate not having answers.

But. I made it almost two weeks into this month before I ended up in bed unable to function. That's two week I didn't get last year. I'm still able to write, although really I'm not entirely sure what value my words have to anyone else right now. I'm still writing. Still pushing publish. I haven't shut the world out or turned into a zombie. It's not as much progress as I want. This inching forward one exhausting step at a time feels ridiculous. Yet it's going forward. For the first time since I can remember I'm not stalled out just because of the calendar. That's never happened. All the work I'm putting in, being self-absorbed and micro-focused on my own healing, on my own becoming, is paying off.

So I'm going to keep showing up to whisper into the vast void of the internet. I choose to show up in my own life, as best as I can because I know that on my worst days, I need to read, to hear that others choose to show up and stare their dragons in the face. Your dragons probably don't look like mine. I'm going to tell you this anyway - you are not alone. I see you showing up, fighting to hold the scraps of yourself in the face of overwhelming odds. I hear you. You are not alone. (and neither am I)

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.

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