The Year of BrokenOne day in 1990, I packed a bag, jumped in my car, and left college. I was in a dangerous space; I felt overwhelmed, all circuits blown, wanting nothing more than to make it all stop. I'd been sexually assaulted (for the life of me, I still can't say raped) a few months before, my mother asking me the day after when it spilled out of my on a phone call, "What did YOU do?" I didn't deal with it, just stuffed it down, self-medicated with alcohol, and tried to carry on business as usual. Except I couldn't. Classes overwhelmed me, and I was filled with an overwhelming urge to run, to make the pain stop in whatever way I could. A few days after I got home, my parents asked me what I wanted to do and I told them I wanted to be locked away somewhere away from the world where I could just cry. At that point, it felt like the tears would never stop. It is as close to suicidal as I have been, and although I have walked through many challenging seasons, I have never felt quite as awful again....until now. Teachers have this thing that happens: we get close to a break from work, our body can finally feel all the stress we've stuffed down, and quite often we spend our breaks sick with strep throat, bronchitis, or other illnesses. As we crawl towards the end of the school year (tomorrow, thankfully, finally), I have found myself sinking into deeper depression, short-tempered, all out of fucks to give about almost everything in life, crying easily and daily. I have been holding it together for so long out of necessity, but my emotional immune system is spent and anticipating not having to hold it anymore. This year, y'all. I know it was challenging for everyone in its own way. But as a teacher who gives everything and had it fall short despite best efforts? Who heard the public call us lazy/stupid/evil/selfish/incompetent all year? Who had to start from scratch and figure out how the hell to teach and reach kids online with ZERO training or experience and face black screens with names in white font and rely on the chat feature for signs of life? Who is now hearing our public, politicians, and education leaders talk about how schools can now open (like, wtf was I doing all damn year if we weren't open???) and learning loss and all manner of bullshit that demeans the heart, soul, blood, and tears I shed this year? I don't have it. This year broke me, and I fear that at this point I'm like Humpty Dumpty, no chance of putting me back together again. I don't even know how to begin to process this last year, to make sense of it all. My brain isn't functioning, and I find myself wanting to run like I did that year in college. Run. Burn it all down. Say fuck it and spend the next however long locked up somewhere, crying until the tears finally stop. I'm not suicidal because I'm wise enough to know that this will pass, that it will not always be this way. But writer Anne Lamott tweeted recently that a friend of hers told her, "I'm not suicidal, but sometimes I wish I was dead." I feel the truth of that right now. It resonates deeply. And I'm not quite sure how not to feel that way. Yet. The urge to add yet to that last paragraph gives me hope. Right now I can't see how I will have the energy to return to the classroom on August 23, but that yet gives me hope that I will. My plan is to get through tomorrow, then write my report card narratives and finish remaining school business. After that, I'm going to rest. Stay in my jammies all day and sleep a lot. Venture back to exercising once I have the brain power to figure out how to use the program I signed up to via my partner's work perks. Make art. Cry a lot. Write what shows up. Maybe get my hormones checked and take some meds until the floor resumes its position under my feet. One of our students last year, during her exit portfolio, said, "It's okay to not be okay." I'm not okay, but I have hope that I will be.
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All my life
This woman has been Too something for someone. Thighs--too thick. Voice--too loud. Opinions--too expressed. Desires--too much. At 2 or 3 called Sarah Bernhardt by Mother, Grandmother, Aunts-- Too dramatic-- Laughing judgment of Needs expressed. Eat--but not too much. Laugh--but not too loud. Smile--but not at the wrong person. Be sexy--but not too sexy or you'll be a slut (don't be a slut). Speak--but not too often and never when someone else has something to say. My seeming goal in life for years has been to find That just right spot and stay there. Let others speak, live, desire. Hide yourself. Crawl inside. Disappear. This forty-seven year old woman Has reached her end on what others want her to be, On silencing herself, On pretending everyone else's wishes are more important than her own. This Too Much woman-- Too loud, Too emotional, Too fleshy, Too old, Too expressive, Too embodied, Too fierce, Too clear on her power-- Is done hiding The best parts of herself. This Too Much woman reaches back To that Too Much two-year-old, Says, I gots you baby girl. It's safe to Be. And no one will silence you again, Least of all, Me. A few years ago, if you'd told me I was a people pleaser, I would have snorted at you.So would a lot of other people. I really perceived myself as someone who worked outside of that realm, who chose herself relentlessly. After years of doing personal work, however, I have realized the resistance has mostly been an inside reality. Oh, sure, I turned down invitations to social engagements and got into arguments with my husband about my introversion and need to recharge. I was oppositional, combative, strong...and also, seeking the other person's understanding and permission. I was always waiting for approval, thinking that if I could just explain or educate others, they'd have an epiphany and say, I get it! No judgment here. You are okay to do what you think you need to do. So, while my actions were that of I do what I want, my inner reality has been to torture myself for the way I feel and what I need. The judgment I have heaped upon myself has been cruel. I have made myself wrong, called myself a bad person, and given my power away to others' preferences and expectations (and judgments) again and again. I cannot do that to myself anymore.Awareness is the first step. As a child, the primary message indirectly communicated to me by my mother was You can't do anything right. I see how that unconscious belief manifested itself in my life, from not going after things I wanted to believing other people's perspectives, beliefs, and way of living was more right than what felt true for me. I have twisted and contorted and made myself wrong, always. It's the reason why I check the door a thousand times before leaving when my husband isn't home. I am so wrong, I cannot be trusted to lock the damn door! I know this is false thinking, but it feels real. I will curse and scream and resist, but, in the end, I'm walking back to the fucking door to check it. This is my work, my responsibility.I am not a victim of anyone's expectations; people--rightly or wrongly--have expectations. It is a part of our humanity. I am, however, a victim of my belief that what others think of me or want from me (or their own lives for that matter) is more important, more true, more right than what I want, need, or crave.
It is easy to say but hard to do, recovering pleaser that I am. It's that tender, sore spot from childhood that will always twinge to some degree. There are habits to break, namely asking for permission or believing that if I can just explain, people won't judge me harshly. I want to be free. I deserve to be free. I deserve to honor my inner knowing and trust myself. Letting others have their feelings about my actions and their often limited understanding of the bigger story is hard...but it won't always be as hard as it is right now if I commit to myself. No one else has to approve or understand to make it right for ME. When I was growing up, my grandfather would often use the expression, Shit or get off the pot. It usually made me giggle, what with the curse word and all. As I have gotten older, my understanding of his sentiment has deepened from a superficial Make a decision already to a more robust Take action or let it go already. I finally figured out why I have become so irritated with motivational speakers and conferences, vision boards, law of attraction, and other If you dream it and feel it, it will come to you messages and practices, and ultimately it's not with the practices or the ideas behind them at all. Rather, it's that too many teachers and followers get stuck on the thinking and dreaming about the thing and forget that a piece of getting in alignment with your dreams is to begin acting on them. Money, cars, and honeys aren't going to show up on your doorstep just because you made a vision board or felt in your heart-of-hearts that it was going to happen. Creating the things you want in your life requires action on your part. The energetic alignment is just prep work that gets you clear about what you actually want and attuned to your environment so you can see the pathway and take action more easily. Every single time I have gotten clear about my desires and started taking steps in their direction, I have been successful. Every. Single. Time. It feels like magic because I've screened out distractions and bullshit, not because I was sitting on my couch meditating on my vision board. YOUR ACTION IS REQUIRED. That other stuff all alone? It tricks you into thinking you're doing something, when really you are navel gazing. My father called it mental masturbation, and it's entertaining, but passive as hell. STOP:
Now, if you're going to take active steps in service of the above, by all means, use those practices. They can help you gain clarity about what you want and why you want it, useful tools if you are going to take action. In other words, as my friend Sandi Amorim often says, Do. The. Fucking. Work. End of rant. It has been two years since I have written here. In the past, I would have judged myself, entered it into evidence as yet another example of how I have failed to do what I set out to do. Fortunately, I am not that person any more. I'm just me, doing my thing, figuring life and myself out bit by bit. I needed this outlet for those couple of months in 2015. Big energy was moving. My mother had passed in February of that year, my father in May of 2013. I'd added a movement practice in the form of yoga and walking. I'd done the Rolfing series and been in therapy for about 1.5 years at that point. There was big learning at the time. The way I described it to others was it was as if an iceberg was calving. Big unhealthy pieces falling away. 'Bout damn time. This type of transformation happens in bits and pieces. You keep doing the work, chipping away at the things that keep you stuck. Nothing changes...until, suddenly, it does. I looked back at the pieces I posted from 2015, and there's nothing I disagree with. The past two years have been about practicing those things. Finding my path. Letting go of what others think. Speaking the truth of my experience. A new cycle...Everything goes in cycles, though, and practice only lasts so long. At some point, it's time to investigate a deeper layer of the onion, to peel it away and get closer to the truth of who you are. Last week, I hurt myself pretty badly during a workout, wrenching my back and sending me to a chiropractor for the first time in ten years. It was my fault; I had ignored the gentle calls to do so on my own. Two sessions with the chiro has unleashed big physical, emotional, and energetic shifts. No coincidence that the misalignment resides in my sacrum and cranium--family of origin and nervous system centers. Two adjustments in two days left me raw, emotional, and anxious. The first left me with a dream visit from my mother and grandmother where, upon giving me shit about something and getting all up into my physical space, I told my mother to stop touching me and to go the fuck away. The second left me with a Henny Penny sort of energy, all raw nerve endings. Fortunately, I had a massage scheduled with a woman who knows me and who gets energy deeply, and we kept that big energy moving. I left the session with clarity, big downloads about what must happen next. While my therapist was working on my left hip, center of most of my discomfort almost all of the time, she said it asked her, "Does she gots me?" That little girl phrasing just about slayed me because I could connect with that little girl who'd had to get tough and bolster up. My response is, "Yeah, I gots you. I gots you good, baby girl." Because I do! I can now. I can let go of those old stories about me. I can lean into the discomfort of how others are going to perceive what happens next. I will be okay...for the very first time in my life, I know I will be okay. I deserve joy. I deserve freedom. I deserve love. Nothing I've ever done in my life or will do going forward excludes me from my birthright, no matter the messaging of my childhood. So that's the new work, to say, "Hell YES!" and commit. Another calving season, it appears. As much as I hate the disruption, I love the gifts it brings. My mantra: I am willing. Because I am. No turning back from here. The longer I live, the more I realize that life is a whole lot of Got it...got it...got it...fuck, don't got it. It's messy, nonlinear, complex. We learn, we grow, we think we've finally got it, and then WHAM! Smacked upside the head. As much as I know anxiety is a disease, as much as I embrace the idea that everything in life is process, I still fall victim to the trappings of believing I've arrived or have it all handled. We all have setbacks, times when we slide into old habits or ways of thinking. We can be victims and tell the story of, "This always happens," or we can see it as an opportunity to recommit to ourselves and our vision of what we want for our lives. We can use it as a tool to remember that mindfulness, daily practice, and gratitude are what have served us so far in our journeys. Life is messy, and we are imperfect. To expect otherwise is insanity. We travel this life perfectly imperfectly. Instead of fighting our missteps, we need to embrace the learning and reminders they bring us. This is a lesson I need to relearn periodically. Here I am, again, and not for the last time. Blessings, friend. You are not alone. I'll start with the bad news first: No one can save you, grow you, change you, make you learn. Nor can they lose your weight, make you happy, fill you will self-worth, self-love, and self-acceptance. They cannot rescue you, heal you, make you whole. The good news? You can. You're the only one who can make all of those things happen for you and more. You have the power to transcend your situation, to heal your wounds, to find deep happiness and love within yourself regardless of the circumstances. So, maybe it's all good news because, if we have the power, we do not have to wait around hoping someone else will step up to do our work. Personal transformation is available to us any time we choose. The thing is, we have to choose, and that requires leaning into uncomfortable places and stretching beyond what we're doing right now. What will you choose with this limitless power to transcend your stories? When I was about to turn 16, what I wanted most in the world was a red Pontiac Fiero. Despite evidence to the contrary, I convinced myself that it was possible I would get one for my birthday. I woke up that morning, fully picturing and feeling in my heart the car that would surely be gifted to me. I knew it was mine, that when I looked in the driveway, it would be there, waiting for my grabby, grateful hands. The disappointment I felt when I rose from bed and peered out of my bedroom window only to see an empty driveway was crushing. Fast Forward...Around ten years ago when I first dove into the world of personal development, shortly after moving to California, The Secret and other manifestation-type materials flooded the market. It was heady stuff: if I could only change my thinking--focus on what I wanted to attract instead of what I didn't--I would have everything I wanted with no more than the cost of concentration. The problem is that, while changing your thoughts will change your world, simply meditating on that shiny red convertible you covet or the hot bod you want will not make it pop into your world as if your fairy godmother granted your wish. Trust me: my vision boards were filled with things that never manifested themselves into my world, no matter how much I thought about them. Same Ol'Changing your thoughts is a starting place. If you aren't attuned to possibility, if your energy is focused on what you don't want or what you always do in a certain situation, there's no hope for a change of behavior. And if there's no change in behavior, you'll continue to get what you've always gotten: Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. ~Albert Einstein Once you change your perspective and get clear on what you want, you have the opportunity to make different choices than you have in the past. Unfortunately, this is where your habits and resistance kicks in, setting you up for more of the same. The actions we take are the fuel that gets us what we want, whatever that happens to be. We limit what is possible in our lives not only through our old stories and thinking, but also through our actions. To get what we want, we have to DO something different. We have to be willing to be uncomfortable. We have to have discipline, which, as Michael Hyatt quotes Andy Andrews "Discipline is making yourself do something you don't want to do in order to get a result you really want." How to Get (Almost) Everything You WantThe process of creating the life you want is easy, but uncomfortable. I resisted it for years, but once I began to consciously follow this process, my life began to change in the ways I desired.
Sandi Amorim has written an inspired book, The 100 Day Promise, and developed a class around these concepts plus a whole lot more. After three courses of following through on promises to myself, I finally see (duh) that there is no shortcut to doing the work. If you are looking for something to ready you for and guide you through the process, Sandi's guide and coaching can't be beat. For evidence all you need to know is that I. Don't. Run. And yet, I'm running, and I like it. (Well, once it's over, I like it and the happy little endorphins that show up. I still hate it while it's happening. But I'm doing it.) You already know what to do, you just have to be willing to be uncomfortable for a little bit while you step into a new story. Are you? I have been fortunate to have the house to myself and very limited items on my To Do list for the past six days. The space and quiet of the past almost-week have been transformative as I've had the time to think deeply and focus on what I want for my life without any interruptions. This morning, after completing my morning ritual of coffee, writing, and study, a simple contemplative question came to me. What story about myself or the world do I need to give up in order to have what I want?We all have stories we tell ourselves or which we learned from our family of origin. Sometimes we don't even recognize it as a story, so True from a habitual stance it is in our brains. Those stories can be useful and form a framework through which you organize your life. But often, especially when they are unexamined or deliberately chosen, they become the walls of our self-imposed prison.
We all have stories that don't serve our highest good. This is not an occasion to beat ourselves up; those stories once served an important purpose in our lives. The key is recognizing when it's time to revise, rewrite, or toss the story altogether. Like anything, it is a process. We come into awareness that something isn't working for us, we desire change, and we seem powerless to make the change. The story is pinchy, but a new story is scary and unknown. Growth demands letting go of the stories that no longer serve us. We have to lean into the discomfort of the unfamiliar to reap the benefits of growth and an expanded sense of what's possible in our lives. This is not easy. It never is. But: it is ultimately liberating and necessary if you want more for your life than you have right now. Albert Einstein said, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it," and it is the questioning of our stories that creates this new consciousness. So, what story about myself or the world around me do I need to give up in order to have what I want? The two stories that have been nibbling at my edges are thus:
It is not an overnight process of eliminating this thinking from my life, but now that I have awareness, I can practice and write a new story. There's liberation on the other side of the discomfort. I'm curious; what story about yourself or the world around you do YOU need to give up in order to have what you want? I have been feeling like a sad little bear all morning long. My favorite conference in the world, the World Domination Summit, is happening in Portland, Oregon this weekend, and I'm not there. Likewise, my husband and his family are all in wine country in northern California for a family member's wedding. I am here in San Diego, all by myself, and I have been feeling Left Out. I'm seeing the posts of friends at the conference, feeling the desire to be there with them eating waffles in bed and drinking dark and stormies, anticipating the speakers and unbelievable high and connection with others that comes with this event. I Chose This.I was set to attend the wedding, already sad about missing out on WDS, when my youngest cat was diagnosed with asthma. When one of the medications took nearly a month to arrive, I made the decision to miss the wedding as well as it's an inhaled steroid, and there's been a definite learning curve for both me and Henry (the cat) to get used to the AeroKat device. Knowing you chose the path does not make it any easier to walk it sometimes. I was settling in to be like Eeyore for the next few days, and I felt awful. But there is another choice.I am a champion wallower, but this time, I decided to spend some time writing up some goals I have for the summer. The more I worked, the better I felt, and I decided to clear off the cork board to make space for what I want to remember each day instead of the cluttered mess it had become. I even dug out some pretty paper to back my goals, core desired feelings, and current promise for the 100 Day Promise program.
As I worked, I had a revolutionary thought: I can choose how these next few days will feel. If I want to feel like I am rejected and missing out, I can feel that way. But also? If I want to feel nourished, connected, and happy, I can feel that way instead. The difference is the lens I choose to use. Which path would you choose? For me, it's a no-brainer. I am now looking at all the gifts this time at home are giving me, and I am starting to feel excited by the possibilities. It has even occurred to me that the gift of not going to this year's WDS might be learning to feed and inspire myself instead of relying on something or someone outside of myself to do it for me. I can be, must be, the architect of my growth, joy, achievements, and life. If I wait for something outside of me to do it, it will never happen. Of course, I knew this already, in my brain. But my body? My being? Sometimes it takes a little longer for those guys to catch up. The next few days I am creating my own little retreat, just for me. Green juice. Delicious food. Reading. Writing. Creating the space to accomplish my goals and beginning to plug away at them. I get to choose how I feel, and I choose to feel good. What about you? |