I am ALIVE

Two years ago – December 2019 – I was suicidal. As I type that, I am reminded of the pain I was swimming in at the time. I can feel the places in my body where some of that debris still exists and I can hear the gentle call to make note of those places and dive into them when I find the energy to do so. I am reminded of the depth of dis-ease in my body that existed at that time. Dis-ease that had blown up in my face when I saw him on the ground. Gone. Chilled to the touch. In a breath of a second, I saw and felt all those pieces and parts fracture, explode and hover in mid-air in front of my eyes to be witnessed and taken note of…”will you heal ME?!?” they asked. 

At the time, I could not even conceptualize what that would look like or what that would ask of me. I was left to pick up the pieces – MY pieces – and I found myself in over my head to a depth that I hadn’t – until then – experienced. The funny thing is that I am also reminded now how it was never about the death of the person that gutted me so much. I mean, it was painful as hell, that is a truth that I cannot escape. What *scared* me and gutted me was what I was being given an opportunity to explore around my own healing. It was about the “killing” I was being asked to do as a way to heal. The killing of my stories around what I was “worth” – where my “value” was rooted – around what I “deserved” and what I was willing to look at – nurture, love, heal, release and rewrite. I quickly found myself desperate for a way to avoid it all. How could I step up to the ALL of ALL of that healing? There was TOO MUCH – or so I thought. 

Too much. What does that even mean? Goddamn, I have met that phrase throughout my entire life. Not one I am particularly fond of either. It “does not mean what you think it means” (HA! Nod to Princess Bride). To be fair, I can’t assign to you what it means to you, and I can tell you what it means to ME. When I say – or in this case when I said – it was all TOO MUCH, what I meant was “I don’t deserve this.”  When I said “This is too much. I don’t think I can handle this” – what I meant was, “I don’t deserve to heal these things. I am just supposed to carry them as a punishment for all of my bad choices.” I believed that to my core – that I was just supposed to carry this shit around and the fact that I was now being given the opportunity to heal those things made me – well, angry and scared. Two feelings firmly rooted in the emotion of fear. I was afraid of what accepting the opportunity to heal these wounds would mean for me. Who would I BEcome past this door of healing? In my opinion, healing requires feeling and seeing things as they ARE and not as we WANT them to be (or have been) in a given moment.  Healing requires us to read the story as it is written and not as it is edited for lifetime television. I was desperate to hang onto the edited lifetime version of my life up until that point. I was acutely aware that to do so would mean to die and there were times – many of them – that I welcomed the idea of death as a way of sidestepping the dive inward. 

So, let me throw out an unedited truth around what I was being asked to reconcile, release and rewrite for myself. The death that blew the doors off of the closet that I was storing all of this dis-ease in was just the tip of the iceberg. Just a catalyst. The relationship with that person, now gone, started years before this explosion.  It started with a sexual encounter – that I had pursued – where I was black out drunk, and this person was completely sober. ß- Yup, read that again. I said what I said. It is what is true – it is how the story is written in its raw form before editors get their hands on it. I am well aware that there is a word for that kind of experience, and I will let you decide for yourself whether or not you will say it. I have done my work around it – know exactly what it is to me – and I am good with being at peace with letting you decide how you will ingest it or how you will spit it out.  

It was in a Grandmother medicine ceremony that the opportunity to dive below that surface level truth was presented to me. There I was, swimming in the medicine when the memory of that day came to me. Grandmother quickly brought me past the surface level pain that I was so accustomed to hanging onto and invited me to a deeper level of healing. I WAS FURIOUS and I accepted the offer to dive. What I found myself swimming in was a pool of profound pain. Pain created by the wounding of a young girl – me, if that isn’t obvious – who had clung onto deeply rooted sexual trauma. Clung onto it because it was what she knew, what she was told was a form of affection, and represents some of her earliest memories. Sexual trauma that started at the age of 5 – if my human memory is accurate where it comes to my age at the time it all started. It started with a (male) babysitter – that was the first memory I can pull out. To be clear, that was not a repressed memory at all. I had remembered that – with painful clarity – for most of my life. 

What was new to me was being able to see – with compassion – how that experience colored in my steps, my choices, my – well – all things, as I moved through my life from 5 forward. What was new to me was being able to see how I could forgive myself. Forgive myself for hanging onto the idea that my body was designed to be taken, used, abused, and treated in a way that is not in alignment with my divinity. That my value and worth is not at all rooted in what my body can be sacrificed to - - - but rather rooted in the fact that I am a divine being and my body is a gift from the Goddess. What was new was being able to offer myself that love, compassion, forgiveness, and healing without making excuses for why I have done what I have done in my life. No excuses are necessary here - - - I have made unskillful choices and done unskillful things. Even when those things were rooted in trauma responses from that wounded inner child, I can own those things and love myself through the process of releasing them. I was offered the opportunity for all of that while still owning that the damage I have caused others is also real. Those things are real, and I was shown that I could forgive myself and release that little girl from the shackles of her pain. 

Today, I am ALIVE. I would love to say that I am never unskillful, that I never feel sadness, never feel waves of pain and opportunities to heal. That I spend my days throwing glitter around without a care, pain, or fear in the world. That would be the edited for lifetime television version of this story and it would be a damn LIE. There are days that are profoundly hard and challenge me to dive back into the debris of my trauma. That challenge me to love myself unapologetically, to own my truth and speak it as necessary and to own my ability to heal all of it – ALL. OF. IT! I mean, early on in this post I made a mental note on where some of that dis-ease still lives alongside a commitment to dive into that when I had the energy. I will do that – because I deserve my grace, my love, my compassion, and my divinity and not because my “deserving” needs to be measured. I am deserving just because I AM. Nothing more has to be measured or weighed – I AM. 

This blog post could be a book in and of itself. Hmmmmmmm - - - more to come.