Honoring Her

I woke up today to a gorgeous sunrise. There was hot pink in the clouds and back in my Evangelical days I liked to tell myself if I saw hot pink, my favorite color, that meant God loved me. Cute little idea I made up to comfort myself when all signs said otherwise. I now see only the beauty of nature without ridiculous meanings but still love a hot pink sunrise. As with most tragic events in life I didn't see what was coming.

A friend had texted me asking how I knew my friend Bridget. This is a typical thing to do in social media when you see you both know someone and are curious as to how the connection happened. I thought nothing of it. Scrolling through Facebook while starting to text my friend back I see a post that sent me sideways. It looked like something had happened to Bridget but I was confused and couldn't figure it out. I then see the words "Sorry...she didn't make it." What? Who didn't make it? Didn't make what? I scrolled further and was pummeled with the posts saying she'd been hit by a car, driver drove away, and she later died. 

I'm piecing together when we met and the timeline of our friendship. I started going to her yoga classes after running a marathon injured and having no other outlet for exercise. She was an amazing guide who could get you into a pose and help you to feel the full expression of it. Though I say my first time I stepped on a mat was 23 years ago, my true yoga practice didn't come about until I met her. I started taking her workshops and got deeper into my yoga journey. When I was curious about yoga teacher training she was my biggest encourager. She believed in me when no one else did. After becoming a teacher she vouched for me and helped me to get a teaching job where she was teaching. There was an acceptance I felt which motivated me to try harder. My most profound mentor.

When someone dies it's typical for people to gush about them, push aside their bad qualities and anoint them to sainthood. But for Bridget she truly was one of the good people. She exuded a kindness that was genuine. When you spoke she listened, was engaged and you felt heard and seen. She radiated a glow around her of warmth and love. She didn't gossip, didn't speak bad about others, and was held in high regard by anyone that came in her presence. The world was truly a better place with her in it.

All the clichés on death are screaming in my head ~ tell people what they mean to you before it's too late, you don't know what you've got till it's gone, I thought there would be more time. Yet they are true. I know I thanked her but did she know just how deeply she touched me? Perhaps I didn't know until this moment. 

So I am pondering how I can honor this amazing woman who I had the priviledge of being in my life for a short time. I look to how she lived her life ~ with kindness, compassion for all, understanding and love. I don't know when my last day will be but I'm committing to a new path of being like Bridget.

My favorite saying which is used frequently in yoga fully defines her life:

Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu ~ May all beings everywhere be happy and free and may the thoughts, words and actions of my own life contribute to that happiness and freedom for all.

Thank you, Bridget. Thank you for your teaching, your wisdom, your guidance, your belief in me and for showing us all how to live. I'll miss you deeply.

He was human

I don't hide that I'm glad my father is dead. I know that's harsh for many to hear as they had a lifetime of being cared for and adored but that wasn't my experience. Today is his birthday. I'm sure one of my brothers is composing some post to honor him, which I will completely ignore. Even when he tried to love me you could tell it was difficult for him. He told me to my face "You are my least favorite." Well gee...then I'm not even a favorite at all. All the "Daddy Issues" snarky cuts and comments apply here. He messed me up.

This isn't about his backstory but I do need to acknowledge how horribly abused he was as a child. He felt by not beating us in the front yard with other kids laughing (this happened to him) that he'd broken the cycle. Instead of going to therapy and dealing with his trauma he became a pastor. I'd say the jokes write themselves from here but that's a pretty painful statement.

Recently I was shuffling my Spotify and one of my favorite songs came on, "Don't fall in love with a dreamer". A memory came back that I'd long forgotten where my father said how much he loved that song. I blew it off in the moment out of not caring but now so many years later it struck me as an odd song for him to like. The song is about two lovers last night together knowing they will say goodbye forever in the morning. My father was hard core Baptist and I can't fathom this had ever been his experience, yet it hit him hard. Another memory sprung up of him telling he loved the song "Memory". 

Touch me
It's so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days in the sun...

I sensed sadness and regret from him when he'd told of loving these songs. And if I dig deep I could say he always had a melancholy sadness. I do know he wanted to love me. What hurts the most was it was obligatory love and not natural. He believed in truth at all costs so this is why he had no issue telling me I didn't measure up. How much of his own self hatred was projected onto me? Why me? I hurt him too. After a 3 hour knock down fight at a restaurant where I sobbed for him to hear me and care about me, I left saying, "I love you Dad but I don't like you." He never let that go and carried it to his grave.

My father was a human trying to get by on this planet and he made statements that destroyed me. He was a human. Only human. If I allow him grace then how much more grace should I allow myself?

He died at 73 years old of Alzheimer's. His older sister died 2 months later of this. His younger sister now has it. My chances don't look good. I have relationships that need reconciliation. I have some people that I never want to see again. So this gives me roughly 21 years give or take to make it right.

Why are you still thinking about that?

I've been in and out of some form of therapy for at least 30 years. If you looked at the subjects and issues I speak to my therapist(s) about you'd say I was crying over the same stuff with no getting to the other side. Yet I've found even when going over the same things, the therapy and what I get out of it is different. You let something out, gain a new insight, and maybe it's good for a bit but then a memory comes back that sends you sideways and you look at it from a new angle. It's the same but it's not. 

Most people expect our healing to be linear and if you aren't "all better" in whatever timeline they deem appropriate then it's on you. I once had a pastor say that if you weren't over something within a year, no matter how horrific or how long the trauma went on, then you were now sinning. Gee....the church victim blaming? Who would have seen that coming?! Thankfully I no longer believe in "sin" so I'm free to go at whatever pace is right for me.

We tend to expect others to turn their feelings off and on at will. We are dismissive when we see pain that we feel should have been done by now. So the hurting person stays silent for fear of being shamed or having some well worn cliché thrown in their face. We applaud those that seem to skip through life without a care and chastise those whose feelings and thoughts linger on what happened to them. 

Hanging onto bad memories is also a trauma response. Our minds feel the need to stay on guard and part of that is holding the memories close. Our brains do not have the same wiring as those who haven't experienced horror. In many ways we feel behind compared to others.

I do have many thoughts and memories I don't share because I feel to do so would bring on shaming. If you made a bad choice then you might further silence yourself for fear of being told you deserve this pain. Though I will say after decades of this I'm a little better at figuring out who is safe for me. 

When teaching yoga or meditation I frequently say, "You can't control your thoughts. Your brain is going to fire them over and over, and this is good as it means you're alive! But you can acknowledge a thought without attaching to it and spiraling downward with it." I'm working on staying away from that spiral.

The Number

When I travel and first open the door to my hotel I'm always a little excited to see if I have a fabulous room. I love looking around to find anything special or unexpected. While recently traveling I found myself in a gorgeous suite in Las Vegas; amazing view, sunken living room area, phenomenal shower, and a scale. I don't have an exact date but I'd estimate I haven't stepped on a scale in roughly 7 years. Scales are deadly to me in all ways physical and emotional. 

I have an eating disorder that I'm purposefully vocal about both for my healing and the healing of others. A large part of my disorder is a preoccupation with numbers. If you know me well you'll know I actually hate dealing with numbers and it's certainly not my gift in life. When I'm deeply into my disorder my entire life revolves around numbers: weight, measurements, sizes, BMI, hours exercised, calories eaten, calories burned, steps taken, air breathed. At my worst I would weigh myself compulsively; when I woke up, after using the bathroom, after eating, and even in the middle of the night. I would check the sizing of my clothes repeatedly throughout the day and then try desperately to remember if that item of clothing ran large or small, how it fit the last time I wore it, what my weight was the last time I wore it, and endless other questions that I usually couldn't remember the answers to and still I kept asking. I've had times I've cut all the sizes out of my clothes only to still try to figure out what size I thought it was. I say jokingly but with full truth "If you hear me talking numbers then I'm not well."

I gasped when I saw the scale. It was a pretty glass one that complimented the bathroom well. I knew what was going to happen and didn't try and stop it. If I'd reached out to someone in recovery I would have been advised to put it somewhere I couldn't see it or ask the hotel to take it away while I was staying there. But I wanted to know that number. Felt terrified and at the same time excited. I controlled myself the first day but by the morning of the second I woke up thinking about it. I stood before it feeling hopeless as if I had no choice but to do this. I thought for a moment of what number would be acceptable and what number I figured it might be and then stepped on. It was worse that I'd anticipated. Double digits worse. I felt dizzy and held onto the wall as I tried to regulate my breathing. Reminded myself my clothes fit and nothing had actually changed other than I now knew what I weighed. As I got dressed everything felt tight and constricting. Tears welled up in my eyes and I simultaneously started to plan how to lose the weight while also completely defeated.

Eating disorders aren't about weight - they are about control. When life feels unmanageable it's the one thing we can do that no one can take from us. I can starve, over exercise, binge, abuse laxatives, take massive amounts of pills for "energy" or "metabolism" or straight up speed, go on a "detox" (for those of us with ED this is a cute way to restrict that you are praised for), and mistreat my body in ways you'll never know. We can hyper focus on something other than what we need to be dealing with in our lives. 

I'm home now and that number hangs in the air. I put on a pair of pants I wanted to wear yesterday and they were way too tight. My mind flashed to the number on the scale. Mind racing "Fuck! How am I going to lose this? What if I can't this time?" Thankfully I'm far along enough in my recovery that these moments dissipate quickly but the fear hangs in the air around me.

As part of my recovery I've had to accept I'm not going to be the weight I want to be. I've had to accept the body perfection my crazy mind desires would hurt me. But I am more than a number. My worth cannot be measured with a number. I define who I am.

Standing up for myself

In a week I will be back on the same stage where I attempted stand up comedy nearly 30 years ago. Though I'm nervous it feels different this time. I'm grounded as a human being and in who I am and where I'm going. I've done my research, I've tested my material and I feel ready to go. Some 20-something male in the front row spouting shit won't phase me...I'll annihilate him. 

When I first tried stand up it was just to say I did it. I've always been that way in life; I'll try anything to say I did it. I'll embarrass myself, get humiliated, crumble before your eyes, and while wiping tears I'll try the next thing that comes my way. My father was that way too. If they asked for a volunteer to try something he couldn't get up there quick enough, and if it was only for kids he'd be screaming (excited - not angry) for one of us to go up and try it. The only time I recall turning him down was at a rodeo in Louisiana. They wanted kids to come out and run through the mud after pigs and if you pulled the ribbon off the pig's tail you got a prize. Whatever the prize was I was pretty excited about it but I was wearing my special "rodeo outfit" and didn't want to get it dirty. Yes, I have always been prissy. 

Though I'm not at all sad that my father is dead he does haunt me. I told him part of my stand up routine decades ago expecting he'd hate it and he said I was good and called it "tastefully risqué". He'd likely refer to my current act as "garbage" and that actually makes me smile. Though it's a freer life with him gone, I do still frequently wonder what he'd think of me now.

So why do it again? I certainly don't have aspirations of making it big (whatever that means). I want to say I had the balls to do it again. My mind comes up with these comic acts all the time, it used to be what I'd do in traffic, and I feel I have some decent moments. You could compare this latest attempt with someone who enjoys writing music in their spare time, who goes to a random open mic at a coffee shop to see how people dig their new material. Or even a person afraid of heights that still goes sky diving. I just have to try again.

I've rarely stood up for myself in life. And if I have it comes out too big and too much because I've held down the pain and anger for much too long. To get back on that stage is to stand up for myself and say that life hasn't beaten me though it sure tried. It's a scream to the universe that I'm still here. It's a reminder to myself that even if I'm a failure I'm still a bad ass.

While there is nothing inherently special about me I do have resilience that rises above even my own terrors. I've said for many years that what I lack in talent I make up for in tenacity. I may come in last but I'll die making sure I still finish.

Four Years

I received a card from my realtor, who went onto become a good friend, celebrating the 4 year anniversary of me closing on my condo. I remember the date well as the following day would have been my 22 year wedding anniversary. All involved in the paperwork and efforts to get me to close said it was one of the worst they'd experienced. I was still married at the time, divorce finalizing the following month, so my debt to income ratio was still including the house I was in while I was married. It felt like every other day more money was needed and I was ill from the stress. The title people went back and forth saying I was single, married, and then single again (as technically I was married when I closed). The man I was buying from had his own set of issues where he needed his ex wife to sign off, she was in Norway refusing, so he flew there and went through his own special hell before ultimately having her sign it. Even down to the night before my finance people were doing money gymnastics to get me in. It was an amazing group effort and maybe even a miracle or two. (Not that I believe in miracles.)

My first night in my new place was possibly the loneliest I've ever felt, even after a lifetime of feeling it was me against the world. I only took my clothes and a living room set with me and not much more. When my parents divorced my father insisted on getting half of everything no matter how traumatizing it was to his kids. If there were 20 toothpicks in a drawer he sat there and counted out 10 for himself. We had a literal tug of war with a family photo album as I scream cried for him not to take it. I remember going into rooms and seeing them empty, looking for something in the kitchen to find it gone, and how painful it was. I refused to let my son feel that way, as he was staying with his father, and decided I would instead completely start over. (I only took the living room set as he was getting a new one.) Without a bed I laid on the couch with a thin blanket and tried to will myself to sleep. Tears streamed down my face while my eyes were wide open and no sleep was coming. 

Even though years have gone by I still have moments where I go to look for something and realize I don't have it. Things like band aids, light bulbs and other items I would typically have in stock but didn't make the connection that I didn't have them. It's a little pop up reminder of what went down. The first few years I don't recall thinking about this date as much but my memory could be wrong on this. Though I don't want to be with my ex husband, nor does he want me, the length of time gone is weighing on me. Last year was intense between the pandemic and it being what would have been my 25 year anniversary where I added to the drama with burning my wedding dress. Not the same vibe but today feels heavy.

To add to my current level of processing I'm also losing my therapist next week. She has decided to take another position that allows her more time with her children. In a few days I'll have been with her for 6 years. I adore her but I'm not excessively sad as I've felt for awhile that we've gone as far as we can with each other. She asked me to think about all we've been through together and look at my growth. Perhaps this is adding to the heaviness of this moment. And that's OK as I'm ready for it, strong enough for it, and wanting it.

My ex husband is engaged and really hasn't been alone for much at all since I moved out. I honestly and truly wish him well. Though I know it's not actually the truth, it feels like most people I know find someone immediately after divorcing, if not right before. My learning curve back into dating was steep and mistakes were made. I'm leaning into and accepting that maybe I'm a person who isn't meant to be with anyone. I've always been hyper independent, and fiercely guarded while making you think I've revealed a lot, and these things don't mesh well in a healthy relationship.

It's been 4 years and I barely recognize that woman who walked into her first space living alone hyperventilating and crying. I've given myself permission to make my place the crazy ticky tacky look that I love. I'm making it. I've finally surrounded myself with people that dig what I bring to the table. I haven't crumbled, I've held my head high when shit went sideways, I'm still here. 

4 years later I can finally say I'm home.

Don't Let Me Get Me

 I was at an amazing Drag Brunch today, Sunday things, and the song "Don't let me get me" came on from Pink. I love Pink's daring, don't give a single fuck attitude. I've joked for years that she's who I want to be when I grow up. While being a huge fan I'd forgotten this song. and though I was drunk on mimosas, having a blast with friends dancing in the summer sun, I also welled up with tears as I sang along with the lyrics.

"Everyday I fight a war against the mirror

I can't take the person starin' back at me

I'm a hazard to myself

Don't let me get me
I'm my own worst enemy
Its bad when you annoy yourself
So irritating
Don't wanna be my friend no more
I wanna be somebody else"

I'm at this space in life where the self deprecating thoughts are less, I feel well grounded in who I am, and though not thrilled, I mostly accept it. 

"Everyday I fight a war against the mirror..."

Compliments always shock me a little. Though I work hard to take care of myself I'm always taken aback when I get what appears to be a sincerity. My go to response is to detail to them how they are wrong. Yet I've been working hard at simply saying "thank you". It's interesting as the moment trails away to other conversation that I find I feel anxious at acknowledging and thanking them for the compliment, as it goes so far against my usual response. I'm trying. Trying something new. 

"I'm a hazard to myself"

For most of us that fear compliments it's due to a history of someone taking those kind and awesome words and instead cutting you down. And instead of understanding it was their own projection to hurt you, you take them on, hold them tight, and believe whatever negative vile was thrown on you. When I receive a compliment my first thought is "What do you want?" "Why are you saying this?" "Are you making fun of me?". While taking the smallest of steps, I'm slowly realizing their words are heartfelt, and figuring out how to take it in.

"I wanna be somebody else"

Do I really want to be somebody else? For the first time in my life I'll say I don't. Not to say I wouldn't change a ton of things; soften my big ass mouth, give me more talent in pretty much everything, I'm sure I could critique to all hell every body part, but in most ways I'm OK.

I'm scared to be OK. You see if you say you fully accept yourself it now challenges others to do the same, and very often they let out their own inner hate onto you. So I have to ask myself what exactly do I think would happen if I fully leaned into self acceptance? What could I achieve if I didn't care about anyone's opinions?! What could you do in your own life?

I recently posted about my goal and desire to do stand up again. I thought I'd decently limited the post reach and was astounded at how many people were supportive. I keep getting more likes and loves and think "Really?!". This is immediately followed by fears of what will happen if I let everyone down...what if they believe in me and I crumble before their eyes? How would I face them if I'm not good enough?

I find when my mind is able to come into acceptance that thoughts of my father resurface. We were polar opposites. Most of my core qualities he would hate...especially since I was female. We tried to offer love to each other for the sake of being a parent and a child, but we didn't like each other. He'd hate me now! I find this both hysterical and heartbreaking. I'm glad he's dead. Harsh and horrifying words to speak about a parent but it's my truth. 

While I'll never say "everything happens for a reason" (seriously...I'll cut the next bitch that says that to me), I do believe my life has purpose. I love to compliment others and I'm fully sincere in whatever I say. If I see you fight me on it (as I do to myself) I will push back so hard until I know you believe what I'm saying. I don't want anyone to experience what's happened to me or feel what I've felt. 

I don't believe in an after-life and have accepted I'm flying on this rock through space to my death...and I want it to matter. And to fully matter, to make the most impact, to help the most beings, to live all the way...I have to not let me get me.