And doing the homework while doing the work.
I did both today.
I did a lot today.
It was a day.
Tomorrow will be a day too.
All the days.
All the work.
Letting out slow, long breath and waiting for the tea pot to boil.
It was a good day at work.
It was a good day to do a lot of work.
I’m done with it for the moment and need a reprieve, which will look an awful lot like watching Project Runway and chilling out with an apple after I finish this blog.
I have done enough.
And.
I remind myself that I am enough.
That I am resilient and strong and I have come through so much to be where I am at and I am grateful that I have been carried to a place where I can see that.
It stops with me.
I thought today, a couple of times.
Then.
I thought.
What if that’s just another way of me trying to protect me?
How about I change instead.
How about I look at the trans-generational traumas in my family on my father’s side and on my mother’s side as the things that have made me the diamond that I am.
“Sometimes God uses a heavy hand to create a beautiful thing,” she told me as I sobbed my way through my first real inventory over a decade ago now.
The pressure it takes to create a diamond from the black morass of sadness I was created.
The crucible that holds me I cannot even begin to list all the ways and hows of it.
The secrets and shame and the wildness and the wrong.
The places I have tried to hide and not be found.
I always was.
I always knew.
I know now and it is a deep sadness, but also a formidable strength.
I sometimes can get tired trying to process it all.
“You had this conversation while you were at work?” He asked me aghast on the phone.
I did.
I had a very deep, but not totally deep, there were layers of things left unsaid and things that I still have questions about, but I got what I needed and I could trace the wellsprings of it farther back than I had first suspected.
High temperatures, high drama, high pressures.
I had some clue, but then I had no clue.
And yet, I knew all along.
In fact.
I had avoided making this particular call as I wasn’t sure I really wanted to open the can of worms.
“Sometimes going to far into a genogram can be hard for a client to deal with,” my advisor said to me as I showed him some of the work I had done.
Um.
Yeah.
And there’s so much more.
It’s like a legacy of pain that just rolls through my family.
It is astounding and deep and yet.
I feel that somehow or other I have gotten out, gotten over to the other side and I am looking at it from a distance.
Yet.
There are these ways that I react to the world and there are these defenses I have that I would like to let go of, to open myself up to more life, to not be fearful that I will be shattered again and need to begin again.
The things that worked for me, the safety defenses, they don’t work so much anymore.
And “it stops with me,” in the way that I have used it is not working.
No partner, no relationship, no children.
Because that way I wouldn’t pass it down.
It would really stop with me.
Ultimately that kind of isolation hurts me too.
It’s a solution and a defense that needs to change.
Grateful for the awareness.
Now to wade through the acceptance part and the forgiveness part and get to the action part.
Not sure exactly what action to take, except that right in front of me and to take the suggestions that others have to give me and to not carry the secret or the shame of it that curdles inward and hurts worse than shining the light on it.
Oh.
There are nooks and crannies I’m not too compelled to go spelunking in, at least not right yet, not right now.
I don’t need to stare at my past, I can just look, take it in, and accept it.
And remind myself that acceptance is not approval.
Fuck no
I fucking hella disapprove of the shit that went down.
I do not, I do not, I do not.
That being said, I can’t change it at all.
Although having a different perspective and hearing about some of the things in my family history definitely cast a different light on things.
So much compassion for the human experience.
And that I’m not dead.
For fucks sake.
Or in some straight jacket or in a gutter with a needle in my arm.
The noise of it all.
The machinery of the monsters that clanks down the hall to stumble upon me hiding in the shadows.
I will not have it.
I will not live underneath that banner of fright.
So.
I heal.
Soft and slow.
Gently I go.
It’s the only way.
Compassion and gentleness for myself and awareness that this does take time, perhaps my whole damn life, and that’s ok too, I shall always be seeking and that, that I do believe, is what will make my life that much fuller and richer and deeper and more experiential.
I am not numb.
Granted I am a little tired.
Granted I would like to make a phone call and say.
Come over, hold me, make it all better.
But there is no one to call that can make it all better.
All better is between me and my God.
And so far.
Well.
Things are going ok.
Really.
They are.
And when they are not, I know where to turn and I know that my feelings are fleeting, they pass, the sadness will be followed by joy or awe or discomfort or all of hundreds of other feeling states.
Feelings are not facts and they won’t kill me.
What I hope is that I can lose a little more of my rigidity and become more flexible while not losing myself or my self care.
Find me in the rooms with art.
Find me with flowers in my hair.
Find me with children strewn across my lap, warm, and a sweet and wearing footie pajamas and listening to me read stories.
Find me with love in my heart.
Find me with my heart on my sleeve.
Find me loving, lovable and worthy of love.
Yes.
Love.
Find me there.
In that field of fallen stars, like fireflies in the grass, at the dusk of this purpled twilight of pain and gray sadness a silent reprieve of pearl light and luminous joy, a flower blooming, a remonstrance of family and a flying laugh, a wallop of joy, a holler of thunder in this church of pain.
The doors flung open.
My heart too big to be contained.
Or.
Restrained.
No more.
My.
Love.
Restrain me no more.
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Auntiebubba 