The days stretch out languidly in waves of breath, in and out. I have become viscerally aware of the moments that pass and have slowed my reactions down as opportunities to step away. The practice I have started is becoming more regular. I still struggle with the flashes of rage and disappointment that spring up around absence, grief and loss, but when I feel them now, I focus on the sensations of my body and I breathe. I know, it's not really that exciting to read about...breathing. The struggle is more interesting, more relatable. But it's exhausting. I have worn myself out with it. Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't say I am ready to sail away into the sunset. I still feel shaky a lot of the time, I still get scared and anxious as certain thoughts pass through my head. The lessons I am learning through my body's reaction to stimulus still goes on, and I am certain there are some lessons I will learn over and over until....I don't know...death? I will keep writing about all that..but this week..just for a few days, I have decided to just float. Be extra good to yourself this week in the form of doing exactly what you want to do to be free. As much as you can.
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I have been so scared for so much of my life. I can bring up the memory of it, the sensation. I can feel the fear in my chest, filling my lungs with hesitation and my head with confusion. I can feel the sting of anxious memory in my gut. So much worry wasted over...so many things I can't even remember. I struggled for so long to be free of it that I think maybe a part of me became the fear I was trying to free myself of. Rather, as time passed, more of my personality was fear-based, even as I was struggling to be free. No matter what the anxiety or problem in front of me, though, the fear was always the same: that I was not lovable. I didn't always know this, it only came to me within this last relationship as I was destroying it with my fears and doubts. After I had ended it, and while he and I started forging a friendship, I could see very clearly that the love I had always doubted had been there, and it was there still. I had to free myself of the relationship to see that, but I see it now, and I also see how it happened. It started when I was 15, feeling ignored by my parents, and not really loved or cared for by my father in particular, when my step brother showed me kindness, and I leapt at it. It turned out to be sexual, but I was so desperate for some type of love that I took what I could get. That was what taught me the lesson I couldn't let go for most of my adult life. He took advantage of a young girl needing love, and in that lesson, I learned I was not lovable unless it was sexual. So here I am, almost fifty, and I get the twisted nature of that message, along with every other message I was fed as a girl and young woman, and I'm not even angry. I'm empty. I'm hollow. It was all a lie based on other lies. Based on insecurity. Based on a deeply damaged system that has reinforced my fears all my life. Based on nothing, really; a ghost of a framework that only existed for as long as I believed it. Now I am free of the lie and I'm not really sure what to do with that empty space, except maybe to let the freedom come in, wash me of the fears and the doubts and the time wasted worrying about it. I am no longer heavy with the burden of doubt and fear but light with the weight that has been lifted. I had no idea just how heavy it was until I dropped it. Sometimes blog posts go this way. They twist they turn, then stop suddenly. Just like a roller coaster. Except no vomit. Except for emotional. Which doesn't smell as bad and doesn't require buckets. As we wrestle with who we are becoming, he and I, both together and separately, I've learned a great deal about myself. We have been attempting a compassionate friendship since the split, and while it has been slow going, overall, it has been successful, and I think it's because within the relationship I have switched my focus from him to me. There are some things that I am only capable of when challenged. I feel like this new sort of relationship I am creating with him gives me the space to be a better person, and in that space, that is what I become. It's not that it's easy. It's that I have been there before and chosen the other. I never realized it was a choice, down there in the muck, after I have said or done something horrible to him, but now that I have chosen another way, a compassionate way, I am embarrassed to say that yes, I chose that. I am feeling more compassion for myself than I ever have. I focus only on the beneficial, only on helping, only on empathy. I have decided to make the choice for how I want to feel about myself tomorrow, next week, next year, and when I die. I am not reacting in the moment but methodically creating an environment in which I can feel pride for my kindness. I thought I was doing it right. I thought that my conscious effort to be as kind and loving toward him in the relationship was the right way to go. But within my behavior there was an undisclosed expectation of a reciprocity that could not have possibly been fulfilled. I didn't consciously realize I was doing it, but I was, and every so often I got a glimpse of the sharp edges of it. Every so often, I would cut him with the disappointment I had set him up to provide. It was the most painful kind of shame after I saw what I was doing, setting myself up as a victim, and he as a villain. It's painful to write about it now. I feel it so clearly, rattling around my lungs and heart, bruising the soft organ tissue as it whirls. If I am to stop setting myself up as a victim, I have to stop treating myself as one. I have to stop perceiving myself as one. That is why I have focused my compassion inward. It is why I am planning for the happiness I hope to feel tomorrow. I am finding that it is nearly impossible to see myself as a victim while I am planning out my joy. It is still so early in this phase of my development and this phase of our relationship, but I feel strongly that again, I have become a better person in the challenging space of intimacy. I am finding that there are still parts of me that are as yet, undiscovered. That in itself is all I need to keep going, and keep believing that one day I will be different. Thanks for reading! Thanks for following my blog from my last space to this one, and thanks, if you happen to look around this website, for looking at all the important art I have made over the last few decades. I am singularly proud of all of it.I could feel it stirring in me as I walked purposefully across the gravel driveway. As I stood listening to the story of how my tools had come to be loaned out, I felt it thickening in my veins. As I heard the story of my lost tools, irretrievable for a day or two more, I felt the familiar buzz in my head. I was in a rage, so angry I had to walk away. I know that walking away is the kindest thing I can do when I'm angry. Instead of making the situation unbearable, I went to yoga, took a bike ride, went to a book store. I let myself air out, and within the spaces of breath that I took, I knew I wasn't mad about the tools. I was mad about all the other things. I was mad for every time someone didn't respect my boundaries, mad for every time someone didn't consider my feelings. I was mad for every time someone treated me as if I was unimportant. All those instances had come flooding back to me in that unfortunate moment, so I did the only thing I could do: I showed myself mercy. I showed myself compassion. I took myself out of the situation and put myself at the center of my universe, and soon enough, my veins, blood and bones felt right. My head was blooming. My heart, calm and even. I grew up in a house of rage, and I learned that skill set well. I learned the explosive-out-of-nowhere anger. I learned the boiling-brimming-over anger. I learned that to walk on egg shells would never be enough to avoid the anger I didn't deserve. I learned the wrong lesson, and over time, I have had to teach myself the right one. I have lost too much to my rage. Too many loved ones, too many opportunities. When I returned I told the man who had lent out my tools that he had hurt my feelings. That I held our relationship in a special place of conscious collaboration, and when he did things like this, it felt painful. I told him I loved him and that his friendship was much more important to me than tools, but that my boundaries were more important than to allow this. I calmly told him to never do this again. He apologized and thanked me. I walked away in pride and love and a belief that at least this time, I had done right by myself. At least this time, I hadn't fractured a relationship beyond repair. At least this time, I gave myself the room I needed to take care of the most important thing, my heart, and come out the other side with a much better lesson. I desperately, quietly hope that next time, I am wise enough to do it again. That I can slow down and step back far enough to see that it is not this moment that has created my rage, but every other moment I suffered in silence. I hope to remember that it is not the person in front of me who has deeply fractured my faith in humanity, but the people who, over time crossed boundaries when I was too small and too naive to understand how to protect them. I want to remember, most of all, that I have to forgive myself for wanting love so badly that I would sacrifice my boundaries, my safety, and my heart to receive it. I have to have compassion for the woman who gave up the wrong things in lieu of the promise of a love that might finally heal. I must love myself enough to not sacrifice any part of me in order to earn the love of another, because it is hard to really appreciate a love for which I have given up so much to receive. Happy Father's Day! Thanks for following me over here to my Artist's website, and thanks for the support over the years that I have been writing. I know it has been a winding road, but learning for me has never occurred in a straight line, and that is why I write, to learn more about myself in the writing than I knew before I started.As I walked through the market today, I realized I was getting looks. In produce, I got some looks. In dairy, more looks. I even got a stare or two in the bakery section, which is what finally pushed me to question what was going on. People in the baked goods section shouldn't be looking at anything other than cake. So I looked down at my overalls, my boots, and my sweatshirt, and I couldn't really see what was different about me...then I realized I wasn't wearing a hat, and I knew. I have been doing a project on Instagram this month (@spike_of_all_trades) where I wake up, put on my glasses, take a selfie, then put it on Instagram. I was doing it so I could get more comfortable with my face. I have always had an insecurity about it, so I thought, why not do what I did with my naked selfie project? It is day 24, and I am so used to my hair being completely wrecked, that today, I went out without really much thought as to what was going on up there. And when I looked into my mini super computer, (or, Magic Mirror), at what was going on, I couldn't help but laugh...out loud...so that added to the whole effect, I'm sure. For so long I have been doing things to avoid this or that...avoid pain, avoid embarrassment, avoid heartbreak, avoid feeling jealous or mean, and today, standing in the marketplace, looking something like a wet chicken, I realized...I am no longer setting "avoidance" goals. I am setting goals of comfort, of resilience, of confidence, and it has changed everything. Instead of trying to move away from certain things, I am moving toward others, and the difference it has made in my life has been astounding. I have found that it is much easier to be nice when I am not trying to avoid things. It is much easier to take care of myself. It is much easier to allow myself time to rest, to consider, and to dream into what my life can be. I am also not taking things personally, and I am much more free with my personal time. I am allowing things to surface rather than forcing them down into the depths of my murky, silent hollow. It is scary, but in a roller coaster ride kinda way, which is also pretty exciting. Of course, this is a new thing, and things change every day for me, but this has been a substantial change in my perspective that has created a significant shift in how I do things. I am emerging from the darkness that had swallowed me, and with me, has come some buried memories, a few old habits, and something else...I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it might be something like....hope. This is where you will find my writing now. I will leave my old blogsite up for a bit while I am figuring out how to transfer it over, but from now on, I will be using this website as my blog site. Let me know what you think about that, and also, what you think about what's going on right now in the world. It's a bit disquieting, is it not? |
Sara YoungIs an artist, a philosopher, a writer and a teacher. She will be writing random thoughts here. Follow along if you are interested. BlogThis is the NEW Blog on Creativity. I have started it here to continue on the many years of writing I have done here and in other places. Subscribe to my Newsletter below if you want updates every time I write a blog, which will be once a week. Old Site |