Muchness and Light

My tongue gets tied when I try to speak. My insides shake, and there's no relief.

Yesterday, I reached out to the Hive Mind that is Facebook, and I asked about the logistics of post-divorce dating. Having been separated and divorced for five years, I’ve had some experience with it. Three years with Rango, the months that turned into whatever with Bounder… plus the dozens of others I entangled myself with to varying degrees.

But having unexpectedly met someone threw me for a loop. I am often hypersensitive to others, and I’m constantly on high alert for warning signs of disappointment (read: abandonment). I am persistently in a state of overthinking everything. Everything.

Ah, the joys of anxious attachment!

I wanted to know about the logistics of dating. I didn’t actually date in my teens and twenties. I married DH at 21. Though I’d been in a four-year relationship prior to him, it was abusive and tumultuous. Dating again five years ago was weird, for sure, and Rango was intended to be the last one.

Best laid plans, man.

So now having unexpectedly met someone, I have been struggling to determine if my feelings of anxiety and agitation are warranted, i.e., did he really pull back, or are those flutters and weird pangs in my chest just my own insecurities in a panic?

With rare exceptions, all of my romantic partnerships during the last five years started intense and immediate. We exchanged lots of messages, dates’ worth of information disclosed over the course of a couple of days via text and chat. Phone conversations were rarer, but it’s hard to talk when you’re both working and managing kids and lives.

Dating after divorce is hard. For everyone, there is the complication of past hurt, of trying to honor your own internal struggles and pain without getting caught in the same loops again. Those best laid plans were decimated, and it’s daunting to consider opening yourself to the possibility of hurt again. The demands of adulthood make finding time to connect even harder. And when one or both of you have kids, the scheduling difficulties and emotional concerns expand exponentially.

But what turned out to be my normal experience with dating again maybe wasn’t very normal at all. That constant connection felt fantastic, because it satisfied my tendency toward anxious attachment. While this new guy and I did have days of constant chatting and a couple of fantastic dates that first week, the communication dropped back. There are lots of logical reasons (see above), but the loosened connection made me agitated, sending me into days of hyper critical thinking.

Is the lack of constant, effusive attention normal, or is he an avoidant who's about to bail?

The thing about anxious and avoidant attachment styles is that they are inherently insecure--that’s why they’re not part of the secure attachment style. But secure attachment requires attachment to something (really someone). Even if I were secure in my own talents and attributes and accepting of who I am (which I’m plainly not), that doesn’t necessarily mean I could be securely attached to another person--though it would certainly improve the chances. An attachment is only formed in connection to an Other.

For me, this has most often manifested as this pathological dance between anxious Me and avoidant Them. We both want intimacy, and we connect immediately. When the feelings and connections become very intense, they run. Right on cue, I chase, trying desperately to maintain the lack of agitation that comes with being connected.

What I have finally learned is that the lack of agitation does not mean the attachment is secure. An absence of fluttery pangs in my chest does not equate to happily-ever-after. Because of the inherent insecurity on both sides, they are likely to bolt when they feel trapped by the intimacy they commanded. I’ve done the dance a dozen times and know the warnings signs, so I am always on high alert.

My rose-colored glasses can make even the whitest of flags look like they’re signalling the riptide that will drown me.

So did the new guy pull back, or is it normal dating behavior?

I don’t know.

I have polled my friends. I sought roundabout advice from the Hive Mind. No one knows, and I sure as hell don’t. The consensus is that I should wait and see, play it cool and just wait.

But I am impossibly impatient. Because I am not throwing everything at him at once, because I’m not demanding answers from him, I am agitated. At times, it feels as though my heart is about to claw its way out of my chest like a lovesick Xenomorph.

I don't know what to do with the agitation. I'm walking again, which helps. I'm down nearly 20 pounds since Rango and I split. I'm writing, though I recognize that almost no one but me sees these words. They are cathartic for me, however, and that has its own importance.  

But the writing and therapy have shined a glaring light on my insecurities. I know why they came about, how they were formed, just not what to do to make them better. And not doing things how I always have, not demanding that he give me the weight of answers I may not want to hear, is uncomfortable

What worked before isn't working now, because I'm not letting it.

But this is driving me crazy, and there seems to be no peace to be found. The firefighters are at odds with one another, fighting inside me over how best to help me feel calm. All I can do is plod ahead, hour by hour, and do the things I need to do. I know that’s the managers, though, distracting me with to-do lists and minutiae that feels all too important.

I may feel like I’m coming apart from the inside, but at least my toilets will be clean.

 

 

And if love is real, maybe I'm just too bad to remember how good it feels. My heart is still.

One of the things I like about the Internal Family Systems model is that it doesn’t pathologize any of the subpersonalities. Even when their behaviors are seemingly destructive, their dysfunction serves a greater purpose, at least in their minds. Their actions and reactions serve to protect the Exiles, to prevent further harm from coming to the already damaged parts of the psyche.

When I am hurt or sad, and usually in response to infliction of hurt by someone else (and usually a romantic partner), one of my subpersonalities will fling terrible thoughts and words at me.

You’re fat. You’re ugly. You’re gross. You’re stupid. You are unlovable, and no one loves you. You aren’t worthy of love and don’t deserve good things. You are a waste.

Now, logically, I understand those things may not be true. But why the hell would part of me continually tell other parts of me that I’m a waste of human flesh?

For a while, I wasn’t even sure who she was. I thought it might be Stephie, but she’s more likely to inflict her anger on others, not on me. And this one’s voice is no one else’s. It’s not my mother’s or my father’s. It doesn’t belong to any number of exes. It is a strangely-pitched, younger, strange version of my own voice. She knows how to inflect dripping sarcasm, spitting hatefully at me when I’m in the worst of the throes of pain. And just when I can’t take more, she hits with a final sucker punch, spinning me deep into tears and frustration.

She’s Harley.

Yes, it’s an easy moniker. And if she does her job well, she can get Quinn to act out, to seek out comfort in dark places.

And all of this to protect some Exile.

But what’s her purpose? I’m already hurting like hell; what good does it to do to inflict more, albeit different, pain?

Well, my first reaction to hurt and sadness is to close it down, to wall it off where it can’t reach me. Rango complained more than once that I would turn icy when hurt and angry. I can become very mechanical and refuse to feel emotion, let alone express it.

And that’s what she does: Harley forces me to feel something, anything that keeps me from returning to a dissociative state of numbness.

I spent the first ten years of my sons’ lives in that space. Struggling to find value both within myself and reflected from my husband, I shut down. My anxiety after giving birth to Max was so great that I started a low-dose SSR. It stopped the anxiety and kept me in the center, so I stayed on it until I couldn’t bear not feeling anymore. While the wild swings from joy to sorrow were abated, I generally felt nothing. When I got nothing in return, I became frustrated, and Quinn stepped in to give me some semblance of meaning again.

But because I am drawn to emotionally-unavailable men, Harley does what she can to keep me from becoming an avoidant myself. Given the last few years and recent relationship troubles, I get the appeal of shutting everyone and everything out. I get how it can seem beneficial to artificially limit what you’re willing to feel for another person, who well might break your heart. There is safety in walling yourself off from the Great Outdoors.

But I’m also a firm believer that love matters. It matters when we feel deep, caring emotion for another person, no matter the context. I don’t mean infatuation or attraction or simple affection. I mean the kind of love in which we are willing to sacrifice to help them reach their next goal. The kind of love that is so simple and pure that it expects to be cared for in return, simply because that is its nature.

It is unimaginable to me to walk away from that. It makes no sense to me that the people who’ve said they loved me could then walk away, could turn their backs on the thing they need most, which I just happen to be willing to give in droves. It’s nonsensical to have what you want most, what is good and healthy and true, right in front of you and to drop it carelessly on the ground on your way out the door.

So, the hurt for me comes from both the act of abandonment, whether physical or emotional, and the injustice of the leaving. And emotional abandonment is a very large part of the hurt for me. Hiding deep inside is a little girl who felt abandoned. Every time she felt it was safe to come out, trust someone enough to hold their outstretched hand and hope for love, she was let down again, over and over. She continually learned that she wasn’t worth loving, because people who love you stay and support you and care for you. They sacrifice for you, and no one sacrificed for her. She was, at times, a sacrificial lamb of sorts.

So, when the same wounds are reopened, Harley steps in to keep me from shutting down entirely. She steels me for an onslaught of disappointment and confusion. If I can already feel badly about myself, the abandonment makes sense. If they leave, it is because I am unlovable, so it shouldn’t be so hurtful or saddening. Even if what I feel is disgustful pain, that’s still better than feeling nothing at all.

While I know the things she says to me aren’t always true, there is, of course a nugget of truth to everything she says. I regained weight. I became complacent about my health. I can see myself aging both in photographs and in the mirror. I am emotionally difficult, hence my return to therapy. And even when those faults seem natural and overblown in my mind, there are long stretches of time in which I’m unable to find more good than bad, unable to value myself as more than my faults.

Pandy and I had a wonderful Saturday recently. I took her to see my beloved Afghan Whigs for the first time. Even though I’d just seen them in Atlanta a few weeks before, I traveled to Birmingham for what turned out to be the best Whigs show I’ve ever seen.

 

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A few days later, she messaged me and asked me to look at the photographs she had taken of me that night. She asked me to see what she sees, what she was trying to capture, “joy, or strength, or tenacity reflected in you.”

You are exquisitely beautiful. I know you seldom feel the woman I see, but that doesn’t mean you are any less the one I see. Sometimes friends see us more clearly than we see ourselves. Those are the times we need to redirect our focus, and look with kinder eyes; look at yourself for a moment as I do. See yourself in my photographs of you, and imagine what I was trying to capture. I see beauty. I see sass. I see strength. I see might. In short I see a very real version of Wonder Woman. She is a woman I love, admire, and appreciate. She is you.

I looked at her photographs. I can see what it is that she sees, why those moments capture those qualities of the woman in the photographs. What I don’t see, is myself. I don’t connect to those women in those pictures. I don’t feel attached to or protective of them. I don’t feel that their beauty and strength and sass is my own. Because if I feel those things about myself, it will open the door to hurt. It will allow for the possibility of disappointment.

But no matter what I do, no matter how far I get from my own center, Pandy is there. She is with me through thick and thin, through skinny and fat, through aging and heartache and wonder. I love her, and she loves me. I know this. I feel it every day, even if I don’t talk to her. Even when I’ve been at my worst, she stayed and supported me and loved me anyway, even if it meant telling me truths I didn’t want to hear.

Sometimes Harley argues with Pandy. Sometimes she rolls her eyes and just lets her talk. But every so often, she stays still and lets me feel the love that comes from this woman who has no desire to ever abandon me.

Somehow, that is progress.

 

 

Though you drown in good intentions, you will never quench the fire. You'll give in to your desire, when the stranger comes along.

Break-ups can be foundationally shattering. The end of a long-term relationship can be shocking to the core. There is the grief that comes from severing a deep, meaningful connection, of lamenting what has been lost, but there is also a sudden shift in daily routines that now feel hollow and future plans that will never come to fruition.

The day after Rango came to get his stuff from the house, I struggled just to maintain. I woke early, fed the cats, and cried for a while before falling back asleep. At noon, I realized I needed to get up and do my normal Sunday chores. The boys would be home from their dad’s that evening, and they would be expecting clean laundry and food for the week.

Walking through the grocery store, I felt raw. I felt like everyone who passed me in the aisles could see the sadness dripping from my every pore. I was certain that my hard-fought composure would come undone if anyone spoke kindly or smiled at me.

It’s not just that the sadness is a part of the grieving process. The sadness fulfills a purpose.

When I realized the futility of the relationship, I started looking for a new therapist. Therapy had been incredibly helpful through the demise of my marriage to DH. I was fortunate to have found an incredible therapeutic partner to help guide me through a couple of years of divorce and dating and loss. But my insecurities undoubtedly played a role in the tensions and break-up with Rango, and I knew I never want to feel those things again. I never again want to feel so easily broken by another person, especially when my head knows it shouldn’t be possible.

As I did some research online, I came across the Internal Family Systems therapeutic model developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s. It seemed to be especially effective in treating anxious attachers and rejection sensitivity. The idea is that we are each a Self, which is the true, whole, spiritual center of us. But we also have these discrete subpersonalities with their own intentions and needs and quirks and purpose. Each part has a specific viewpoint, developed from its interpretations of life experiences. Each has its own memories and interprets them according to its unique perspective:

• Managers handle the way we interact with the external world. They try to protect us from hurt, whether from others or from our own memories.
• Exiles are the parts that feel the worst emotions—pain, hurt, shame, fear—usually resulting from childhood trauma. Managers and Firefighters try to exile these parts to prevent their emotions from coming to the surface.
• Firefighters show up when Exiles break free and demand attention. They try to distract us from the pain, often encouraging unhealthy behaviors as coping mechanisms.

The goal of IFS is to allow the Self to access and connect to each subpart, healing them one by one. Thus, the Self leads the other parts in harmony and health. We become a whole, heathy person, rather than an amalgam of these smaller bits that exhaust themselves fighting to maintain a losing battle.

I have long believed that we each are made up of various persona, and we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone….

In an online interview reposted through the band’s Facebook page, Alex Wheeler said the title, Persona Non Grata, referred to all of the unacceptable and unwelcomed parts of everyone—the lurid, the shadowy, the hidden, the broken.

“Each of us has a persona, all the time,” he said. “I’m one persona with the band, someone a little different with my fans, someone else entirely with my wife and daughter. Sometimes that persona is ‘good’ and sometimes it’s ‘bad’. I spent a lot of time exploring the bad sides of normal, everyday people, you know? Not serial killers or rapists or anything. I wanted to look at the things regular people like to hide from the people they know and, most especially, from themselves.”

                                                                                                                                Persona Non Grata (2012)

I have, at times, named some of my subpersonalities, though I wasn’t thinking of them within the context of IFS.

• Cissie is the sweet, blond girl who never seemed to be pleasing to her parents, no matter how hard she tried. She never felt like she was enough. She was also molested for years, and she spent a lot of her time agitated and afraid. She is an Exile.
• Quinn is the rebellious teen who learned to trade sex and secrets for affection, often in an attempt to protect Cissie. She has her own anger and hurt, but she will bear it all to protect that little girl. She is a Firefighter.
• Stephie is a loud ball of angry. She will erupt and tantrum and demand her way when she feels she is being ignored. She is potentially a special subpersonality called a Tormentor. (She secretly wears that like a badge of honor.)
• Sassafras Bombalurina O’Malley is the one who reminds me to be shiny and sparkly and to tell the world to go fuck itself if it doesn’t like it. She is an eccentric, outrageous Manager who knows how to call on the Firefighters to back her up.
• Wonder Woman is the Amazonian princess who does it all, because she has to. She handles the day-to-day business of life, and she is remarkable. She is strong and capable, smart and intuitive, and she can predict everyone else’s needs and desires before they can. She is a Manager.
• Stephanie Quinn Jackson is the writer who sees it all, who arranges it and espouses the shared perspective of the others, who bears witness to it all and gives them a voice when it seems that no one else will listen. She is a Manager.

There are others, nameless but all with some variation of my face. Each has its own role and purpose in getting Stephanie through her life. Not to be confused with Dissociative Identity Disorder, I am not claiming to have multiple, distinct personalities. These are simply facets of my personality, and each strives in its own way to help me be secure and healthy and safe—even when its influence result in dysfunction.

The sadness is tied up with the hurt, and it’s not just from this break-up. This is hurt that hasn’t healed in 40 years. This is sadness that helps me to keep others at bay, or to curl up in bed and sleep when I should be doing productive things, so that I don’t have to feel the hurt. So I don’t have to delve back into every haunting memory and question again why I was both too little and too much. Why I wasn’t worth careful, healthy love.

None of these parts can or should ever be exorcised. Each is valuable and necessary, both as its own part and as a part of the larger whole. But the hurt can be healed enough so that it doesn’t make more hurt, create more sadness, because somewhere in there is joy and beauty. Somewhere in there is a sad and lost little girl who desperately wants to be loved.

I have to find her and help her.

We have to find her together.

 

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Muchness and Light - But if you'd known how that would sound to me, you would've taken it back and boxed it up and buried it in the ground.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

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I don't want to be tied to anyone's strings. I'm carefully trying to steer clear of those things.

I am a passionate person. I tend to throw myself fully into whatever I do, doing it loudly and brashly and intensely—though I am perfectly capable of tempering that passion when needed.

I’m also verbose. If you’ve read Muchness and Light over the last seven years, you know I rarely spin up any idea in less than 1,000 words. Text messages and emails are almost as wordy, even if they’re just to myself.

Even while I’ve been inactive in this forum, I have tended to continue to journal, whether in a Word doc or an email that sits forever in my Draft box or in a note on my phone. Bounder commented once that he was amazed at how much I could get out through a tiny phone keypad. Although initially interested in my writing, and in being the recipient of effusive love letters, Rango eventually told me to stop sending him walls of texts that he’d lost interest in reading.

Over the last few days, I looked back at many of those messages. What I saw was almost two years of trying to convince him to love me. That’s not to say he didn’t feel the affection. I’m certain that he did. But I wanted his actions to match his words, to behave in loving ways toward me (and the boys) as often as he told me he loved me. It wasn’t just that I wanted reciprocity of affection—I needed to feel loved to feel secure in our relationship.

What I also saw in those messages was a slow spiral into severe insecurity. I didn’t regularly and consistently feel love from him, and I questioned the distance he was putting between us. Like so many others I have known and loved, he compartmentalized his feelings into these tiny boxes that he used to build a wall between us. As it got harder and harder to get reassurance from him, sometimes to get response at all, I inferred a great deal to fill in the empty space. Eventually I adopted what I interpreted as his skewed perception of me as my own, and I became unbearably self-critical, lobbing ugly accusations of flaws and unlovability at myself.

Last night, as I was journaling again, I got myself type the words, “He wouldn’t have hurt me, if I hadn’t made him so angry.”

There was no physical abuse, ever. But for me, the systematic elimination of my passion was just as devastating. I reread months and months of my begging him to engage me, of telling him that I couldn’t take much more of his ignorance. I saw him blame me for being too much and causing him to withdraw.

His withdrawing would stop, the distance would shrink, if only I’d give him space and time to allow it to happen. Every time I changed my own behaviors and approaches to match what he led me to believe he wanted, he would move the finish line and leave me just as far away from him as I had been just weeks or days or hours before. Eventually I learned to stop having expectations of him, because expectations are just regrets waiting to happen. Eventually I learned to suppress my own desires and needs—until my passionate nature would erupt in anger at having felt ignored for far too long. My anger would, of course, drive him further away.

“Baby, why you make me wanna hit you?” Queen Frostine commented dryly.

While I have been effectively starved for intimacy, I am also incredibly fearful of it now. Certainly, it hasn’t even been a month since we broke up, and I’m not ready to meet anyone new. I’m still not quite ready to entertain the thought that it might one day happen. The idea of getting over someone by getting under someone else is repulsive to me right now. As I explained to a friend today, the thought of anyone touching me make me physically ill.

But I long for affection. I long to be touched carefully, to feel my own warmth reflected back from the skin of someone who chooses to share in intimate moments with me. I miss being seen, being regarded as an interesting woman. I miss being valued as a woman in any way.

At the same time, I don’t believe I am an interesting woman. If I were, surely Rango would’ve stayed interested. He told me time and again that he wouldn’t have been here if he didn’t want to be. But wouldn’t he have chosen to engage me, if he’d really wanted to? He did other things he wanted to do. So, if he didn’t choose me, there must be something wrong with me. And if there’s one thing wrong, then everything is wrong. If I have no value to him, then I must have no value to anyone else.

I understand the logical fallacy. I get that this thinking is maladaptive and self-defeating, if not self-destructive. If I ever expressed these thoughts to him, he would tell me I was wrong, that none of it was true, but he would never offer reassurance. He might say it’s not true, but he would continue to behave in the same ways that contributed to my having arrived at the conclusion that I am fat, ugly, stupid, worthless, etc. And so my insecurities systematically buried my own passion, compartmentalizing it away so that it was less likely to hurt me.

He told me a few times that he didn’t understand why I needed him, or anyone else, to contribute to my own satisfaction. In his mind, I should be able to be fully independent, especially emotionally. In the end, I believe he saw me as weak because I needed him.

But I believe that love is shared. I believe partners in healthy relationships care for one another. They do the things logistically and emotionally that support the other. They work to create and maintain intimacy that is meaningful to each and to the whole.

I believe love should be greater than the sum of its parts.

I want to believe that there are others who believe the same, who want to live and love passionately for their whole lives, not just for the initial stages of a relationship. I want to believe there are people who care about others more than they care about themselves. And I want to believe there is someone who could both allow me to care about them in such a way and do the same for me in return.

But I don’t. Not really. I want to. I want to still be the woman who had faith in love above all else. I want to still be a believer. I’m just not. Not because I don’t think it’s possible for me to be that woman, but because I have become so accustomed to being shown those beliefs were delusional that I don’t trust them anymore. I can’t. The possibility of hurt is far too great.

Even if I never again allow anyone close enough to hurt me, there is still the damage I have done to myself. There is still my own culpability in having allowed him to hurt me, to have given him the proximity and knowledge-as-weapon to be able to do it.

Maybe in the end it’s not just that I don’t trust others. I don’t trust myself. I adopted those skewed perceptions, and I’m no good to anyone until I can unravel that mess of barbed wire. But I am truly afraid I will weave into some kind of armor to keep others at a distance—including myself.

 

 

In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams, that is where you and I shall meet.

Since my thyroid radiation in July, I’ve been struggling with still feeling like general crap. Fatigue and brain fog have been intermittently worse. A pretty leisurely two-mile walk with Rango and the boys recently wiped me out for two days. My bloodwork shows wildly-swinging levels of thyroid hormones, indicating that the regrown tissue is indeed dying off, though it may be months before it normalizes.

With that has also come more weight regain and self-recrimination and outright self-loathing.

I have tried to get back into the gym even semi-regularly. It’s hard enough to juggle work and school and kids successfully, and trying to find even six hours a week for myself in that is sometimes unmanageable. Of course I know the exercise will actually help me to feel better, but the fatigue that comes with hypothyroidism can be unimaginably oppressive.

Recently I started a series of virtual races through Yes.Fit. Of course I chose the Alice in Wonderland themed races. After I complete so many miles, as tracked by my Misfit activity tracker, my medal is sent to me automatically. As of today, I’ve completed three of the six Alice races, totaling more than 60 miles.

As it does every day, Facebook was kind enough to remind me this morning of memories from this day in previous years. I find it interesting to see how life has changed over the last few years, but I tend to face those reminders with some trepidation. I love the pictures and funny quotes from my boys from their younger days. Sometimes the memories are useless or now meaningless, or sometimes even too painful, and I’ll delete them. Sometimes I leave the painful ones, knowing those ghosts will haunt me again next year, because I’m either not ready to deal with them or I know they’re so important that I will need the reminders again.

But today, there were two things, from 2010 and 2011. Not surprising, there were pictures from a 2010 concert, of a band I loved then and love now. It was the second in a series of shows that were seminal for the changes that would come over the following two years. A year later, it was the memory that was down 99 of the 115 pounds in total weight loss. Yet another year later, I’d just separated from my now-ex-husband.

All of that has fueled my writing since 2010, which began with the realization that I’d lost my muchness--just like Alice in Wonderland.

I have said repeatedly over the last year that, for a variety of reasons, I felt like I was back in 2010 and didn’t know why I was reliving such similar circumstances. Regardless of the logistical changes and strides I know I have made, I have replayed the past in tandem with the present and come up with only confusion and emotional failure. I have continually grappled with figuring out which choice I didn’t make or should’ve made differently. I’ve tried to re-learn whatever lesson I obviously needed to repeat.

But somehow, I keep sliding farther and farther into the past. Where 2010 may have felt like a rabbit hole, 2016 is feeling more and more like the other side of a looking glass. Where then felt new and exciting and rebellious, now feels reflective and reversed and exhausting.

What is it? What did I miss? What do I need now that can only be retrieved from then?

It just so happens that Alice Through the Looking Glass comes out on DVD this week. Of course I saw it in the theater when it opened--how could I not?--but I really didn’t love it as much as I did the first one. It was beautiful, and I looked for the clues to my missing lessons, but the torment of Time was unsettling to me. I could willingly believe in a lost young woman traveling to surreal place and conquering her fears, but it was almost impossible for me to suspend my disbelief as the same woman mended old wounds.

But maybe that’s it. Maybe my path has been a big circle, and maybe the obstacle is an unturned stone.

Certainly I can pinpoint errors and mistakes and regrettable decisions, but I feel like I have done everything in my power to apologize and make amends for those actions. I would say I have done my best to move on, but I damn well know there are frozen moments that continue to haunt me.

I don’t know what it is, but there is something. It is maddening, appearing and disappearing, always just out of my reach.

So I’m starting back at the beginning, at Alice. I am literally retracing my steps, one foot in front of the other, until I can find a way to the next landmark on this destination. I don’t want to believe that I am personally destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over, that there is literally no way to avoid spiritual repetition. I’ve already seen the White Rabbit, I just passed the Cheshire Cat and am making my way toward the Mad Hatter. There is still the Caterpillar and the Queen of Hearts.

After that, I’m seriously considering the Pac-Man races, where I get to eat a series of brightly-colored ghosts.

When your mama heard the way that you'd been talkin', I tried to tell you that all she'd wanna do is cry.

So it has been a rough couple of months. Honestly, I don’t even know the last time I checked in, the last time I wrote something that wasn’t schoolwork or workwork or some ranting, raving text or email that I hoped would perfectly and pointedly enunciate whatever the hell has been trying to claw its way out of me. Heart, brain, mind, soul… all a big confusing blob of Idon’tevenknowwhat right now.

Radiation was a downer, but I got through it. All of this activity with my thyroid has sent my hormones into overdrive. Concerns about my health have sent my head spinning, and three days in isolation, binge watching Game of Thrones, sure as heck didn’t help.

But I have, at times, been a raging bitch. It’s not that I am imagining things to get upset about; it has just been far too easy for me to explode about anything and then find myself curled into a sobbing ball of inconsolable self-recrimination.

In the middle of a tense discussion about it a couple of weeks ago, Rango told me that he doesn’t understand why I am so drawn to chaos.

“It’s like you need the tension.”

He doesn’t get it. He says he prefers to be in the middle, at even keel and as balanced as possible.

“I don’t trust extremes,” he continued. “I don’t like euphoria any more than I like chaos.”

But me? I thrive in chaos. Euphoria is my drug.

“I need the tension to know I’m alive,” I replied. “It’s the only way I know I’m not numb, and I don’t ever want to be numb to my life again.”

I challenged that I abhor the happy medium he espouses.  But he has a point: I am drawn to extremes.

Lately, though, there seem to have only been extremes of bad, of anger and disappointment and outrage, over the slightest things. I can blow a gasket if the towels aren’t folded right or if the boys didn’t clean the table.

Last night, I was adamant that I’ll be kicking Max out of the house when he’s 22, because he can’t hold down a job or finish school or take care of himself—all because the kitchen was a torn apart by a ravenous, irresponsible, 15-year-old boy.

For the last week, I’ve been hearing other people say things, often random things that aren’t directed at me, that seem like messages the cosmos intends for me to hear. There was a gathering of the Castration Committee at my house over the weekend, and all three of the present girls said something very specific about themselves that I also needed to take to heart.

Yesterday, I was driving to work, in a total funk, listening to my favorite podcast, Death, Sex & Money (with Anna Sale). The latest episode was an interview with author and Buzzfeed senior editor Katie Heaney. Anna had interviewed her a couple of years ago after she published Never Have I Ever, her memoir of then-lifelong singledom. Now dating and now openly gay, Heaney talked about what it was like to let go of much of her apprehension about dating when she realized she really might want to date women instead of men.

No, I didn’t need to get the message that I’m really a lesbian, no matter how often the Castration Committee and I plan to swear off men and just be together forever. There was actually a lot in her story and in her words that jumped through the car speakers toward me. (That happens a lot when I listen to Death, Sex & Money. That’s why it’s my favorite.)

Sale asked Heaney if there’s anything she feels like she needed to be taught in her new relationship, having never been in a relationship herself.

“Not really, no…. Not taught. I think that I… and I am still learning this… I have to learn how to not catastrophize every disagreement or every feeling that comes to me that isn’t a one-hundred-percent joyous one. You know, I always thought that I was above the sort of ‘white knight’ narrative and thinking that a relationship was going to improve my life. I don’t think I thought it was going to improve my life, but I thought that I had struggled so long to find it that once I did it would just be perfect or easy…. I was naïve about what it really means to spend that much time with someone and still be happy but still have days where you’re just like, ‘Ugh, I don’t feel good, I don’t feel good today, this is not my favorite thing that’s going on today,” and I think early on I would get very nervous about that, because I was putting a lot of pressure on both of us.”

Dude.

Is Katie Hearney living in my head?? (I’m sorry if you are, Katie. It’s a cacophonous place.)

Sale did the same thing I did, questioned whether or not “catastrophize” was a real word, or whether Hearney’s mom had coined it in reference to her daughter.

Turns out, it is a real word. It’s an irrational thought that something is much worse than it actually is. According to psychologist John M. Grohol, catastrophizing can take two forms. The first takes a current situation and turns it into catastrophe—a small mistake at work will result in your firing. The second form takes thoughts of future happenings and creates a reality around the anticipated catastrophe.

Guilty as charged, on both counts.

In the very beginning of my break-up with Bounder, when I saw the potential of so much going badly because of something he felt I had blown out of proportion, he called me on it.

“You’re always looking for the worst thing to happen, waiting for it to blow up, because you just know it’s going to. Things aren’t always that bad, Sass.”

Well, he was right and not, of course. So was I.

I am incredibly analytical by nature—I am a good Virgo, after all. And my job requires me to be hyper-analytical, looking not only at what is wrong, but also at what might be wrong, to anticipate a response and a rebuttal and a reply to the rebuttal, all with the end goal of being right. I am very good at my job, but the cacophony in my head is often just the buzz of this computation of possibility and plausibility in a way that is extreme, even for me.

So while I’m analyzing the minutiae of every relationship I have, often to my own detriment, I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to give this one with Rango (or any one) a fair and healthy shot. He noted that I am constantly scrutinizing everything, waiting for it to break down and fall apart.

And with another year of hormonal chaos ahead of me—so says my doctor—I don’t know if either of us has the energy to try to keep up with my thoughts.

My crazy train can be gloriously and devastatingly exhausting. I am always on the go, and the next year will be no exception. There is not time to slow down, between work and school and the kids. But somehow I have to find a way not to expect the worst, even though I have planned for it so carefully.

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to just stop being me. And I am afraid of taking away the glorious if I abandon the devastation. I am afraid of being numb again.

I don’t have an answer. I have a recommendation for a book, The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living, and I have ordered a copy. I am not one to turn to self-help books, unless someone very special recommends the book. This time is no exception, and it feels like the cosmos wants me to read something.

So for now, I am waiting patiently for Amazon to deliver my copy. I will not expect it to get lost in the mail—I can always go to the book store for another one if that one never shows.

But I will try to take those thoughts when they come and let them be that, just thoughts. They are not action, they are not reality, unless I make them so.

 

Will you let me follow you wherever you go? Bring me home.

It's been an incredibly busy six weeks, and I've been sorely out of touch.  Summer break for the boys was surprisingly busy, especially for Max who was gearing up to start high school.  (High school!  My baby is in high school!)  I was working when I could, and I was constantly doing homework or in class—completing the 15-hour class load for the summer session.  It exhausted me, but I managed to pull off a 3.8 GPA for the semester and both boys are still alive. 

In the midst of all of that chaos, there came Rango.  While talking during our first date, I was telling him what my hectic life was like.

"How do you manage time to date?" he asked across a ginger beer.

"I just do it," I replied.  "If it's important to me, I find the time."

That was an issue with so many of the Fragile Cats before.  They would often say they were too busy to be regularly available, but they also had the expectation that I would be happy and welcoming when they wanted to drop a dead mouse on my doorstep.  As most of the Castration Committee will attest, I thrive in chaos; I am generally at my best when I am forced to prioritize and organize and be efficient in my decisiveness.  I could always find time to spend with Bounder or Katniss or Rex or any of them. 

They wouldn't always find the time to spend with me.

As I realized over the year-and-a-half of dating after my separation, I was mostly drawn to avoidants—the asshole Fragile Cats who justified running hot and cold and often made me feel like it was my fault for wanting or expecting them to follow through on their word.  Yes, if you tell me you're going to show up or call, I actually expect you do show up or call.

Somehow they were always surprised when I felt hurt or angry with them for not doing what they'd said they would. 

Eventually I learned it wasn't me at all that had screwed up in these exchanges.  La Bruja told me months ago that I would eventually find an amazing guy who wasn't like that, at which point I would cease to even see the avoidants who were trying to get my attention. 

She was right.  Kind of.

I still see them; I'm me—I can pick them out of a crowd in five seconds flat.  But I don't pay attention to them.  I don't feel drawn to help or empathize or soothe.  Usually I smile and nod politely while mentally running through my to-do list for the upcoming days.  Sometimes I just roll my eyes and walk away. 

Given my own hectic life, it's surprising that I even bothered to try one more time.  I was determined that July 2nd would be my last date for a very, very long time.  I'd intended that to be the case if and when it turned out that he was another avoidant asshole.  Never did I expect the guy to actually be Rango. 

Because he mattered to me, I had to make the decision very quickly to incorporate Rango into my life.  He was willing to accept me and my crazy, plus my two sons and the logistical issues that divorced parenting brings.

Somehow, because I matter to him, he finds the way and the time to make me and the boys a priority.  When a recent family illness brought an unexpected road trip to Alabama, he didn't hesitate to offer to go with us.  He hasn't shied away from meeting my family or friends.

More importantly, when I woke in the middle of the night crying a few weeks ago, he didn't shy away from me.  The logistics of my life were taking a physical and emotional strain, and I woke at 4 a.m. to a barrage of hot, angry sobs.  He was awake elsewhere in the house, trying not to wake me with his own sick and sleeplessness. 

I laid there for a moment in the dark, paralyzed with fear and hurt.  All the nights I woke alone like that came crushing back, and I couldn't breathe.  Then I remembered that I had begged the Universe for someone who could help shoulder that weight for me.  I had prayed for someone to be there in the middle of the night when I was crying.

I padded down the hall to where he was in the kitchen.  He looked at me, saw the glint of streaming tears in the dim light, and dropped everything just to hold me and listen while I sobbed against his chest.  Eventually he put me back to bed and stayed right there with me until I fell back asleep. 

Impossibly, he was still there the next morning.

Rango doesn't shy away from my heart any more than I do.  I warned potential suitors that I was a lot to handle, and they always said they were okay with that.  He is the only one who has consistently and unabashedly embraced the intense chaos that swirls in and around me. 

He loves me not in spite of but because of that intensity.

Queen Frostine commented the other day that I had not once called her crying or lamenting some stupid thing Rango had said or done—totally unlike any of my other relationships.

"He grounds you," she noted.  "He keeps you centered."

I quickly pointed out that I do the same for him.  Even though it's a tenuous balancing act some days, it's easy to be with him, to love him.  We are open and honest in our communication.  We are true to ourselves and to each other.  He is the same way with me that I am with him... that I was with the others who couldn't manage to get their furry heads out of their own asses long enough to realize that it didn't have to be so damn hard all the time. 

Interestingly, he doesn't make me feel like I want to puke.  Yes, there is the excitement and the giddy and the uprush of love.  There are no underlying warnings, no red flags flapping above choppy waters that bring the seasickness. 

Invariably, I am me.  Stephanie is prone to moodiness and difficulty.  She attracts sea monsters, curiously dancing with both Scylla and Charybdis, struggling sometimes to stay afloat in a hopscotch board of eddies. 

Hurricane Sassafras is always swirling, in danger of whirling me under my own upsurge.  My biggest fear is that I accidentally pull Rango into that riptide.

But this one has his own undercurrents, his own battles and strengths that pull against mine.  Somehow we manage to moor each other into the safety of our own harbor, like Puerto Rango is the capital of Glamazon Island.  (In my head, it kind of looks like the lagoon on Gilligan's Island.)

It's natural and easy.  We just fit in ways that we've never felt together with someone else.  Even with all of the awareness of the past and cognizance of the present, it feels effortless to love each other in the ways we each need to be loved. 

Rango and Sassafras live contentedly in the eye of the storm, looking up at brilliant skies in the midst of so much buffeting wind.  And if it means a lifetime of my cracking coconuts for dinner and his building radios from the hollowed shells, so be it.  At least there will be piña coladas and music.

 

 

 

With one breath, with one flow, you will know.

I have ludicrous amounts of coincidence in my life. 

It's far beyond thinking of someone and then they call.  I have quit being surprised when I dream of someone and hear from them the next day, or even when I dream very detailed, seemingly random events that later come true. 

It's really more a matter of synchronicity.  In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung developed the term to explain "the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related, whereas they are unlikely to be causally related."  It's meaningful coincidence, though the events do not have to happen simultaneously and there doesn't have to be explanation of their meaning in terms of cause and effect. 

For Jung, synchronicity gave a basis to his concepts of "archetype" and "the collective unconscious".

For me, it means a whole bunch of batshit. 

It happens so often that it's become a fucking joke within the Castration Committee.  But what also regularly happens is that these patterns of synchronistic events precede the most poignant and profound moments in my life.  They are like omens for what's coming, both good and bad.

When my crying jag started last week, it took about two days to run its course.  In addition to all of the stress I've been under, Friday brought a series of events that were both unexpected and unsurprising.  Unrelated to each other, but these two currents in my life that should be skew—meaning they are not parallel and do not intersect—began to curve toward each other and resulted in a momentary traversion. 

That continuum of crisscross marked yet another landmark event in my life, specifically with Bounder—the person with whom I am most synchronous.

Days before it happened, I told Hot Pocket and Growler that something was brewing.  ("Something penis this way comes," I said.)  I could feel it, the shift in energy around me.  I'm very sensitive to such things; Absolem once told me I was like some kind of freaky, voodoo static magnet.  I just feel other people's energies.  With the people I'm closest to, I can do it from a distance.  I just know when something is wrong or happening.

The synchronicity often comes in waves, and inundations of it often herald the approaching crazy.

Right now, and especially tonight, I am swimming in portent. 

I don't know what this will be.  I almost never do.  I just know that it is coming.  It doesn't feel bad, though it does feel colossal.  Based on what happened in the past week and what I know is supposed to happen over the next month, I could take a guess as to what (and whom) in involves, but the details won't be revealed until the actual time.

Part of it is that I am open to the idea.  I am willing to see signs and meaning in the strangest of things.  I do actively look for it in my life, though I try very hard not to see more into something than is actually there.  Sometimes when I call something out and name it for being important, the person on the receiving end of the prognostication will tell me I'm full of shit.  All too often, I get to tell them I told you so.

Four hundred years ago, I would've been burned at the stake. 

I pay attention to these things, because my life has consistently shown me that there's reason for me to do so.  I get these vibes, for lack of a better term, and they almost always happen just before my path shifts dramatically. 

In the past, when it's been this strong, Fate has stepped in and forced me to come face-to-face with my next step, the impact so strong that it leaves me figuratively bruised and shaken.  She's a bitch, for sure, but I know better than to fuck with her.  There's a reason for it, every time, although I don't always see it until it's too late to even beg her to let me turn back. 

Whatever it is this time... okay.  I can rail against it and be a petulant, ungrateful little brat about it, or I can just accept that something crucial is about to happen and conserve my energy for when it actually plays out.  Someone important is going to need those energy stores, and I have the feeling that it's someone very, very important to me. 

It feels like a test, of everything that has come before, of everything I have learned over the last three years.  And I hope I'm up to the challenge.  I hope I have the skills to fight this battle—and maybe even the Vorpal sword one of us will need to slay that Jabberwocky. 

 

NOTE:

Just as I was finishing this piece, getting ready to post it, my phone popped up with a push notification from my Facebook fan page.  Earlier in the evening, I posted asking for suggestions for what to write about for a new blog post.  This is what I see when my phone got my attention:

THAT is how my life works. 

 

I can't stand myself. I'm being held up by invisible men.

Sassafras O'Malley has double-blind confirmation of a new superpower: the unmitigated ability to attract alcoholic men. 

She's not especially thrilled to have this talent, though I suppose it's an equal and opposite reaction to her ability to dazzle small animals and children (and stupid people) into submission with her disco ballness. 

All joking aside, it's shocking to my system, just how well I can not see the addiction sometimes, how I can have come so far toward self-awareness and integration and still be so willing to ignore the flashing red signs when my heart is on the line. 

The thing about addicts is that they are selfish: self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-deprecating, self-loathing, self-mutilating, and self-destructive.  As Bounder said to me recently, quite ironically, it's not that they don't want good things in their lives—they aren't trying not to love or feel or be available to those that seem to matter most to them—it's that they can't; they are so selfish in their addiction that they are unable to see past themselves to the secondary and tertiary damage they inflict on those around them. 

It's one of the hallmarks of addicts, to deny themselves the things and people who are truly good for them, to push out anyone and everyone who might be able to serve as a lifeline to reality and healthfulness.  They will instinctively surround themselves with people who support and facilitate their patterns of addictive behavior, who tolerate and even sometimes encourage their excuses and their inconsideration and their lies—enablers.

My refusal to enable the addiction of men I loved was, in part, responsible for the demise of previous relationships.  It's always more complicated than that, but addiction has played an important and sometimes torturous role in more than the last twenty years of my life.  When I wrote at the end of the year about what I didn't want going forward in my life or a new relationship, addiction was part of that list—mine or anyone else's. 

And yet, here I went again. 

I don't get it, either.  In my head I can understand how the addiction, especially alcoholism, works and impacts the addict's entire life, including the people closest to them.  But deep in my soul, I cannot fathom how a person could be in such desperate need for something, or someone, and flatly refuse it when it's presented to them on a shiny, silver platter.  When you most need it, you're given a gift from the universe of exactly what you both need and want, and you are openly thankful for that—until you realize it won't follow you to the bottom of a bottle.  Then you turn your back on the good in exchange for the bad, like an ungrateful, petulant bastard?

I don't fucking get it. 

What I do understand is the other side of it—the heartbreak and the rejection and the feelings of being worth less than a fucking bottle to that person who says they care about you.  The dismissal and the isolation that come when they start drinking.  And it's dramatically juxtaposed to the attention and the connection that's there when they're sober, when you let yourself think for just a moment that just maybe this time you will be enough, be special enough, to help them see the light and to give them the goal and the strength to break out of those patterns.  But those moments become more and more fleeting as time goes on with the addict, until it's a constant daze of distance and excuses and emotional neglect that borders on malice. 

Hot Pocket says it's not that I'm worth less than that bottle; it's that he feels he deserves the bottle more than he deserves me. 

Growler says she understands why it feels like I will never find another person to love, who loves me back in a healthy way, but that it's just not true, no matter how hard that may be to see right now.  (I'm not looking, but I wasn't looking this time, either.)

Queen Frostine listens patiently while I rage about how I'm done with men, about how I hate the catch-22 of being myself and attracting damaged men or going back into my own box just to make a man comfortable in the hopes he loves what is ultimately a shadow of Stephanie. 

And I'm pretty positive I don't want a romantic relationship with a woman.  Women are crazy.

Yet again I find myself spinning, trying desperately to touch solid ground and calm the nausea, to stop the sickness that is surrounding me and invading every fiber of my being.  I'm trying again to catch my breath, the wind knocked out of me simultaneously by love and heartache.  As much as I may want to fix this, to use my incredibly unrelenting resourcefulness to make this okay, I can't.  This is not my battle, no matter how hard I fight.

Maybe it's not about me, but it sure as hell still feels like it's me that's taking the brunt of the damage.

So I'm pulling back again, shunning men and shunning that sector of my heart.  I was pretty sure I was ready this time, pretty sure I was healthy, but I feel like I missed something.  My trusting, naive, hopelessly-romantic nature let me, encouraged me, to believe the unintentional whispers of another alcoholic.  I can't do this again.  I really would rather be alone that to go through this another time.

 

If I fall through that hole, would you pick me up, if I lose my control and break your loving cup?

Sometimes life hurts.

This is something we all know.  Hell, the mere act of being birthed is probably painful—being squeezed and pulled and prodded into a less comfortable, brighter, louder, more chaotic new world.  (Plus, I think gravity just has to suck after being a relatively freefloating form for the entirety of your previous existence.)

Pain is a natural response to damage.  It's the body's way of telling us something is not right.  We are injured or in danger or did something outside the scope of our normal limitations.  Pain is a necessary device of physical form.

But I'll skip the physical pains associated with being human; I'm pretty sure we're all well-familiarized with bumps and bruises and accidents—the inflictions and afflictions that become our personal histories, filled with anecdotes of our agonies. 

It's the emotional pain that is so often the most debilitating and longest lasting.  Whether it be pain from an outside source or from inside ourselves, our souls are molded by both the nature of the damage and the way in which we react to it. 

Jealousy, anger, sorrow, grief... all signs of emotional pain and some kind of damage.  Betrayal, malice, negligence, parting, death... all naturally occurring events in virtually everyone's lives. 

But it is how we face these pains that determines if and when and how we heal from them. 

Sometimes the damage is minor—your best friend canceled dinner plans with you, again, to see her sometimes boyfriend.  Sometimes it's more substantial—the death of a beloved pet.  And sometimes the harm is so great—betrayal by a lover, death of a close loved one—that we find ourselves paralyzed, both physically and emotionally, in that injury, unable to escape the constant gnaw of harrowing discomfort. 

Just like it's physical counterpart, emotional pain is a necessary part of life.  If we are to move forward on our paths—whether individually or with another—we must encounter hardships.  To never feel the deepest despair means we will never feel the greatest joy when the pendulum swings back the other way.  And it will; it always does. 

If it ebbs, it will flow.

If there is no counterbalance, if we are always in the middle of the road, we can never fully appreciate the wonderful without fully understanding the terrible. 

When emotional hurdles are tossed onto our paths, we do have options:

Stop.  Become still in your life and never get past that place in time. 

Go around it.  Pretend it wasn't there and keep moving forward.  Any time we look back, that hurdle will still be there.

Destroy it.  Smash it.  Bulldoze through it.  Throw it into the briars.  It's still there, even in bits and pieces, but now we're exhausted from the exertion.

Go over it.  Jump, climb, crawl or step—whatever works best.  Conquer the insurmountable in the way that suits each of us best.  It can still be tiring, but the force of energy needed to deal with the hurdle is manageable. 

Regardless of how we choose to deal with the obstacle, it's still an obstacle.  It warrants respect and reverence for being important enough to alter our path, no matter how long or short its wielding of influence may be. 

The key to healing from the damage that's causing such anguish is to feel it, to recognize and accept that we cannot go up until we hit bottom.  We must let our feet touch the hard depths in order to get our footing and push off again, bounding to the top.  Floating freely and erratically in our pain may feel comforting for a while, oddly reminiscent of being in utero, but it will not end until we push hard toward the light at the end of the tunnel that is still squeezing and contracting around us as we go. 

It's incredibly difficult to watch someone you love live their pain.  We want to protect those closest to us from harm, but it's impossible.  The acting of even trying to protect them can inflict more damage than we can imagine.  Everyone has to deal and heal in their own way and in their own time.  Sometimes the best we can do is to offer help—a bandage, stitches, or a hand to squeeze when the pain is too much.  Sometimes a lullaby or a soft shushing will be support enough.  And sometimes all we can do is mutely watch them fall, waiting for them to hit their bottom and come bounding back, rushing toward their light.  Our love may cushion them, but it can never fully break their fall.

Sometimes pain leaves scars.  My physical scars are like a topography map of what I've seen and where I've been, but they are a manifestation of healing from deep trauma and heartache that was inflicted by others but mostly by myself.  At the core of me, I am the same person I've always been, but that old Stephanie isn't exactly the same as the one I am now.  I am grateful for the comprehension of joy and love and truth in ways I'd never experienced before, even if it comes from having my world and my head turned upside down.  I am sometimes disgusted by the proof of my own self-inflicted carelessness, but I also understand that it's made me better able to pause in my journey when needed, to ask myself if the choice before me is healthy or unhealthy.  It's all proof that I was, and still am, ready and able to move forward, no matter what obstacles lie ahead.