Muchness and Light

Scratchin' and survivin'.... Hangin' in and jivin'.

I wrote my last blog post four days before an unexpected first date.

That was eight months ago.

I have been crafting this post for weeks or longer, debating and processing what I wanted to say and what the implications were for me and others. I have thought about who would see this—those loyal readers who’ve been with me from the very beginning, the new friends I have picked up in the 10 years since I started writing again, the people who were removed from my life by their own accord or by mine, those who I know still lurk from time to time for whatever reasons.

Like so many others, I met him online. In the aftermath of my last breakup, I spent some time with some of my girls and debriefed, both before and after Achilles’ tendon surgery. I wanted to have some fun and see what the dating landscape might look like, for whenever I decided I was ready to spend time with another man. I needed to heal, both physically and emotionally. I was still working and raising two young men and in the middle of grad school.

But there was this smile, this tilt of the head that intrigued me. It was simply lovely. Candidly bashful but brazenly joyful and mischievous. Real, complicated emotion captured at just the right angle. Just the right moment.

We realized quickly we had mutual friends, people I’d gone to high school with in Alabama in the late 80s. Similar sense of humor. Incessant, funny, deep, honest conversation started immediately.

The day after I wrote my last blog post.

I was still in a splint and on a blue knee scooter with a basket, but we both wanted to meet. Soon.

That was eight months ago.

Neither of us could have foreseen this, though I suppose no one ever does. But our respective breakups happened almost simultaneously. There was no intention of becoming really involved with this man, and I know he had no intention of jumping into another relationship.

Woobiee. My manister. He’s warm and fuzzy and comfortable. He is strong and supportive. He is present and mindful and considerate. He has done his work—really, with a professional!—and he is wholly encouraging of my continuing my work. He is brilliant and funny and caring. He is gregarious and generous. He is complicated and open and honest even when it’s difficult for him or for me. He is respectful of my boundaries, and I am encouraged by his words and his actions to defend them when necessary, without fear of recrimination.

He did what I asked him to do—which is the same thing I asked of myself—to be open to the possibility, truly willing to accept the consequence of each other, good or bad.

That was eight months ago.

I could gush ad infinitum about his qualities, and I share those words with him regularly. That’s not what this is about.

Muchness and Light was born out of my need to understand myself and to change. Ten years ago, I was unhappy and unhealthy and restless. I didn’t understand that my midlife crisis was beginning. To look back from the position of my life now, it’s startling to see the changes. I don’t know how 2010 Stephanie would feel about 2020 Stephanie and if she would have made the same choices, if she’d known what changes were coming.

Whatever intention I had then, I have achieved only a modicum of success by those standards. I did some writing. I saw some bands. I did a lot of therapy. I have been in and out of a string of relationships that became increasingly nuanced in their unhealthiness.

Whatever I hoped or planned for in 2010 and in the subsequent few years didn’t materialize in the ways I’d intended.

What I got was even better.

I have gotten two sons almost to adulthood. I have a close-knit core of friends who love me, and whom I adore, even when we can’t be together. I am six hours away from finishing my third college degree. I work at a job that I love, and I intend to add part-time teaching to my schedule as soon as graduate school is finished. I am in a relationship that is healthier and more secure than I have ever experienced.

From the very beginning of this process, I have written about how it’s all about the journey and not the destination. I was always open to the possibility of having my path twisted and turned in unexpected directions. I often chose the road less traveled, just to have something new to see along the way.

Above all else, I wanted to live an adventure. It didn’t matter the details, so long as I could talk to my friends and hang with my kids and listen to music and eat some good food and spend time with a romantic partner who offered reciprocity in care and honesty. Nothing ever has to be grand; I thrive on small moments strung together like colorful, random beads.

That journey took me in an unimaginable direction. When I started Muchness and Light, I desperately needed to hear my own voice. It was never public validation that I needed. Accolades and encouragement from others is always nice, but what I needed most was to know that I existed and had value. For a while, I searched for proof that I had value to others.

What I was really always looking for was the value I had to myself.

Over the last 10 years, I have struggled through the demise of my marriage, the financial and emotional aftermath of divorce, returning to college while working and raising two kids, health issues, and one unhealthy relationship after another. Sometimes I flailed and raged against the difficulty and the unfairness of it all, but I never stopped moving forward. Not once.

I still have days that I struggle. Life continues, and my journey is ongoing.

But I am content. Most days, I’m happy. Some days are darker than most. But I am generally content in my life. I am still defiant in being exactly who I am, but it’s no longer in reaction to other people or their bullshit. I am no longer screaming to hearing my own echo, just to know I exist.

Woobiee has admonished me from the beginning to be present, to avoid comparing the past to the present or looking too far outside the immediate moment. As I’ve discussed before, creating expectation spawns the possibility of disappointment, and I still believe that to be true. But expending significant energy on extensive emotional contingency plans is exhausting, and Woobiee makes it safe for me to relax and enjoy myself. He does not make me happy—that’s wholly on me—but he supports and encourages my happiness to the best of his ability, with as much effort as I expend in supporting and encouraging his.

Most days, I am centered and Self-led. I am integrated and whole, better able to handle stressors and insecurities. Not perfect, but better. Self-aware and Self-actualized and Self-controlled.

One of the things I have struggled with is how to handle Muchness and Light.

This blog has been a huge part of my journey, though admittedly decreasingly so over the past couple of years. As my work and school took a different direction, I turned to this outlet less and less. I am no less- Self-analytical—perhaps even more so—but I can hash out those deep explorations with an audience of one or two who know me intimately; I no longer need to hear myself to know I exist.

 I am a Real Girl.

So I have decided to put this on hold indefinitely. I will likely leave something up for a while, at least until I can get my files downloaded and park my domain names and figure out what I want to leave publicly available. For a while, I felt as if I were letting down 2010 Stephanie and 2013 Stephanie and any number of internal parts and iterations that have depended on this medium to be heard.

But I realized they don’t need that anymore, either. Muchness and Light was an invaluable tool, and it helped me to find the voice I lost over the years. It helped me learn to listen to myself and to advocate for myself, even and especially when there is no one else who will advocate for me. The support is always nice, but it’s ultimately Me who is responsible for Me, no matter when or where I am.

I wanted a life with no regrets. That’s impossible to achieve, really. To be wholly human is to be flawed; it is how we react to the consequences of our flaws that defines us.

But to be comfortable in my own skin is blessing. It is a merciful gift that I have given to myself. All I could tell my earlier Selfs is that it gets better, to just keep going.

I intend to still be going for a while, just not this direction.

Thank you to everyone who has encouraged me and supported me and challenged me. You have been an integral part of my journey. Some of you always will be; some of you may never have a place in my life again, nor mine in yours.

Wherever your journey takes you, I wish you well. I wish you good health and peace and the exact amount of adventure that you need. I wish you contentment and love.

Just as importantly, I wish the same things for myself, and I intend to do everything in my power to make that happen.

I deserve no less.

- StephQJ 5/16/2020

 

 

Vous êtes très belle, mama, girls and boys.

Queen Frostine is coming for a visit on Friday. She was supposed to have been here in September, but she was the victim of a bungled mob hit in NYC and got a broken knee. (She slipped in a puddle in the hotel lobby.) I’m super excited that she’s coming but also a little anxious. (surprise!)

She hasn’t been to Atlanta in almost five years. I’ve seen her in Chicago a few times, and in Birmingham when she’d come to visit family for Christmas. We met up in Boston and in New York for girly time. But the last time she was here I only had three kittens—not the four grown cats I have now—and I hadn’t even met Rango yet, let alone broken up with and kicked him out. The boys were smaller, and honestly, so was I.

But I texted her today, vacuum cleaner leaned against my hip, that my internal system is freaking out. “They’re freaking out that you’re going to judge us for our clutter and our extraneous grime.”

“Who?” she replied. “The cats? Tell them bitches to chill. If it’s your kids, tell them I am totally going to judge them, and they better clean the fuck out of that house.”

“They’re afraid you’ll think I can’t take care of myself when you see the bad paint and the external disrepair and the dirt at all the edges.”

She promptly texted me pictures of her own chipped paint and dirt and clutter. (And damn! She has a lot of Cheez Balls!)

I know all that matters is that she is here and that we enjoy each other’s company—still after more than 32 years. But parts of me are afraid she will be embarrassed of me, to see that I’m not holding it all together like I should. Like I used to.

As I was mopping an hour later, I thought back to 2014, to being in school full time and working three part-time jobs, including mopping other people’s floors so I could feed my kids. I remembered a summer day when Tricky was with me at a house. He sat on a bed that I’d just made, and I quickly admonished him to get up and stay on the hardwoods, where there would be no sign that he had been there at all. And I loathed every second of the implication that somehow my wonderful, amazing, fantastic child was less than because his mom could do no more to support him than to clean other people’s toilets. Never, ever did I want him to feel like he wasn’t good enough for anyone else, to be anywhere else, to sit on someone’s bed. For all of my belief that there is never shame in honest work, for all of my Sinderella jokes, I hated that moment more than most in my life.

The truth is, it has already been a hell of a year. As if work and two teenaged boys and four cats weren’t enough to amp up my anxiety on any given day, my long-distance relationship with Bumblebee has been complicated by his battle with a rare and aggressive cancer. (I can’t even begin yet to talk about how hard it is to be 180 miles away from him when he’s struggling with chemo fatigue.) And for some reason I thought graduate school would be no big deal to add on to everything. Plus my decrepit spine and chronic pain.

“You have got so much shit going on, if you didn’t have a bit of grime around the edges, I would be worried,” Queen Frostine texted.

So five years later, I am again mopping the fading kitchen vinyl, in the spare time between sessions of classes, battling the impulse to recriminate myself for every misstep that took me away from the easy upper middle class, with a cleaning lady and a lawn service and time to work out every day. I have finished two degrees and am working on a third (with a 4.0 after my first semester). I have a job I love and wonderful-if-challenging sons. I have great friends and supportive family and a boyfriend who loves me deeply.

But I am still struggling with my worth. I am still afraid that if she or Bumblebee or anyone really sees the clutter and bits of dirt at the edges that they will not want me. Somehow there is a part of me that still believes it is too dirty to be loved.

I don’t know if I will ever be in détente with my insecurities. I don’t know that I will ever not fear emotional abandonment. I think it’s hard for people who don’t fully empathize with it to really understand why I can’t just accept that I have people who love me and who will support me no matter what.

Every time I fall into this pattern of insecure questioning that I am lovable, Queen Frostine is there to remind me—literally every day—that I am loved, no matter what. She is the most secure relationship I have, and I still question it from time to time, but she never lets me forget that I matter, than I am good enough and accepted, no matter what.

Fuck the dirty floors.

 

But I don't need a man who doesn't understand the difference separating need and trust.

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” This is not the first time I’ve mulled over that famous Warren Buffett quote. When I first started grappling with defining my own value and self-worth, I examined Buffett in relation to the Dutch poet Lucebert, who wrote, “All things of value are defenseless.”

The price any person is willing to pay to make themselves truly defensible, whether to themselves or to others, is at the core of their value.  Sometimes we do stupid things that tear that down, that devalue us in the eyes of others or in our own mind's eye.  Sometimes we do things inadvertently that drive up our value, and perhaps those acts are somewhat less important when we aren't really striving or sacrificing to make them happen. 

I think it's the acts and actions we require of ourselves to actively defend ourselves that make us valuable, that make us worthwhile.  And when those acts are performed in the face of adversity, especially self-adversity, they can often be those most costly while offering us the most to gain. 

Value is a manifestation of worth, which is some mystical, magical ratio of cost to benefit. But for something to even have a cost—or a benefit—it has to have been traded. It has to have been utilized in a market, in an exchange.

It has to have been subject to experience.

Relationships are all about negotiating each partner’s needs and wants. It feels kind of seedy to think of it as a debit-and-credit system, but it is a similar give-and-take. In healthy relationships, both partners do a good job of expressing their own needs, of fulfilling what they can for themselves, and of being able to rely on their significant other to be willing to fill in any gaps that they can. It’s delicately symbiotic. If any partner consistently takes too much or gives too little, it quickly shifts to parasitic, and one or both partners suffer as the relationship dies.

What is exchanged has both a cost and a benefit, which is totally subjective to each party to the exchange. That mystical, magical ratio is evaluated—sometimes over a long period of time, sometimes instantaneously—and out pops the worth for the evaluator.

When writing before about my own relationship goals—in early 2013 just before I met Bounder and again in 2014 just before I met Rango—the things I could articulate as wants and needs were themselves manifestations of more basic qualities of a person. I still agree with most of those desires, but I can see how those laundry lists are driven by providing relief from past experience. I cherry-picked moments from different relationships and looked for someone who could engage me in ways that were reminiscent of my past.

Now, though, I understand that the actions are expressions of traits I value in a romantic partner, and the worth I assign is based on my own lifetime of experiences, of gains and losses, and how I evaluate the costs and benefits of previous relationships. At the heart of each of those listed wishes, are there more basic attributes that I would value, regardless of the man who possesses them?

I value intelligence. Maybe it’s snobbish of me, but I just can’t date a stupid guy. It’s important to me to be able to engage in thoughtful conversation with my partner on a variety of topics both sacred and profane, and I don’t have the patience to have to define my vocabulary mid-conversation. I don’t expect someone else to know everything about the topics I do, nor would I want to know everything they know. But I thrive exchange of ideas, and that necessitates a certain intelligence.

I value patience. I am incredibly impatient. Motherhood has taught me a million ongoing lessons in patience, but I am still prone to jump headfirst into a moment without significant deliberate thought. (That tends to come after the fact, historically with self-recrimination.) It’s important for me to be with a partner who can remind me to slow down, who is willing to wade through my thought process to whatever realization I eventually come to. Sometimes I need the reminder to stay on task, in the moment.

I value expressive affection. In the realm of Love Languages, I have equal needs for quality conversation and physical touch. I both need to touch and to be touched. But there has to be emotion beneath the skin-to-skin contact. Hand-holding and hugs and random kisses are a physical manifestation of care and concern. I need to hear that I matter and why. Acts of service and gifts are nice, but they mean very little to me if they’re incongruous with words. For some people, outward expressions are difficult. For me, they are a necessity.

I value passion. Yes, sexual passion is incredibly important to me, but I also value a general passion for life. I want a partner who is passionate about his beliefs and his work, who combines them into a personal purpose. I love what I do, and it’s saddening when I meet people who don’t enjoy the work that consumes a third or more of their life.

I value compassion. Whether it’s toward me or toward themselves or toward the world at large, I find it valuable when my partner can feel and express empathy.

I value availability. Because I have a lengthy history with emotionally-avoidant men, I have been stood up, ignored, and dismissed more times than I care to remember. There are the logistics of availability, meaning our schedules have to match relatively well to be able to see one another. But emotional availability—a willingness and ability to be emotionally open and vulnerable—seems harder to come by. By this time of middle-aged dating, it’s virtually impossible to meet someone who doesn’t have some kind of damage. But I’m no longer willing to be trapped by someone else’s defenses.

I value bravery. Life is hard. Bad stuff happens. Sometimes it’s enough to make you want to shut down and crawl back under the covers until the world calms down. Everyone is afraid of hurt and failure and rejection. But there is strength in acknowledging the vulnerability that comes with fear and stepping forward anyway. I know the failures and the successes that come from facing your fears, and I cannot stomach another man who refuses to accept his own challenges.

Per our usual, Pandy and I have talked at length about my ideas of value. She asked me to turn the tables and think about what I’d want a partner to value in me.

“I don’t think it matters,” I told her.

I know what I value in myself, and that value comes from having paid a cost to become the person I am today. I also know what I value in someone else because of those same costs. I spent a lot of time getting my garden to grow. I weeded out the thorns, and now I’m culling the dead growth that could threaten to choke out my prize roses.

Someone else will have paid their own costs, had their own experiences before they come into my life. How they assess my worth to them will be based on their perceptions of their own needs and wants, their own successes and failures. Maybe my curiosity and quick smile mean more than my vocabulary. Maybe they place more value on my punctuality and dependability than on my tendency toward effusive, written expressions of emotion.

I’ve come to realize there’s something else that has its own set of values: the relationship itself. And what is valuable in one partner or another may not be at all what’s valuable in a relationship.

I’ll explore that topic in my next post.

This is the second in a three-part series. For the first post, please click here.

 

 

I was feeling insecure you might not love me anymore.

I’ve been listening to this podcast, The Overwhelmed Brain: Personal Growth for Critical Thinkers, a good bit for the last few months. The host, Paul Colaianni, is a personal empowerment coach, whose offerings of advice and perspective are usually in response to a listener’s email. I find his advice to be accessible and easily-understood. There always seems to be something personally relevant, even when the topic is not one I’ve felt bothered by before.

A recent episode, however, dealt with insecurity. I was driving home from work and thought, “Wow, that listener could be me.”

Oh wait. It is.

It actually was my email to the show. Because I do enjoy his approach, I had written in to see what perspective he might offer.

I have struggled off and on for years with jealousy. Sometimes that jealousy has resulted in extreme behaviors that I’m not proud of. But where does it come from?

“When you’re jealous,” Colaianni says, “there’s something that you believe that someone else is bringing to the table, or that you aren’t confident about in you.”

Jealousy is a manifestation of insecurity. For me specifically, I am emotionally insecure. I am often afraid that my partner (when I’m in relationship) will leave and emotionally abandon me. I do sometimes require more reassurance and emotional attention than others. I can be needy—though I argue that word is loaded with sometimes-unwarranted connotation that has often been defined by the emotionally avoidant men on the other side of my equation—and when those needs aren’t being met, I become anxious and activated. I’ll spend far too much time analyzing the occurrence that led to the anxiety, usually a conflict with my partner:

What did he say or do? Well, what did that mean? Is what I think it means different than what he actually said or did? Is there a disconnect between his actions and words? What was my role in the situation? What words or actions did I offer that exacerbated the situation, or made it better? What could I have done differently? What should I have done differently?

It’s easy for me to list my own faults in the situation. That leads to a list my own deficiencies, in general. And if he sees these things as flaws in me—which he must because they’ve made him mad enough not to talk to me after an angry exchange—then he knows it’s a flaw because he has an unflawed point of reference, which is almost always an ex.

At least that’s how my thinking has usually gone.

I have found myself spending an inordinate amount of time comparing myself to my partners’ exes. Rarely were they women I knew. I often knew a good bit about them, because they’d come up in early conversations about past relationships. More often, they were just these nebulous, vacuous ideas of what his life had been like before me.

Ghosts.

So, if there is conflict between my partner and me, it must be because I don’t measure up to his ideal. His ideal is based on his own past experience. That experience was defined by his exes. I must not be as good as they are. What he had before is what he really wants. He is likely to leave me to be with one of them, or someone more like them.

But this idea that his previous relationships were ideal is fallacious. If they’d been idyllic, they wouldn’t be past relationships at all—he’d still be in one of them. So those women may have had fantastic qualities, but somewhere something went wrong in how those two people related to each other. Usually what I do know about them comes as self-reported flaw. The men with whom I’ve been in romantic partnership are self-aware enough to admit to at least some cursory, palatable version of their own mistakes, and they can usually point out their former partner’s mistakes, as well. So I’m only comparing myself and my relationship to their admitted interpretations of events that occurred years before.

I have often gotten caught up in comparisons of physicality. Being a 5’11 Amazon, I am taller and bigger than most other women, even when I’m not struggling with my weight. I am a physical outlier, for sure, and that means that their previous partners were almost certainly smaller than I am.

Was she shorter and thinner than I? Probably. Was she prettier? Did she have better hair? Was she so physically attractive that she could get him to push past the emotional boundaries that prevent him from being fully present?

But Colianni cautions, “If you’re gonna compare something you’re insecure about, you don’t compare it to the people that appear to be perfect, because you’ll always be unhappy if you do that.”

Somewhere in my own head, these women became idealized by my partner. Whomever they actually were is still unknown to me; I am basing judgments about myself based on my perceptions of his perceptions (and very limited admissions of that time in his past) of this woman with whom he had an unhealthy relationship that ended in emotional trauma.

So, if I am already afraid that he will leave me, because that’s what I learned to believe people who loved me do, those fears are underscored by wholly unreasonable beliefs about my partner. Using that standard of comparison can only lead to skewed results.

The only standard of comparison should be me. But I have struggled for years with my sense of self-worth. I’ve written several times before about calculating my value. It’s all too easy for me to pick apart what I think is wrong with me. What do I think is right? What do I find valuable in myself?

I am smart. Tests have said I’m very intelligent. I know a lot of information, and I am very adept at making connections between data, extrapolating further meaning. I enjoy learning, and I am constantly curious about new topics.

I am funny. I have a wicked sense of humor, though that’s somewhat subjective. I love to laugh, especially with other people about absurd moments we share together.

I am tenacious. It’s not just I go after what I want—at least once I make my mind up about what that is. I am unlikely to give up when I run into challenges. It’s what got me and my sons through the last five years.

I am brave. I have fears. Some are rational, some are not. But rarely do I let that fear stop me. If what I want is on the other side of that fear, I will find a way.  Sometimes I’m able to make friends with the fear and sing it to sleep, so I can step lightly past it. Sometimes I have to whip out my Vorpal sword and go straight through it.

I am loving. I feel deeply, and I express those emotions readily. I also try to act on those feelings. I try to do things and behave in ways that express my care and concern and affection. Admittedly, this sometimes butts up against my fears, and I can raise my defenses to try to keep people from hurting me. But I can never maintain that distance for very long, because I feel the people I love, no matter what.

I am self-aware. I have spent a lot of time getting to the root of my own heart. Much of that journey has been documented openly on Muchness and Light. Whether through therapy or conversations with friends or while I was on some meditational walk, I have learned who I am and what makes me tick, both good and bad.

Were those other women those things? Maybe. Were they as smart or funny or brave? Maybe. Maybe not. Did they share his same interests? Probably. Only his interests? Unlikely. Did they have insecurities? Probably. Were they able to put aside their own insecurities and needs, making him comfortable enough to be secure and happy with them? Obviously not for long, if they were.

But really, none of that matters.

All I can do is strive to be the best plausible version of myself. Trying to be the best possible leads me down a path of perfectionism and self-criticism. I will almost never live up to social ideals, nor to anyone else’s personal ideals. It’s taken me a long time to come to understand what is valuable about myself, to myself. The best way for me to honor that is to act in ways that support rather than undermine my value, and that includes the behavior that I will accept from others.

But I still have insecurities that sometimes are at least a catalyst for conflict within relationships.

Be vulnerable, Colaianni offers. Sharing my insecurities gives my partner the opportunity to access one of four things within himself:

• Compassion
• Acceptance
• Apathetic ignorance
• Judgment

Sometimes they’ve been compassionate about it, at least for a while. Really, though, it’s easy to offer sympathy and kindness to someone who reveals they’ve been abused. It’s rare that I’ve met an asshole who said out loud that abusing others was acceptable. And it’s not the abuse, per se, that is still an ongoing issue, but rather the tangential aftershocks that continue for so long—the fear, the sometimes-constant anxiety, the ways in which the abuse colors almost every decision the victim makes from that point forward.

Once my partner realizes the damage left me with more than just some shit to talk about over drinks, it’s very rare for their attitude to remain compassionate or to shift toward acceptance. When I asked to stop once during a romantic moment—unexpectedly triggered by a brush of a hand that felt all too terribly familiar—that partner yelled at me that the past is in the past and that I should just “get over it.” Needless to say, I didn’t see him again.

Most often, I’ve been met with apathetic ignorance. They don’t want to know, and they don’t want to care. Rango specifically told me my shit was my problem, to work on it by myself, and to keep it away from him. He was actually more verbal about it than most. My experience is that most of the emotionally avoidant men I’ve dated tend to pretend my damage doesn’t exist, distancing themselves when they realize I won’t be all rainbows and light all the time.

But, Colaianni stresses further, It’s a choice in them, not a problem with me. It’s a problem in me when I devalue myself because of it.

“They are choices, and they are in them. Because if you show up owning what you’re insecure about and being okay talking about it, now the ball’s in their court. They have to do something about it. They have to make a choice. Whatever’s going on at that point is going on in them.”

This is where my choice to value myself outweighs their choice. In a healthy relationship, I’ll be met with compassion and acceptance; I’ll be supported and actively loved (not just thought of affectionately). If I am again faced with apathetic ignorance or judgment, that is a huge red flag that I cannot ignore. It signals a conflict in values that is likely insurmountable and wholly unhealthy for me.

And if I expect anyone else to treat me with compassion and acceptance, I must do the same. I cannot apathetically ignore my own needs and must find ways to meet those needs myself. I’ve spent years hurling judgment from within, and many of my bruises and scars were self-inflicted. No one else is allowed to hurt me, and neither am I.

But my needs and assessments alone are not the entirety of the relationship. By definition, I have to be relating to something else, and that happens to be someone else. So if I know what I value in myself, what do I value in that someone else? What happens when those values clash, and is it fatal to the relationship?

This turned into a much longer, more in-depth process of thought than I’d imagined when I emailed The Overwhelmed Brain. I’m turning this into a three-part series on Value. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

Burn up a basement full of demons. Realize you're a slave to your mind. Break free.

A couple of weeks ago, in her perpetually optimistic way, Goldilocks suggested I give Finn a call.

“No. Absolutely not,” I responded.

“But why?” she pressed. “You guys got along so well. Maybe his schedule has eased—”

“No.”

When I told Pandy about the suggestion, she replied that she would be in agreement with Goldilocks.

But here’s the thing:

 As I see it, one of two things happened. Either I did have significant personal value to Finn, and he wasn’t able to communicate that or to make time for it (for me), or I wasn’t worth to him what he had previously indicated, and he wasn’t able to communicate that and bow out respectfully. Either way, he all but stopped reaching out to me. Even when I questioned whether his schedule would allow time for dating me, he assured me it did. But then it didn’t, given his line of work and the time of year. Rather than say, “Hey, I’m really sorry this is the exact thing I assured you it wouldn’t be,” he just let it drop until I made the call to see other people. Although I said I had no intention of cutting him off from contact and would still like to hear from him, there was nothing from him. After a month of radio silence, I did indeed add him to the ever-growing list of IGNORE THIS ASSHAT contacts in my phone and put him on permanent DND.

This was wholly indicative of much of my dating life the last five years. Sure, potential relationships dwindle, and other things are more important sometimes. Sometimes people realize they aren’t as interested as they’d initially believed. I’ve been on both sides of that. I’ve had dating plans hijacked by daily logistics.

And I admit to having ghosted on people, though never anyone I’d been dating for several weeks, as Finn and I had.

I find it to be cowardly behavior, and I’m tired of dating cowardly lions.

There’s no justification for my own cowardly action at times. Reasons, not excuses. Yes, it’s hard to say to someone that you’re just not feeling it, especially when you know first-hand the feeling of rejection that comes on the other side of that exchange.

But to say to someone that they are important, that they matter, that you enjoy your time with them and want more—with only them—and to then just let it dwindle is cowardly. That person must either keep putting up with feeling like an unimportant option because of your actions, or the other person must be brave enough to admit that their worth is higher than the value of your passive-aggressive rejection and make the call to end it.

That’s exactly what I did. Given my history of holding onto decaying relationships far past their natural expiration, especially to the detriment of my self-worth, it was strange to make the decision and carry through with it. It was uncomfortable as hell and felt a little arrogant to say to someone that their actions were unacceptable and to stop accepting them.

Breaking that cycle, not doing things the way I always have and letting the relationship drag on ad nauseum, is part of my redemption of my past. I can’t control what other people do. I have some control over what I feel about it. But I have complete control over how I react to their actions.

Part of the pathology of anxious attachment style is a repetition of the past, of constantly striving for some kind of cosmic do-over in which it eventually doesn’t turn out the same way it always has. Another part of the pathology is being attracted to emotionally-unavailable men—especially those who want desperately to believe that they are available and thus initially convince me that they are. But if I am always doing the same thing, so are they.

I’m by no means the first woman to be hurt by those men, and I likely won’t be the last. And here’s where I am trepidatious of my dating future. I don’t know what it will take for me to believe that someone else is telling me the truth—not some hopeful aspiration, but honest truth—that they 1) are willing and able to engage in a healthy relationship and 2) can maintain that healthy relationship when things get complicated and difficult, even if the relationship has to come to an end.

I am more jaded now than I was five years ago, and that’s part of the reason I’m choosing not to date right now. It’s not fear of rejection or disillusionment with love or men in general. I don’t want my jaded perceptions to establish expectations of others before I’ve given them an opportunity to truly engage me. I don’t want to go into a date with a half-hearted, cynical view, because it would never give that other person a fair shot at getting past my other defenses.

I get that I tend to dive inward deeper than most people are ever willing to go. My expectations of my own self-discovery and -exploration are so high that it would be unreasonable to expect that same of anyone else. But dammit! It irritates the hell out of me when people are too afraid to try to move past their pasts, to be too afraid to confront their own failings and shortcomings and to try to learn from it.

It’s hard as hell to admit that you have a role in the demise of your relationships. In my experience, it is never only one partner’s fault. Ever. No matter the circumstances. But to choose to hide your eyes and cover your ears to avoid your own truths, especially when you know it will mean you’ll continue to make the same mistakes over and over, hurting other people in the process, is utterly nonsensical to me.

Right now, I am reticent to believe that I will ever meet that man, who is brave enough to choke down his fear and really face himself, especially if it means having a clearer view of me. Right now, I’m not sure I would even recognize him. I don’t know that I could see past my own jaded expectations to see someone else clearly, and I’d likely end up right back in that same cycle of infatuation and rejection and hurt.

So I’m taking the time change my own views, which includes evaluating my own worth only through my own lens. I can’t adequately gauge my value by someone else’s metric. It’s hard. Sometimes it’s a little lonely.

But there is also freedom from expectation, of my self or of someone else, and so there is hope that I will be able to do it all differently, someday.

 

 

 

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How silent treatment is used as a defence - Andrea Harrn Counselling Services

You can be the outcast, or you can be the backlash of somebody's lack of love... or you can start speaking up.

NOTE: This post includes discussion of some pretty difficult subject matter, presented in an emotionally honest way. It may not be appropriate for all reading audiences.

At the heart of my myriad insecurities is a deep-seated fear of emotional abandonment. I am afraid that the people who profess to love me will stop caring, will decide that I am not worth their love and affection, and will dismiss me and my own emotions outright.

Physical abandonment is daunting enough, but it always seems to be symptomatic of a deeper emotional distance. DH left after our 19-year marriage crumbled, but that came only after he’d emotionally checked out of our relationship for years. I’d struggled to get Rango to engage in any emotionally significant way for more than a year before he told me he just wasn’t showing up for Max’s football game or my birthday. And when Bounder was most overwhelmed by the intensity of our relationship, he stood me up and distanced himself—at least until he decided he missed me too much to stay away—only to do it again and again.  

But the fear comes, plainly, from my childhood and adolescence.

I’ve written extensively about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. There are at least six years during which I can remember being told, “Don’t tell anyone. You’ll be the one to get in trouble.” Years later, when I did finally tell—in the aftermath of a date rape at 16—I was left to deal with the physical and emotional impact on my own. Both the molestation and the rape were acknowledged very calmly for a few days, but there was no significant follow-up. I wasn’t sent to a counselor or therapist. I was sent, by myself, for my first pelvic exam to make sure I didn’t contract an STD.

My fear and my shame were dismissed, were boxed away so that someone else could handle what happened to me. My emotions were treated as if they were secondary and unimportant—or at least it seemed that way to me. With the exception of one close friend who literally held my hand through the process of telling, I never once felt that I was supported or cared for in those days and weeks.

I was scared and sick and confused and alone. When I most needed to be loved, the person who should have loved me most left me alone in my horror, pretending then and for most of the years since that none of it happened.

So what I learned from an early age, and relearned over and over and over, was that when someone loves you, then they leave you when your emotions are too much for them.

They leave you when you are too much for them.

Because they can’t handle what they’re feeling in response to what you’re feeling, it’s easier to pretend the feelings don’t matter or that there are no feelings at all. So while love is supposed to be this caring, beautiful, wonderful thing, for me it’s also tainted by hurt, twisted up with rejection and carelessness and neglect.

None of this is new. None of this is revelation.

What is new for me is the realization that the subpersonalities are afraid that I will emotionally abandon them. They are terrified that I will decide that they aren’t worth the trouble, that the help they try to provide is too much of a hassle for me to bother to listen to them. They are afraid of being ignored and dismissed. They are afraid that I will shut them all down, in turn becoming exactly what I fear most.

And my choices, my culpability, in all of my relationship failures make my trustworthiness questionable. My complicity in DH’s ignorance of me, which I would go on to rebel against in the most damaging of ways possible. My constantly shifting boundaries, allowing Rango to pull further and further away while I accepted the blame for his distance. And my tortured love for Bounder, whose kiss could make time stand still and the seas turn to sand—who I will still seek out when I feel utterly lost and alone, even though I know he will almost certainly let me down. The multitude of others, who said I mattered but then walked away with barely a glance over their shoulders.

Besides, I was the one who was making out with that guy the night of the rape. I was the one whose tiny body reacted with sexual arousal when touched inappropriately. While that is a totally normal physiological response, the behavior that wasn’t normal became utterly normalized. I knew things at an age when I should’ve been happily playing with my baby dolls and getting hugs goodnight instead of confusion and lies to deflect someone else’s blame.

They won’t love me anymore if I don’t do this thing that feels weird and wrong, being done to me by someone who says they love me.

Hurt was normalized. Secrets and shame were normalized. Pretending like nothing happened, like it didn’t matter, was normalized.

So if I have culpability or complicity in those hurts, who the hell am I to be trusted? How can my internal family trust me to make healthy loving decisions for them when I can’t even seem to make them for myself? How can I be trusted to do the right thing for any of us?

The difference in me and those who’ve hurt me is that I don’t want to be distanced from my emotions or anyone else’s. I don’t want to be ignored or dismissed, and so I try like hell not to do the same to anyone else. To disregard those parts of myself, to act as if my own emotions just don’t exist or matter, inflicts unbearable hurt. Shutting down, being numb again, silencing those inner voices entirely is the last thing I ever want to do.

I have to show myself the love and care that I expect from anyone else.

Integration can only come about if I trust the parts not to hurt me and vice versa. I have to honor what each feels, acknowledge each emotion I am ultimately feeling, and accept that the emotion itself is not the trauma. The traumatic events are over and done; the feelings are ghosts whose chains rattle me in a million directions at once sometimes, making me shaky on my feet. Making me insecure.

I may be moving forward, but I’m not leaving them behind. These parts of me, trapped at different ages and stages of development—disintegrated—deserve the chance to mature. They deserve the opportunity to grown into the woman they would’ve become had shit not gone horribly wrong.

I deserve the same.

Part of that maturation is coming to terms with the fact that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t allow those other people to hurt me. I didn’t encourage them to devalue me and to dehumanize me. I didn’t ask to be sexually assaulted. I didn’t ask for them not to love and care for me.

It wasn’t my fault.

IT WASN’T MY FAULT.

I am worth love, and I am worth care and concern. There is nothing about me that is so inherently ugly or unlovable to have warranted horrid, difficult abuse. I was a sweet, smart, precocious little girl with Moonpie eyes and one dimple. I should never have been a sexualized object. I didn’t deserve to be molested. I didn’t deserve to be raped. I didn’t deserve to be smacked around and degraded by an angry boyfriend. I didn't deserve to be used and abused and discarded.

I never deserved being the target of someone else’s self-loathing and guilt.

I was worth more than dismissal and ignorance because I didn’t meet someone else’s expectations or conform to their fucked-up, dysfunctional norms. I am worth more than an eyeroll-and-sigh in toleration.

All of those bits inside me have fought to protect me from hurt, from allowing anything in that might cause more damage, But the fracturing of my personality into smaller parts left vulnerable cracks. Rather than fill the spaces with gold, like Japanese kintsugi, I often used whatever I could find: leftover packing tape ripped from an old dusty box… someone else’s half-chewed gum… desperate hope coated in blood and sticky mess.

But I was never going to be able to close my own rifts with someone else’s effluvia.

It’s up to me to find the healing from deep inside me, to let those internal persona who so badly want and need to help do just that. If the end goal is a whole Stephanie, the parts that make her up have to have a role in filling those gaps.

So I’m letting them talk, and I’m listening. I’m hearing what each of them says they need, and I’m doing my best to honor those wishes. I’m giving each an opportunity to share their respective visions of wholeness and then choosing what works best for all of us. For me.

It is a process to pick up the broken pieces and put them back together. It took years for the breaks to happen, for the dust to settle enough for clean-up to begin. But it has.

And it’s up to me to do that work.

It’s up to me to show myself the love and care that I need, and that starts with sweeping away everyone else’s pain and destruction and refusing to force my bits to fit with theirs.

It’s up to me to trust that I can do this.  

 

 

And a place in your heart, dear, makes me feel more real.

Last week, I was walking and listening to music, as I’m prone to do. I’ve been walking again a lot lately, both to try to lose the weight I regained over the last couple of years and to clear my head a bit. The last few weeks have seen a lot of processing about everything going on in therapy. I admit to there being a lot of overthinking, as well.

I was listening to the new Mynabirds record, Be Here Now. Their first two records were especially poignant for me during and after my divorce. I hadn’t had a chance to hear this one, so it seemed a great choice for a three-mile walk on a lovely autumn evening. The record is quite good, and I added several tracks to various playlists, as I’m also prone to do. But something—and I can’t be sure what—in the song “Wild Hearts” set me off. It’s as lyrically fantastic as any other song Laura Burhenn has written, but something sent me spiraling toward epiphany.

As I’ve said before, the goal of the Internal Family Systems model of therapy is to reintegrate the subpersonalities that are formed as the result of traumatic events. No matter how dysfunctional their behavior may (or may not!) be, my subparts are trying their best to protect me from hurt and further damage. Some have very simple roles, while others are complex and nuanced in their approach to what they see as their role. They are such an integral part of me that I don’t always notice when one subpersonality is controlling in a situation. (Just think about any time you’ve ever gone off and yelled at someone, had a full-blown tantrum, maybe not even realizing how out of control you are until the moment passes and you’re able to reflect on it rationally. You were always you. You always knew you were you. You were just… not really yourself in that moment.) This part of my journey ends when each subpart is reconnected fully with my Self, which is able to make healthy choices without the need to call on the managers or the firefighters to protect the exiles, perpetually trapped by a moment of trauma.

As I was walking and listening, I had the realization that there is another subpersonality I hadn’t noticed before. In my mind, she looks like a child, though she isn’t. I tried to reach out to her and let her tell me about herself, having an internal dialogue with this deep part of myself. I realized the others had crafted her, had created her from their own bits and pieces. She knows everything each of the other subpersonalities knows, though they don’t each know everything she knows. She acts as sentry for Cissie, a strong last line of defense of the exile, able to protect her (and thus me) with the full knowledge of every other manager and firefighter subpart.

Every time a subpart experienced any kind of extreme emotion, it was transferred onto Pearl. Layer upon layer of hurt and damage, of ecstasy and deep love, grief and agony, irrepressible joy and unflagging hope—all built up slowly to create their own scapegoat, much in the way I created them.

And if I created them and they created her….

Yeah.

Pearl is, essentially, my muchness.

She is the figurative embodiment of everything I’ve lived for the last seven years. She is the angry rebellion against being shoved into a box and denied reciprocal affection. She is the wild abandon that led to not-always-healthy choices. She is the late-night drives with the windows down and the same song blaring for thirty miles. She is the trail of glitter left in my wake. She is the frustration at loving someone so much and not being able to be any more entwined with them.

She is the shame that comes from needing so badly to be loved. She is the uncontrollable, make-me-shake-with-the-sick-of-it-all fear of being emotionally abandoned. She is the overwhelming sorrow from not being able to think of one more thing, the just-the-right thing, to prove that I was worth their love.

Pearl takes those hits, because even the others aren’t always capable of doing it. So they—I—created her, coating both good and bad carefully on an amorphous form disguised as innocence. At the center of it all is the exact hurt and shame that they all fight like hell to protect Cissie from.

Even in the depths of my fucked-up psyche, I tried to make something beautiful from something ugly.

Queen Frostine and I talked at length about it all, as we are prone to do. She was surprised to realize how much of what I do is tied up with self-protection.

“All these things I think about when I think of you, I always just thought of them as personality traits. Now I’m seeing that they’re defense mechanisms, and that is so fucking weird to see.”

And it’s not just the unhealthier traits, like redrawing personal boundaries to accommodate men who refuse to do the same for me. It’s also the gregarious and seemingly-healthy ones, like my openness and willingness to put all of me out there no matter what others think.

Pearl came about as a last line of defense. She’s the general behind my own enemy lines, telling everyone else what to do. And she mimics my voice so well that I let her be in charge.

But she’s not the one who’s supposed to be in charge—I am. I’m the one who gets to make the decisions about what’s best for me, for us. I can have an internal dialogue with these persona, assigned by me as a way to catalog and contain my emotions, to make sense of it all.

The irony is that in dividing myself into these intricate parts, I have compartmentalized my own emotions, segmenting them and locking them away until I’m ready to deal with them—the very thing I hate most when others do it to me. To be ignored, to be dismissed, to be relegated to the dark and dusty recesses of someone’s heart until such time as I am convenient is enraging to me.

But I’m doing it to myself.

It’s time to let them out of their boxes, to remove the walls of compartment and allow them to wander free, talking to each other and to me. It’s time to let them out into the light and the fresh air, to experience my life fully and mindfully, able to see more than the limited view from the bottom of a box.

 

 

 

High as a pretty star, don't you break my faded heart.

If I believe in nothing else, I believe in serendipity. I believe in those unexpected moments in life that can lead you suddenly in a different direction, that can force you to see what you were too busy looking elsewhere to notice, that can turn you slightly until you notice a new path you hadn’t been privy to consider before.

Fate or fate.

Knowing I would eventually want to date again, to feel connected to something deeper and more poignant than myself, I reactivated my online dating profile. I immediately had to find three-year-old messages from Rango and delete them, to find his own reactivated profile and block it. I wasn’t willing to dwell on what was before. There were a few passing new interests, but mostly it seemed like more of the same again. Sometimes Harley found it a useful vehicle to remind me that I could get hurt again, ever.

But then…. But then.

Days of talk. Constant, funny, respectful talk. Flirt but no innuendo, no offers or requests for late night sexting. Just getting to know one another.

And then… a great first date. Really wonderful date.

And, thus, a serendipitous moment of possibility. Of opportunity.

Yes, possibility and opportunity with this man, but also possibility that I am, just maybe, worth time and effort. Opportunity to not be the same and do the same that I’ve done before, to slow my own roll and allow connection to unfold organically. To discover someone else but also to discover things about myself, to examine my own new ways of looking at the world, whether external or internal.

Consciously, mindfully, I have chosen not to throw myself headlong into someone else. I didn’t drop my baggage suddenly at his feet and dare him to step over it. I didn’t dig deeply into him, demanding to find his damage and steel myself for what might come.

Though I did caution him that a deep Google search for me would reveal this life, of Stephanie Quinn Jackson, the writer who bears witness to the cacophony. It’s a thing, for sure, to have so much of the last seven years laid out for the world to see. Love and joy and heartbreak and fear, the incessant and sometimes brutal self-analysis that is Muchness and Light. He replied that he would rather not search for me. He’d rather learn it all from me directly.

Even if this goes nowhere, even if it ends after a couple of great dates, I have been privy to the serendipity of possibility of future, of opportunity to not be bogged down by the past, sorting and resorting my own baggage over and over in simultaneous delight and dismay.

But I am also fucking terrified. At this moment, there is an unexpected someone with the ability to hurt and disappoint me. Sure, there are other people I care about who could theoretically do the same, but those are people I already love and trust. I made the choice to accept the opportunity to be vulnerable to hurt, believing so deeply that serendipitous moments should not be ignored or taken for granted. I chose to accept the possibility of hurt because it also comes with the possibility of not hurt.

Dating me offers him the same. There is possibility that I will bolt, revolting against fear in reaction to my past. But where I have been plagued by ghosts so many times before, I have come to realize that my ghosts are my own fears, deep inside me, trying to protect me from future hurt. When I let the past fall away and listen carefully, it is variations of my own voice that I hear whispering, cautioning me that hurt is possible and to avoid whatever might feel like an imminent threat.

My insecurities are real, anchored in a very difficult past, and I am still learning how to calm those voices. He, or anyone who may come after him, certainly has his own insecurities. It doesn’t seem possible to be human and not have uncertainties about yourself that can derail you at times.

What I have come to understand is that my partners in previous relationships have blamed me when their insecurities flared. Sometimes in reaction to my shit, and sometimes in reaction to something I was never privy to, they relegated me to the role of villain, of fallen superhero, and made me the patsy for their own emotional shill. They would tell me I was wonderful and that they loved me, while they formulated an exit strategy. They compartmentalized me and rationalized losing what they said they wanted and loved most, rather than face themselves and deal with their own shit.

But what happened before is not what’s happening now. I get to choose what happens next. My future is not necessarily determined by my history. I am not doomed to repeat my past, because I am still, constantly, learning those lessons.

I didn’t stop trying. I didn’t shut down my heart completely and stubbornly refuse to embrace serendipity. I didn’t kowtow to my fears, and I won’t be blamed again for anyone else’s.

I am worth knowing. I am worth talking to and discovering and sharing. I am worth loving.

I’m worth the risk.

 

 

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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