move on, and deny safe passage

The more we feed the denying of our pain with addictions to cope, the bigger the pressure builds.

I made the mistake one evening recently of looking at photos of myself during that era, the one where I got down to 100 pounds, my body skin and bones and a sullen… sunken.. skeletal being with heart palpitations and physical heartache so deep my body felt it wanted to burst at every moment. I’m 37 now and look younger than I even did 8 years ago. I was trying to create room on my phone and I still have photos and videos from even before the pandemic on this device I’ve held onto trying to make it work in my life all these years. I try to cling to technology well beyond it going obsolete at an attempt at throwing away less, but at some point it works against you in this era. That could be in the way that these phones stop working, or show you memories and time lapsed captured in digital pixels without your permission you want to forget automatically from a timeline of many years ago. I burst into uncontrollable tears and tenderness for the love I had and could not have any longer, for a love I was told I wasn’t good enough to give, to pour in the deepest way I know how. It brings up a compassion for myself and where I am now, how I got such a big wound that I tend to fill by unhealthy means. The wound to grasp towards whatever breadcrumbs of love or recognition or affection given, after losing the biggest love ever known to my body. A love I still am told I need to feel differently about, or ‘move on’ from already, by people who have never been alone, or never had their heart broken, never allowed themselves to dip into starvation out of the will to not live any longer from the loneliness and despair of losing those who mean the most to us. Those who are uncomfortable with the depths, will tell you to feel differently, to move on in a timeline that is comfortable for them.

The thing is though, I think I’ve had this wound for a long time. Growing up neurodivergent in the south roaming field of tobacco and poisoned soils of fungicides to keep mold off nightshades, getting rashes from touching plants at my dad’s nursery sprayed to oblivion with artificial fertilizers, seeing pictures on the wall of my grandmother’s house as a child that had a woman’s head cut off and it said ‘a silent woman is a good woman’ or something like that…, I was often told the way I thought about the world was weird. The questions I asked were strange, the way I behaved didn’t make sense to people. I didn’t understand gender binary. I didn’t get dress codes of proper or feminine. I looked curiously at a lot of things. It I often didn’t feel super accepted in school. I didn’t grow up somewhere with a lot of opportunities for creative artsy outdoorsy kids and I felt a big sense of loneliness all the time for peers who wanted to camp with me or do creative things. After a certain point, my father became someone who I hated one minute, and longed for the company of in another moment, and he stopped wanting to do things like fish with me, and really I didn’t want to do it with someone who I couldn’t predict their moods. We did camp a little when I was a teenager, but he was so busy working to death to spend quality time with me that would have really been good for our relationship likely, and at some point I was so hurt by other things that would happen between us, and hearing no so many times, that I gave up trying. The wound of not feeling good enough to be loved started early like it does for many of us, from childhoods with parents working a lot to keep up with the cost of living in this world at the sacrifice of quality time with the children they decided to bring into existence. I was taught that the bare minimum I received was love, that financial support was love, but asking for needs met of kindness and quality time was too much to ask for often. I took whatever little breadcrumbs I could get, and a pattern began where when those little bits are withdrawn, my body reacts somatically in the most intense ways in reaction to abandonment. Abandonment, it feels like the lonely childhood is being repeated all over again. I have self-abandoned so many times seeking love from places that aren’t good for me, that can’t actually meet me in the depth I have to offer or give, and find myself chasing that same thing of my childhood, love just barely out of reach, and often take abuse and lack of kindness, even still today, for the hope of someone finding me worthy of being kind to, showing up for and appreciating immensely. I know I’m worth that in a lot of ways, we all are. I have students and podcast listeners come to me regularly sharing they love and appreciate my work, and what I offer the world, the beauty I bring. But in other ways, its interesting to observe how out of my fear of abandonment, fear of not being liked or misunderstood, fear of being alone like I was so much in childhood, I seek belonging and acceptance where I have to beg for it and settle for way less that what actually is good for me. This is in so many aspects of my life, not just in a romantic way. In work, in housing, in boundaries around my sensitivities, around teaching and sharing knowledge and experience. Even if I know someone is projecting something onto me, their own insecurities, I still will end of accommodating it, for wanting them to like me, and over give in order to try to love them or make them happy, sometimes at my own expense.

What the heck to do about all this? I am trying my best to at least see it for what it is first and foremost, even if the patterns are still there. Like anything in ecology, observing is key in allowing things to unfold, for patterns to be able to shift or morph. The shifting and morphing is the pattern itself, things don’t always stay the same, even the traumas we experience that set along paths, grooves that get well worn. I’ve been trying to look less at the online mental health and abuse circlejerk meme land that tries to tell us constantly that every relationship that has abuse is narcissistic, that people are inherently evil and out to get you, and that your trauma is something you can fix for a small fee if only you consult with them and yet those narratives and stories are all around us.

Lately I’ve felt as though I need to form a better baseline lovership with the land as primary partner, as so I am less devastated by relations in the human realm, and while this is a worthy endeavor that will certainly help me in the long run deepen self love, and the ability to love in general, it still thwarts the importance of the human need for human companionship in a world that communicates to us often that as humans how we relate to one another must be transactional, who has likes, who is cool, who has money, who has cultural beauty, who performs all the right motions of worth and tendencies of appearing cool. 

This summer has been hard, I’ve been quiet here. I haven’t had housing in months and have been sleeping in my truck bed set up in different places every night— which is nice for awhile but there are days when I want to have control over my environment and have the sturdiness of peaceful space that feels safe to me. Safety is a funny thing depending on who you are and your experience of the world, I’ve had a lot of people tell me my felt sense of safety or lack of is not real, especially if it involves them taking accountability for how they influenced my sense of not feeling safe. At the end of the day, it matters most in loving one another to simply believe and acknowledge these experiences, even if we don’t understand or agree, even if some of it comes from a lifetime of experiences, even if we have some responsibility for creating these scenarios too.

If someone breaks things in front of you, and then you say you don’t feel safe, the correct response isn’t : we’ll I didn’t hit you and never will so you shouldn’t feel unsafe. The response should be: I hear that you don’t feel safe because I broke something, and I take full entire responsibility for how my actions felt harmful to you. I will do whatever it takes to honor your requests and boundaries so that you feel safe again in your own timeline and I understand if that takes a long time.

I grew up with this same logic, being told over and over again that my felt sense of safety was not mine and that I can’t actually have any say over what happens around my body. As children, we don’t. We live in a society that normalizes violence towards land, children, women, people with darker skin, each other. We are told it is normal, it takes a lot of self-will, intuitive self guidance, to realize it isn’t ok, and to make boundaries for ourselves, what we can control as adults, and these hard choices, ultimately reverberate into the further ecological and societal violence happening in the world.

It is so difficult to continue to be lonely, in a world that wants us to be isolated and individualistic, when we are all so weary from that already. For me, seeing the interconnections, that bullshit of Babylon, of existing in spaces with people in certain ways that feel shallow and pointless, eco-killing, often has me feeling that no one understands me. So I settle for the breadcrumbs of seeking friendships from people who may not actually want that from me, or who only see what I can ‘give’ them, for the desperate hope of belonging.

Don’t fall asleep one friend has told me, it certainly is hard in a world that wants us to stay asleep and not question anything, to wake up a little and say no or yes from our own intuitive knowing.

And yet at times, I feel so not alone. The constant companionship of life around me comes back into vision, glows more brightly in the face of grief. The birdsong and alchemy, the trees swaying, the wind itself fill me with the upmost euphoria of belonging and kinship. The wish to embark on a longer solo is for me right now an attempt at strengthening my own inner knowing, to form deeper kinship with land devas, with voices that don’t come through when there’s so much societal noise, telling us how to feel and think, when the plants and rocks are trying to reach us and we can’t hear them. I know I can go to that place and find the solace I need, but I don’t take the time enough. There’s always reasons, fear of going crazy, fear of not being missed, fear of getting hurt or lost, fear of not being able to adapt back to society once leaving it. And yet, without going back to baseline regularly, how can we make decisions about how to use our precious lives from a sound and certain place? Decide it and make it happen. The patterns I keep encountering in my life over and over, I want to see shift. The indecision, the overwhelm, the anger, feeling misunderstood and caring so deeply about what others think. What if I stepped aside from these patterns and look at where they are coming from, the choices I make that perpetuate the problem? Sometimes we have to do things on our own, and others may join at some point and they also may not. We must do them even if we are on our own, even if other’s aren’t ready.

I have lots of ideas for the next year, and I’m scared I won’t see them into fruition. I am scared of the depression taking me hold as it does occasionally and sinking me into the fear, into the grief bed and not being able to get up and try to relate to the world even if I am not understood. I fear not being able to show up for the things I create for myself because what if the depression debilitates me? What if I get overstimulated and can’t follow through? What if I can’t find enough time and space to rest? To share love, to be in my body in primal ways?

If we give our love to breadcrumbs, we deplete ourselves of the reserves of self-love we must have in order to truly give. If we give with the hopes that everyone will like it or us, or see us, then we will be disappointed constantly. I hope to find the strength to pivot in ways where I seek belonging out of desperation, out of an old wound that hasn’t healed still needing validation, still believing what was told to me growing up about everything wrong with me because I called truth to power and questioned things, asked to be treated with kindness.

I wish I could go back to that person I saw in those pictures, where I lost all that weight, and could tell them that it is ok to be feeling the hurt I feel. That is is ok that they loved so deeply, and that their love was and is enough. It is ok to love people who cannot reciprocate or only give you tiny bites so they feel in control. It is ok to feel devastated by the state of the world, by feeling loss in a world that destroys so much of what we love all the time. I will tell my child self too who was so hurt by my favorite tree being cut down, that the adults that told you you were over-reacting, just couldn’t access their grief. It was too much for them in a world that tells us that trees aren’t alive.

So it was a mistake to look, but I will have to look eventually. If I want to clear out the old, to even delete images of the past, I will have to look at them again in order to make that choice. I don’t want to forget that I have been to that place of losing all hope for life, and for the possibility of being loved. I still teeter on the edge of that place, being so pulled different directions by the ways others see or treat me or give me tiny bites of the love I know I deserve.

If anything, it was a reminder, and the anger I felt, the pain I felt again by seeing myself in a photo, and how it haunted me uncomfortable in different dreams through the rest of the night, if important to see and feel. I still have not allowed myself to get to the other side by going through completely.

The more we feed the denying of our pain with addictions to cope, the bigger the pressure builds.

I read this recently in Dale Pendell’s book, one of the Pharmako triology books, about the nature of addiction as it is tied to unresolved trauma. I, like many in our society, struggle from some type of addiction as a way to cope with pain that our communities cannot hold and alchemize with us collectively in union, that feels too much and too scary. The pressure builds, but we must have compassion for it all, for even those who hurt us the most, who enact violence to intimidate us into submission, for those who choose to cut down the sacred trees, or poison coyotes or prairie dog holes. They are allowing the pressure to build too.

SO I ‘shouldn’t’ have looked, but I did. Getting triggered is information. Simply information, a state to observe. We are not bad for feeling love and pain deeply. You are not bad for it. Anything that tells you that, is feeding into the greater societal suppression of our greatest capacities to love. And we need to have compassion for that too, and see it for what it is.