Dormant Child

Aside ~ July 22, 2017July 22, 2017 ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 11 Comments

I hear you now

From within, so deeply hidden you had no chance of being heard until now

I thought maybe you’d flown away with the night and my innocence

Or maybe you’d been crushed by the weight of his body on mine

I held a funeral for you inside and accepted the loss

And then, one day, there you were; and at first

I could not recognize you through the warp and woof that my soul became

Here you are now

And I found you, and though you were unrecognizable to me

I knew and loved you at first sight with every fiber of my being

I’d never seen anything more heart-breakingly beautiful in my life

I drew your little burned body into my arms, your flesh black and peeling

Raw, red skin angering through the seared pain of the past

I loved you until the dead flesh fell away, until you pinked up and began to flourish

In the fore of my heart I let you pick your own room and decorate it pink and kitty cats

Let the other girls invite you to play and read you stories

I gave you hot baths and fed you warm milk and cookies, told you I was putting you first now

And I realized that you were more me than any me I had ever been before or would ever be

Now you are here

And you are my everything, you are the key, finally – the center of us all

You carry my truth, my play, my freedom, my deepest self-song

Now I am here

The parent who will protect you from that kind of hurt ever happening again

The mother who will love you like you are my everything

The woman who sings a self-song so beautiful it makes me cry to hear it

I hear you now

For Suzanne, with Thanks & Love

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: dormant

Pushing Daisies

Aside ~ July 12, 2017 ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ Leave a comment

Bury me deep

Disappear me in the earth

Let the rich soil fill my mouth

Wanna lay to waste, lose my worth

Weave twigs in my hair

Sprinkle daisies on my chest

Do not cry, don’t despair

I’ve yearned a lifetime for this rest

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: bury

Aural Fixation

Aside ~ July 8, 2017July 8, 2017 ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 16 Comments

For as long as I remember, I’ve had a hard time with people making certain sounds.

A healthcare worker on the train incessantly popping her gum. The man behind me in line jangling the change in his pants’ pocket. A toddler at the grocery kicking at the back of my shopping cart. Some street vender guy whistling on the street.

These have the capacity to drive me crazy.

I am not talking mildly bothered. I mean, they make me feel homicidal.

(Disclaimer: I have not nor would I ever act on those impulses. But I do have them.)

What is it about these sounds that gets my goat? I mean, I am a singer, after all. I love music. I am an actress. I love and study voice and vocal expression.

I have very acute hearing, and I process quite aurally. My sense of hearing is a very rich source of sense memory for me in my work. Having the sense of a person’s voice will flood me with my experience of them. Recalling a song will take me back to all the sensations I was having at the time when I was first living with it.

I believe in the healing powers of sound and have benefited from and used them in my healing work.

With such a powerful connection to sound, you’d think that I would love ’em all. Nope.

There’s something about a repetitive sound that is out of my power to affect being generated by someone else that just gets to me.

Sometimes I think it is because I am the youngest, and grew up in a household with a workaholic, rageaholic father. I learned to listen to the house to pick up on cues and signals so that I could navigate the often-dangerous waters of our family dynamics.

I have a strong need for freedom as a result. It is way up there on my needs list. I need to feel free to express myself and to act freely over just about anything else. Cannot stand to feel suppressed or contained.

So you would think I’d applaud the free sound-making of others. Live and let live!

But, well, no. Just no. To certain sounds. The repetition doesn’t have to be steady. It can be slow and constant, like Chinese water-torture. It can be an intermittent or random pattern. (That can be worse!)

Having to hear someone else’s music on the subway, either when they blast it from their phone (without ear buds!) or so loud that you can hear it through the earbuds isvery aggravating for me.

The worst is the sound of slurping soup or smacking eating sounds. (Chewing or crunching for some reason is OK.) I had a dear ex-boyfriend who loved soup and loved to slurp it. It gave him such joy. I could not stand it. It was one of a few deal breakers. He offered to change it, but I didn’t want that. He got such pleasure eating it that way. Just because I happened to have a problem with it didn’t mean he should give it up. It was sad, but we were not to be.

There’s a song in the musical “Chicago” called “Cell Block Tango” where the women in jail sing about why they killed their husbands/boyfriends. One does it because he popped his gum. “He Had it Coming.”

“You know how people
have these little habits
That get you down. Like Bernie.
Bernie like to chew gum.
No, not chew. POP.
So I came home this one day
And I am really irritated, and I’m
looking for a bit of sympathy
and there’s Bernie layin’
on the couch, drinkin’ a beer
and chewin’. No, not chewin’.
Poppin’. So, I said to him,
I said, “you pop that
gum one more time…”
and he did.
So I took the shotgun off the wall
and I fired two warning shots…
…into his head.”

I so get it.

I have done a bit of research, and apparently there are others like me. There is something called misophonia that unfortunately sounds a bit too close to home on this.

Misophonia: “also known as selective sound sensitivity syndrome, starts with a trigger. It’s often an oral sound — the noise someone makes when they eat, breathe, chew, yawn, or whistle. Sometimes a small repetitive motion is the cause — someone fidgets, jostles you, or wiggles their foot.

Interestingly: “This lifelong condition usually starts between the ages of 9 and 13 and is more common with girls. It comes on quickly, but isn’t related to any one event. Doctors aren’t sure what causes misophonia, but it’s not a problem with your ears. They think it’s part mental, part physical. It could be related to how sound affects your brain and triggers automatic responses in your body.”

Source: http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-misophonia

I’ve never sought a diagnosis or treatment. I assume if I do have misophonia, it is pretty mild.

I always have choices. I can move away, change cars, practice breathing exercises, put on headphones and listen to music myself to drown out the other’s.

I try to remain curious, compassionate with myself and others, and also find some humor around it.

After all, the making of the sounds is out of my control in the end, isn’t it? All I can control is how I choose to live with my response to them.

In the words of good ole Autry:

“I got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle
As I go ridin’ merrily along
And they sing, ‘Oh ain’t you glad you’re single’
And that song ain’t so very far from wrong”

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: jangle

Olive Oyl’s Lament

Aside ~ July 4, 2017July 5, 2017 ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ Leave a comment

Every time I think,

“That’s it. Gonna be smooth sailing from here on out!”

It is always anything but.

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: sail

Happy Fourth of July! Let freedom ring.

Constant Craving

Aside ~ June 30, 2017July 1, 2017 ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 10 Comments

When I was a girl, I lived for food.

The promise of the after-school snack kept me going through the grueling days of my youth. I’d race home to find sweet and savory relief from the confusion of adolescence.

I’d eat from a box of graham crackers, spreading layers of vanillla chocolate chip canned frosting. Or I’d slice up a Snickers bar the way they did in a commercial on at the time, pretending I was in it. Then maybe some Lay’s potato chips. Maybe a Wonder Bread/Gulden’s Mustard/Kraft cheese and baloney sandwich.

I was on my own, so I could eat like I wanted to. No father home yet to bring tension and self-consciousness to the air.

I’d fill myself, quelling the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that haunted me at any other time of my day. This was all mine. My time free from criticism, pressure or fear.

Over the years, I became desperate around this intimate connection with food. Protective of the rituals. The private pleasure I found in food and the act of eating it.

I knew something was off about how I related to food. I felt ashamed and like there was something wrong with me, while at the same time feeling like it was crucial to my very existence. That trichotomy created a painful struggle inside me of shame and appetite and need.

I became secretive around it, knowing on some level that I was not like other people.

I now understand that somewhere along the way, I learned to equate food with so many things I needed: love, attention, security, connectedness, relief, quiet, peace, pleasure, a sense of having something for myself, a way to feel like I had control of one thing in the world.

I believe that some of this relationship to food was learned, familial. My mother, too, sought refuge in her treats. She loved candy, and when I came home from school, she was usually lying in her bed, reading mystery novels, eating candy from a stash she kept in her bedside table. She, too, at some point in her life, reached for food to solve and resolve being on this planet.

I understood her for this. I feel such compassion for her. For her huge needs and the dysfunctional way she had developed to cope with getting them met.

It has taken many years of unraveling this connection for me to find a new relationship to food. There’s been tremendous loss in it. A loss of my friend, my savior, my companion, my sidekick.

But it has been so freeing, too. I have been learning how to give myself what I had asked for from food all those years: love.

Sounds easy, and obvious, right? But what does that actually look like?

It looks like this: giving myself The Five A’s of Love: Attention, Acceptance, Appreciation, Affection, and Allowing.

(The Five A’s concept is from the wonderful book How To Be An Adult in Relationships – Five Keys to Mindful Loving by psychotherapist, David Richo, PhD.)

Those Five A’s satisfy the snack craving every time. I’m not saying I don’t still crave and even miss that snack eating ritual. I do. That’s a deeply embedded habit. I got pretty hard-wired around it.

But today, I take the snack-seeking girl inside by the hand, and I ask her what she really needs.

Sometimes it is some appreciation for all I have been doing all day.

Sometimes it is affection. Maybe a bath. Some demonstration of loving care.

Maybe it is the need to be allowed to really acknowledge feeling afraid, or spent, or angry.

It took awhile for that part of myself to trust that my needs could be met in new ways. To trust in something other than food.

To trust life. To trust love. To trust loving myself, in life.

It is an every day practice, this mindfulness of love. I pour the energy I used to hold for food into other things. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t gotten my wires crossed, that food wasn’t so complicated for me.
But it is.

And so I accept this truth as if I were diabetic, and I do what I need to do to care for myself.

Mostly, as I said, I feel free.

I no longer carry that shame I felt around it. I am literally lighter in spirit. That feeling is the prize I keep my sights on. It is what makes it all worth it.

I may no longer “have” snacks. But I have me.

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: snack

Under the Influence

Aside ~ June 27, 2017June 28, 2017 ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ Leave a comment

There are times I should not be behind the wheel.

I am not talking about driving drunk or high. Or texting while driving.

I am talking about driving while triggered.

Some call it Road Rage. I think that is deceiving. It conjures up extreme versions of what I am talking about and makes it easy to disassociate with the images it brings up (think: The Hulk.) I am talking about driving under the influence of your emotions.

I would posit that there are at least fifty shades of grey to the emotions that can be set off while driving. And that driving while unconsciously in the throes of them is just as dangerous as being on a drug or a drink.

It is far too easy to feel slighted by some entitled asshole who cuts you off or pulls in front of you, or zooms in to take your space in the parking lot. Or someone gets cute and slices ahead of you from what is really not a lane but the side of the road. Thanks buddy. Yeah you deserve to beat us poor suckers who were following the rules.

When these kinds of thing happen, I have a rush of fear that quickly becomes anger. And sometimes, if I do not intercede in time, that anger drives me to become aggressive back. As in start driving like a nimrod.

Suddenly, my ride home becomes a primal fight for survival. My body goes into fight or flight mode.

I catch myself. My blood pressure has spiked and my jaw is clenched as I squeeze the handle of the wheel like I am squeezing the life out of the other driver who has either threatened my safety or “taken” what I perceive as mine.

I breathe deeply, and slowly breathe out again, making a conscious choice to let it go. To figuratively get back into my lane. Get out of the kill or be killed Thunderdome lane.

It is serious. I bring myself back from the edge.

I don’t recall them addressing this in drivers ed. I think it should be. A chapter on “Practicing Emotional Intelligence While Driving” could go a long way in preventing accidents. I know I am not the only one who gets triggered out there.

I am glad I know it and can choose to let it go. It’s as simple as changing lanes.

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: wheel

Cutting the Cord

Aside ~ June 21, 2017June 21, 2017 ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 4 Comments

I am on a quest.

A quest to trust myself more. Especially in the arena of decision-making.

It sounds easy enough, right? I mean, I am me. So it makes sense that I should be able to make decisions and act on them. Easy-peasy.

I have thoughts and feelings. I reference the information stored in my brain and body that I have gained through experiences in my lifetime until now.

I know my values. I have my goals, my aspirations. My action plan. I have one, five and ten year plans in place just like experts tell you to. These are supposed to be the touchstone from which you make decisions. Check in with what they are, and if the thing is in alignment with them, voila, you have your decision. What’s not to trust?

But the process above is not the way it goes for me. I agonize over decisions, major and minor. Whether it be deciding what restaurant to go to for dinner or if I should buy a new apartment.

In my decision-making process, I am riddled with doubt at every turn. There is a constant loop of second-guessing that plays in my head. What “should” I do? What are other people doing? What if I pick the wrong thing and ruin my life forever? What if I regret my choice? What if I could have made a better choice? I torture myself.

I used to explain this away as a Libran “ism.” As a Libra, I am prone to weigh the different sides of things. I can see the value in opposing sides. Fairness is of high importance to me. I can see the good in the bad and the bad in the good. It makes decision-making a tedious mess. I end up feeling torn.

I have also pointed to my being an actress, a storyteller, as part of the issue. When posed with a scenario, my mind naturally starts to put together paths of logic that stem from every possibility. I have a vibrant and active imagination and can envision potential outcomes in great detail. This does not necessarily make for easy decisions.

I have even thought that my difficulty making decisions had to do with being the youngest. Often, as the youngest, you grow up doing what others want you to do and going where you are told to go. You learn to follow your older siblings’ lead. You want to do what they do. You want to be where the action is. You don’t know there is any other way than how the family treats you: as the littlest: you are usually just told what to feel, think and do.

I also come from a Protestant people who I think are quite fear-based, so it is in my genes to be cautious and to fear bad things happening as a result of one’s own actions. Don’t rock the boat. Go with the flow. Don’t make waves. This desire to fit in and to protect myself by blending in is often at war with my other desires and impulses, making decision-making all the more tricky.

I also know that due to traumatic events at a pivotal time in my early childhood, I learned to discount my own experience and sense of truth. To doubt my inner truth in favor of what others’ think. That certainly has messed with my ability to reach within, make a decision and trust it.

Though all of these may indeed and probably do contribute to the problem, they aren’t the root cause of my decision-making difficulties. The root, I have come to learn, is satellite thinking.

Satellite thinking/living occurs when a person makes other people’s ideas and opinions and actions have more meaning than one’s own. To be constantly seeking outside evidence, clues and advice as to what to do.

I didn’t even know that is what I was doing for many years. That I was always looking outside of myself to decide what to do. It is incredibly painful to live that way. It’s exhausting!

I know it now, and I am so grateful.

There’s no fulfillment in that way of living. Ever.

It has been quite an awakening to realize this and to shift into my own core. It has been perhaps the most amazing healing work I have ever done in my life. It has taken patience and tremendous love. I have had to learn to really listen to my own voice within and to discern it apart from those other voices inside my head that have worn their groove into my neuropaths.

And I now feel that I am at the last phase of becoming core-centered. I am at the phase where I actually jump off the psychic edge of the familiarity of looking to the outside to guide me. Where I willingly fall into the unknown abyss that core-centered living feels like.

It is flat-out terrifying. And exciting.

When I think about truly entering into this relationship with myself: asking myself alone what is the next right action; when I think about asking questions of myself such as how do I really want to lively life, and what does a meaningful, well-lived look like to me; what will I feel was a “worthy” life when I am on my deathbed…when I begin to live with these questions, really listening for the answers within underneath the cacophony of those loops, I feel dizzy and disoriented, literally.

It feels like I will become like the astronaut in 2001 A Space Odyssey who is disconnected from the mothership, floating away into black nothingness…

A terrifying image. That is truly how scary it feels. My entire relationship to life is changing. Scary, to be sure. And yet.

It also feels like finally coming home to roost. Like the Eagle has finally landed.

Like I have finally found what I have been looking for and missing my whole life.

Can I ever truly erase that ever-playing loop of doubt in my head? That constant tendency to look to see what is happening “over there,” to ask what are “they” doing in order to decide what I want to do? To question my own sense of reality and defer to what others say is the truth or what I think others would do or what I imagine they want me to do. Can I halt that loop?

Maybe not. But I know it for what it is now. It is just old static. I can brush it away, like a stray hair that is tickling my face.

I can tune the knob and find my own frequency inside. Sometimes it takes awhile to find, but it is always there.

Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz discovering the power to go home again, I find I’ve had it in me all along.

Turns out, I am my own mothership.

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: loop