My heart needs a buff
It’s long lost its shine
I tried to be tough
Tried hard not to pine
But enough is enough
I must draw the line
Smooth out what’s rough
Act as if it’s divine
Get rid of old stuff
Start to care for what’s mine
Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: buff
When I was around age 20, my life exploded. My entire world literally blew out from its center.
Looking back, I suppose it was destined to detonate at some point or another.
I oscillate between feeling sadness that it did not happen sooner and gratitude that it did not take longer to happen.
Spiritually-evolved and wise people would say that it happened “right on time. ”
I say “Bite me.”
(OK, I got that out of my system. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. Maybe we all do. We all have our crosses to bear in this life, right?)
No, seriously, I guess it did have to happen sooner or later.
At that point, I had been away from home for several years…the deep truths that had been bubbling molten hot at my core had had time to gain strength unencumbered by parental presence.
I was also living a breakneck speed: I was a full-time acting student, working a part time job and stage managing productions for the acting company associated with my acting school. I was busy 24/7 and running on fumes.
And then, one day in a bookstore, I was drawn like a magnet to a particular book. (This is the book that was to teach me that I do not chose books but rather they choose me.) It was Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child.
I bought it and read it as quickly as I could, and shortly thereafter, the volcano of my psyche erupted.
This book seemed to be explaining things about my experience growing up that I had long since hid from myself. It was as if in reading each chapter, carefully placed barriers were loosed around the nucleus of my being.
In the days following reading it, I felt like the ground I was walking on was constantly shifting and moving underneath my feet. It was unsettling.
Pressure within me began to build, until one day, one Sunday shift in the restaurant where I worked, my internal world just exploded.
Shards of self flew from my core, and in an instant, a horrific revelation from within flew up through my body from my gut into my consciousness in a searing flash and the fairy tale fantasy that I had been living inside my own mind of a perfect family and a perfect childhood turned to ashes.
And, just like that, I was forever changed.
From that day to this one, it has been a whirlwind, rollercoaster ride filled with astonishing kindness, loss, addiction, danger, self-abuse, despair, hope, comedy, tragedy, loneliness, desperation, shock, torment, friendship, mentorship, recovery, love, joy, bliss, confusion, celebration, emptiness, wholeness, perversion, goodness, synchronicity, luck, terror, horror, wonder, adventure, growth, overwhelming gratitude and grace, forgiveness, miraculousness, passion, sexuality, understanding, caring, shifting, healing, working, giving, taking, receiving, being lost and being found, again and again and again.
(I suppose that is simply a life being lived.)
I would not change one moment because if I did I would not be right where I am today.
Don’t get me wrong. Right where I am today is not puppy dogs and moonbeams.
In some ways, I feel like I am only now rising, like a phoenix, out of the ashes of that apocalyptic day.
And as uncomfortable, often terrifying and unsettling as that feels, to be in totally unfamiliar territory in my own surroundings once again, I know that I am indeed in the process of rising, like a phoenix, out of those ashes, and that knowing, in and of itself, is pretty amazing.
I don’t know where I will land, or even if I will. But I know that this is my journey, meant just for me, and I am rising to the occasion.
Prompted by The Daily Post Word Prompt: detonate
Go gently in the night, my love
I’ve been granted a reprieve
But my heart is not yet free
I love as much as I can
But there are nubbins squirreled away
Awaiting the Spring that has yet to come
The pink of my heart lays under hard-packed drifts
Be patient, my love
One day the big thaw will come
And my heart will bloom once more
I have been thinking a lot lately about trusting life.
I have come to realize that I have been living, but not trusting, life.
What does that mean?
It means that when I was six, things occurred that were so traumatic that decisions were made on an unconscious level that 1) the world was not a safe place, 2) I could trust no one and nothing, and 3) life was not meant for me.
Fast forward through decades of living from the decisions of a wounded child who felt that what had happened was on some level her fault and who also thought that she carried responsibility for the whole world as she knew it.
What does that look like?
It is exhausting to live but not trust life. I am exhausted. I have been dragging my soul through all of these years, cheerleading myself every day to show up despite feeling on deep unconscious levels that life was not meant for me.
It has been a strange dichotomy: wanting to live so badly, to work so hard to have a happy and meaningful life, yet to have an equal and opposite drive in my telling me that life is just not for me. That I was not meant to be happy. To live “in spite of” not feeling as if I deserved a good life or even was a worthy or necessary part of the world.
I have loved life. Needed life. Wanted life. Fought life. Almost killed my own life. But I have not trusted life.
And not trusting life, it has been hard to trust myself. I mean, if you do not trust the very force that sustains you, what can you really trust anyway?
I did, indeed, survive. Miraculous, indeed, because when you live from unconscious wound-influenced decisions from a child’s psyche, you tend to make some very, very poor and unhealthy choices.
I look back at all of the choices I made from those 6 year old’s decisions today, and I am truly in awe. I used to be embarrassed, ashamed even, at how poorly I have managed for some times in my life. But today, I am astounded at my resilience and my ability to bring myself through it all. I survived, and I live to write this.
But I have not yet truly thrived.
I have healed so much. But here I am, having cleared away so much wounding, seeing these decisions that were made about life and my place in it, and I am exhausted.
And it is time. Time to finally trust life.
I have blamed Life for what happened to me when I was six. Life and God. But mainly Life. And I understand why. The pain and shock of what happened was just overwhelming to me at 6. I just could not trust after that.
One of my favorite lines from a play is from Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz. “Most people don’t have to make a step-by-step decision to stay alive, most people just basically want to live. I am not one of those people.”
I have always deeply identified with that. It has taken me work each day to push through the energies around those early decisions to find the strength, courage and hope to face another day.
But I want to address that. Really see if I can forgive Life — it was not Life that did anything to me. Life is not to blame.
Life has held me through. Life has loved me no matter what. Life has always just been there, offering me breath, love and trees.
I don’t know how I will heal this or how long it will take but I am ready and willing to try.
I can start by making a list of what I think that might look like. If I were someone who trusted life, how would I act? How would I talk? How would I make decisions? How would I love?
Will my smile be different? My laugh? Maybe my very breathing will change.
I am eager to live in these questions, this exploration.
To take my six year old lovingly and gently by the hand and take over the reigns. Give her a soft place in my heart to go play in and reassure her that I got this now. Yes, my child, it is time.
Here we go.
Numb from shock
Arisen from the depths of you-hell
Sooty and scorched
I made a catapult from leftover heart shreds
And slingshot essential soulparts
To the netherlands of the void.
No map, no key: safe from seeking human grasp.
Whatever was left of my battered soul
I tried to serve to the world.
But tough in-spite-of life meat
Makes for a bony bounty.
Anemic and spent
I am calling me back.
There’s a welcome home mat
In my hungry-heart self.
I will feast on my fullness
Grow meaty layers of love.
Then pinked-up and throbbing,
My catapult in hand,
I’ll release to the stars
Any memory of you
To burn into ash as I rise.
I slipped my moorings today
Just like that
All this time they were mine to release
I thought the knots were untieable
I thought only he knew Marlinspike ways
These straining years
This drydock life
Now left behind on the shores of past pain
I have my own anchor now
I’ll set it down where I please
I slipped my moorings today
Just like that
I love to jump off cliffs.
This runs antithetical to just about every way I was conditioned growing up.
I come from very fearful people, stoic Protestants who practice “keeping things in the family,” “never let them see how you really feel,” and “stick close to home.” Cautious, careful, deliberate action-takers. Spontaneity? Not so much.
I never questioned it growing up. It was normal to me. Things like traffic and weather dictated activities. Never let them see you cry. Don’t show weakness. Therapy might as well have been witchcraft.
It is imbedded in my code, this desire to avoid potential problems. This fear of something bad happening if you are not careful at all times.
And yet.
I am no adrenaline junkie or extreme sports athlete. While I do enjoy a good rollercoaster ride now and then, I have not been ticking off a list of things I must do such as skydiving and bungie jumping, though if the occasion arose I might do those things.
But.
Years ago, at a quarry in Vermont, I discovered that inside me is a kind of a dare devil all the same. That there are times I want to take risks, when I must, in fact, take the leap.
I love to stand at a precipice and then jump off into a deep body of water. I just love that sensation in my body as I step off into the air, my heart in my throat as an unheralded scream of joy-fear comes out of my mouth. Those moments of being totally free and falling through the air are just so life-filled, so in the moment. I experience the rush of my own full life force. There’s a feeling of being at one with something outside of me and yet within myself all at once. And then, the landing into the water. Being encompassed, becoming one with it in those moments in the muted depths before surfacing. Astounded at having been saved once again.
Maybe those moments are my church, my sanctuary.
For those seconds I am not thinking, not watching, not taking care.
I just am, and I am far from alone, and it feels great.
I know that experience now, and I seek it out in other ways. In my work as an actor. I feel that same way when I fully invest in my character and truly lay deeply personal life and death needs on the line and take that same kind of leap into the scene. My partner and I leap into the air of the play and sometimes find astonishing moments of true experience together. Surprises, places unexpected. When it is over, the same astonishment and gratitude for having landed safely. This is also my church, my sanctuary. It, too, is holy.
My early conditioning and the family encoding have not gone away, maybe never will. I can still catch myself getting very anxious when it is raining hard and I am in the car with my husband, feeling as if we should go straight back home. I carry unwarranted dread around at times like a Pashmina shawl. It can feel comforting and necessary.
But that’s OK.
Today, I consciously choose times to allow my spontaneity to take the front seat, put caution and fear in the back and assure them that “I got this.” I look for more places to find my free-fall worship, and I’m so grateful that I do what I do for a living.
Acting as I know it is not for the feint of heart, and I am honored to embody the lives of people who are fighting to live better lives, love more fully, taking risks to get what they need.
For them, and for me, I am happy to take that step off into the air and see where it takes me.
#freefall #risk-taking #acting
Inspired by The Daily Post Word prompt: precipice
I’m in the middle of a massive shift.
The last time I felt such a massive shift in my life, there were all of these external changes happening.
In the space of three years, my mother died, I planned a wedding, my brother died, I got a mortgage, bought an apartment, my father died, I got married and moved from Manhattan to the Bronx.
By the time I was settled into our new apartment, I didn’t know which way was up. I literally did not recognize the outer landscape of my life.
With so much having changed on the outside, it made sense to me that my internal landscape would need to recalibrate. I was living in a new world. I needed to find a new true north.
This time though, there’ve been no circumstances creating the pressure that precipitates such movement. This time, the shift has come solely from within, a seismic shifting of the tectonic plates of my very soul.
It is terrifying and yet so right-feeling at the same time.
Everything in my life has come into question. A massive excavation. A massive exploration.
It’s as if I have been squeezed out of myself and am born anew, looking around. And the one thing I can see clearly is that my whole life I have been in pursuit of one thing or another. Popularity, academic excellence, talent, money, happiness, fame, career success, love, a thinner body, a better me, forgiveness, acceptance, self-love, a desire to live, a desire to stop wanting to die (they are different,) peace, direction…fame (I come back to that one because that is a huge one)…you name it.
I’ve been running around like a woman with my hair on fire for as long as I can remember, and I couldn’t stop even if I had ever wanted to, and I didn’t. There were times I wanted them to stop, for life to stop, for the pain to stop, for everything to stop, for me to stop being conscious. But I never wanted and could never imagine not being in pursuit.
Until now, that is. Now, I just want to…stop.
That is the seismic shift I am in right now. I am shifting from a life of pursuit to a life of, what? What is the opposite of pursuit? I don’t know.
Is it simply being? I don’t even know what the hell that is. Is that really OK? What will happen? What if I give up the pursuit of pursuit? What will I do with my life if I do not pursue something?
Who will I be? Will I fall I back into the chasm? Will I be falling into the obscurity I have so feared?
And if I fall into the chasm of my own soul, will it be a free fall that lasts forever, or will I land on soft ground at some point? This cannot be yet another pursuit. I have to let it be whatever it is. I cannot fall back wishing it to be one way or another at the other end.
I just have to fall back. And that is terrifying and yet so absolutely right-feeling at the same time.
I’ll either see you on the other side, or I won’t. Deep breath. Here I go.
Beyond the Skinny Branches 