Let’s become savage
Want to leap down from my tower
Unlearn restraint and good manners
And see what will flower
Underneath the polite and the shame
Want to smell my own desire
Bury myself deep in your fur
Throw my human-ness on the pyre
A stranger I am, here am I
I sit and watch the world go by
I reach, I strive, I seek to live
I know that I’ve so much to give
I try to drive, I drive to try
I think God’s laughing in the sky.
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.
Sometimes when I am out in the world, I feel a compulsion to go home immediately.
I literally feel drawn, as if by a magnet, back to the safety of home.
I have lived with this sensation for many years now, since 2001. I blogged about it last year when I wrote about depression.
I am still unraveling what is contained in this dynamic within.
On the one hand, I love life, being alive. I crave connection. I love people. I love humanity.
I am an actress. Human behavior endlessly fascinates me. What makes people take actions. What drives us all to stay alive on this spinning blue ball. That we choose every day to love and aspire to things.
And yet. There are times when I am filled with a mix of emotions and sensations that compel me to get home as soon as I can. Fear, anxiety, panic.
I never thought if it before, but is this a version of a panic attack? I have no idea, no way to guage that. I hear people talk about panic attacks. I know people who suffer from them.
How do you label an internal experience like what I experience? I guess if there are enough people experiencing similar symptoms, someone names it and it becomes a way to discuss, diagnose.
I have brought it to conventional therapy. Past life regression work. Rebirthing. Shamanic healing work.
I’ve learned cognitive behaviors to manage it. All have been helpful in one way or another.
But I still don’t have a concrete understanding of why it happens to me. Is it genetically encoded in my DNA? Did my people learn to survive by keeping close to home?
In a past life, was I some tribal member who died traumatically when being away from the others and my soul just cannot let it go?
I know for some years, I withdrew from being in the flow of life because I did not know how to cope. I had to learn how to be in the world again. I had to mature emotionally, with help. That has been an amazing process.
But that period of time is many years past. I have never felt more healed, more whole, more integrated than I do now. I am in awe of the healing I have done, of where I am today. I have a truly gifted life, filled with love, connection, abundance, and creativity.
And yet. The magnet pull comes upon me still.
I believe my body has more to show me. There are answers coming from within, but on my body’s own time. Not my ego’s.
And so I bear patient, loving witness as it happens, listening for clues even as I experience the pull when it hits me. I have finally stopped adding to the pain of it all by beating myself up for its mere existence. Or trying to bully myself into being able to “just bypass it already.”
When I have that pull to go home, I choose to see it with the eyes of a loving parent. I take my own hand and ask myself if it can wait until I finish my day. I promise to give that part of me full attention when safe at home, later.
And I follow thru on that promise. That is crucial. I need that part to begin to trust me, to trust that I can handle whatever may go down out in the world.
I feel that trust growing inside. It is a deeply important feeling.
And I welcome this.
I am building a new home within. And when completed, I will be there, wherever I go, wherever I am in the world.
Sunnyside up
Not just my favorite egg
A way to be in the world
Not pretending, can’t do that
But steering towards the light
Can’t avoid the dark and grey
But I can keep the sun in mindsight
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
Here is what I can do today.
I can create:
Joy. By Taking time to find it in my body and then give it to the world in the form of smiles and kind interactions with others.
Peace. By listening and respecting others, staying unattached to needing them to agree with me or see things my way. By refusing to war with my self or anyone else.
Art. By choosing to use my body, voice, mind, emotions, instincts, words, will, expertise and talent to create in whatever ways I can. I can do this regardless of whether I get an audition or booking, or am in a show or film or not. Especially in today’s world, I can create art and share it daily, for my self and others.
Positivity. I can choose to meditate, practice gratitude, use mantras and affirmations and select an intention to guide my day. As many times a day as I need to, I can tap into the ever-abundant source of this that is within me. Every moment contains the choice of love or fear.
Justice. I can stay active politically for the causes I support. I can use my voice, body and energy as needed to take action. I can speak up when I see injustice.
Equality. See above.
Beauty. I can allow my spirit to shine freely from within. I can reflect back to others the beauty I see within them, encouraging theirs to flow freely.
Comedy. I can listen for the clown (my unsocialized 4 year old) within, and work with her impulses instead of tamping them down. I can laugh at myself and at funny things and share that with the world.
Music. I can hum and sing and make up silly songs in the grocery line. I can sing at the top of my lungs for the sheer joy of it. Or I can create art from the music in me.
Excitement. I can go against the grain of the social conditioning that started in junior high school and begin to allow my enthusiasm for life to thrive and be seen. I can choose excitement over “cool” and feel my own aliveness flow into the world. Maybe I will spark enthusiasm in others.
Intimacy. I can choose to be vulnerable with myself and with others, and perhaps help them to become vulnerable as well. Vulnerability may well be key to saving the world.
That’s what I can do today.
What happened that night
Punctured my soul
Essential me-parts leaked out
In slow seeps, bit by bit,
Leaving a life force shell
A burst balloon hanging from a tree
It’s taken years to repair and refill
But I’ve tested the patches
And I’m flying high now
No strings attached
Just enjoying the view
There’s new growth inside
Tiny greens are poking through
In-between the cracks of my heart
Tender tendrils of hope
Pushing promises of freedom
Of joy and release
And of peace at last
I attend to their needs with full study
I patiently await what will bud
I pulled down the walls myself
I was the one who built ’em
They were mine to demolish
I removed each stone, thanking it for its work
I excavated my own soul
I dug until I discovered the me I was before.
Anemic and shivering
I performed CPR on my self
I pinked up, began howling
Raw and primal, hungry
My natural beauty exposed
No renovations necessary.
#soulexcavation
Beyond the Skinny Branches 