The truth is I am at a point in this story where I have stalled. I know what happens next. I know what I need to say but I am feeling the shame spiral reliving the stories. So let’s talk about shame for a minute. I have lived with intense shame my whole life and I have lived with guilt that was shameful all of my teen years into present day.
Shame had been the defining point in a lot of the decisions I made. Shame defined me for a long time. It’s one of those things that creeps along in the background, always ready to spring. It’s vigilant for those moments where you’re uncertain and falter a little and then it runs forward laughing screaming, and berating, “I told you you couldn’t do it. You never should have even tried. Sit back down and keep your mouth shut you idiot.”
So what I’ve done over the last few days was try to reconcile that this is simply part of the story. That certain parts of the story will add to it but they don’t mean that IS the story. I think we all feel these moments of shame and I am working through how to make sense of mine. Typing out my story has helped me see these things in a different light, but I still feel shame in how I interpreted some of those events. I guess the shame has coupled with regret on some level, because we all see at some point that we are responsible for our own bullshit.
When you spend years telling a story in a certain way and the narrative changes your world gets a little rocked. Sudden realization of what really happened is jarring because you still can’t do anything about what happened, but you now know that things may have been different. And even that is challenging because you can’t change that either.
Shame is a universal emotion. How we deal with it is unique. I am choosing to share that I am feeling shame right now and I am also choosing to pause. I don’t want to let my emotions dictate what happens next. And that is a new way to look at my history with shame. Small steps we can all remember when we find ourselves in a shame spiral.
Today I am grateful for my health. I haven’t been feeling the greatest lately—my anxiety has been high and I’ve felt on edge for no reason. I’ve been especially hard on myself and I have been pushing and pushing and I appreciate that my body has been putting up with my shenanigans for the last few months. I am alive, I have my health, I have my purpose.
Today I am grateful for how tired I feel. I put in a ton of work today, fixing things around the house, painting, taping to get ready to paint, prepping walls, laundry, meal prep, organizing my laundry room, and taking care of my son in the process. I am grateful because I was able to do all of these things. Just last night my anxiety was so high I didn’t fall asleep until after 3AM. I woke up at 7AM and I jumped in to everything that needed to be done choosing to not wallow in the horrible feelings from the night before.
Today I am grateful that time slowed down for me. I’ve been going 110 miles an hour for the last few weeks trying to get everything done and I thought it was making me efficient and proactive—accomplished even. All it was doing was increasing my anxiety and reaffirming my control issues and my inability to truly relax. Not sleeping last night threw me for a loop but I was able to focus on one thing at a time today and I feel like I accomplished more than I have been.
Today I am grateful for my son and his constant reminders to let go and have fun. He has acquired my love for books and he has been begging me to spend time with him at the book store (I got to pick up a few more books this weekend) and to read him stories. Honestly, it’s one of my favorite things in the world. He helped me sand some walls and he helped me pull up tape and he helped me bake some chocolate chip banana bread yesterday as well as some roasted chick peas today. This kid has an endless curiosity (as most kids do) and I am so fortunate to witness his process as he figures out the world. It is pure joy.
Today I am grateful for a weekend of learning to assert myself and taking the time to do the things I needed to do. I’ve been allowing myself too much leeway to float through decisions that needed to be done. At the same time I’ve been too rigid about how things need to look in order for me to move forward…with anything. I’ve felt like I was having a mental breakdown this week so I took some time this weekend to decide that I wanted to really cook and prepare for the week; normally I only prepare breakfast and lunch for myself but this week I added in snacks, a healthy dessert, and some sides as well. It may have been routine but after the week that just passed, I needed small bits of familiarity that I could change as I saw fit.
Today I am grateful for self-care. This evening I knew I needed some time to decompress and relax. I took a wonderful shower—without my child busting into the room like the Kool Aid man—and I even got to do some skin care after. Self-care doesn’t always look like that for me but I needed something to rein in the anxiety. I needed to connect with my body in order to ground myself. And it was wonderful. I even did a little foot massage at the end to reinforce the grounding.
Today I am grateful for the week ahead. I have more stories to share, I get to explore new avenues for my work, and I am taking steps to actively participate in my life. I try to be cognizant of that most days, but I have gotten swept up the last few weeks so I am setting the intention tonight to continue to be patient with myself, to stay present, to joyfully make decisions, and to work with what comes my way.
After the experience with the counselor I literally had no clue what to do. It felt like no one really heard a word I said and that everything I was going through was in my head. So I pretended everything was ok. I still had contact with my ex because I was friends with a lot of people in the same group. He became increasingly cruel and abusive and I became more and more withdrawn. I hated myself. There was one girl from the group who genuinely seemed to care and she couldn’t make sense of what was happening either so we developed a deeper friendship.
We spent weekends camping at her father’s trailer and getting drunk and laughing like the naïve teenagers we were. One weekend I was puking on the river bank and she handed me her sock to wipe my face and she asked me what was going on. I couldn’t even find the words but I knew if I kept going like this more and more people would know that I was not ok. I wanted to cry but I smiled and told her I was going to be just fine.
The next weekend I was at her house this time and I found some travel bottles of whiskey and I drank more than my 90 pound body could handle. I nearly blacked out but I played it off as just a night of fun. In reality I was doing anything to erase myself. When I woke up the next morning, I knew I didn’t want to exist anymore. For all the times I had cut myself I never really contemplated death. That morning I didn’t even care. I took some aspirin at her house and said to myself, “This is how I’m going to do it.” I had read a book that you couldn’t take pills all at once because you would just throw them up so I took a few at a time. I forced myself to take a few pills every 30 minutes. By the time I went to bed that night I had taken over a full bottle of aspirin. I told my parents I loved them and I went to sleep.
About an hour later I woke up feeling nauseated and dizzy and knew something was happening. I ended up making it to the bathroom and I started throwing up. I vomited every hour for the rest of that night and woke up and got ready for school the next morning. I knew I wasn’t sick and I was so mad that I had woken up I was forcing myself to go through the routine. My mom pulled up to the school and I started crying. I told her I didn’t think I could make it through the day so she let me go in and get my assignments and I went home.
I vomited for the next three days with more and more time between, knowing it was from what I did. My parents thought I caught a bug. I missed three days of school and on the third day my friend reached out to see what was going on. She actually told me she wanted to make sure I was alive because she didn’t know what I was going to do. I spent that time sicker than I had ever been, my muscles straining, my nerves becoming damaged in my back from the effort, my throat raw and my brain vacillating between damning myself and knowing I was going to have to start over. I told myself that I had been kept alive for a reason because there was no way I should have woken up.
For two years after that experience I stopped cutting and I stopped drinking. I focused on school as an outlet. I always did well academically so it was an opportunity for me really direct my focus and take some more challenging classes. I figured if I couldn’t control what was going on around me I could focus on something that I enjoyed and that might help me figure out what I was going to do in the future—especially since I made it through all of the hell I put my body through.
I’ve seen kids in this generation expressing their opinions or talking about their difficulties and I was always inclined to brush it off as typical teenage crap. Or I found myself angry that these kids were trying to be so adult so young. It was a leftover instinct from my own trauma of being brushed aside when my mental health needed the most attention. I’ve learned that age has no bearing on experience. Sometimes youth is the best teacher. It’s a reminder as I raise my own son to always validate and try to understand his feelings no matter how I perceive the situation. I also learned that sometimes we have to be our own support system and that it is possible no matter what situation we find ourselves in. Sometimes we are meant for something bigger than we can see. It just takes some time and some clarity to bring it to light. To be continued.
After I cut for the first time I was careful to hide what I had done. After a few weeks I slipped. I was washing dishes in the sink and rolled up my sleeves and my mom saw the cuts. I remember her seeing it and asking what had happened and then making up some ridiculous lie. I knew she didn’t believe me for a second. She looked devastated but we didn’t continue the conversation—and I understand that now. Honestly I was completely grateful at the time because as upset as she was, neither of us were prepared to have a conversation about mental health. What ended up happening was I got better at hiding the cuts. Apparently not good enough.
Roughly three weeks after I first cut and probably two weeks after the second time, I got called out of gym class. A counselor walked me into her office and asked me what was going on with my wrists. I made up a bogus story about doing gymnastics and stretching the skin on my wrists and scratching them. Again, I knew this woman didn’t buy it. But this time around I was pissed. I felt like people were trying to take away something that was mine, the only coping mechanism that I had. In hindsight, I know this woman was doing her job and reaching out to a kid who needed help. I just never wanted to admit that I needed help.
By this point I did anything I could to appear extroverted and draw attention away from any possibility that something could be wrong. When I was on my own I kept hating myself and hurting myself. I got creative and cut where people couldn’t see and where it was easier to hide. I even learned how to cut with minimal scarring after I read an article about what would leave a scar. I used to take tacks and push them into my fingers because that was quicker and easier to hide. It worked for a long time.
Once I entered high school, I did let up for almost a year. Maybe it was new things, new distractions, new people. But the urge came back after a horrible experience with a group of friends and an ex-boyfriend. This time I cut and my sister found out. She demanded I go get help. I spoke to a guidance counselor at school and he referred me to the school social worker who referred me to a counselor.
The office looked like the waiting room in a pediatrician’s office. Books and toys littered everywhere. The only thing missing was the tacky clown paintings on the wall. The counselor was a medium height, medium build, shoulder-length blonde haired woman. The first meeting went well. She gave me a blank journal and gave me some prompts to work through anger, anxiety, and self-loathing. The second session she asked me about my previous cutting and wanted to know if anything I had done had left scars. I told her yes. She asked to see them so I walked across the room and showed her the scars from my earlier cuts. She looked at them and looked at me and said, “oh, those aren’t that bad.”
By this point I’m almost 15 years old, I’m lonely because I just lost an entire friend group, I have the wherewithal to know what I’m doing isn’t normal, I gave in after two years and sought help, and the woman who is supposed to be helping me just told me that what I did wasn’t that bad. She dismissed what I had done to my body as not that bad. I went to one more session with her and she sat me down on the floor and told me that we were going to play games today because she needed a break and didn’t need to talk.
Let me tell you what I learned from that part of my experience: you don’t need a visible scar to prove that you’re hurting. And let me tell you when you have any kind of scar, there is no qualification that makes it “bad enough” to be worthy of attention. We all hurt and we hurt in different ways. When you hurt bad enough to take it out on yourself, there isn’t a need for someone to tell you it’s bad. I learned to own what I was feeling. Yes, it would still be many years after this point for me to integrate and understand that lesson, but when I learned that it was ok to feel what I was feeling, I cared for myself more and I didn’t let other people talk me out of it. I learned to sit with my feelings rather than cut them as a physical substitute for the emotions. I did all of that in spite of people I was supposed to trust telling me I wasn’t damaged enough to warrant help. To be continued.
I was 13 the first time I cut my wrists. Until I typed these words, I could count the number of people who know this on one hand. Looking back I see the drama of it all and I recognize it as a poor coping mechanism. But the events that brought me to that point were all too real and painful to my adolescent brain and I lashed out at myself because I had no other visible or viable outlet at that time.
I fear sharing this story because I hid it for so long that I became protective of it; it’s my story and it was something I had complete control of in my life. I didn’t want anyone to interfere or tell me that the way I felt was wrong. The emotions of early teens are complicated enough and I was tired of having them dismissed. I felt like everything I was going through was ignored or downplayed because the people in my life were also going through things. Or maybe I kept what I was really going through quiet because I thought their issues took precedence over mine.
My siblings are older than me by quite a bit—the closest one to me is eight years older, then ten years older, then fourteen years older. So in my early teens they were all knee deep in the throws of adult life, and life was not easy for them. I chose to keep quiet about myself because how could the challenges a 13 year old faces compare to the real life shit of an adult? I had convinced my brain that I didn’t need to bring any more “stuff” to the house. So I took care of it myself.
For me that started prior to 13 as many of my perfectionist tendencies really began to solidify early in school. I’ve always had an independent streak (fine, stubborn) that inclined me to do it myself. Couple that with large age gaps in the home and it’s a recipe for a child to struggle to keep up and prove were they fit in. And that is exactly where I was at. I started trying to prove myself early in so many ways. I wanted to be right and I wanted people to know that I knew what I was talking about. In reality, I think I just wanted to be accepted. But because of the age gaps, I didn’t have that closeness to my siblings as a child and because I was a neurotic know-it-all mess, I didn’t really have many friends. Don’t get me wrong, my siblings and I actually all got along fairly well but we butted heads a lot. And I did have a small group of friends that, in hindsight, I simply wanted to take charge of. I could talk to people but I couldn’t get close to them. I spent a lot of time alone or giving homework answers to other kids only to be ignored again the next day.
So, being lonely, feeling out of control, having the need for perfection, and seeking approval, attention, and an acknowledgement of my accomplishments created the perfect storm of self-loathing and hatred in a hormonal teenager. That’s how it started.
I can’t remember the exact final trigger, but I remember walking home from school that day and knowing that I was going to cut myself. I remember the feeling of frustration I felt and knowing I had to get it out of me. When I got home, I walked into the basement and took a razor off of my dad’s work bench. I went up to my room and grabbed a clean towel from my closet and turned on some music. It was completely melodramatic but it spoke to me at the time. I knelt on the floor and spread the towel over my legs and pressed the razor into my wrist. It felt like time stopped. I didn’t hear the music anymore and nothing and no one was around to stop me. I drew back the blade.
The instant I saw the thin line of blood well up on my wrist, it felt like a gigantic exhale from my body. Everything I had been holding onto completely went away. I cut again. And again. And again. Then I switched wrists. I eventually lost count of how many times I cut that day. But when it was over, I felt lighter than I had in years.
It took over a decade for me to stop hurting myself in that fashion. There are more pieces to this story, but I want anyone reading my work to know that I have been to the lowest of the low. The journey to self-love and self-acceptance is NOT an easy one. However, if someone can come from hating themselves so much that they would draw their own blood for fun and still learn the importance of their being, then anyone can.
When I speak about the importance of learning to hear intuition and connecting with spirit, I am speaking an entirely different level of truth. Some days are easier than others, but that is the forefront of my work; learning to make peace with your truth is key. Learning your worth, your purpose and expressing it is a goal I have for everyone. Trust me, no matter how bad it seems, there is always a way to the light. The secret is that the light is each of us all the time—we just have to learn to access it.
Being human is so messy. There’s no book on how to get through this life. There is no guidance for the day to day and we are all doing our best within our own frames of reference. So we make it up as we go and we get it “wrong” until we get it “right.” The room for error and the room to experiment and have fun in my life is something I struggle with every day. I feel the creative urge a lot but I let myself get distracted by the mundane or the things that I’m told I need to do. My fear keeps me firmly on the path set out before me.
Being human is about creating space and that is hard to do when you have a preconceived notion about what that space should hold. It’s even harder to create space when you are only allowed to create the life you’re looking for if you can afford it. So really when it comes to creating space, it’s about creating space for yourself as well as others to be equally flawed. It’s up to us to decide how that impacts us and where we put that energy.
I have a story that I’ve been hesitant to share before now because I was afraid of how it would make people perceive my work. I was afraid it would be too off-putting. I felt shame about this story because even as I was living it I knew it was “wrong” and as time passed, there were fewer and fewer people I could share it with. The way I handled the trauma of my life was not the conventional way—and there are some who would debate whether or not what I experienced even was trauma. I felt guilt because I didn’t believe that I had a reason to feel guilty based on my life. It left me conflicted about who I was—because I knew I had this experience but there were people who didn’t think it was enough to feel the way I did. I always carried the belief that all of these things were the direct result of my decisions, so anything that came of it was a result of my own actions. How could I be upset over things I brought into my life simply because it was more than I could handle? Do we have a right to be upset over the world not going our way?
I think the point is, regardless of what others may think, our stories are all an indicator of our messy humanity. We all have things we’d prefer not to have lived through. We all have things that embarrass us or make us feel a level of shame. And that too is part of being human.
Over the next few days and weeks (however long it takes me to compose it) I will share this story. I can’t move forward with this work without sharing this piece. And I can’t profess honesty and transparency without being honest and transparent. Sharing the pieces of life that we have choked down is a mark of our need to connect and also a need to remind ourselves that we are human. No matter how messy it gets, we are lucky to live in the beautiful chaos of it all. We can either invite ourselves in and learn to weather the storm or we can fight it and get carried away. I choose to open the door.
Today I am grateful for such a beautiful weekend. We have needed some time off, only to decompress. This weekend was absolutely gorgeous and we accomplished a lot. It was great to accomplish those things on our to-do list together.
Today I am grateful for progress forward. We took our house off the market a week ago and we have started making improvements to our current home already. We’ve been painting and making the space fresh. The ultimate goal is to find our forever home, but I am so grateful that we were able to take a stressful situation and work together for the bigger picture.
Today I am grateful to remind myself that I am capable. We all go through funks every now and then and I’ve felt off lately. It started as we were waiting to see if we were going to be selling our house or staying and now that we have decided to stay, I feel more settled. But there are things we need to do around here regardless. So as we are beginning our next adventures, I am seeing that I am able to follow through. I am able to do things I haven’t done in over 20 years. And I am happy.
Today I am grateful to release some energy. It has been challenging to get out of my head and challenging to find the right actions to take. So I’ve taken to making little decisions throughout the day rather than treating each decision as a life altering event. If I need to rest, I rest. I meal prep, I have been painting. When I can’t paint, I prep by taping walls. Anything to keep me moving forward. And it feels good. I know this is something I’ve mentioned frequently, but I genuinely need to remind myself of this all the time because I will fixate and paralyze myself if I’m not doing something. And then I will sit there doing nothing—so the reminders help. Today I am grateful to develop beyond my comfort zone. I’ve been spending time looking beyond what I have around me. I’ve been reading books on different topics, a lot of memoirs. So many of their stories have inspired me in the work that I want to share and offer on my own site. A lot of the pieces I have read have inspired me to have the courage to share more of my own story. It is only when we are brave in reaching beyond what we know that we learn.
The world needs us. The world needs us present and attentive and giving a damn about what is happening. The natural order of things shows us that with care, nature flourishes. We are the same. At work yesterday there was another issue between my employee and one of my coworkers about clothes. The context of the event made it clear that the last event involving my employee’s cloths (that I spoke about a few months ago) came from this coworker and not from the group that we initially thought brought it forward. My initial reaction was to be completely angry. Like all consuming righteous anger. But I had to pause because we were in the exact same position as several months ago and I am done repeating that story. So I took a beat.
The woman who has this issue is older and she has found herself in a pattern in her life. I can’t make assumptions but she has a different view on how things should be because she is from a different generation. When there is nothing to complain about a person’s work ethic, the age old tactic is to attack on a personal level. She approached my staff member and said some really inappropriate things and touted her position as a right to discuss these things with her. She had also mentioned that she had some frustration with work over the weekend so she was primed and looking for anything to target.
After I thought through all of this I realized the story is always the same: Fear. It’s fear and a lack of introspection. An inability to stop and pause and ask whether or not you are really the appropriate person to address an issue. An inability to recognize an unrelated issue can cause us to snap. And it took a LOT of work for me to understand that this woman needs some care. We need to care enough for each other to manage our own loose ends rather than lashing out at someone for a completely unrelated issue. It takes a lot of personal work, deeply intimate and thoughtful work to keep ourselves in check.
I feel like we are at a stage where we have to re-learn this whole human thing. Being human is as powerful as it is fragile and it will behave according to how you treat it. We have a choice to nurture ourselves and each other or we have a choice to remain defensive and isolated and victimized. I’m not sure what the tipping point will be or what side of the fence we will ultimately land on, but I know we have to make a decision and I know that whatever decision we make will have a factor in which way we go.
Whether it is a big moment or a small moment, we can start by breaking habits. I fought with everything in me to tailor my anger at hearing my employee was harassed again—and for the record I made sure to defend my employee. But taking a moment to really think things through helped me see where she was coming from and that it wasn’t my leadership she was attacking and it really wasn’t my employee. She was going after something she felt she could control. Knowing that helped me keep the situation in check both for myself and for my employee.
So let’s start small with taking care of ourselves, with understanding ourselves. We can demonstrate that we have tolerance for our human state by having tolerance for who we are. We can’t fulfill our purposes if we are treating ourselves like garbage so make yourself a priority. Own your worth and find joy in your experiences. Having love and compassion for ourselves is a step toward having that empathy for everyone else. Starting small can be the biggest step you take.
Scrolling through Instagram today I saw an add for magnetic lashes. You had to put this special liner on your eyes and these lashes stuck to it. They stuck so hard they wouldn’t come off even if you pulled them. We constantly put on a façade. I’ve spoken about it before but seeing how pervasive and compulsive the need is to appear a certain way and to control other’s perceptions is really disturbing. We have such little tolerance for natural or real. We’ve forgotten how to identify what we really feel because we are so busy trying to appear a certain way.
Why? Why do we have to present ourselves as fake? And worse, why do we encourage image over reality? It feels manipulative to me, but when I really think about it, I know it’s protection. We are protecting ourselves because we aren’t able to show our real selves. We have to learn to stop poisoning ourselves in every way and to just be seen a certain way. To be fair to those who simply enjoy makeup and use it as a form of expression, go for it! Even for those who simply want to enhance themselves and look different for an evening, go for it! The part I am against is the toxic belief that we need these things to look a certain way to be worthy.
Our revolution begins with self as I have mentioned before. Start with taking care of yourself—good care of yourself. Be patient and loving. It means getting to know yourself and getting comfortable with your own wants and needs. And then it means giving up distraction and focusing on the bigger picture, the bigger goal. Dig. Don’t buy into what you are told is necessary. Do away with what doesn’t serve or nourish you.
As someone who has struggled with control issues nearly my entire life, I struggle with acceptance every day. I’m good at helping people understand where they are at—but I struggle accepting where I am. I am human and flawed and no amount of pushing will ever get me to the perfect image I have in my head. What is perfect is life as it is. Having a life is a gift – and it is perfect. I can stop expecting the idea of perfection because it doesn’t exist. Life will be perfect as it was meant to be. That’s enough. The goal isn’t to be a perfect human—it is to be perfectly human.
Tonight I end with a simple prayer that I want to share: I welcome all change in my life and accept the events that occur as what is meant to happen. I give up control and accept what is brought into my life and I am grateful for the gifts I have been given. I will share my gift with others.
Today I am grateful to have experienced such a beautiful day. We were moving a ton today–lots of errands and cleaning and prep for the week. It was absolutely perfect outside and i am so grateful to have been able to see the day and spend it with my family. Some shots from the day are above.
Today I am grateful to have made a decision regarding our move. We have made the decision to take our house of the market. Things were not coming together in a way that would have allowed us to move forward in all areas of our lives. Not that we would have been suffering, but we would not have been thriving. We made the decision to live beyond “just making it” for the sake of thinking that is what we had to do.
Today I am grateful to be taking decisive action. Now that the house is off the market, we can work on projects we had wanted to do prior to trying to move. We are able to change things in the house, fix up a few additional things we didn’t have time to complete, and we are also able to start working on some personal projects for our businesses now that we have freed up some additional savings by staying put.
Today I am grateful that things didn’t go how we planned. There was a definitive redirection of our goal from a few months ago. Life was on pause for the last three months because we weren’t able to move one way or the other until someone made a decision on our home. Now that we made the decision for ourselves, we have these opportunities we were waiting for. To my first point above, we shifted out of the pattern of what we should do and are able to see what we really need to do.
Today I am grateful to end the weekend on a relaxing note. The last few weeks in particular have been so stressful and it has been taking a toll on my mind and body. I’ve been more forgetful than usual, I’ve been angry, and I’ve been holding an insane amount of tension in my body. Today we took the time to hang out together and to just have some fun. And after that we did a lot of running around to pick up things for some upcoming projects. It was a busy day but far more relaxing than it has been.
Today I am grateful to prep for the week ahead and to be in the moment at the same time. I try to meal prep as often as I can. Food is really important to me and I am learning how to take care of myself by nourishing my body. So, planning ahead means taking the time to carefully prepare what I’m going to need for the week. I find it really soothing. A few hours of work and I have everything I need to take care of myself every day.
Today I am grateful to let it all go. The aggravation, the anger, the frustration, the impatience, the intolerance of any mistakes (especially on my part). I am releasing it all and ready to start over. It can take a lot for us to accept our humanness. And being human means that we are going to make mistakes. It means that life course-corrects itself often and that we are meant to be there with it. I’m learning to distinguish between what I need to hold and what I no longer need to carry. It is an ongoing lesson and one that I appreciate more and more with practice.
The Intentional Dreamer 