what i wants....

  when i think about what i want, it is not to have a blog where i share my crazy sad darkness.  i'd rather just show my gleanings and musings.  for one, though, i wonder how often i'd post.  once a month, right around ovulation?  for two, how many times have i been getdownonmyknees grateful for reading some other woman's words, where she bares it all, including but not limited to all the dankly dark grit, and how many times has the reading of others' stories been what's kept me from feeling completely alone in this experience of being the woman that i am?   and third, how many times, have i, been relieved, by sitting down and writing my stuff out?  how many?  a zillion.




(our burned mountain)


in thinking about how i've been on here lately, i wonder this.....
why don't people talk about stuff more?  i often wonder this, actually.  why do i feel so alone in sharing my hard times.   we go around with our 'i'm ok, i'm fine, i'm good' faces and words, we display that to the world for the most part.  because it's not acceptable to be real with our hard sad pain and anger.  it's just not.  our culture for the most part has shadowed it all to the back of the closet.  pack away your hard feelings.  put them in the suitcases and pretend they're not there.  it's like using the bathroom.  you're taught to go into a private space to be with these feelings.   ( and just for the record, i am glad we all go to the bathroom in private.  but i question going to the back of the closet for 'negative' emotions.) or the kicker for me is this:  i was taught as a young adult, just through experience, cuz noone in my life had been there for me the way these people began to be,  that the main best way to be with these unacceptable feelings was in a private room, with a person i'd never known before, and i had to PAY them to hear me express my hard confusing feelings. and PAY them to talk back to me.   it's a very very disturbing reality, i find.  a disturbing reality that i'm glad to have been introduced to.  i am.  if it wasn't for this psycho~therapeutic reality, i'd have self~imploded long ago most likely.  but still, isn't it sad that that's where our culture has brought us.  so many of us feel we have to go pay someone to listen to us.  so many families were shrouded in shaming  negative feelings.  i'm hoping to start a small change in this little family of ours.  talking about whatever, anything and everything, nothing is taboo to discuss.  parents are tuned in, maybe sometimes too tuned in to kids' emotional states in this house, and kids are pried open even.  i remember going to my teachers at school to talk about how sad i was at home.  that never worked.  i would be sent to some office to talk to some lady i didn't know about my feelings more, or worse, they would call my parents at home to tell them what i'd said, even after i begged them not to, and then i'd get in trouble at home,  for saying i had it hard.  'you think you have it hard?'  i got that speech.   how insane is all that?  us poor humans.  trying to be all cool and rise above stuff, trying to teach our kids to brush their feelings aside.  i remember being brought to church to tell the preacher what i had done, disrespecting my parents by sharing private home-stuff at school.  i remember my dad telling me to smile at this one christmas gathering at my step mom's parents' house.  i had been crying before we went over there, and he said if i did not smile the whole night i was gonna be in crazy big trouble.  you know, that might be why i have the biggest aversion now to faking my way through feelings.  not only do i have an aversion to it now as an adult, i can't even do it.  i have friends who can put on the most presentable face any time they have to.  and they tell me they're faking it.  cuz i ask.  they just have that skill.  i do not have it.  it sucks a lot of the time to not have it.  it makes my social skills look so piddly sometimes.   that might be why i love it, that at zhi's school, she is never told she has to share in the morning check in sharing circle.  it is TOTALLY fine if she wants to pass.  she passes every time.  i've said that before here i think, how she does this.  i just love it so much.  no shame for feeling shy.  if she wants to outgrow that she will.  but she will not feel shame for feeling how she feels.  she is pretty confident at school.  and she simply doesn't like to share with the whole group.  someday she may be in a class where it's required, but hopefully at that point, she'll have a really secure sense of herself, and it won't be so painful.  don't know.  but i'll be there cheering her on, and honoring her feelings.



i want to ask again, why don't people talk about stuff more?   actually why never really gets me anywhere but further into my head.  instead of going there, i'm gonna just share what i've noticed.  as a kid, i learned that the effect of sharing my truest sadnesses with people who i thought would listen and care, meant i would get in trouble at home.  i didn't want that again and again.  that was worse than dealing with the way things were.    i learned sort-of fast not to talk about my sadnesses.  it simply meant shame and spankings and trouble.  then as an adult, with my first baby, i learned pretty fast, that no body really wanted to talk about what it was like to have a baby with a brain injury and those big honkin hearing aids on his head.  i wanted to talk about it, with people who understood.  that's a big part of it.  sometimes our experiences are just very unique to us.  sometimes it is true that no one can understand.   it was impossible.   or maybe sometimes there were really kind souls who wanted to hear and inquire about how it was going, but my sadness then, would be so unbearable to me, that then I couldn't go there.  i'd stuff it in and just focus on the joy.  and that wasn't so bad.  the irony of that time, is that as painful as it was, i experienced some of my highest joys being with max as an infant.  that boy was magic, and it was literally impossible to not be sucked into his joyful vortex.  it still is like that, thank goodness.  when i get paralyzed in fear for him, he is the one, with simply his roots in the joyful present moment, that catches my attention and gets me to feel things other than just fear.  but life seems to sometimes do that to us.  gives us these experiences that for a while anyways, we have to weather alone.  or with a therapist.  that has been my experience a handful of times.  i am faced with feelings and experiences that just don't feel appropriate for anywhere other than the closet.  i was taught this.  we have all been taught this.  shame.  shame.  shame.  be perfect.  be perfect.  be perfect.  (maybe this blog could be called the shadows in my closet.  or maybe i need two blogs.  the shadow one and the light one.)

and what about with marriage stuff.  why is it so freaking taboo to get real on what it's like to be married?  when d and i were going through our 7 year nasty freaking horrific itch, there was nobody really, no woman that i knew, who was willing to say what it was really like to be married.  to share what the sexual relationship was like.  the psychological one.  the spiritual one.  buttoned lips were all i found.  or turn~the~other~cheek kind of advice (pervert pun!!).  that was unbearable.  so of course, back to the therapist i went.  david and i actually had one couple friend who tried to call an intervention when they saw what a bad space we were in.  that was brave and cool and i'll never forget it.  it helped.  that guy friend is who suggested david do the mankind project which was a definite turning point in our ability to connect deeply, on the level we were needing to.  that couple has since divorced, though.  we couldn't help them.  but they also did not go to years of couples therapy.

 you know, the skills required to guide people through feelings like these, traumatic feelings, aren't had by everyone.  so that's a good thing for me to remember.  it makes me feel like therapists are superheroes.

the other deal, is this:  it sucks to go into my pain and talk about it.  that means i have to feel it.  i'm guessing this is the biggest reason for why it's not done more, being real about hard stuff.  and to top that off, it sucks also to feel what it feels like after sharing hard stuff too.  it's so exposing.  after we've been wired to feel ashamed for sharing dark feelings, it is terrifying to do it.  BUT.  i feel like most of the time, if i shared my feelings with integrity, without shame, without trying to hurt anyone in the sharing, as much as it sucks, both during and after, since i've been an adult, and there is not fear of getting in trouble, there is some freedom that i gain, that does make it worth it.  a bit like childbirth.  there's just no way around the pain.  and then there is the almost guaranteed gain of more freedom.  for those of us who signed up to syphon pain through our systems anyways.  some of us, don't have a clue really, as to what would make a person need to share their stories.  that's ok.  but i am onmyknees grateful for the people who feel the need to and then do it.  they are my lifelines.  i wish my parents had shared their stories.  they were too painful i guess.

how much longer am i going to resist who i am, or what i feel?

how much longer am i going to feel lame for having to, needing to,  reveal my darkness?  even when i feel so held in people's responses when i do go dark.  i still want to ask why so hard?  just is.  i hear a therapist telling me that.  it just is.  gah.  crazy making.  i read elizabeth zimmerman's opinionated knitter book all saturday morning this weekend.  she was light and funny and got down to business.  i want to be more like that.  god damnit.  maybe i will be someday.  right?  maybe. maybe that's just my goal.  but i'm not that way now.  and the only way to get any relief from my darkness is to be with it and let it have space.  respect it actually.    to be real about it when i feel it, and perhaps someday, i really will feel very free.  and i will have mostly lightness and humor and ease to share.  and all that.  mostly though, what i want more than that, is to get to a place where i don't resist what comes through me.  where if i fear feelings, i don't fear them for long.  cuz i'll remember who i am, under the feelings, and that girl is not afraid to be herself.  she is strong.  and capable and here to teach like she's been taught, how to be cool with feeling what she feels.  how to feel unashamed of feeling what she feels.  how to say with words, both spoken and written, what she feels.  how to respond to others' feelings openly, honestly and fearlessly.  the feeling warrior.  heh.

there's something i'm getting about, yes this is hard.  really really hard.  and like max showed me when he was just a month, 3 months, 6 months old,  it can also be really really joyful. hardness and joy playing around together.  they happen at the same time.  if you know it.  if you look.  if you choose.  if you see.  he was so easy for me to see when he was so little.  he still is.  and he was so good at sharing his joy.  he still is.  and the girls are too.  if i choose.  they are so easy to feel joy oozing from their spirits.  and i can be like that too.  i got some good tastes of feeling myself happy last night, listening to the music we went to hear.  ani.  happy music high.  they don't negate each other.  the pain and joy.  i am feeling that as radical at this moment of insighting it.  like childbirth.  are the birth metaphors getting annoying yet?  they kind-of are for me.  but they keep coming.  it's not all like childbirth, obviously.  there are some pains we feel that don't necessarily guarantee we will walk away afterward with a baby, or something we could relate to as a metaphorical baby.  and still, i am wondering if even in these kinds of experiences, like when someone you love dies, there can still be times in the days, of joy.   i know this to be true.  and i need to write it anyways.  i want to remind myself of this.  and when those moments aren't here, it is time to honor the ones that are.   but maybe,  i'm getting an understanding i think of how people can struggle and seem so genuinely happy sometimes, even at the moment of feeling horrible internal emotional pain.  and maybe i'm  even getting an understanding of how those people i know, are able to turn on the 'fine' vibe when really if they are honest, they are not feeling fine at all.  is it some kind of reservoir they tap into, or some kind of knowing, that this fine channel is available too, and maybe switching to it cuts them off from current other feelings if they choose to change to it for the sake of being socially acceptable, which is why my friends who do this,  say it's not actually enjoyable to fake it like that, but maybe i'm thinking, that is how they do it.  they are genuinely rooted in joy and can switch to it if need be.  but it doesn't take them away from the pain that gnaws away inside, cuz it's needing its own time being tended to as well.


 my step mom and me watching soap operas.  that was the one time i remember feeling that i could trust her.  she'd do laundry then usually, and it was such a mellow hour, watching those stories on the tv.  we need our stories.  they are like some light in the dark for sure.  and some kind of trail map.  many to choose.  and she and i watched the saddest juiciest dramas together.  and felt comforted by them.   but she had no way, no resources or knowledge, for how to transfer her inner world to health.  that's all i'm trying to do.   it's a big process.


indefatigably

insouciant

my new favorite vocabulary words.  thanks to virginia woolf and elizabeth zimmerman.  learning me some new words.

i want to be indefatigably insouciant.  but i'm not.  and i bet you i never will be.  but here and there, maybe so, that would be cool.