Reclaiming my body

I feel peaceful. Yesterday I began painting a mural in my room. It's a copy of a self-portrait I drew several years ago of a nude woman clinging to her body, hugging it into herself with her eyes closed and an expression of protectiveness on her face. Around the time that I did this piece I was sexually assaulted by a married man who was a friend of my boyfriends while he was outside having a cigarette. We had all been drinking and I was drunk, I felt a false sense of security because of the man being married, and had children, I didn't expect that he would touch me sexually and because my partner was there I thought I was safe. At that time in my life I had not yet taken ownership or responsibility of my own safety. I thought that I could blindly rely on pretense.
It was not the first time that a man touched me in a way that was unwelcome, so this experience brought up a lot of emotion from the past, in addition to what I was feeling in the current situation. I remember slurring to my boyfriend that things had gone too far, but can't remember that anything happened next. Likely I began to keep my distance from the friend.
I was unaware that the drawing was about this experience until, several years later, a friend of mine alerted me to an art show that was about sexual violence awareness. I submitted the drawing along with a couple of others, that I came to see were all about me trying to understand my pain and reclaim myself before I was ready to admit it. I was secretly healing because the fear that I would forever be broken, and there was no point in even trying, consumed my conscious mind.
I've recently felt this calling to make large art so I realized that I needed to recreate the drawing as a mural. After some semblance of completion, I lay on my bed and stared at it. I feel hope, I feel joy, I feel so much love for the original artist. My past self was always taking care of me.

No matter the despair you feel, there is a part of you that is secretly fighting for your life on the sidelines.

Getting Old(er)

One thing I noticed that as I got older is that I became more and more careful with my body. I don't think it was a healthy careful, but more motivated by fear. As someone who has experienced bouts of depression, I knew that bodily injury was rife with opportunity to be depressed: change in schedule, reduction in exercise, a new, likely unwanted normal.
Sometimes these injuries are the result of us trying something new and feeling excited about the prospect of this new thing in our lives and so there's the disappointment and sense of failure that can accompany establishing the 'new normal'.
Yesterday, in the midst of having extra time on my hands, due to good old Covie, I decided to do a handstand not against the wall. Last year I started doing acroyoga with a group in town and I had so much (supervised) fun. I started feeling stronger and motivated to practice my handstands (against the wall). It had been awhile and I missed the fun of it so I thought, throw up an old handstand. I had rearranged my apartment so there was no good wallspace...
I fell.
No one was around, as I live alone, and the little child in me is like, "if a tree falls and no one hears it..." The pain was delayed by this thought for a few seconds before it slammed into my nervous system. Man! I haven't felt that kind of pain in awhile. It reminded me of just how careful I am always being with trying to prevent injury. It also reminded me of the rush that comes with the adrenaline of toeing the line of potential injury.
It hurts and I'm concerned that I can't run or do yoga which I've put a lot of effort into creating these habits. But I can get back into them when I feel better. I am RESILIENT! I've put a lot of effort into creating resiliency. Because these physical situations can also apply to emotional ones.
We can spend our lives avoiding putting ourselves in precarious emotional situations, not allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and therefore not getting hurt. But it does hurt. It reminds us of the pain that we had experienced to create that level of protection, we continue to live in that former pain and it rules our lives. Or we can celebrate that pain and recognize that it represents our spirit to try new things, to trust, to experiment.
I don't regret the handstand. I know I'm getting older and I need the wall. That's not going to stop me.

Attraction

Attraction is really uncomfortable for me. In the past I had trouble differentiating between being attracted to someone and acting on it. I felt that the intensity of my experience of attraction felt so intense that the object of it must notice. While perhaps it is difficult to completely obfuscate when I'm attracted to someone, I now understand that I can make some decisions as to how I allow it to influence my behaviour. To some extent.
Do not operate heavy machinery while under the influence of attraction. I recently read an academic article that was comparing the neurochemistry of interacting with your baby and with someone that you're in the throes of new love with. Apparently they both inhibit the same part of your brain that does critical thinking. So just like how you still love your baby despite it's high pitched enduring screams, you still feel loving towards you new flower despite their very obvious drug addiction.
So how do we navigate these waters so that attraction does not become disaster? There are some strategies that I try to employ. I try not to keep my attraction to someone a secret from trusted others in my life. I have learned not to tell them because that creates more fireworks. Secrets also create intrigue and adrenaline. Being mindful of where and the length of time I spend with someone I'm feeling amorous toward has been helpful. Noticing how I interact with them through text, making conscious decisions to flirt, or not.
This is all to protect myself from yet another relationship with someone who's not quite a good fit for my temperament. Not that I regret any of the partners I have had, I still even have a lot of love (but no contact) with the drug addict. But I'm getting old and my energy is more focused on the other luxuries in life, like spending time on my own, being still, writing!
Relationships take up a lot of time and energy, and that's great when they enhance your life, but not so good when you end up in a caregiving role with someone. I don't want to take care of anyone. I don't even know if I want to have kids anymore because the thought of taking care of someone else makes me want to run. Taking care of myself is a full-time job, that I'm enjoying.
But feelings of attraction...they're so yummy, so consuming! The pull of potentially having an erotic experience with someone else can be difficult to manage. It takes a lot of effort to resist, but I imagine the effort of being in a draining relationship...probably more effort than resisting sex. Plus, sex is so much better when we jive with our partners emotionally and feel seen, heard and respected.

Journey in anxiety reduction

Breathing is hard. It's supposed to be automatic so when people used to tell me that I had to breathe in order to calm my anxiety, I was pissed. I have experienced symptoms of panic in my life, residual from abuse. If you don't know panic personally, it constricts the chest and feels like breathing is not an option. So when I try to breath, it reminds me that I'm dying. Like drowning without the water.
Over the years, as I've healed, I've come to understand that it's in my mind that I cannot breath and if I'm patient and I do go through the motions it will help. I needed time to get there and people continuously reminding me made me angry. Made me feel misunderstood. But maybe it encouraged me to keep trying? That's a relieving thought.
Now sometimes I'll wake up and feel like I can't breath, once I gain enough consciousness I can remind myself "BREATH". I know that I process tough stuff in my sleep so I try to do a mediation or some other calming activity before bed, but it can be challenging to find discipline in the evening. It's my least motivated time of day. Sometimes the meditation feels too fast paced, sometimes I feel distracted, and sometimes it feels just right and I don't remember if I was awake for the whole thing.
Meditation can be a tricky thing, just like most anxiety-reducing techniques, when you're feeling anxious it can be hard to engage. When I'm anxious I feel like I can't do anything right, what's the point in trying, my life is over, I'm damaged, I'll always be alone...etc., etc. Do I really want to pause and be with my thoughts when I'm feeling like that? HECK no. Again, over time I've been reminded and reminded the benefits and experienced them. So meditation has become a part of my life.
I figure, even if it doesn't feel like it's helping it probably is and at times it really feels helpful. The former was what helped me stick to it. Also one meditation I did said that the action of recognizing my mind had wandered was meditation, that made me feel a lot more successful at it because I caught my mind wandering heaps!
I wonder if anxiety will always be a part of my life. Does abuse ever fade away until I am accepting of the way it's shaped me and I'm no longer angry? I'm not sure. Sometimes I feel accepting, but more often I feel so angry and frustrated. I feel broken.
I want to take responsibility for who I am, but things can feel so hard and it can feel impossible. As I'm writing this I recognize a lot of these thoughts are ancient in my life span, perhaps even ancient to my lineage. We can pass thoughts like these through generations. When your parent repeats something thousands of times to you as your brain is developing, you keep hearing it well into adulthood. It's a lot of work to challenge these thoughts.
I wonder how much we can really undo our conditioning. To what extent can we erase generational trauma. What percentage can I achieve difference from the aspects of my family history that have been going for several generations?
Stopping drinking has been a fascinating. I was blind to the insane consumption of alcohol by many generations of my paternal family until I decided to not drink myself. I actually felt afraid that I would no longer fit in and that I would be rejected by my family. That's how deep drinking goes. This was an unexpected feeling, I had no idea that's how integrated alcohol had become.
I did get pushback from some family members and it has been awkward at times, but there is no doubt that it has been a worthwhile effort. Drinking gave me a false sense of safety and the real thing is so much more calming to my anxiety.

Lonliness

Sometimes I feel so damn alone it feels like I'm going to die. I know this is a figment of my imagination, that it's a story that caught caught in my neurocircuitry, but also it feels so real. And it feels like it's my fault. Having been abused growing up, or maybe it's just some human's condition or being a woman, I have a tendency to feel like things are my fault. I assume that I'm in control, I'm in charge of my life so if I'm not happy I've obviously been doing something wrong. I am happy sometimes, dark moods can permeate my soul and allow me to believe that this is the new reality. Soon it will pass. Just writing it down is starting to put things in perspective and lift the veil of judgement.
I make mistakes. I grew up thinking I was not allow to make mistakes, that it was a fatal error, and yet I survived and I know they are opportunities for learning and growing. There's still a loud voice in my head that screams I'm a failure at times. I'm shouting back Take A Hike! Literally that's all we can do sometimes with those nasty voices in our heads. Find compassion that they mean well and shout over them.
I tend to be a good listener. I don't like to interrupt people, to the point where it can be challenging to set boundaries because I'm afraid that it will upset or hurt someone's feelings if I don't want to hear what they are saying (see previous article on people-pleasing). I've started to practice telling people, "actually I'm at my capacity for this topic, can we switch to something else?" or recently "I have a lot of opinions about this and feel very emotional, if that's not what you're wanting from this conversation we can change to something else." I think this is an interesting practice. It is not that I don't want to hear what the person has to say at all, it's a matter of subject. I am allowed to want or not want to engage in particular conversations. The number of hours I have endured lectures and tirades and monologues about things I was not interested in...that's when I'm doing a disservice to myself. That's where I'm at fault.
I don't always understand I have a choice about things, but I do. Especially as a white cis able person. I have a lot of damn choices. I can decide who I want to spend my free time with for damn sure and if they don't respect that I have boundaries around engaging in conversation, then I probably don't want to be around them. Even at work, I can walk away if I don't want to participate in a conversation. Or hang up the phone. I prefer to address things directly if I can, but sometimes I just too tired and that's okay too.
I require a lot of permissions. I need to remember I'm allowed. One of the voices in my head shoulds on me, and says 'you can't do it that way' and repeats 'you're doing it wrong" over and over. I've spent a lot of my life fearing that I'm doing it wrong. I read recently that you can be addicted to fear. What a concept! Addicted to a particular emotion. I would say that I fit in this category.
One thing about naming it as an addiction is that it externalizes the concept of 'fear' and allows me to play with it in a way that it has less power over me. Fear is a jungle cat of the jaguar variety. It prowls around inciting fear in everything that encounters it. This visual of my fear gives me an opportunity to pet it, to soothe it, hell I can even cuddle with my fear if I want. I generally imagine it curled up behind me nearby or around my head on my pillows at night. It comforts me and makes me feel less alone. That's the point of an addiction anyways...to keep us company in our terrible feelings of aloneness. When we feel just "so damn alone".

People-pleasing

People-pleasing is a long term disease in the women of my family. It can also be called martyrdom. It's all about predicting someone else's needs, trying to meet them at the expense of one's own, and then being angry when the person is not happy with the results. There are several problems with this activity. Often, we can't predict someone else's needs very accurately. We are denying the other individual from learning the much useful skill of asking for help. They might not even need or want the help we are providing. Finally, we believe we are being so self-less in the process but we are actually seeking praise and gratitude for our efforts, or some other particular outcome that is self-serving, so it's all a lie.
This behaviour is so innate, that I cannot control it. I do not always have a choice as to whether or not I will engage with someone this way. It is my default. If anything triggers me, of which there are many possibilities for this, I will begin to people-please. It is a lifelong effort for me to recognize it coming up, and make new choices.
It was actually a real 'light bulb' moment for me to recognize that helping others made me feel good and was self-serving. This allowed me to start receiving help with more ease, because why deny people that good-givin' feeling! It also allowed me to turn down help when I don't want it, which sometimes can feel pretty awkward because particular people are aggressive about wanting to help. They just can't stop themselves. I can empathize, which also leads to it being triggering and then falling into my own people-pleasing default mode...
What do you get when you put 2 people-pleasers into a room together?
I'll leave the answer up to your imagination and I'm not feeling so witting atm.
People-pleasing can be disguised as politeness and refusing it can be disguised as 'being rude'. I fucking abhor politeness for this very reason, especially as a woman I feel this intense pressure to 'fall in line' because it would otherwise be impolite. Do you have any idea what it feels like to bite your tongue and accept someone's "help" even thought it stresses you the fuck out and you feel that have no choice? *head explodes*
It's all about control. People-pleasers want to control what's happening around them, not because they're being malicious, but because they don't feel safe. Having grown up in an emotional abusive home, I understand completely. We create all these nonsensical rules to try to feel some semblance of control over what's going on around us, and even though it doesn't work, we pretend that it does because the only kind of safety we have access to is our imagination.
A lot of people continue to live in these imaginary worlds well into adulthood. The problem is that it can be hard to connect with others that aren't grounded in reality. Then there's all these minefields to navigate that they don't warn you about because they're not aware they're in a fantasy world and they have all these expectations that your actions will reinforce the fantasy, but how can you know you don't have access to it.
These fantasies are beautiful works of art. Beautiful, painstakingly detailed worlds. Folks have spent years creating them and they are magical 'safe' places. We spend a lot of time maintaining them. We spend a lot of time defending them. We feel like we will die if we forfeit them. It's a brave act to slowly release aspects of this world. It's hard to see the hands reaching out for help behind the walls. It's worth it though.

Rage

Whenever I feel rage, it makes me sick to my stomach. Often times, I will have a dream that night where I am expressing my rage. Last night, I was at a popular camping spot and I was having a hard time parking properly because the rage was clouding my mind. Then I was trying to set up my tent and the zipper was tangled, but another woman was trying to help me untangle it when it could only be a one person job. Our hands were obscuring each others' view and making the job twice as hard. That's when I acknowledged my rage. Now that I think about it, the rage had been building throughout the dream. Previously to being in the car I was lost in a store and then went out a door with a suspiciously wet bar handle.

Rage is often only something that can be elicited from family members, close friends, or partners. Family members and partners are the most likely culprits.

I feel rage when I am being held accountable for a significant event that was not in my control.
I feel rage when I am being judged or told not to feel how I am naturally feeling.
I feel rage when I am touched in a way or by someone that I do not want to touch me.
I feel rage when I think about times that these events have happened.

I have recently been studying boundaries. Psychological boundaries, and the importance of their existence. Some interesting aspects came to light:

Some people will try to fight my boundaries when I put them in place.
Some people will be angry when I state my boundaries.
In order to establish my boundaries, I cannot take others' feelings into account.
My boundaries are to protect me, they will also benefit my relationships in the long term by allowing me to be closer and more comfortable.
I do not need to explain or justify my boundaries.
Refusing to accept genuine compliments is a sign of poor boundaries.
Setting boundaries is not a selfish act.

Friendship and letting go

I realized in my 3 and a bit years in recovery that relationship is relationship. How I engage with others will be reflected in all my relationships: family, friends, romantic, myself. So I need to make the healthy choices now, today, in this relationship or it's going to continue biting me in the ass.
Over the past few days I've been feeling like I've 'realized' that a particular friendship isn't working. The physicality of this experience is like someone is screaming inside my head and there's a loudness that is being contained by my skull, a feeling of being frozen/trapped/can't move, a full body tension of wanting to run away. I've been working on tuning into my bodily sensations, it is not easy. More on that another time.
So I realized that this relationship is not working. Now what? Do I repair it? Do I tell them? Does it need to be in person? Traditionally there's all this hype about how it's 'unfair' to break up with people in text. Why exactly is it unfair? Does it apply to friendships? I can empathize with being on the receiving end of 'it's over' from a friend. Sounds painful. But is it more painful that someone pretending to be your friend even though they feel like someone is screaming inside their head?
I send love to all the people that don't want me in their life. I embrace them in their bravery to recognize what they need, especially women who feel the need to take care of everyone's feelings at the expense of their own needs. FUCK that. I can't take care of this friend's experience of me needing out. I don't have the capacity. I'm doing the best that I can and that's enough. I am enough.
I wrote a letter of forgiveness to myself in this process and the part that stood out for me most was, "I forgive myself, in the past, in the present and in the future for any mistakes I make in relationships. If relationships are meant to thrive, they will endure my mistakes." It feels true, it is true.
My body feels jittery with nervousness and excitement about trying something radically new: Taking care of my own emotional needs above all else. Oooo shit.

Something with my sponsor also resonated with me...I don't owe this person anything. We have shared our lives with each other and that is a gift, I am so grateful for the time we spent together, the things we learned from one another, and the support we mutually gave. There is no tab to pay up or IOU at the end.
It appears that I have all these rules and contractual agreements that I think I've entered into when I engage in various relationships. I'm 'supposed' to do all kinds of things, but it's exhausting and then I want to avoid these people because I feel so tired. I'm hopeful that my next friend is also aware of their internal rules and contracts and checks in with themselves so they can make decisions if it's a clause that they are holding on to or letting go or having a conversation with me about.

Some of the rules of friendship (which apply to some other relationships) that are no longer working for me are as follows:
1. I owe it to someone to have a conversation if I am feeling tired in the relationship because they deserve a thorough explanation as to why I'm doing something so 'horrible and mean'. Even if I don't have a particular answer, but a confusing buildup of many nuanced interactions that have given me enough information that I see we are not compatible.
2. I must be super honest and vulnerable in all the relationships I consider close, even if it is not reciprocated.
3. I need certain people in my life or I will die.
4. If I decide a relationship is too much for me, it is my fault and I have to fix it.
5. I'm not allowed to suddenly realize I no longer want to be around someone, but we have to have several painful and uncomfortable conversation that leave me exhausted attempting to negotiate how we can continue the relationship in some way.

Away with you RULES! I set myself free in enthusiastically breaking them!!!