Quivering Heart

My quivering heart yearns for connection and fears that it is not available. This is an old fear, as now that I am sober and mentally well, I am able to recall moment upon moment of genuine connection: tears, laughter, silence, deep conversation. With myself, spirit and others. It takes time for the memory to catch up with reality. The fear that past hurts will resurface remains for some times.
I must experience this recall of the good moments to soothe my quivering heart. To gently coddle it with tenderness, with memories of tender. It is unsure, wanting to hope, but hope feels so uncertain and potentially not safe.
Hope is such an interesting emotion. It feels quite elusive, unknowing, is it really there? Hard to pinpoint in the body as it's quite gentle and soft. It allows us to use our imagination for what could be. To allow our creative thoughts to go wild and explode with possibility. What about this?! And this?! It's exciting.
Excitement is another strange emotion that I can often get confused with fear. Am I excited or am I anxious? It can be hard to tell. They have similar physiological characteristics: a buzzing in the chest and head, urge to move the arms and do, brightness in the eyes trying to see danger or incredible beauty.
It is irony such as this that gives me great joy to reflect on. Needing to catch the slightest, nuanced differences and really pay attention to know what's going on. If I'm caught up in the past then I will project that onto my current experience. A fearful past will always divert to fear, even if excitement is a possibility.
There's privilege in recognizing this. Privilege in having the time to contemplate it. In having the education to develop the tools of deep thought. In having the resources to have the time. In having the ancestors to encourage critical thought as a value. In being white, cis, able in a white not having to cope with visibly standing out.
These privileges are awkward to name, but I choose to take pleasure out of recognizing and labelling them. Despite my quivering heart, or for it, I recognize and feel gratitude for my privilege. It gives me the strength for fight for what is in my integrity. To know when something is not in alignment with my values and to speak up about it. To create waves in other ways despite not having the most popular opinion.
Be still my quivering heart, for we have won.

Dear Dad

Dad,
Thank you for the funds to continue my education. I appreciate the support and am enjoying my masters in counselling immensely. It is helping me to grow and I feel extremely passionate about the material and a potential future career.
I was surprised by your letter and your assistance considering we haven't spoken in some time. I am not able to forget our most recent exchange without continuing to address it. I wish it were something that I could sweep under the rug so easily, but that type of coping has already caused me more trouble than it's worth.
Everything I spoke to in my initial letter is still true to me. Despite you may not perceiving your behaviour as sexually threatening, I must assure you that it very much felt that way to me. I was not only a child when you were making sexual comments about me and grabbing my butt, but a sensitive person. The way that you behaved towards me led me to feel terrified and extremely unsafe for much of my life. I have experienced a great deal of anxiety as an adult, including panic attacks that have been triggered by interactions I have had with you.
I believe that you were doing the best you could as a parent. I understand that parenting is not easy and am not sure of my own desire to become one. I wish I had felt that I could have expressed to you more directly how I was feeling at the time. Holding in my feelings in was very harmful to me psychologically and contributed to my desire to suicide as a teen and ongoing feelings of suicidality as an adult.
I'm not sure if you know this but, I endured quite a bit of sexual violence in my undergrad including rape, assault, harassment and stalking. These experiences have likely further fed into my fear and discomfort around men. These events were not your fault, but reminded me of the feeling of powerlessness that I felt when I was a teen when you made flirtatious comments towards me.
I feel like you don't and can't understand the connection here. We are very different people and I get the sense that you do not value the emotional world as I do. I believe this is quite a significant obstacle to us having a relationship.
I am an emotionally-oriented person, it is something that I do not feel I have a choice about. In the past, I attempted to drink and think my way out of my emotional world, but that behaviour contributed to my poor mental health. As I've become older and attended to my emotional life with more care, I have reduced my experience of suicidality and felt more confident. I believe that this effort lent me the confidence to return to school and pursue more lofty goals.
What I desire most is to have a father that interacts with me in a completely platonic way. This is not a normal request for a daughter to have to make. I have come to understand that this is standard behaviour for a father and your flirtatious style of interacting is out of the norm.
I do not know how to reconnect. It is not for a lack of care, love, or effort. All of my life I have wanted to feel safe around you. I have tried everything I can think of to make peace with my emotional experience and reactions to you. I have poured hours of time into counselling, groups, art, self-reflection, meditation, convincing, and forcing myself to let go of the past. Because I love you very much and I have been feeling so ashamed that I am afraid of you in this way. I am afraid I did something to make you feel sexual towards me. That I was a bad daughter and somehow I caused this.
I can no longer think that way because it is not useful to me. It hurts me. I cannot take responsibility for your parenting or your behaviour. Only you can. If you want a relationship with me then I need you to make the effort to understand my experience. I don't know what to do. I'm sad and I miss you, but I am unwilling to return to a reality where I hide how I'm feeling around you and pretend I'm fine. I would literally rather die because that's what hiding my feelings makes me want to do.

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".