Maybe There Isn't A Reason
But why? Because it doesn't matter "why" it is, just that it IS.
Summer is coming to a close and that of course sparks a feeling of self reflection within me. It may only be a season, a few moon cycles, but I have evolved. I have been reborn after a metamorphosis. My mind, body, and spirit feel woven together in harmony for the first time, allowing me to be brave enough to share myself with the world, honestly and authentically. Despite some forgivable hiccups of human moments, I have been true to my reality and my voice since my emergence from cocoon. Shaving my head was 100% a catalyst for this profound transformation. When you cut off all your hair after having lived in my brain for 29 years you realize how much fucking time you spend in your brain.
Perhaps it is simplistic, alas, I am the simplest of the human folk. I wish I was able to run a break down of time I spent thinking about my hair pre- and post- bald life. Not just doing it throughout the day 15-20 times, but the touching it, tucking it, critiquing it, comparing it, hating it, loving it, drying it, avoiding wetting it. I had always known on a level that my hair was simply holding me back, like everything that occupied my brain though, I just tried to ignore it. To make myself be like everyone else. For some reason I didn’t think I could be that person; the person who shaves their head for the hell of it. It is just hair though. And I can be any person I want to be.
No More Asking “Why?”
Quick story, when I was growing up my grandparents lived in Florida for half of the year. Wild to think now how unrealistic that would be for any of us to ever have that in our lives now, but it is how the old people got to live. To be fair it was also a trailer park on a golf course in Ocala, so not the Ritz. I digress. For spring break every year we would go and visit and it felt like the most lavish vacation in the world. My cousin and I muse now about how when you look at the community they lived in it was more of an Elk’s Club commune with a community pool. When I was six though it felt like the most incredible trip. For a whole night we would drive. Dad braving the exhaustion, mom snoring loudly beside him. Me, co-pilot. Firing questions as fast as they could fly into my child and ADHD riddled brain. Most of my questions began the same way: “Why…?”. Like many of us, I felt like everything needed to be able to be explained. Probably why I struggled to grasped the concept of Catholicism. Anywho, one of these drives I was posing a particularly obscene amount of questions driving my father to tell me “If you ask one more question I will not pay for your wedding”, to which of course I replied, “Why?”. Luckily, he forgave me and years later did pay for my wedding and even photographed it himself. I was three years ago today. Tiny. Perfect.
Asking questions, finding meaning: it’s kind of my thing. I am trying so hard to hang it up though. Obviously not all questions, but questioning everything. Questioning myself. I am so fucking done with that, I will make mistakes, but I will do them confidently.
Really what I want to focus on is trying to find reasons for all the things that don’t matter. The person I was a year ago would have been wrapped up in that Ballerina Farm bull shit so quick when that NYT article came out. And I saw a TikTok or two, I mused. I didn’t give it meaning though. The truth is people like that don’t matter. Celebrities, influencers, even artists. Art matters because of the impact it makes on you. I do think we should celebrate those who are uniquely gifted at their medium, however the worshipping of other humans is, well a silly human thing.
I do this on a much smaller scale too. If I feel tired or sore or angry my immediate response is to identify the cause and the solve the problem from there. I am learning though, I am almost 30, I am going to be tired. Sometimes after a day of chasing my mini me around my knees are going to ache. The scary part if that sometimes I will do this in much more insidious ways. I will have a head ache late at night and then instead of sleeping that night I will lie awake first convincing myself of an aggressive brain tumor. Followed by hours of negative self talk and shame cycling between being crazy for even having this internal dialogue and shame for not having got help sooner because now the imaginary tumor is inoperable and I have now have my death sentence. Lastly, I will lie wide eyed staring at the ceiling until the sun comes up, think of all the things I wish I could have done, things I should or should not have said, regrets.
Since I have stopped asking the questions though, the whys, I haven’t had one of those nights. I haven’t had a car ride that I don’t remember because of how deeply I have dissociated into planning my, very much alive, father’s funeral and writing his eulogy. I haven’t been pulling over to check that the carseat hasn’t become unfastened somehow and my baby is about to figure out how to open a car door on the highway.
The thing is, I am actually just so fucking scared all the fucking time. I feel like if I know the whys, then I can figure out the hows, and avoid the whats. Even when I was preaching out releasing what you cannot control there was a part of me somewhere on a level still trying to figure this all out. To make all the puzzle pieces of the world together all neat and tidy. I accept it now though, that the world will never be neat and tidy. That’s okay. Messy is beautiful, I just want to help make it less painful. Right now that means removing the pain I create int the world. Starting with my own brain.
Everyone Deserves Love
I am going to admit to you all that I am a “ghoster”. I will ice someone out, usually it is more in situations where I just am not feeling it, if a conflict or something occurs I will say something. I am quite proud that I am a rather good communicator when it comes to the subtle exit from someone’s life. Remind me to tell you the story of the time I politely told someone to fuck off. Dating though, oh I ghosted people all the time. I am not proud, but I did it. I even stood a guy up once. I ghosted a man that I had had multiple, meaningful dates with. We connected deeply on a level, but it was a vibe thing and I just needed to not. So blocked and ignored everywhere. It’s crazy that we live in a world where we can actually delete people.
I am saying all of that to admit that it is so much easier to walk away than to stick it out. I am trying so hard to stick it out with my person. My person who inspired the interjections in my head that make me question every decision I make. My narcissist, maybe not clinically, but in behavior. I think most of us have one, or many in our lives. I want to stress that the way you navigate your relationship with your person is deeply yours, but I also want to share the story of someone who inspired me recently.
A person in my group therapy was sharing about their person, who for them is their spouse. They were expressing feelings of being attacked and lashed out on. Their person was projecting a lot onto them and we all gathered around and showed our support for this person and their situation. A lot of the conversation following was based around the theme of leaving the relationship. Getting yourself out and keeping your heart safe. An unbelievably valid option. Especially when it is an option.
There are other options and this peer of mine was feeling called to the option of sticking it out. Being there for their spouse because unfortunately they don’t really realize how they are. That’s the sad truth of these people in our stories, we want to make them a villain, but they are clueless. My person wouldn’t know their impact on others lives, they would have no idea the imprint their words created within me. Does it excuse the behaviors? No, but it does add a layer to the process of understanding it. Sometimes we don’t have the capacity to hold space for people who challenge us, that is okay. Of course it is. I have been struggling all summer because I had a group of friends tell me that I was too much for them and they could not handle me. I want to be angry, sad, some other emotion, but instead I am finding peace. I am accepting that sometimes we can’t stay and fight.
Other times we can stay though and we can fight like hell. We can fight a lot harder than we thought. My peer was sharing with me that she was finding strength through this partnership through a bible story. Deborah’s story. Now, I may have been raised Catholic, but I don’t know how to understand the Bible. I also don’t have a Bible in my home, one of the few sacred texts we don’t keep. The sentiment I took away from Deborah was that she was the one who gave love to those that others felt were unworthy. She had patience for those others did not want to wait for. She forgave those others wanted to condemn. Deborah seems pretty bad ass and I have been channelling her a lot more when it comes to my person and our connection.
No matter how difficult, cruel, confusing someone is, they still deserve love. When I stop believing that I stop being human.
A Healthy Dose of Exposure Therapy
Another fear of mine: spiders.
Really any and all creepy, crawlies. The more legs the more terror they make me feel. Living in San Diego and experiencing cockroaches for the first time was not a fun experience. They move so much faster than something that size should move. They defy logic and I fear them as greatly as octopi.
Thankfully, northeast Ohio does not have cockroaches, yet. We do, however, have spiders. More spiders than I ever really imagined. Perhaps the fact that we live in such a rural area increases the number, but I am not sure. I can say it affects their size. My hypothesis is that it’s because they have more room to live and hide. Whatever the reason my home has a plethora of large spiders. In my first year here I avoided them and demanded their death at the hands of my husband. I practice reiki and do not align with harming living beings, so I justify it by being the orderer instead of the executioner. When Mason moved in he started naming their species when he saw them, I had no idea the wide variety in such a small area. One has stood out to me though, the orb weavers.
I have one that sits in the upper right corner of my sliding door in the kitchen. I have a perfect view of her web while doing dishes, a fact I tried to ignore for long time. Until I started to take advantage of the opportunity the universe was giving me: a chance to find love for something I am absolutely repulsed by. Like death, spiders were a nightmare theme of mine, keeping me up at night. One night I decided to take a look at the spider, almost instantly I became entranced by the intricacies of her web. I was amazed at how she continues to return night after night to this same spot to build her web even though it was so trafficked during the day that by the time night comes and she emerges to hunt she has to stat from square one. Almost every night. She does it though. I highly doubt that when she arrives at her spot and finds her masterpieces destroyed she blamed herself for it. And not only is her web her art, it is how she eats. It is her work. Creating this web, caching food, survival. That is her whole existence. She will never see what her web looks like at 6:30 in the morning when the sun is first coming up and the dew glistens on her spiral weaved maze. She has no care no clue of the beauty she creates in this world, nor that inevitably she will wake up and it will be gone. Does she spend all day mourning her fallen web and upset that she is yet again having to build a new entanglement?
Charlotte. She lessons I have learned in my evenings with her are orphic messages I get to decode through the beauty of nature. How could I fear her when she is one of the angels in this world showing me all I need to know?
So basically, fear of spiders: conquered.
Until Ursula. Ursula is a garden spider, a yellow orb weaver. A cousin of Charolette’s, if you will. A…evolution of Charolette. I stumbled across her at sunrise one morning taking pictures of small, non intimidating spiderwebs. I looked up from the stick I was photographing when I saw her and my heart stopped. Ursula is fucking terrifying. She is huge. Her webs are so intimidating I feel like I could get caught in them if I cam not careful. She dominates a corner of the garden by the fence with the forgotten zucchini. Zucchini that some how ended up 30 feet from all the other zucchini. This is where Ursula lies in wait for her next victim to fall prey to her web’s unique design. Made to catch the wind juuuust right so that they won’t even know what hit them when she finally makes her strike. Ursula is so fucking scary. She is teaching me that sometimes, it’s okay to be scary. Sometimes you scare everyone around you, yourself included. You do it because you have to, not because you want to. I am sure Ursula isn’t getting off on the fact that the final moments of her prey’s life are spent paralyzed with terror as she wraps them up into a tight ball, then sinking her teeth into them. A slow, painful death I presume. I don’t think it’s intentional. She has to eat.
I am a bit nervous to see who shows up next at my spider intervention, I fear they will be even more menacing than Ursula, but that can only mean that I have so many more wisdoms to learn from the arachnids.
