Going on being.

I am typing this at the airport and I am really excited about this trip. I was anxious for a few of the previous days- but now the anxiety has passed. I feel happy and excited. Feeling really happy still sometimes feels weird to me- I mean sometimes I have to stop and think `What is wrong?` Because the feeling of feeling and of feeling ok still often feels foreign and new. But here I am.... Happy and on my way to be with friends I love. It does feel good to feel so much better.

Shifts.

Tomorrow I am leaving for my trip.  I am really excited about it and just a little anxious.  I lived in the midwest for 26 years and then have had just 2 quick visits there in the past 7 years.  And I have never (in the past 7 years) been back to the actual state I grew up in but this time I am going there.

I saw my doctor for the last time before his two week vacation last Thursday and not many days after that something happened that triggered an enormous anxiety attack in me.  I have not had such a strong trigger and anxiety attack in a long time.  I got really upset and I was crying and yelling (mostly to myself) and I contemplated calling the doctor who is taking calls for my doctor while he is away- but I didn't do that.  I also thought about cutting myself and getting really drunk- but I passed on both of those options too.  I cried, I yelled, I cried more and then the feelings passed.  It took me about 6 hours to calm down and then get to sleep- but I did not come close to hurting myself.  In fact- just the opposite.  Even though I thought of doing all of the things that I used to do when I would be triggered about/by something from the past and be in a lot of emotional pain- I did not actually do any of them and I instead thought: "This is going to pass.  I am ok."  And I thought:  "I AM GETTING BETTER. I AM GOING TO KEEP GETTING BETTER.  I AM GOING TO HELP OTHER PEOPLE BY TELLING MY STORY."  Major win.  :-)

Today I made this dress and I am going to draw on it.

Moving the fabric pens onto the drawing table which is next to the sewing machine.

Yesterday I saw my doctor for the last time before his two week vacation.  I am going to be spending 10 days in the midwest with friends but I am not leaving until this Tuesday.  (I will be blogging from there.)  Last night after therapy I felt really relieved that I am going to get a two week rest from my therapy work.  I also thought, "What am I going to do between now and Tuesday?"  I need to start working toward my new goals.  I am going to draw and sew, sell my work and apply for graduate school.
I feel scared about moving ahead but I am more scared to sit in the present and try to hide from a past I can not change and a future that I want to create and make good.  I am going through all of my things today- my drawings, my clothes, my art and sewing supplies and I am cleaning up and organizing my space and making room for change.  I think I have been waiting for a time to come when I feel less scared.  But no matter how much I overcome some fears there will always be new or other ones.  So I am not going to pretend that I am not afraid but I am not going to let it paralyze me anymore either.  I keep having these moments today of feeling completely overwhelmed while I am cleaning and organizing stuff- so I just keep sitting down and taking a quick break and thinking, "What is the one next thing I need to do?"  And then I see it and then I do it.  I get totally overwhelmed when I think all at once about how much more I want my life to change and the goals I want to accomplish- but when I pull myself into the moment and take the next little step ahead- I can make it.  And I have already cleared a big space for sewing, moved some furniture and I am going to keep going on all of this.  I can not really let go of my fears- but when I accept them I am more able to move forward.

mpd

I will not be silent.

Every time I want to write something here I really struggle first.  I tell myself I am unable to write well or to communicate my ideas in a clear way.  As I type that now I think it is not true but yet another "protection mechanism" -against knowing my own mind- which is really no longer really protecting me at all.  Not speaking about my life and feelings probably save my life when I was young- but now it just hurts me.  I keep feeling fearful about not being able to write well here- but I am just going to write anyway.

Last week during a therapy session with my doctor I was talking about what an enormous relief it was when I was in high school and I got accepted into colleges.  It was a relief because it was the first time I really knew I was going to get away from my sick parents.  It was also a shock because my father used to tell me I would be lucky to get a job at Walmart.  My therapist looked at me and smiled and said, "I don't think there is a Walmart in Venice."  He was referring to this. 

I am getting better and it has taken a long time and a lot of work but I really want to keep writing about my recovery here because for a long time I just really doubted that I would ever start to really feel better and now I am making progress almost every day.  Yesterday I had a very difficult therapy session.  I talked about things that were very painful and six months I would not have been able to talk about what I talked about or if I had- I would have stayed in bed today all day.  The "day after a therapy session" for a long time has often been a difficult day- but even that is getting better.  I feel like I am able to tolerate what I have said in better ways now.  I was really used to feeling bad for a long time after a therapy session- I would get really sad or depressed about something I had talked about and then I would feel like- as a sort of way to balance things out or as a way to recover from the 'overload' of what I had said the day before- I would spend much of the next day sleeping.  But that is changing and it feels really good.  This morning I saw my sister, did a few errands, finished a book, drew and started to read another book.  I need to figure out a lot of things- like how to sell my art, how to make money- but this is progress.  And it actually feels really big for once.  I have been so impatient for so long- I feel like this therapy has taken such a long time- but now I am feeling like it is not the heart of my life.  And for a long time- it felt like my main job was therapy.  Now I feel like I am starting to have much more of a life and therapy is a part of it.  And it just took 7 years of work to get to this place!!  Oh, child sexual abuse hurts people in so many ways- and it is difficult and it takes a long time to heal from it- but it is possible.  It really is possible to stop hurting and start feeling better and real and alive.

The book I finished reading this morning was "Comfort: A Journey Through Grief ".  It was written by Ann Hood and it is a memoir about suddenly losing her five year old daughter to a virulent form of strep throat.  It was an incredible book because of the way that she was able to describe her grief.  Or better yet- she was able to describe how indescribable her grief was.  And while the title of the book is "Comfort"- it was really about how there was none.  She could not be comforted.  There was nothing anyone could say to make her "feel better" about the death of her five year old daughter.

I appreciated the book because I really understand the feeling of not being able to find comfort in anything.  Healing from child sexual abuse is difficult and painful and often it feels like there is very little or nothing that can comfort you.  And you sort of just have to sit with that and tolerate it and wait for the feeling to pass.  I feel like I have had to sit with the grief and the sadness that I was not able to fully know about or feel while the abuse was actually happening to me because it would have been far too painful- and really just impossible for my mind to tolerate.  So after the abuse you start to know about the sadness and you kind of have to just sit with it and one of the worst parts of the horribleness of the feeling is the feeling that you will feel horrible forever.  But it will pass.  The pain does pass.

You are like a hurricane.

Jessieh breezed through town last week on her way back to school.

Sushi, tattoos, doughnuts.

Oh I love her.

Mary/Shelley

works in progress

Bursting heart.

Cherry Tomatoes
by Anne Higgins


Suddenly it is August again, so hot,
breathless heat.
I sit on the ground
in the garden of Carmel,
picking ripe cherry tomatoes
and eating them.
They are so ripe that the skin is split,
so warm and sweet
from the attentions of the sun,
the juice bursts in my mouth,
an ecstatic taste,
and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,
sloshing in the saliva of August.
Hummingbirds halo me there,
in the great green silence,
and my own bursting heart
splits me with life.

High time.

work in progress

Running to my fear.

Helpful.

"Suffering can be triggered by numerous causes over which we sometimes have some power, and sometimes none.  Being born with a handicap, falling ill, losing a loved one, or being caught up in a war or in a natural disaster are all beyond our control.  Unhappiness is altogether different, being the way in which we experience our suffering.  Unhappiness may indeed be associated with physical or moral pain inflicted by exterior conditions, but it is not essentially linked to it." from "Happiness" by Matthieu Ricard

Today I went to the grocery store and as soon as I walked in a woman looked at me and said, "I love everything about you."  She went on to say that she loved my tattoos.  A lot of people comment on my tattoos but no one has ever quite put anything to me in that way.

23 days until my 10 day gluten-free trip to MN!!

3 pages.

You will have to sit with a lot of painful memories.

You will think you will never feel better.

You will think you will never feel better.
You will believe it is impossible to really heal from something as painful as this.
You will know that the pain you carry with you now will be with you forever.


People will tell you it is possible to heal from the rape and you will want to believe them
but you will not be able to see it at all.
You will be truly blinded by your pain.


And it will not matter that you can not see it.
You are always on the path toward healing
and by the time you get there you will know
it is the same road you have been walking on all along.

You will want the pain to be about something different.

You will want the pain to be about something different.  You will want the reason you keep hurting yourself -to cover that pain- to not be because of the awful things that happened to you.  You will be wishing all of the time that all those awful things that happened  to you that you can not get out of your head- you will be wishing they were not real.  You will wish you were mistaken and pray that you are crazy.  You will want to be corrected but you will have no real hope or idea of what that could even mean.  You will sit for thousands of hours in silence and try to undo with your thinking the thoughts that keep wanting to come forth to you and you will do everything you can in your mind to try to make those horrible thoughts seem not real.  You will cry because none of this will work and at some point (after the thousands of hours praying that you are somehow crazy) you will know that what is in your mind is not illness but painful memories from your childhood that you wish had never happened.

Every synonym for rage.

High dirge.

Poem by Maggie Smith.

Button

It's the '50s. You wear your dark Levi's
cuffed up six inches. You have a cowlick.

There is a birthday party you won't attend
after a bad haircut. Your mother says,

Button, it's not the end of the world.
But the weathervane says, Button,

the end is near. It says the sky's gone
yellow with twisters. Small white stars

are invisible all day, but you hear them
chatter like teeth. Button, they say, why

not play with the others? Look at them,
having a fine time. But you wish the devil

on the neighbors. You wish them nothing
to pin the tail on. You wish the children

snatched up in the funnel, paper punch
cups still in their hands. The devil won't

call you Button. He says if you must
be haunted, at least be unashamed.

Maggie Smith