Just a Light Introduction

Feels like home....

I was so over the moon confident and excited to join when I heard about this community. I was told this is where I would find my writing home, and I think I had been craving that, though I had never really given it language. I had been being super consistent in showing up for myself to write daily and I fully believed that I was prepared to show up for the world now. Also, for the first time in my life I had absolutely no goal, other than to write. That simple. I heard this platform was a better alternative to other social media platforms where reading, like in most of the world, seems to have been replaced with 15 second live stream selfie clips. I finished my Bachelor’s last year at 43 years old (pauses to pat self on back). It was the most expensive accountability partner I’ve ever had, but I felt like I was killing myself slowly with all the words inside me demanding to be written through my fingertips, and yet I remained immobilized doing nothing but bragging or testifying every so often how in another life (before trauma, drugs, cocks, and kids) I was a talented future author. I had peaked at 12, and had been chasing a million and one other shiny things since, always promising and declaring that “someday” I was going to come back to my first love, and write “that book”. What book? I had no clue, I could barely be consistent with journal entries.

Before going back to school, I had tried to “get serious” about this business of writing, which I understand now is entirely different than just being a published author. Not that one is better than the other. Sometimes I genuinely was working to pursue the reality of writing “that book”, because what else were writers doing if not working on a book (at least that’s what I had been conditioned to believe and also something that had been stunting my writing journey). I felt I needed this to create my own personal legacy, a lasting imprint of my existence in a tangible way to be shared and passed down, like the stories of our humanity - something we are rapidly forgetting in society. Most times though it was to silence the ache, the gnawing, the call, to just write. As cliche as it is I needed it like my lungs needed air, yet I starved myself of both.

I’ve been cigarette free now for 5 years, and vape free for almost a year. Woot Woot. Thank you Covid. I am a hopeless romantic and always can find the silver lining and 2020 was the year when I said, “Ok bitch” (in the good kind of way), “you are almost 40 and life is passing you by…..” Blah blah, we all know the pep talk. I also almost died in 2020 (not from COVID or the Vaxy - and no I didn’t get it). But being close to death really helps you remember to live. (Another silver lining.) The irony to the smoking is that it literally was stealing my life from me, but taking that first hit gave me the illusion of safety, calm, peace, and respite while silently killing me. Like wise, not writing was doing the same to my soul. I looked like I was living on the surface, but there were so many doors of myself locked away that nobody including myself could see, until l put the pen in hand and began unlocking them layer by layer.

It’s not the sharing (I will get there). No it’s the unraveling that happens when the pen hits the paper and I realize that everything I have tried to pursue to find, release, and light up the hidden unknown places deep within have been in vain, because this is truly the only place I can be found, and its a never ending exploration that just keeps going, exciting me at every turn, drawing me in to fall deeper in love with myself in a way that causes me to fall deeper in love with the world I had existed in feeling like a stranger for so long. This world of writing shows me how connected I am to the fabric of this human existence in ways nothing (not even the deepest years in religion ever did - bait for other topics so come back).

But what did getting serious about my writing even look like, if I wasn’t focused on writing a novel? For me it looked like creating a daily practice and trying to immerse myself in it, and manifesting a powerful circle of other female writers that organically created a collective space where we could all play and emerge slowly at our own pace with no pressure. Oddly there was and still is so much resistance. There are so many trashy, unhealthy layers of judgments of others and self condemnation in myself I’ve walked out (and still can fall prey to) reading what I determine is shitty writing from others (when I’ve not been brave enough to submit my work for fear of scrutiny or rejection), making excuses about cards dealt in life, and a litany of justifications for why someone is actually writing and I’m not. The victim in me will find every excuse, and I hate her while also trying to learn to love her and validate her too.

I struggle to make space for my writing when I have already created a world with lots of people that take up space and have expectations of me. This patriarchy has done a wonderful job of making me feel less than human to prioritize something just for the sheer enjoyment of it. Some generational inheritance in me that is the belief that there needs to be a goal to be obtained at the end, the kind that would put food on my table for my family because that’s the only thing valuable enough to take time to myself away from the little humans that didn’t ask to be here. (A crock of shit I don’t buy but have so deeply embedded in me its hard to unravel the programming). That, in and of itself makes me angry as hell! (How funny that hell in and of itself was created to do that, scare me out of living for me and what I feel and hear in myself). Not an excuse either, because apparently there are many mothers that can do both, but I am not and never was that mother.

Ironically, I myself, am away on day two of a retreat that was specifically allocated for me to focus on content for this Substack, because this (I was told) is the safest place to both share and hide, where I would find a true writing collective - a world of people that get it, and where my demographic of readers would find me. Good luck because I don’t even know what kind of expectations to give a reader other than I am a manic, consistently inconsistent writer that trusts my intuition and the direction of my emotions and my time of the month. Sometimes I’m writing about taking down the patriarchy and other times I’m writing about perimenopause and depending on my perspective of either is determined from what angle I’m coming at them from because at the heart I have nothing but good will and optimism and a vision for utopia for all life on this planet, but I am fucking pissed at how hard I’ve had to struggle to find these deep, real layers of myself because of all the programming (I use this word repeatedly to remind myself and others our mainframe was highjacked before we had a chance but I believe we can get back to the “original intention”), conditioning, and well intended misinformation there is out there.

I do think if I had devoted the time “back then” my writing would be way different than it is now, for more reasons than one. But why I’m whining about the injustice of it now is because I am overstimulated and can not concentrate. My thoughts race. I will have a strong sense of direction for a topic, then go down a whole other rabbit hole, as I feel I may be doing now. I need frequent breaks as I get anxious and, the ugliest of it all for me, all performy (I make up my own words and performy is a variation of performing). It’s that performing piece that is a major block when I feel it, now, because when it used to happen putting on the mask was automatic. Survival is automatic, Primal, and we have programmed each other to do it so well - shapeshift that is. Then there is that other mother fucker, the perfectionist, come to steal the joy and bliss in my writing.

So I came here, on this retreat, after months of not writing- when I had written daily every kind of random and poetic reality under the sun without a care in the world - now frozen instantly when I made the commitment to show up for myself in a more public space, and lying to myself with the procrastination of life that it had nothing to do with fear. And I don’t even want to admit that, but vulnerability looks like that, not having it all together and being ok with flaunting it. It’s also highly irrational, because seriously whose going to read it? It took me almost 20 years to build the “followers” I have on Facebook, and I don’t have the bandwidth for marketing, so what was there to be scared of, yet “they’re all going to laugh at you” plays in my head while I type, knowing that’s the root of the fear.

When I first started my degree program it was to pursue a career in psychology and I remember learning that hostility teaches a child they are a burden, but being neglected or ignored teaches a child they are invisible and don’t exist. We are all just little children at the core (aren’t we), and for me being laughed at, or argued with, or getting attacked even isn’t the fear. No, its the rejection, the crickets when you share the most private places of your soul. It’s the shame I’ve carried in myself not giving myself my writing because I rejected so many places of myself, and its the fear that I will reap externally what I tortured myself with internally for so many years somehow thinking if I rejected myself and could be ok with it, then I would finally be ok with the world rejecting me. But I’m not ok with being rejected, none of us are. But I am in my wisdom learning that when I accept and hold space for all of myself somehow the shame and the fear fall away, but each time I close myself off again it comes back full force as it it never left.

I want to hold space for it. But I didn’t, and typically don’t. Which is why I left a fairly consistent writing practice and let the muscles, strengthened in my writing program, atrophy. Self-sabotage, because somehow not following my dream has always been so much better to me than pursuing it inauthentically, and I did that almost 10 years in the 2 cults I was in (more bait). I shouldn’t say lack of authenticity though, because back then I did believe I was being fully myself and in a way it was, an extreme piece of myself that holds the keys to all the masks. That archetype is definitely masculine. The protector of my psyche coming out to put on a show when there is the slightest hint of risk, failure, or vulnerability. I appreciate it and am thankful for the role it played in protecting me, but need some integration now.

I am determined, now at 44, to be true to myself at all times and that is a fucking scary thing, and not something I could have ever been without so much time looking like a worn out, lazy woman, by society’s standards, sitting in the midst of trees and feeling into who and what I really am. It was in that space where I really began to have a true physical sense of my femininity. I had all these pieces that were just the start of pulling the thread of her, and allowing her to come see the light as she had been hiding for and from for such a very long time. The inner child, never able to blossom to a woman before the man in me came along on his black stallion and wildly rebelled against us to fit in to the mold of the world by stealing and storing us and all our gifts away, only allowing them to reemerge by way of cold, callous technical papers and letters professionally articulated to be used for the business of running a household to which I’d hear, “you should’ve been a lawyer”. Why? Because I refuse to budge and come to your side? Because I can argue my point without sounding like a cantankerous emotional hag? Or because I’m a good liar?

In 2020, I stopped lying a little to myself about who and what I’d become. Still full of fear but tiptoeing out of hiding. Then a little bit more ever since. So on the verge of my crone phase of life I carry much wisdom from wounds, but am only recently embodying the mother in her fullness having lived in the shadows, while also working rapidly to redeem the maiden, and I find myself feeling so confident until we start to emerge in all we’ve learned and have to offer to the world and here I find myself putting on my cloak again before I go outside. But I’m grown now, and when my masculine is in balance we know that I can hold my head high and walk around naked in all my beauty. And so here I am.

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