On the last day of November
Making it a year, healing internalized ableism, land co-regulation, choosing writers... :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON NOVEMBER 30th 2022
It is about 6:30 am as I start this email. It is fairly dark outside, the sky currently transitioning from a dark starry black to a deep concentrated navy. The wind is howling a bit. The sun will rise in a few, but it’s not time yet.
This reminds me of when I was writing Can You Turn The Lights Off in the winter of 2021. The timeframe between 5:30-7:30 am was my favourite time to write. I miss it less more and more - and I think that is a sign that my grief about it ending is integrating. I have deep fondness for living it, rather than despair that it’s gone.
And I am thinking a lot about how lucky I feel to be chosen as a writer; as a storyteller. That could potentially be sticky language to use, but it does end up feeling that way a lot. I feel chosen by you.
Picking and choosing a writer, or a storyteller, is no small thing. Storytellers influence us. It is vulnerable to allow influence in.
I think about my deeply chosen artists and writers and storytellers. And so I think of Iman Gatti, and Marlee Grace, and Sara Gibbs, and Katherine May, and Anna Fusco, and Sarah Wilson, and Dolly Alderton, and Ruthie Lindsey. I let them influence me. I let them teach me through their writing. I know myself more because of their writing. They shine flashlights to places of me that I need to see, and know and hear.
And it is one thing to read a piece someone wrote and love it. That happens to me a lot. But it is an entirely another thing to fully choose a storyteller. To say:
I am in this through all your seasons, through all the themes you explore, through all the things god tells you to make.
And so if you have chosen me as one of your storytellers, and you are in it with me through the seasons, interested in how I will describe life and what I will notice and learn and transmit, I thank you. Writing is a practice that is done in solitude in technicality, but it is never just for me that I write - writing is the most connective thing I can think of. Thank you for buying my new book this year, thank you for emailing me about it and thank you for reading this newsletter.
I have dubbed this the vibe of 2022. Here I am at my friend Danielle’s house following the event in which my air conditioning in my car stopped working when it was 45 degrees celsius in the southern states of the americas. I have mainly only worn this MTV shirt I found in Danielle’s closet since, just FYI. This is now my contact photo in Shannon’s phone.
Danielle and I, June 2022. Somehow not wearing the MTV shirt during this day excursion.
I talk a lot about how I am pair bonded with the land I live on. I think whatever happens to my lake happens to me, and whatever happens to me, happens to my lake. I met this forest this summer, a gift from my acupuncturist - letting me know about this specific forest and set of trails that locals keep very tightly hidden from the world at large to preserve its magic. She said, do not tell anyone about this forest except those you trust with your life. I have only told my mom about it so far. Have only brought her too. Also I loved that my acu decided to let me into the landscape here more.
The forest and I over the past few months have formed an inexplicable love affair. I feel her when I leave her and she begs me to return. There is this huge moss covered rock in there I have named Cleo. One afternoon not too long ago, I was leaning against her, and I was like, would you like a name? And then a couple with their dog were heading my way on the path, as I leaned on the rock, and the dog outran them and arrived to me in a fury. We met, and then they said her name: Cleo. Wait her name is Cleo? Yes, they replied. No way, that was my beloved dog’s name!
So as we parted ways once more, I said to no one, except maybe Cleo herself, well you are now also a rock Cleo. Not just white butterflies.
I had no idea if I would like the forest when snow had fallen - I had never met her like that - I was nervous last weekend when we drove out and parked and started our climb.
Spoiler: REALLY loved her.
Today marks the year anniversary of a significant familial trauma for me - the start of my falling apart - something that has initiated some of the deepest healings in the most profound corners of my psyche and nervous system for the last year.
Of course, every initiation is merely an invitation. We can decline it. We can look the other way. We can say, “not now”, and then another invitation will be made to us later on.
Laying and chatting with my mom the other night, I said, “Can you believe it’s not even been a year yet? It feels like a decade has gone by already.”
Before the snow came
I have been facing myself and my avoidance of being loved or of being supported or of being comforted quite seriously, because I realized that I thought somewhere deep in my psyche and nervous system that being loved would mean that I would ruin someone else’s life by way of being a priority.
And month by month, I have arrived somewhere new in my self-concept.
It sounds silly to admit out loud, but I truly did not believe loving me was anything but a very large burden for other people, sometimes I even felt it about myself vis a vis myself, so when someone loved me and told me they wanted to love me, or that I was easy to love, or they wanted to give me things, just as an extension of that love, I felt immediately suspicious. I genuinely felt they were lying to me because it was so far from the truth I saw. So of course it felt like they were liars and not to be trusted.
If the truth as I saw it was that I was extremely terrible to love, and I was more or less a curse to just get through, if someone were to tell me this was not true, or act as though this was not true, I felt like they simply didn’t get… reality. It was a them problem to me. I would place myself on this bizarre pedestal as though I knew more and they simply didn’t get it yet - how burdensome I really was.
That’s how completely disconnected from reality internalized ableism makes you feel. Internalized ableism literally makes you feel like people who love you are delusional and that they just haven’t seen it yet. When in true actual reality, the one that is not distorted by your trauma, they do see it and more often than not, they don’t mind at all, because they love you.
Nowadays, I do not think or feel that loving me is a chore, a horrible fate, or even (much of) a burden. So I wouldn’t worry that I would be ruining someone’s life if they loved me. In fact, I have caught myself a few times lately realizing that whoever ends up being a long term partner of mine next might even be a little lucky and it doesn’t feel so fcking improbable anymore.
The land heals me. I have been so influenced by Sharon’s Blackies work this month and I agree so deeply with her that sometimes our approach to healing is too intellectual, and what we need the most is a reconnection with the land (a somatic experience) and then the healing naturally occurs.
As she says, “Two peas in a pot”. Mum and I forest bathing- November 2022.
One of my best friends is going through a heavy grief-filled breakup right now and I told her the best bad breakup advice I have ever received this week: do not compare new people to the ex. The new people - they will always fall short - because you have no already established depth with a new contender. Depth sometimes makes you think someone is the love of your life when they’re not. Depth doesn’t necessarily mean alignment. Just because someone knows everything about you, and once literally left your shared apartment to go to vans to get supplies to fix a toilet you clogged, doesn’t mean it’s healthy for you or either of you to stay in something. But then we get freaked out when we don’t have immediate depth with someone new and we think, well, I messed it all up!!! That was the love of my life. And then we get into these dangerous romanticizing cycles, perhaps not seeing reality well in the throes of loneliness.
My particular brand of romanticizing looks like this:
If I would have just done something different, I would have been loved forever the way I wanted to be loved because it is *I* the entire problem, and if I could fix me! The problem! then everything would have been fine. And to that, I ask myself this question:
Can I stop giving myself so much power?
I know that is a bizarre question to ask oneself. But for me, I give myself too much power. I think I have more power than I actually do. People are typically super self- centred. People aren’t doing stuff to me - they’re just doing stuff because they’re people and they are hurting or unaware or something else that usually has so little to do with me. For me to think I can change someone’s entire trauma history or their entire personality that is both innate and influenced by huge things such as systems of oppression, and familial structures I had no say in, like damn girl, you’re living breathing ambition. You think you can turn this entire ship around, with one different action, or a simple change in your attitude, or changing an approach you took?
I mean sometimes, maybe. But most likely not. So why romanticize as though everything would have been perfect just if I…
People act the way they do generally as a reflection of their relationship with themselves, how resourced they are currently, what their inner landscape looks like, not as a reflection of your value, worth, etc, but when you are a small child with people not reflecting your value or worth, you don’t learn this - you don’t know it’s not you. So we must learn it in adulthood.
Learning to undo the neural circuit of romanticizing myself, things, or people has been of great help for me in healing from heartbreak. That huge one back at the end of 2018, and other ones I’ve had since.
I’m thinking also about how it is wise for me not to do circus acts to make sure someone doesn’t become unsafe for me.
I would rather not mask and say exactly what I need, instead of hiding it to make sure someone doesn’t reveal how unsafe they are for me. All that does is delay that truth.
I am getting so much better with just accepting incompatibility, without taking it as I did something wrong or the other person did something wrong, instead of trying to fit myself into what the other person deems acceptable or proper or good.
Part of getting better at that is continuing to increase faith and hope that there is compatibility available in the world for me. This is also part of healing internalized ableism. I do not have to accept crumbs because I am so broken or different. I do not have to hold on to scarcity patterns so fiercely.
I even had this show up with a practitioner of mine this week - she does things a certain way and has some strong ideas about what is right and what is wrong. It is part of why I like working with her - I feel safe. There are no underlying emotional currents I am not aware of with her. She is upfront and transparent, but what happens if/when, I need something that does not fall into her category of “right” or does not match her exact protocol? Will she become unsafe for me, by judging me harshly by way of belittling or misunderstanding?
I had to get okay with the fact that it is okay to lose her, that I would be okay if she became unsafe and I wouldn’t have to stay either if I didn’t want to, and so I called her, and I told her what I needed instead of masking, and she was completely awesome about it.
Which makes me believe more and more, the circus acts aren’t even needed at all.
THINGS I HAVE LOVED THIS WEEK(ish):
TV shows: I decided to stay in bed for the last week or two (except for work) and I have watched many a shows - Loot on AppleTv (then googled mega rich people and why they are rich and got sad/ felt odd); The Morning Show on AppleTV (literally a spiritual experience); Time’s Traveller’s Wife on HBO (once wrote an ISU of 50 pages on this literary novel in school); White Lotus Season 2 on HBO (even better than season 1, fav show right now), I am now watching the crown on netflix and am completely adoring.
Movies: Don’t worry darling (worth it); Sam & Kate; Ticket to Paradise with a lil George Clooney/ Julia Roberts action.
Podcasts: Chosen family by Ashley Gavin, Alayna Joy and Mak Ingemi, and The pop-up pod by Nicole Antoinette.
Love what medical medium says about ADHD/ autism that Lisa sent our neurodivergent club. I know many people on this list have been helped a lot via MM protocols, so it is reassuring the take is not ableist or inaccurate, isn’t it?
Sending many excellent energy vibes to make great soup your way.
I reached 2,000 days sober on November 11th. :)
I got a haircut and took a car selfie.