what places were magic

podcasts have become what i listen to. last year after i left my husband i stopped listening to the radio, to much music and just existed in silence, listening to myself.

lately, i have been listening to podcasts, typically as i do the dishes or clean.

chai chats has been an insightful favorite, i found a new one called embodied astrology, and a friend shared one of theirs called bash-o-bash.

i started with the 3rd episode and then went to the beginning. listening to chickens cluck and talk immediately connected to me and where i want to be, grounded in the food that nourishes me by raising it myself.

however, the part that most resonated for me is the title of this blog. what places were magic? in the boundary work i am doing, i was asked to think of a boundary of protection and for me, it was high up in the trees. climbing to the top of the pine tree in the backyard of my childhood home. up, up, up where it swayed and the world stretched out around me far below. a place i took myself, and could just be. i don’t remember much more than that, i’m so tired of not remembering. but in that memory of the top of the tree, the tang of pine needles in my mouth, that place was magic for me. oh and the tomato plants in the garden of our house before that, so huge as a kid i remember crawling beneath them and hiding and just smelling the sharp, green smell of the tomato plants.

that my magic places are centered and grounded in plants isn’t a surprise but that for years in between i have lost those magic connections.

life. trauma. abuse. survival. so much of myself stopped, became trapped or hidden or lost, i’m not really sure which. even knowing for i am feeling, what i need is hard. hard to trust myself. before anyone else can hear me, i need to hear myself.

i want, need the magic places. where i am nourished so that i can nourish those around me. i am working, with love to create.

black hole of need

On February 1st I sat with my kids and niblings watching the lunar eclipse. Within a day I had realized that I need time for myself, I realized that thanks to my therapist that I wasn’t ok, and all of a sudden being ok wasn’t enough.

But I had no idea how to be anything but just ok. I had the things in life I knew I should fight for, the things that created glimmers of hope of things to come, the things that allowed me connections that glowed warm, I was still alive. My life existed in an place that felt and was discordant between what I knew to be true and what I was allowing to be my reality.

nayyirah waheed shared that “the fear of not being enough. and the fear of being ‘too much.’ are exactly the same fear, the fear of being you”.

I have been so damn afraid of being myself. Of loving myself. Of loving the people I love. In my way. Scared of not being loved for just existing. Of not being valued or seen. Of being blamed or wrong. That my sense of self is so tangled up and following the threads left me more confused and lost.

In December Ora North’s ‘I Don’t Want to be an Empath Anymore’ came across my facebook timeline and reading this helped me immensely in articulating what I am struggling with. And simply I wasn’t ok. I wasn’t ok. Despite years of forcing myself into the ok, working through it all, the abuse, the grief of trauma in pregnancy, delivery, miscarriage, motherhood. My body both protected me, in forgetting consciously & allowing me to be physically assaulted and continue on and forced me to recognize through anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, excessive weight gain, being late to force me to slow down, what I needed fundamentally.

Thanks to the support of 2 dear friends I have been able to participate in Hawthorne Heart Magical Boundary Skills which has already been truly magical for me. The second lesson asked me to focus on what one boundary I need and thanks to therapy today, I decided on asking for what I need. Which is scary. If I need things that other people don’t feel I deserve…I need to remind myself that I am not a black hole of need but that I have needs that haven’t been met. I have so often felt that black hole of the needs I have but also that I couldn’t feel it, in emotional and spiritual needs and because of that I would try so hard to fill it and so my disordering eating. So asking for what I need, creates a foundation for me to grow healthy. To rebuild the boundaries I’ve left footpaths crisscross over. My boundaries are living, hills, hedges, flowers, vines, and so many thorns and brambles. I will be ok.

Reclaiming My Narrative

I started this blog for my poetry…my first post was a poem I wrote sitting in a coffee shop. A blog for me. I want it to be that again for me. But also for those who need it.

A few years ago it became dedicated to my struggles during my attempts to keep my family together in the ideal nuclear heteropatriarchal (which means simply straight & male dominated) confines while my husbands abuse impacted our then 9 year old. I fought hard to do things my way even within those restraints of family meaning, mother, father, children, house, pets. I wanted those things so badly I gave up so much of myself to fight for them.

Last year January 7, 2017 I left, behind my house, my husband, my dream family. I left, taking my kids to safety provided from loving and supportive family and friends, to a place that wasn’t our house but was our home, filled with love and beginnings. After years of abuse, which most complicatingly was not always malicious or even intentional but was always, always harmful, leaving in that moment was the most right and natural thing to do.

For almost 13 years I stayed, there are of course memories that creep in now of times I almost left, so many as I remember are others I know I have forgotten. My memory is hidden under the warm comfort of a blanket hiding from me the things I had to put away just to survive, the violence, the soul crushing disregard, the confusion of being both free in ways I had never been and trapped, again.

Domestic violence, mental health, child abuse, physical discipline, love, relationships, boundaries, hopes, dreams, connection, spiraling and spinning. In a society that tells victims to leave and not those committing the violence. In a society that blames victims for their choices and not those choosing to harm. Being willing, like so many before me, to sacrifice myself, deny myself, over and over, as if ever it were my sacrifice that was needed, created a place where leaving always seemed not something I could do. Until that day, January 4, 2017 it was.

Recounting the violence, always too seems to be a thing that victims are required to do. Not to heal, to have people ease the bruises, both visible and unseen, but to be poked at and used as an example of what not to do, ways not to allow it, not to deserve it. My story became a silence, I stopped listening to music or NPR in the car, I stopped having noise to distract me, I started to listen to myself.

There are so many intertwining, interwoven areas that move into focus and I hope to share as I am able and as my healing continues.

I do know that once I was ready to leave I did it with firm boundaries, cutting off contact except that that enforced, for me, that I was making the right decision. My mind would often automatically prompt me that I missed my husband for the majority of 2017, it wasn’t until I faced that yearning and articulated that I missed not the person, my husband but the person I wanted him to be, the person I needed him to be, and that it was grief, soul deep grieving I had to do, I have to do.

Within this, I have so much shame and guilt for letting this happen, not just to me but to my kids, my 12 year old especially. I allowed abuse because I had no way to see of a life with anything but, the spankings as a child with belt and spoon, the way I was crushed as a person created that reality for me. It wasn’t until many, many years of realizing that I could live a life without violence that I was able to escape it, in large part because of the responsibility I felt to fix the harm even though I wasn’t responsible for it. I know that I wasn’t my responsibility and yet those feelings of shame and guilt linger. That I wasn’t enough, that I was too much. Like so so many femmes, the fear of being me was programmed so deeply I never realized that I am worthy and whole just as I am. And even as I type those words, I still have so many areas to uncover, to find all the parts and pieces of myself that were hidden to keep safe, to keep when all else would cut them away from me.

This transformation has come from my love, my fierceness to not act out of fear but out of love, and that I too am deserving of the love I shine out to those around me. That love that dear friends who are family in the deepest sense of the word, shone back to me when I was at my darkest. The love that reached to fill me up from books and articles and words of beautiful souls who shine out for us all. The love that I have learned my foremothers carried, sent forward as they survived horrific abuse as their normal, the love that I in turn send forward as I fight for myself, for my healing.

I am not ok. I am working at it. I am loved. I am joyful and grieving. I am here. I am alive. I am.