 |
| Girl With Balloon - Original Stencil by, Banksy |
A significant amount of my life has been shaped by death, and divorce ... Which is particularly strange when you consider, I'm neither dead, nor divorced. Dead inside? Maybe. Dead to 1 or 2 people? Sure, even more than that, probably (if I'm completely honest)! Divorced? Perhaps from reality now and then, depending on who you ask ... But as of this posting I'm still currently untethered, and topside, and yet, if I had to describe what has, without a doubt, influenced my life the absolute most, it can always be distilled down to death and divorce. I remember knowing, as a young child, that my existence differed greatly from the other children around me. I experienced, and witnessed things that, even now with two feet firmly planted in middle age, my friends are just now beginning to experience themselves, and still more things most of them never will. Is it just a Scorpio thing ... Death, transformation, rebirth, a curious compatibility with the dark underbelly, or even unexplainable aspects of life? Was I born a little too late into a family of malcontents? A little of both probably, but who really knows?
I am certain, however, that there has been a lot of loss, a lot of adapting, upheaval, restructuring of reality, expectations in constant negotiation, and a life lived mostly in survival mode - and the grief of realizing how much of that life I lost to it ... The perfect storm for people waiting in the wings to take advantage.
They say, you really find out who people are through death, and divorce. Of course, I don't know who "They" are, search engines being what they are today: Completely broken. All I can get to come up is little more than A.I. slop comparing the two experiences, and not a single syllable about the origins of the adage. The correct, and honorable thing to do would be to spend the extra time in an attempt to track it down ... But when I tell you I am not putting one more thing on my 2026 to-do list, I mean it! I guess it doesn't matter who said it first, or how long it's been passed around, and it certainly does make the rounds - I can't think of a single time the topic of death, or divorce has come up when I haven't heard it. Without fail, someone will be sharing a terrible experience, and another will start in, "Well, you know what they say ..." and then everyone finishes the sentence together, and yet, somehow, the source remains a mystery (to me anyway, if you know the origin, hit me up - contact info on sidebar - I'm a huge nerd, I'll love you forever if you teach me something!).
Alright, so maybe I don't need to dwell that much on who said what, when the point is simply that folks' true colors jump out in times of tragedy; when the heroes, and the saboteurs show up with equal fervor, and you find out what the people in your life are really made of ... Yourself (myself), included. I understood from early on that bad times could bring out strong emotions, but even now, I'm always a bit shocked by how it can also bring out the ill-est (and I don't mean that in the way the Beastie Boys would say it) behavior in us. The completely unnecessary pain, and abandonment we as humans can inflict on each other just because our feelz are icky, or whatever, is actually appalling. In these same moments, however, sometimes we are confronted with a generosity of spirit in another person so pure it makes you want to weep. These people are the glue that holds a society together ... Them, and yappers. Yappers keep the world turning, I'm convinced ... And when someone is both, look out! All you chatterboxes out there, keep it up. I'm not really one of you (though I've been known to dabble), but I just think you should know in case anyone's ever made you feel unsure about yourself because of it, always remember you have a unique talent that bridges a lot of gaps out there in that big world of ours, and you're doing some heavy social-lifting for the rest of us (pardon my digression).
"The worst kind of people are the ones who see how broken you are, and still choose to break you even more." - Unknown
On the one hand, it has been kind of a compliment to find out who can't handle me at my "fighting weight." Learning who has to wait until I'm at what they perceive to be my rock-bottom before they feel comfortable enough to strike? While it may hurt like hell in the moment, what an incredible piece of information to be gifted! The truly pathetic are masters at unintentionally outing themselves, whilst accidentally empowering their target(s). On the other hand, I admit it is a little bone-chilling to discover just how deeply hated you are by the ones you had once held so close to your heart. I don't mean disliked, and I'm not talking about the ones simply incapable of loving us. I mean the moments you come face-to-face with the true essence of a hatred that strips humanity from the equation, and you realize that you've dwelt in situations where you weren't even recognized as a person in your own right - something wholly sub-human in their eyes - at the very best, just an accessory, a thing, a background character, or third wheel to the most devoted, and committed relationship they will ever have: Their own turmoil and dysfunction. Even that knowledge is incredibly liberating, it often doesn't feel like it at the time, but if the circumstances don't actually kill you in the process (because sometimes, yes, it is that serious), and their ultimate plans of destroying you, or your life whether in part, or full remain foiled, they've lost, they know it, and whether they face the aftermath of grappling with their own failure, and crippling self-hatred ... Eh, that's a little more up in the air. That all depends on a person's capacity for self-awareness, and frankly, their internal Hell is really none of our business, anyway. But I do always wonder ...
In the end, what on Earth was it all for???
This is the question I keep coming back to. Okay, before I dive in, one of my problems is that I always try to make sense of everything. No, I don't think every damn thing has to carry a lesson in this lifetime (women are overwhelmingly encouraged to constantly look for the lesson / turn pain into progress, etc.), but sometimes the lesson really is as simple as - someone just wanted to be an asshole, and there's nothing useful any of the rest of us can take away from that. It is, as they say, what it is. If you know me, you know I hate that phrase with the scorching heat of a thousand suns, but sometimes (as much as I can't stand to admit it) it really does sum it up. Another one that's been bastardized beyond belief is, "everything happens for a reason," which I believe is fundamentally true! It has come to have a couple of diametrically opposed connotations: Fate vs. Action. I don't believe our lives are written in the stars, but I do believe nothing in this world happens out of no-thing. Ya dig? Like, there is always a catalyst, and I'm the little weirdo who struggles to rest until I uncover what that "thing" is. What I have to remember in those moments is that some folks are simply at war with themselves, and everyone near them, sooner or later, becomes collateral damage. Another important revelation I had around 20 years ago is that, if you knew or were capable of understanding, or rationalizing why terrible people do the terrible things they do, you'd probably be just as terrible as they are ... And never, ever mistake their cunning for brilliance. Remember that they are feeble, miserable, and hungry for an agency, or power that does not reside naturally inside them (that's why they're coming for yours!), be thankful you weren't wired that way and keep it pushing. Easier said than done, I know.
I thought I'd done the work...
I spent my 20s coming to terms with a lot of junk, and healing emotionally. I spent my 30s researching, and healing physically. And now? At my big age?
Rage.
Last year, even though a lot of things were going "right" (an extremely relative term) for me, I was experiencing a near constant, almost suffocating resentment, so. much. larger. than anything I'd ever felt before, and nothing I did to cut it loose was working. I brought it up to my mother several times throughout the year, I was astonished by what I was feeling, "I thought I dealt with this. I thought I knew where to put all of this already!" I thought maybe just saying it out loud to another person, and acknowledging it would be enough to begin to break away from it. It wasn't. And then I read something...
Healing will make you angry. And if it hasn't yet, you probably haven't gone deep enough. There is a rage that lives beneath survival. A rage that builds when you realize how much of your life was shaped by someone else's dysfunction. How much of your personality is a byproduct of having to survive chaos. How many of your choices were never really choices at all, just coping mechanisms disguised as decisions. And when you finally see it, when you feel it fully, it's not pretty. But it's necessary. Because anger is clarity. Anger is boundaries forming in real time. Anger is the nervous system screaming, "I'm not safe yet." Let yourself feel it. It's not the end of healing. Sometimes, it's the beginning.
There it was. Unattributed, and, much to my chagrin, probably composed by a chat-bot, but a big part of what I'd been grappling with? Explained. I mean, yes, part of me was borderline catatonic by the notion that after all this time (effort!), I'm possibly only at the beginning of my healing journey. Although it was kind of nice seeing my feelings so succinctly summarized, rather than letting my imagination run wild ... Up to that point, I was categorically unwilling to accept that I was struggling with getting older, or (god forbid) getting ready to dive headfirst into a midlife crisis. I was actually just carrying immense resentment, animosity, and exasperation over all of the abject assholes I'd spent my life shoehorning into relationships, or a family at large that they had no intention of ever fundamentally belonging in, or to. I resented the people brought into my life through no fault, or desire of my own who seemingly made it their life's mission to exact as much damage as possible with the time they were allotted.
Maybe it hit differently because time itself does look unlike that of your life's First Act from this side of The Hill (is this still a thing? Remember all of the Over The Hill birthday parties in the '80s & '90s? And how we'd decorate with tombstones because after 40 - or worse *gasp* 50 - you were past your prime, and basically just waiting for death to put you out of your misery?) ... Why was that ever even popular? Maybe it never caught on other places, but as an American, I remember we were WAY into it - people getting walkers and canes as gifts because getting older, and therefore closer to death was just hilarious ... Don't even get me started on the pipe cleaner jokes. Ya know, greeting card companies get a lot of flack for over inflating things like Valentine's Day, but I don't think we talk nearly enough about the sicko who first pitched the idea of depressing-ass-birthdays-as-humorous-pranks.
Comically speaking, I'd rather get a pie in the face any day of the week, than a tombstone on my birthday cake.
Where was I? Oh yeah ... Time! So much of the first part of anyone's life is spent racing to get out into the world, and establishing your place in it. The pressures to be somebody, the anxiety to get it right, the fear of path-altering mistakes you think you won't ever be able to come back from. It's a lot, it's often fast paced, and a little manic, but it can be exiting, too, if you let it. What became clear, for me, only after the frenzy died down, and my life entered a slower groove, was just how much of my time I allowed to be stolen by people who never deserved it. I don't use that word lightly, "stolen," and I'm not trying to duck responsibility for an existence I essentially authorized to a certain degree. In fact, I have always been painfully aware of exactly which actions of my own have landed me where I am. No one in this world is telling me anything about myself that I'm not already sorely cognizant of, I assure you. It's just that for the first time, I was able to think much less about what's ahead, and get to take a long look backwards on what was.
The sad truth of it is, I knew what I was doing.
Well, I knew what choices I was making, at least. I didn't always know what the consequences would be, particularly because I didn't know the truth about all of the variables involved. You will find in life, that kind of matters! You can be proud of your capacity for discernment, and make all of the best decisions in the world, but if they're made with bad information, you're cooked before you even know you're on the grill. But if you're honest with yourself, you felt when you're giving pieces of yourself away, you knew when the compromises felt like a deal with the devil, you remember rolling up your sleeves to be a team player, just to look around and see you're literally the only person ON the team, all the words you swallowed to keep the peace ... Don't make waves ... Don't make things harder than they need to be ... Extend a little extra grace ... Love harder ... Support more ... Never, ever, ever ask for too much! These burdens are put on good people to keep the truth from coming out. DO NOT FALL FOR IT. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. These idioms exist for a reason. They're true, and abusers of all degrees, and creeds are counting on your silence via distraction, confusion, exhaustion, leading (they hope), to neutrality, apathy, indifference, and every other damn thing so they will be allowed to continue on with their carnage, undetected. What I know for sure? The only thing suffering in silence will get you is an autoimmune disorder, all while the real life you're supposed to be living is slipping through your fingers.
Make the noise. Call out the patterns; the bad and damaging behavior. I don't mean go around policing everyone's every last action, I'm saying let them know you see the harm they are causing. Let them know everyone else sees it too. For the record, I wholeheartedly believe in ganging up on a bully - It's called safety in numbers, and we should be using it more often. You don't have to be cruel, or even rude about it, just speaking, out loud, the simple truth of the matter is enough. Will it be enough to stop the behavior altogether? Not likely for the truly nefarious, because for them the cruelty really is the point, but a backbone and a boundary can stop a lot of bullshit along the way. Further, by remaining silent you are, whether you like it or not, participating in the harm, and each one of us has to reconcile that within our own selves, and with the code of ethics we live by. What, exactly are you okay with? What are you okay with doing? What are you okay with that's being done in your name? What are you okay with happening to your reputation? What are you made of? Who are you? If you keep coming up against things you can not abide, and there is no way to change them, there comes a time when you'll need to let the coping mechanisms die, and divorce yourself from the situation entirely.
It's okay to be angry!
I'm definitely angry. Not bitter. Not cynical. Just mad as hell because of the way things went, because it never had to be that way, because I was sacrificed for (and by) cowards, because I was expected to shrink in order to survive. And it only happened the way it did, because someone(s) decided that watching the world burn fed something inside them at a deeper level than loving and accepting them was ever going to, and quite honestly, that kind of maladjusted desire is so much more convoluted than any of the rest of us need to be out here worrying about. I know it's become really cute, and trendy right now to talk about "meeting people where they are," but less oft discussed is having to leave their socially impaired asses right there! It is no one else's responsibility to validate toxicity, and all the therapy-speak, and sane-washing in the world isn't going to change that. Try as you might, you can't Love & Light your way through something when true malice is involved. It will never be a matter of just trying to understand them harder. Let them stay committed to their rubbish while you get passionate about building the life you deserve, without them ... And let me tell you, anger is a powerful motivator! It's also healthy, rather than avoiding it, to channel it into something positive. Denying your emotions is likely to cause you more problems than you can imagine in the long run rather than if you'd just correctly identified, and dealt with them forthwith. As for me? I'm not mad at any one person, and I'm not carrying endless grudges throughout the remainder of my life, but I am angry that it was ever considered a viable option to attempt to destroy a person's life, and relationships, and support systems because someone else was so completely broken inside, that tearing apart another was the only way to feel whole.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not writing off people who make honest mistakes, or over legitimate misunderstandings, bad days, or hurt feelings. I won't be implementing insane purity tests to see who deserves to stay in the running for becoming America's Next Top Friend (*violently smizing* Two acquaintances stand before me...). However, people who operate on a bad faith basis, people who relentlessly had me measuring bad news on a scale from Pepto-Bismol to Imodium A-D, or put me in a position to negotiate my value or mere existence will absolutely be cut from my life with surgical precision, and it will be breathtaking how much they never existed, because one of the hardest, but most important truths to learn in life is that you can not reason with unreasonable people. Period. You are wasting your time even trying - you will never be able to explain enough for anyone who has committed to misunderstanding you. What's more, anyone dedicated to bringing maximum confusion into your life can, and will likely, and for very much their own amusement, keep you in a perpetual state of fight or flight, a phase we all know is supposed to be used temporarily by your body to quite literally remove you from danger, and save your life - it's not meant to be the blueprint for an entire way of life!
Beyond learning who and what I can allow around me, I've discovered I am quite naturally, a fighter. I don't mean in an obnoxious, or even obviously scrappy way (though, depending on who you ask, your mileage may vary). Mostly, I'm speaking of the essence ... I found out, for sure, I am not the kind of girl who will go gentle into that good night. I want to be here. I fought to be here. I fought like hell for this version of me to emerge, and (ever so humbly) I happen to think she's pretty great! I reminisce all the people I've loved and lost, the many who've died - the ones who wanted to end it all, and the ones who'd have given anything for one more breath - each one irreplaceable. Truthfully, I did it for them as much as I did it for myself, and collectively they're the biggest reason why I can't stand hearing anyone kvetching about "getting old," or acting like everyone would be so much better off if they just weren't here anymore. I see it as such an honor, and a privilege to be alive at ANY age, with each new day being one more shot at doing life the way I want to. No. I will never view my future with disdain, disregard, or lack of gratitude. I've got plans. I had a great-grandmother make it to 103 years old, and somewhere in her 90s she turned to us, and wistfully sighed,
"Ah, to be 75 again..."
And later, just before earning triple digits proclaimed, "I guess I'm starting to get old now..." Not because she'd lost her faculties, and forgot she was old as hell, she just quite literally never felt old until her NINETIES. Can you even imagine? She didn't have a soft life either, she experienced some tremendous hardships along the way, yet she never saw her life as a burden. I'm so lucky to have known, and been so close with this absolute diva, and I can only hope I ended up with a few sprinkles of whatever Grandma Braman was made of, because I know (now) even just a dash here or there will get me through whatever comes. Juxtapose that sentiment with the time I burst into tears (on the inside) when my dad was talking about aging, the last time we were in his vegetable garden together. "Oh Storm-a-roo, gettin' older is the shits. You feel 36 on the inside, and you're stuck in this body that just doesn't wanna work right anymore..." I was horrified. His touchstone age for his prime years was about 6 years north from where I was standing. My health had already begun silently circling the drain, and at 30 I felt like I was eight hundred and ninety seven years old. My brain completely short-circuited at the thought of the kind of suffering that could be in store for me six years down the road ... I couldn't even think about being ONE DAY older than I was in that moment. I couldn't think about the future at all. I had to take my days hour-by-hour just to make it to bedtime, and see if I was able to wake up the next morning ... I mean, talk about learning to live in-the-moment. That did it! And still, after that conversation, it took another another 2 years of circling the drain (and looking like something that'd been pulled out of one) to reach a real turning point. And now you've met the two wolves that live inside me! I've always believed in my happily ever after; a future I love, full of magic, and endless possibilities, but I wasn't always sure of how to get there, or (at times) if I'd even live long enough to have it. For a solid decade, the only thing I knew for sure, and would repeat to myself often: If I ever claw my way out of this situation for good, it's over for you hoes!
Not you hoes, my gorgeous readers! I meant all of the hoes who'd had a hand in knocking (and attempting to keep) me down. Everyone who'd lied, broken their promises, or stabbed me in the back, everyone who'd kicked me when I was already at my lowest point, everyone who'd picked my bones clean of all the resources I had to give, everyone who'd come running to me with their problems, but never had an ounce of care for what I'd been going through - people who didn't even know I was suffering because they simply weren't safe to tell, everyone who'd wasted my time with insincerity, everyone involved in encounters that left me feeling worse about myself, the world, life, God, whatever ... It wasn't even a plot for revenge ... I definitely didn't have the energy to conjure anything like that! It just very simply meant that the paradigm was going to shift, and when it did there was no going back. Ever. I remember coining two of my three now longest-held mottoes during this time; one forged by my intuition, and one almost a prayer.
1. I can not go backward.
2. No one has to help me, but please don't make my life harder, or any worse.
Any thing, and any one that sets either of these internal signals to go off is cause for major pause. For a while they were great in helping to calm the storm (so to speak), and then I turned 40. That's when every weirdo, and their brother who I'd ever had the displeasure of dealing with took it upon themselves to attempt to work their life's frustrations out on me. I was stunned, because I thought after 40 women were supposed to become "invisible," I mean, I guess that's more in a beauty standards kind of way, but still I was really counting on leaning into the whole washed-up hag role ... Have the stray cat distribution system hook me up with a few extras, embiggen my shawl collection, start a poison garden ... You know, hag shit! Nobody told me that at middle age there would be a whole subset of folks looking to settle old scores they'd been secretly tallying for God knows how long. I've had everything come my way from seemingly endless electronic screeds, to the deathbed Batshit Manifesto delivered via attorney, to people concocting fantastical lies right to my face about the dumbest stuff that doesn't even matter, and for absolutely no other reason than their insatiable need for maximum attention. I've been set-up, rug-pulled, and reminded that through certain eyes I will always be seen as less than, and an outsider, just to name a few ... It certainly hasn't been a boring five years, I can tell you that much! All combined, what it reminded me is that sometimes the only thing left to do before letting go, is to thank people for showing me exactly who I do not want to be, and to remember to celebrate those who left far too soon for showing me how to live my best life by continuing to try, and do just that every day of my life for the rest of it.
"It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world." - Mary Oliver
xoxo
