Running into THAT person-1st draft

I have heard co-workers talking about it when it has happened to them.  Someone they haven't seen in a while, someone significant, comes into our popular little grocery store to shop.

"My ex walked in and I just said, 'Hey, how are you doing?' and kept walking," says co-worker.
A crew member responds, "Yikes, you OK?"

or

"That's my mother. I haven't talked to her in three years.  I am going to the back."

I've run into people I used to work with which is much less significant than an ex or a parent.  In those moments of seeing acquaintances from my past profession, I've experienced one nano second of shame, then with chin up, smiled and said, "Hello, it's so great to see you!"

My joy in seeing them typically catches them off guard, we share a brief exchange and they move along.

I have also seen a few of my neighbors shopping.  It's been awkward.  In those moments, I try to move along without them noticing me.  (I have often wondered why I do not acknowledge my neighbors when I see them around our living community or out in the world?  Answer another time.)

Yesterday at work, it was pretty slow.  I wanted to touch base with my daughter but without feeling the presence of co-workers peering over my shoulder and looking at my screen so I took my phone from my locker, put it in my back pocket and proceeded to go to the restroom where I could use the facility and text my daughter without interruption.  As soon as I pulled down my pants to pee, I heard it, felt a tiny splash and knew what it was.  My phone had fallen from my pocket into the toilet.

Kerplunk.

Funny thing is and was, is that, that has never happened to me.  My phone is old.  I didn't really react too terribly to it.  After retrieving it from the bowl, I patted it dry with a paper towel, sat it on the paper dispenser then finished business.  After leaving the restroom and retrieved my bank card from my locker, went to the shelf-stable isle, selected the cheapest rice, purchased it, went back to the break room, got a bowl, filled it with rice, buried by phone in the bowl, overheard my co-worker say, "You should add garlic and onion and microwave it.  I hear that helps."

Ha. Ha.

I returned my bank card to my locker, got another pair of gloves onto my hands, walked out of the break room, back onto the floor and I walk into Pawpaw.

The old man who molested my children.

And on my perpetrator-of-child-sexual-abuse-mother's birthday.  

I said, "Hi. How are you?"

He said, "Fine. And you?"

I said, "I am fantastic," and turned the other way walking to the back,

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Since I last wrote in this space, I have been working.  The little grocery store gig has allowed me space to actively work on healing, especially my nervous system.  I have been working on anxiety
, in real time.  And "In Real Time" unfortunately is the only way this work can be done.  In the moment.  Like, when I see someone heading towards my register with a cart full of merchandise to be rung up, I feel that anxiety and face it head on.  

I get nauseated.

I have negative self-talk.

My body is signaling me to stop, take a breath, examine what is really happening.  

I am safe.  

There is no bear.

And the aforementioned is just a small sampling of the work I have been doing.  There's more work--relationships with my self and others, rewiring my nervous system.  R

Reflecting upon my progress while typing out this sentence is causing my heart to flutter.  Excitement?  Anxiety?  I will stop, breath and figure it out.

..............................................................................................................................................

Had I seen Pawpaw last month, it may have derailed me for a few days.  Today, I am up and writing.  so f you child molesters.

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Then I think of my girls.  How are they healing?  How do I bring it up?

I will.

I am working on strengthening my wherewithal to do it.  And I can do it.

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Episode 73: Feeling Your Nervous System/Self-Healers Soundboard

shame

I have a ton of work to do around shame.  Feeling it.  Sitting in it.   Always allowing it to inform all that I do.  It keeps me from interacting with people.  It feeds my anxiety.

I remember reading Healing the Shame That Binds You, John Bradshaw, in the '90's.  I'm going to get it back out.  And work through it.  Also, maybe, Codependent No More, Beattie.  There are probably updated, newer books, especially with all the newer research around trauma.  In the early nineties, my brain wasn't ready to do a deep dive into that healing.  I was just beginning.  I read them in rehab.  I relapsed a bunch.  Each time, I learned more about myself and the world.  

I got divorced, I did EMDR.  I attempted suicide.  I lived with an alcoholic.  I was bullied in high school.  I'm an incest survivor. My mom trafficked me.  I've been raped, taken advantage of while drunk (still rape).  Money stolen.  Money given away to not be repaid.  I've also been an asshole to people.  I've always kept people at arm's length, even my own children.

AND

I always believed I would, things would, the world would get better.

I want to have a home the girls could come home to.  

Spent the weekend at SIL's family home.  Again.  Grief.  Staying in it and with it.  SIL's kids were there.  All but one.  It's nice to have a place for everyone to convene. I don't know why, in fifteen years, I have not had a real conversation with anyone in that side of the family.

I do know why.

Shame.

Day after day.

My verb tense is not consistent.  Let's call it poetry?  Or just bad writing.  If I was brave enough to carve out time for this, more time, I would actually edit.  My fantasy is that my writer daughter would edit all this bs for me, with me.

I miss my real life, grown-up daughters.

I was able to tell one of SIL's grown children that I hope he was ably to keep shame at bay.  I have a lot to say, I am realizing that this all deserves more time carved out ... it deserves my attention.

I deserve my attention.

And, I am just here creating a habit.  So let's not get too judgy, too soon.

habits

 

I'm just trying to create a habit here.  One that leaves something of value behind.  All other habits I've ever endeavored being of little value.  Well.  I have a horrible habit of learning.  Learning from my mistakes, really fucking feeling them.  But not knowing what to do with that BIG overwhelming electricity that surges in my entire body, entering through the eyes, rocketing to the head, exploding, then sending shock waves to torso and limbs.

That.  All habits have been an attempt to avoid the aforementioned phenomenon from happening to me.

And. 

I am tired of telling about things that have HAPPENED to me.  

I fear that I will be gone and the girls will not know things from my lens.  From my perspective, although I do not like that word.  It sounds small, like the end of a beak on a cardinal.  Small and menacing.  But I do like lens.  It puts us all in the same room together but with different filters.  Perspective gives way to that time I felt my back pasted to my ceiling in my bedroom on 11th Street, floating out of my body.  I could see what was transpiring below me.  So.  Perspective may have saved my life, but I don't like it.  Lens is better.  Lens is less of a gaslight for me.

The habit I am trying to create here is just write this shit down.  Make sure the girls have it.  Temper it because I may not have the stamina and don't want to injure myself.  But do it.

Make sure the girls have it.  Their most beautiful story and how I ...  how I ... would like to try again.

fuss with a muss

I need to jump in the shower and rinse off for going to my second day of work at Trader Joe's.  I quit my preschool teaching job on whim last Tuesday.  After 10 years, I couldn't do it any more.  And I miss my OWN, grown children (GC) so much that being with the littles caused me to miss them in an abnormal, big way.  AND, I just couldn't worry about my students' families anymore, especially after watching  the adult children of my sister-in-law (SIL), same ages as my GC, stand around her hospital bed just moments after passing away from liver failure brought on by alcoholism.

The brain is a fuss with a muss of shit.  It was a sobering, sobering experience to watch SIL die.  It was a short time:  one day to say good-bye when she was conscious in the hospital, next day for us home to deal with work, third day back to hospital where she died less than an hour after we arrived.  We were not completely aware of the situation, it's seriousness, earlier.  We knew a little for a while.  We were not sure how to help.  Do we go to her home where she is drinking and sit with her?  She is sick, after all.  This isn't her fault. 

Now that she is gone it seems so simple to say, "Yes, I should have gone there to sit next to her; what harm would it have done?"

Well, that's the thing with addicts, those with substance use disorder.  How do you help, especially if you are trying to stay clean?  Trying to stay clean after years and years of  a cycle of misuse, non-use, overuse, quit.  Then all the brain work needed after quitting.  All that trauma work, deprogramming from organized religion, learning social skills to manage anxiety, processing regret over being a bad parent--endless list.  It takes YEARS.  So, go sit with someone binge drinking and risk being triggered to use again?  What if shit escalated to the point of needing to call the cops?  What if I just sat there and enabled?  Like, how the hell would I have been able to take the beer out of her hand?

And with that, I must get ready for work.  

Dear friends and family who are pro-life

Dear friends and family who are pro-life,

I have been very quiet because I love you and have compassion for you.  You have been there for me when I needed you and you have told me many times that you pray for me.  And I appreciate that.  You have helped me through many trying times.  And when things in my life have gotten better, I think, "Hmmm, maybe their prayers worked," and I am grateful.  I would never want to hurt you and abandon you.  I know how both of the aforementioned actions sting.  I know.

AND

I have some questions.  They are as follows:

When you hit your children in the form of discipline, is that pro-life?

When you refuse to wear a mask and get vaccinated, protecting others from a deadly pandemic, is that pro-life?

When you insist that all lives matter but recoil at standing up for BLM, is that pro-life?

When you vehemently shout about immigrants crossing our southern borders where they are taking children away from families and forcing women into being sterilized, is that pro-life?

When you refuse to acknowledge that drug addicts are suffering from a disease and insist they should just stop harming their bodies or be left to overdose, is that pro-life?

When you tote around your guns, the biggest killer of children and teens in our country, is that pro-life?

When you support those who violently try to end our democracy, is that pro-life?

When you shun sex education and shame people for having sex, a normal human function, is that pro-life?

When you support the death penalty, is that pro-life?

When you criminalize what women do with their bodies, but leave men who are equally as culpable off the hook, is that pro-life?

When you insist the poor should be able to provide for and support their children on their own and shame them for not having the means to do so, is that pro-life?

When you support discrimination against anyone who isn't clearly male or female and heterosexual, is that pro-life?

When you criminalize abortion, knowing it will lead to more deaths due to back alley procedures, is that pro-life?

Here's the thing.  I love you.  I am grateful for you.  I have been quiet for fear you will abandon me.

I have been religious.  Very, very religious.   And I have had an abortion.  When in the hospital residing in the psych ward, recovering from a suicide attempt, I asked to see a priest.  I disclosed to him the paralyzing guilt I was experiencing from having the procedure.  He said, "But you are here now.  You are alive."

My advice, unsolicited as it may be, is become pro-life for ALL life, not just the unborn, then I think maybe you can call yourself as such.

Until then, be quiet.  Your shouting, shaming and legislating is distracting those of us who are pro-choice.  We are busy saving lives.

Love,

Intrepid Song