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The hard part of all this healing work is actually implementing it.
Saturday was a full day of the most amazing epiphanies. In our training, we were learning about so many wonderful things. I learned a lot about truly listening (it’s not about offering advice or input, but rather it’s about subtly steering the talker towards finding her own ideas and solutions). I learned about honoring our emotional responses (tears, panic, anger, etc), because they have a purpose: they help us survive, they help us maintain bodily equilibrium (have you ever seen a mouse that has just narrowly escaped from a cat? after the initial instinctive power-drive that enables it to escape, and once it’s back in relative safety, the mouse shakes and quivers for several solid minutes — its body doing its work to bring the energy back down to normal — biology, y’all). So we shouldn’t be ashamed of the ways our body and our mind deal with trauma. Instead, we should realize that it’s our body taking care of itself. I also learned about breathing techniques to help restore calmness (and help me fall asleep!). Stress relievers. Centering practices.
I left at the end of the day floating on a cloud. Not only did I feel equipped to be a counselor for others who have experienced sexual assault, but I also felt equipped now to be aware of and forgiving towards myself. I left feeling empowered, on a yellow brick road to soundness of self.
And then I crashed. I had plans with mi’lady directly after the training, but she was running behind and so she didn’t come over until an hour later than we’d originally planned. In my empowered, floating on a cloud state of mind, I was all, “I’m so going to have an awesome conversation with her about why it’s hard for me when she doesn’t stick to our plans; I’ll be reasonable, and direct, and honest, and look her in the eyes, and not be irritated, and will make I-statements, and and and” and and and…
It didn’t quite turn out that way. It’s hard to come out of something so theoretically brilliant and then realize that real life is messy, and there’s no magic fix. It wasn’t that our conversation was bad, per se. It was fine. But instead of *poof* making the issue disappear, in a way it just magnified it. It made us realize that we have a pretty colossal difference of style, in terms of how we treat time. (“At least,” said my best friend, when I spoke with her about it by phone, “at least it’s a style difference, and not a value difference,” and she’s right, because style differences are so much easier to compromise on.) And when the conversation was winding down, I just… crashed. I couldn’t stop crying. I was exhausted and drained and hurt and frustrated and bewildered. Why didn’t it work? It was supposed to work! I thought I was fixed!Where’s my solution?
I guess it will take a while to figure out how all this lovely pretty soundbyte healing theory will integrate into the complexities of living and the complexities of my dynamic relationships. Maybe I’ll end up leaving some of it. Maybe I’ll take all of it. I don’t know. But if I’ve learned anything, I know that I need to accept that the crashing was a natural human response to a state of elation, and so I will let go of my feelings of frustration and failure that I didn’t just fix anything. And that, at least, is a good start.
*Coming soon: I’ve been tagged by the illustrious Em the Femme in the Honest Scrap… so be prepared to learn some scintillating secrets about yours truly!*
I haven’t written about this here, yet, but part of why I’ve been so busy lately has been that I applied for, was accepted, and am now participating in an intensive rape crisis and peer counseling training at a local women-of-color-led, volunteer-based organization against sexual violence. Sixteen hours a week now I spend in their gorgeous mural-covered building in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District (actually, it’s a block away from where I live), with 20 other women, learning how to be crisis hotline volunteers and one-on-one counselors. The training is amazing, and beautiful, and hard, and brings up so, so much for me. Surprisingly, it hasn’t so far been that triggering — it doesn’t bring up stuff about my own sexual assault. Rather, it brings up all the ways I am in general a scarred, flawed human being, how that’s okay, and how I need to work on healing myself in order to be able to start helping others heal.
And it’s liberating. It might seem like being reminded that you’re a scarred, flawed being would be nerve-wracking, or defeating, or would break your sense of self-worth. For me, though, it’s been so, so healing. (I’ll probably be using that word a lot…) It’s so good for me to acknowledge to myself that yes, I’m flawed. I’m hurt. And it’s okay. I’m allowed to be imperfect. And each imperfection just gives me a beautiful opportunity to take care of myself and work on myself.
I forget that the best way to heal and the best way to be the person I really strive to be is to love myself and take care of myself. I oh so often do exactly the reverse — I make a mistake, and I berate myself for it. I get frustrated with my weaknesses, angry that I mess up. I feel powerless against my deficiencies. But I forget that it is in my power to forgive myself for messing up. I’m my own harshest critic, and I’d do well to lighten up. I watch my dad growing older, in his 60s now, terribly, terribly unhappy, all because he believes he lacks the power to help himself. I DO NOT WANT TO BE THAT PERSON. It is his belief that he is helpless and powerless in the face of his own failures that makes him so miserable. And I want to be in charge of my own happiness.
A while back, I posted a list of things I can do to care for myself. I go to that list often, when I’m feeling down and want to feel better, or when I’m facing an evening of solitude and don’t want to wallow. It’s a great list, and it was a good first step for me in focusing inward, being aware of my own needs. But I realized today that I have the wrong attitude about that list. I treat it as a resource I can use to fill a void. Lonely? Call a friend. Tired? Take a bath. Sad? Watch a funny movie. Stressed? Go to yoga. Focusing too much outward? Journal, or blog. In fact, though, self-care is not just something I need to do to fill a void. It’s not just a way to re-fill my tank when it’s on empty. I also need to take care of myself pre-emptively. I need to make a habit of taking care of myself all of the time. As a first priority. Take a bath when I’m not tired. Call my friends just to chat. Go to yoga regularly, to preempt stress.
If I can learn how to do that effectively, then my life might be able to stop looking like a seismograph during an earthquake, and might instead look like a healthy state of equilibrium. Rather than wild ups and downs, where self-care brings me up and then I run out and fall down down down and need to bring myself back up, I need to consistently be aware of taking care of my own body and my own mind, consciously checking in with myself about how I’m doing, so that I can maintain a relative balance.
This will also help me be a better person for others, to bring this post back around to the beginning, when I was talking about learning how to be able to help others. I’m going to refer here quickly, though, to a quote from Lilla Watson, a Murri aboriginal activist:
“If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time…But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
This is to say, I can only help others as much as I can be helped along the way. That doesn’t mean “I’ll only help if I get something back.” Rather, it means that (or I take it to mean that) the only way for me to heal and be whole again is for others to heal and be whole again too. And vice versa — so that others can only heal and be whole again if I make sure that I am also healing and becoming whole. So when I say that I’m learning how to help others… what I’m realizing now is that if I’m going to do this work, this so-important work of intervening in sexual violence and supporting survivors, then I need also to be wholly and completely willing to surrender myself to the healing process.
And here’s where I take a deep breath, and feel my height and width and depth, feel my past extending behind me along with everyone who has my back all lined up to catch me if I fall, and feel my whole future spread out in front of me ready for me to take it in my hands. And I can fill up all that space and feel my power and know that I will not fall off the earth because I take up space and am firmly planted here. And the healing begins.
I haven’t written about this here, yet, but part of why I’ve been so busy lately has been that I applied for, was accepted, and am now participating in an intensive rape crisis and peer counseling training at a local women-of-color-led, volunteer-based organization against sexual violence. Sixteen hours a week now I spend in their gorgeous mural-covered building in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District (actually, it’s a block away from where I live), with 20 other women, learning how to be crisis hotline volunteers and one-on-one counselors. The training is amazing, and beautiful, and hard, and brings up so, so much for me. Surprisingly, it hasn’t so far been that triggering — it doesn’t bring up stuff about my own sexual assault. Rather, it brings up all the ways I am in general a scarred, flawed human being, how that’s okay, and how I need to work on healing myself in order to be able to start helping others heal.
And it’s liberating. It might seem like being reminded that you’re a scarred, flawed being would be nerve-wracking, or defeating, or would break your sense of self-worth. For me, though, it’s been so, so healing. (I’ll probably be using that word a lot…) It’s so good for me to acknowledge to myself that yes, I’m flawed. I’m hurt. And it’s okay. I’m allowed to be imperfect. And each imperfection just gives me a beautiful opportunity to take care of myself and work on myself.
I forget that the best way to heal and the best way to be the person I really strive to be is to love myself and take care of myself. I oh so often do exactly the reverse — I make a mistake, and I berate myself for it. I get frustrated with my weaknesses, angry that I mess up. I feel powerless against my deficiencies. But I forget that it is in my power to forgive myself for messing up. I’m my own harshest critic, and I’d do well to lighten up. I watch my dad growing older, in his 60s now, terribly, terribly unhappy, all because he believes he lacks the power to help himself. I DO NOT WANT TO BE THAT PERSON. It is his belief that he is helpless and powerless in the face of his own failures that makes him so miserable. And I want to be in charge of my own happiness.
A while back, I posted a list of things I can do to care for myself. I go to that list often, when I’m feeling down and want to feel better, or when I’m facing an evening of solitude and don’t want to wallow. It’s a great list, and it was a good first step for me in focusing inward, being aware of my own needs. But I realized today that I have the wrong attitude about that list. I treat it as a resource I can use to fill a void. Lonely? Call a friend. Tired? Take a bath. Sad? Watch a funny movie. Stressed? Go to yoga. Focusing too much outward? Journal, or blog. In fact, though, self-care is not just something I need to do to fill a void. It’s not just a way to re-fill my tank when it’s on empty. I also need to take care of myself pre-emptively. I need to make a habit of taking care of myself all of the time. As a first priority. Take a bath when I’m not tired. Call my friends just to chat. Go to yoga regularly, to preempt stress.
If I can learn how to do that effectively, then my life might be able to stop looking like a seismograph during an earthquake, and might instead look like a healthy state of equilibrium. Rather than wild ups and downs, where self-care brings me up and then I run out and fall down down down and need to bring myself back up, I need to consistently be aware of taking care of my own body and my own mind, consciously checking in with myself about how I’m doing, so that I can maintain a relative balance.
This will also help me be a better person for others, to bring this post back around to the beginning, when I was talking about learning how to be able to help others. I’m going to refer here quickly, though, to a quote from Lilla Watson, a Murri aboriginal activist:
“If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time…But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
This is to say, I can only help others as much as I can be helped along the way. That doesn’t mean “I’ll only help if I get something back.” Rather, it means that (or I take it to mean that) the only way for me to heal and be whole again is for others to heal and be whole again too. And vice versa — so that others can only heal and be whole again if I make sure that I am also healing and becoming whole. So when I say that I’m learning how to help others… what I’m realizing now is that if I’m going to do this work, this so-important work of intervening in sexual violence and supporting survivors, then I need also to be wholly and completely willing to surrender myself to the healing process as well. And together, we all work on healing each other.
And here’s where I take a deep breath, and feel my height and width and depth, feel my past extending behind me along with everyone who has my back all lined up to catch me if I fall, and feel my whole future spread out in front of me ready for me to take it in my hands. And I can fill up all that space and feel my power and know that I will not fall off the earth because I take up space and am firmly planted here. And the healing begins.
I did this without consulting with my psychiatrist or my therapist–I was supposed to have appointments with both last week, but then last week turned out to be INSANE, what with work piling up and mi’lady’s family in town, so I had to cancel both appointments. (I was at work until 10pm on Friday, just to give you an idea of how bad it was. Um, ugh?) Anyway, I know that’s not a particularly good idea, but I just had to stop. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t swallow that baby blue pill anymore. I only had one side effect, just one, but it was a dealbreaker.
I couldn’t orgasm.
Well, okay, I could. But it took. FOREVER. F.O.R.E.V.E.R. For-fucking-ever. At least an hour. And it was a stressful hour, because I would get up there pretty quickly, would be turned on really fast, and then would plateau. And I’d be on this plateau for at least 45 minutes, usually longer, and just couldn’t get anywhere. If I gave up, I was really, really uncomfortable. I totally believe in “blue balls” now. It actually hurt to stop. So I would have to keep going, and it would get number and number, and eventually, after a fucking eternity, I would finally have an orgasm, but by that time I was so stressed and frustrated that I couldn’t even feel happy or satisfied or warm and fuzzy, I just felt relieved.
And every morning, swallowing that pill became harder and harder, because I knew that it was going to continue to prevent me from just having a good orgasm. It didn’t affect my libido at all — I was still as horny as ever, thank god — and mi’lady was really good about being patient and encouraging and supportive and all that. But it just wasn’t worth it to me. So I stopped taking it.
And OH MY GOD. People. ORGASMS ARE SO AMAZING. I forgot how good orgasms are. I forgot!!! They’re so good!!! I just want to have sex all the time now. It was a really bad week to want to fuck all the time, because I was so busy and the family was in town and etc etc. But we still managed to get some good (quick) fucking in there, and OH BOY am I glad I stopped taking that pill.
I know it may not have been the most responsible decision. When I see my psychiatrist next week, I’m going to talk about it and figure out whether something else might work better, and what I should do next time when I’m feeling like I just can’t do it anymore. Maybe there’s a better option than just quitting the meds. And maybe I’ll regret it next time my period rolls around and I’m sinking into despair again. But it certainly made me realize how important sexual satisfaction is for me, and how stressful it is to not have that release available to me. And so I think I did make a decision that was taking care of my mental health.
Plus, even though she was a total trooper, it makes mi’lady so much happier when I’m having good orgasms.
I think it’s another trait of co-dependency that I use up so much of my self trying to figure out what other people want me to be. And then the rest of my self that’s leftover is too small and too depleted to figure out what I actually want to be myself. With love, that’s definitely been a common thread for me. I want so much to be the perfect person for every person that I love. I want so desperately to be, for someone, ideal. The one who meets all their needs. The one essential person. I’ve spent so much of my life feeling so irrelevant. I have a hard time trusting, when I have friends, that they really like me. I always think maybe, somehow, they like the person I am on the surface — confident, smart, warm, compassionate, a little bit goofy, a little bit shy — but would scorn me if they knew what I sometimes feel like inside — needy, hypersensitive, anxious, depressed, fucking damaged.
When I tell people I’ve been raped, I have this whole narrative I feel obliged to give. The “I was hurt but now I’m stronger for it” narrative. The “I’m not a victim” narrative. The “I will never let anyone ever hurt me that way again” narrative. Stoic, strong, whole. That narrative is a lie. I was raped when I was 15, and it fucking broke me. It shattered me into a hundred thousand pieces and I’m still trying to pick them up and glue them back together but when there are so many pieces it’s hard to put them back together right, like a massive jigsaw puzzle where you don’t even know what the full picture is supposed to look like. But I have to pretend that I do, I pretend that I was able to put myself back together long ago, and that while I’m scarred, the way one is after surgery, the wound itself is healed and the scar is just a proof of my strength and a proud symbol of my suffering. That’s the way I’m supposed to be. I’m not supposed to be here, eight years later, still fumbling around in the dark trying to find all the pieces of myself I’m still discovering I lost.
Put those two things together — the need to be the perfect one, and the scary truth that I’m not even a “one” at all, I’m a hundred thousand — and you get my deepest flaw. I can’t be vulnerable for people. I can’t tell people, here I am, I’m broken, but you can have all the pieces and maybe, just maybe, letting you have them will help me put them back together. It’s because I’m scared. What if they take one look at the pieces and run? What if they valiantly say, “it doesn’t matter, broken or not, I love you anyway,” but then it does matter? What if the brokenness becomes too much? Something broken can’t be perfect. If I can’t even figure out who I am, how am I supposed to be the right one for someone else?
I’m just now starting to be able to be flawed. I’m starting to figure out that I won’t ever really be able to love someone, or give her the chance to love me, if I don’t take the risk of handing her the pieces. If I try so hard to be perfect, eventually the illusion will come crashing down around both of us and it will hurt all the more. I used to think I could (and should) keep it up for my whole life. “It doesn’t matter who I am, because as long as I can convince people that I know, and as long as people love me, that’s all that matters. ” But that’s not true. People can’t really love me unless they know me. And how are they supposed to love me if I don’t respect myself, or them, enough to give them my real self?
I’m not sure really how to be really vulnerable, even for mi’lady. What I do know is I love her too much not to at least try. Because if I can’t tell her my deepest fears, my biggest flaws, my most profound insecurities, then I’ll never know whether she loves me despite them.
Mi’lady is out of town this week. She left on Saturday, but the last time I saw her was Friday morning when we rode to work together after having spent the night spooning. She had band practice Friday night, and I had friends visiting from out of town, so we figured it wasn’t really necessary to see each other the last night. Especially since she’s gone less than a week — she’ll be back on Thursday, and you can bet I’ll be seeing her that night.
I realized after my friends left Saturday evening that I was anxious. I was anxious that mi’lady’s absence would make me have a breakdown, make me realize that I was completely dependent on her, that I rely on her completely for my social life, for my sense of self-worth, for my feelings of usefulness. I was afraid I would find out that without her around, I have absolutely nothing to do. See, when she’s actually around, it’s hard for me to know whether I rely on her completely, because she’s just there. It’s like you don’t realize you rely on water to survive until you’re thirsty, and there’s no water available. Since I see her almost every day, it’s hard to know whether seeing her is just a pleasant habit, or whether she’s like water to me. I was afraid of it being the latter. Afraid because I don’t want any person to ever be my water. I want to be my own water.
So Saturday evening, returning home to an empty apartment (subletters are out of town) with no girlfriend to keep me company, friends departed, I was worried that I would crash.
But I didn’t. I didn’t crash. Instead I looked at my list of ways to self-care, and then I made a weekend-specific list of things I could do (both personally fulfilling and errand-like) to keep busy and be a whole person without mi’lady. And it worked — not only did I not feel the panic of being thirsty when no water’s at hand, I didn’t even get thirsty. I was completely able to occupy myself, and was fully happy to do so. I watched a movie I’ve had from Netflix for the past few weeks (Monster with Charlize Theron — mi’lady didn’t really care to watch it with me so I’ve been waiting to watch it alone). I talked for an hour to my friend in Portland who’s going to come visit for a week sometime in the next month. I cleaned a bit. I took care of my dad’s birthday present (totally late… His birthday was June 4th, oops). I slept. I woke up Sunday morning and cooked breakfast, talked to one of my best friends from college on the phone for about 2 hours (she’s also going to come visit in a few months!), talked to my parents back in New York (haven’t had time to really talk to them much lately), had my new roommate over for a visit to talk about moving plans (I’m moving in with her next Sunday! Finally!), played piano, cooked dinner with my subletters who came back over the course of the afternoon, applied for some volunteer positions at various non-profits I’m interested in here, picked up a few groceries, wrote a to-do list for my upcoming move… I did a lot of stuff! And felt completely occupied and fulfilled and happy.
Got a text message from mi’lady around 6:30, saying she missed me, and can’t wait to cuddle. A call from her late last night as she was going to bed east-coast-time, in which she re-affirmed that she missed me, sounded almost wistful that I was going about business on my own without her. She has co-dependent tendencies too, she’s said as much and I recognize them in her. Can relate to them too, so I’m particularly aware of them when I see them. Just got another text message from her now, actually: “i miss you wish i was home with you.”
A little bit of distance. It’s good for me. It’s good to know that I can be okay without her. I don’t have many friends in this city yet, but I have a lot of people who love me in my life, and I have things that make me happy and complete without mi’lady. And so that makes me extra happy to have her in my life, and to welcome her home on Thursday. Funny how that works — the less I need someone, the freer I am to just … love her.
Mi’lady was supposed to come over this evening after she had dinner with a friend and after I had a therapy appointment to talk about various kinds of anti-depressants. But right before my appointment she texted me saying she needed to go home tonight and take care of things at home. So she’s not coming over. This is on the heels of a week in which I’ve been feeling like she doesn’t desire me anymore, for whatever reason. Last night I finally brought it up, since for the fourth night in a week, she wasn’t really into having sex. She wanted to cuddle and hold me, but not have sex. (This is really unusual for her.) And I just said, “Mi’lady, I need to tell you that I’m starting to have the feeling that you don’t desire me anymore.” It was good for her to know that I felt that way, but I also get afraid that saying those kinds of things just drives her away more, because being weepy and needy isn’t very desirable or sexy. So, even though she was really sweet to me last night, I spent all day today feeling some leftover weirdness. And so her text message that she wasn’t going to come over after all was sort of a blow. And it’s so easy for me to slip into these really destructive patterns of self-loathing (“my behavior is only going to drive her away! I’m such a bad girlfriend! I’m not lovable at all, of course she’s pulling away from me!”) and clinginess/passive-aggressiveness (so that I take out my negative feelings on her). These patterns need to stop. Basically, I need to stop relying on her for my sense of self-worth, and need to start providing it myself. Because then, I’ll be much more able to know when she’s actually pulling away, and when she just needs a little bit of her-time. Which I need too. (Though another issue in my co-dependency is that I have a very hard time asserting my own need for self-time, which means that when others assert their needs, I get resentful that they’re not being as selfless as I am. Which is also bad. But that’s tangential.) Good grief, there are so many issues and complexities here, it’s so hard to dissect them all and lay them out coherently.
It’s so hard to coax myself out of the destructive patterns once they’ve started rolling. So, so hard. So I need to have interventions for myself. In fact, this post right now is an intervention, because I’ve been lying on my bed since I got home from my appointment, utterly depressed in the thought that she doesn’t love me, and battling the urge to text her or call her snarkily or whining. So one thing my therapist has told me is rather than focus on huge complicated sweeping issues that will overwhelm me (such as statements like “I’m so awful for being so co-dependent”), I should focus on small behaviors that are easier to reverse (such as saying, “no, I’m not going to text her until and unless I am free of feeling resentful towards her”). That is a specific action. But I think it will also help me to have as a goal that every day, I need to do at least one positive thing for me. Things that will get me in the habit of caring for myself, rather than just caring for her or seeing myself as a part of just our relationship, and will help make me more independent. So that I can rely on myself for my happiness, and not her.
So I’m going to make a small list of positive things I can do for myself:
write a blog post
take a bath
go to the gym during my work day
go to a yoga class
take a walk
play piano
write emails to or call my friends and family
read a book of my own (and not a book that we’re reading together)
watch a movie or tv show
cook a real meal just for myself
take steps towards having my own activities (e.g., go to grad school info sessions, sign up for a university class, go to a meeting of an org I’m interested in, apply for a volunteer job, apply for a new real job, do an alum activity from my college)
spend time with a friend other than Mi’lady
get a massage, haircut, or other salon service
go to the library
go to a Co-Dependents Anonymous meeting
read literature on co-dependency
work on a new skill, like drawing or sewing
clean, do laundry, or take care of household tasks
Obviously, since we spend a lot of evenings together, this might take some work. I’ll need to figure out how to do positive self-care things on days we’re together. It will probably mean going to the gym during the work day, or writing a blog post during work (shhhh!), or reading during my lunch hour. And I don’t think it needs to be a serious activity every day. Just 20 minutes. And I want to try to wake up in the morning and say something positive about myself, and say something positive and affirming before I go to sleep. A mental review of the things I did for myself that day.
Maybe this will help. And now I’m going to go take a bath.
