There is a creator I have decided

When it snows in Alaska, my favorite part is when it catches the light.  The snow refracts it and becomes a glitter sparkle in the pile of countless other glitter sparkles.  For no other reason except the snow flake is designed that way, in all those lovely shapes, each one a different combination and becomes a glitter sparkle.  I am always in awe of the fact that the things that happen around us are just so beautiful. 

I have had a hard time in my life in the areas of love and trust.  To love god and accept him into your heart you have to trust that what the bible says is true.  That was hard for me. It was hard to see terrible things happen to good people or watch children grow up and die in unloving environments –  with no happy ending. I have a hard time trusting that the god of the bible is Loving.  My dad for one reason or another has been distant in my life. It is hard to identify god as my father with that understanding of a father.  The people I can identify with the most are the prostitutes, the unloved, the unworthy.  Jesus was kind to them and I can get behind that.  But faith has been a journey – maybe slow to me since I am still discovering how I feel about God and who he is to me at 35 – almost 20 years to my date of collision with the biggest constant thought in my life. 

When I think of the universe and the passing of time – our understanding that the world is billions of years old, I want to go back even further and watch the birth of the universe.  But if it was a big bang, even further still, where did all the elements come from to create the boom? How are so many things connected in our growth as a species if we are all so accidentally big banged?  And even further, something had to create the elements.  I have decided that there is a creator.  A mass of energy? A wispy cloud of element we call god? A sentient being? a transcended power that resides in another dimension parallel to us? I don’t know but for me it takes more faith to believe something clapped its hands and here we are with all these complexities.  I am resigning to believe there is a creator. 

I have always known of God and have been in church since I could remember.  I know all about the stories, the donkeys, the cross, the whole religion – from a churched child perspective.  And then I asked God to really have some kind of relationship with me ( I didn’t know what that meant really – it was just in the prayer I was supposed to say) when I was younger and it was real for me.  I spent a lot of time trying to atone for all that I was and really missed the concept of free grace because that is NOT what I was taught in every day life and couldn’t trust or accept this reality. I met a guy and my faith was really formed around his ideas of the Christian church.  Unfortunately this was coupled with some religious emotional abuse and I had a really strange understanding about God.  I kind of back and forthed and relied on god whenever I needed to whine about something and blame someone. When I was praying to leave my marriage, I was mad that God wouldn’t do it for me.  When I shut down emotionally at the peak of the abuse in my last marriage, I blocked any and all amount of God out and gave way to any and every sin I wanted. 

Then I hit a moose.  But right before I hit the moose, I felt instructions download into my brain on what to do when a moose comes.  When the moose came, I didn’t even have to think – my body did everything for me, exactly like instructed.  And as I lost myself, spinning, around and around and around down the icy hill in the middle of the night, I let go of the wheel and surrendered myself to whatever the universe had for me.  Because in that moment everything that I thought I knew was surrendered too.  I was stripped to nothing and gave everything.

I have been looking around ever since with a new beauty of the life around me.  It pulses through the cycles of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun or the waves of the ocean.  The Flowers, the passing seasons, the birds, how animals love, the way babies and children grow, love, and trust, the beauty of every person – different in every characteristic, shining like glitter sparkles all over the earth.  I have decided that God is the universe and the universe is my creator and I kind of think maybe he's an artist, a poet, also beautiful- because the story goes that we are made like him. 

When I make something, I am really proud.  I pick all the colors I want and put them all together and I stand back and stare at my creation and I am so proud at the ending result.  God made this world and I can only imagine he is so proud of who we are as people (… maybe not all of us).  And the fact that God created the world with snow sparkles and wish flowers, animals that accompany us and the circle of life- tells me it was thought out.   All the way down to our DNA sequencing, there is order and when there is not, it acts as if it was written to be wild, without order, free to evolve the way it wants.  Kind of like the people God created.  We are all so different, allowed to be full of disorder, allowed to grow and rebel.  A creator that allows me to grow the way I want to and still finds me worthy to keep around ( every morning I wake up again is a gift) is something I can get behind.   And so the journey to faith for me begins here.  My walk into understanding this world and who the universe is.

 

I am Ashes and Light

 

I have been journaling ever since I can remember.  Its been a real therapeutic release for me.   I returned to a blog that I have had since I graduated from college and when I read it, I don’t even know that girl anymore.  I say girl because the things I write about are young, early learning about myself.  Fumbling to understand why I am the way I am and trying desperately to pretend I am not.  Getting divorced was the breaking point in my life.  I don’t want to say my relationship was so terrible, and in the coming weeks I feel open to writing about it finally, almost 5 years later.  It was painful and excruciating – I was held together by all my beliefs I created to make my marriage last and when I had to make the choice to end it, all those beliefs left me with nothing.  I was consumed by the pain that burned like fire all over my soul and the walls I had put up to keep me there.  I was burned to the very fibers of my existence, and I had nothing left to who I was except who I was.  I was made to stare at myself for everything I was and wasn’t and I had to make a choice.  Do I build back up a castle to hide my nothingness or do I deal with myself now?  Well I didn’t know how to build a castle and I was such an emotional wreck that I couldn’t even function so therapy was a place I was forced to go to if only because I couldn’t pretend to be okay.

So therapy.  I unpacked bags I didn’t even know I had. I cried, I begged, I contemplated suicide, I tore my flesh and I was reborn.  Sometimes I think the person I am now is so much removed from the girl I was in these old posts that I don’t even recognize myself.  I am completely at peace with who I am and yet, I am still in the process of discovering who I am. How far I can go.  What this new me is. 

These next few weeks I will be writing.  Writing to tell the story.  Parts of the story.  Some of them wont be pretty, but I have made a pact with myself to honor the truth – even if people don’t like it. Even if its ugly and even if you don’t agree with it.  I wont lie.  

 

With all that being said- when I was in college, I wrote an “I AM” poem.  I wanted to write today but wasn’t sure how to address the change inside my heart.  So I will begin the process of explaining not just for you but for me.  You just happen to have access to it if you are reading this.

 

I Am Poem – template (you should try too)

I am _________________________________________ (Two special characteristics)

I wonder _____________________________________ (Something you are curious about)

I hear ___________________________________ (An imaginary sound)

I see ______________________________ (An imaginary sight)

I want __________________________ (A desire you have)

I am ___________________________ (The first line of the poem repeated)

I pretend _____________________________________ (Something you pretend to do)

I feel _____________________ (A feeling about something imaginary)

I touch ____________________________________________ (An imaginary touch)

I worry _______________________________________ (Something that bothers you)

I cry ________________________________________ (Something that makes you sad)

I am _____________________________________ (The first line of the poem repeated)

I understand ____________________________________ (Something you know is true)

I say ________________________________________ (Something you believe in)

I dream ________________________________________ (Something you dream about)

I try ___________________________________________ (Something you make an effort on)

I hope ______________________________________________ (Something you hope for)

I am ______________________________________ (The first line of the poem repeated)

 

And here I am

I am Ashes and Light  

I wonder what I will do in heaven when I get there

I hear echoes of memories I can’t categorize

I see hope on EVERY horizon

I want my dreams to come true despite myself  

I am Ashes and Light

I pretend I am more important that I think I am

I feel invisible bruises healing  

I touch the future me I am trying to be

I worry that Love isn’t enough  

I cry when anxiety overcomes me  

I am Ashes and Light

I understand change is possible

I say trust the universe

I dream of other worlds

I try to continually change into a higher version of myself  

I hope I can one day live without my trauma responses

I am Ashes and Light

Boundaries

In trauma therapy I learned how we have a moment in life that translates to a truth to us.  For me, most of my truths included how much of a bother I am, how unworthy I am, how I am the problem, how no one loves me unless I am good.  I learned the definition of love the way it was presented to me.  From my mother, it was on her terms.  On a good day, I got great things and on a bad day, I was reminded that I was a disappointment.   When you learn these “truths” about yourself you put on a pair of lenses and see the world through these lenses of truth.  I made poor decisions with friends because I thought “how lucky am I that these people like me” and allowed them to treat me subpar.  Some friendships were mean to me, and I learned new truths about myself: I was fat, I was the “weird” one, I was tolerable.  Some friendships were kind to me, and I learned that I deserved better, that my mom didn’t need to speak to me that way or that what I had learned was wrong.  It really built up the way I saw myself and how I saw myself wasn’t very good. 

Anyways, in my life, I like to disassociate.  I have memories of my childhood and quite a few of them but there are also huge chunks of my life I can’t account for.  I also craved walls.  Oh, I could hide behind some walls. But the most visited place was this place I went to inside my heart when I was stuck with someone yelling at me or stuck in a situation where someone wouldn’t let me leave.  Stuck in a sexual situation I didn’t have the tools to escape.  It looked like big blocks of cement like a stone wall of a castle but a tiny hidden room, about as big as a bathroom.  It was safe.  I would see myself in there, knees pulled up to my chest, head resting on them, arms wrapped around myself and a small little fire across from me.  The walls were especially thick in this place.  I was so so so safe here.  No one could touch me.  This is where I find myself when I am having a trauma response and I can’t kick myself out of it.  This place is where I find myself when I spiral out of control emotionally and all I hear are the old “truths” jabbing me and taunting me, reminding me that I am worthless no matter how much I try to become.  That I am unloved and unworthy.  That my existence is worthless, and I should not be here.  This little place is where I crawl to when I can’t escape those thoughts.  Except I am not myself there.  I am young.  I am so little, maybe 8 or 9.

One of my most transformative EMDR sessions from trauma therapy was when I watched the me, I am today, step inside this little cave and lift that little girl up and hug her. I will protect you now little Jackie.  I will not let them hurt you anymore.  I am in control and if the people in my life can’t save me, I will save me.  And I cried and cried because that’s all I was looking for all along.  I was looking for someone to tell me I wasn’t worthless and that I was pleasant to have around.  I wanted so desperately to not be the problem.  I wanted to be wanted.   It was this moment that I reclaimed myself. 

A lot of how I was raised was baggage and trauma begetting trauma and baggage.  My mom’s father was very mean to her.  I am sure she had a little girl hiding in her heart too.  My father’s father was absent to my dad.  And I am also sure there is a little boy deep inside there wondering why he wasn’t good enough too.  I have to believe that my parents did the best they could and do the best they can with what they know.  I am collateral damage to that. But I am also the rule changer.  I refuse to make any child in my life feel the way I felt growing up.  I will therapy, I will mediate, I will cry and make myself deal with my shit if only to provide the next generation with the love and security I struggle to accept every day. 

Because even though I am better, so much better, and my bad days don’t happen nearly as much, I am still so fragile and full of nervousness.  I am anxious around other people and without the help of my walls, I feel constantly exposed.  See, part of toxic patterns and behaviors is the lack of ability to have boundaries.  If your parents never had them, you never grew up knowing them.  Boundaries are like a fence with a door to your property.  Walls are like... well walls. No one can see you.  However, I don’t have to hide who I am anymore. And I never should have had to.  However, that was my safety mechanism, and I did have walls instead of fences.

The biggest difference is that walls hide, and fences allow.  You can see through a fence, but you have to be allowed to be let in.  The owner of the property has to allow.  Allowing yourself to live without walls is really a very scary thing but I personally desire a life of transparency and vulnerability – to open myself up to real conversations and real talk instead of pleasantries and fake nice peopling.  However, in order to do that I have to be good with my boundaries.  I am not.  It causes quite a bit of anxiety to me to lay a boundary and I think about it over and over, perseverating in my mind what people think, how they now view me, is it a threat? Have I offended someone? Over and over and over in my mind. There is no rest.  Boundaries are excruciating to me and yet I have learned, are also a necessary tool.  When you have a fence, when you say no, everyone sees.  When you have a wall, you can just hide behind it and there is a vague, discrete answer that people can’t 100% identify.  People can’t make a solid opinion about you because they can’t see you.  However, being open and vulnerable, allowing my own freedom to choose and be myself, good or bad means being honest to myself and other people around me.  That means when I advocate for myself and say no or lay a boundary, some people might not like it and create an opinion about me, my situation and my choices.   I personally find this very difficult because again, I grew up in an environment where you didn’t talk about the things YOU liked so no one would take it from you or sabotage it.  I grew up where my honest truth was not celebrated.  I hid my truths behind walls to keep them safe.  Now I have to content with fences.

I was unprepared for boundary backlash.  When I laid boundaries that people didn’t like, I was unprepared for their trauma responses.  See, people are at their best when they’re getting what they want.  I am good at giving people what they want because I learned fast that it was the easiest way to receive their praise, recognition and personal validation despite being the only one who becomes tasked with the job.  But when you lay down boundaries now people aren’t getting what they want, and they become – not mean. It feels mean, but I think people respond with their own trauma responses, their own baggage and their own feelings.  With how hard it is to lay a boundary in the first place, the backlash is all I ever feared anyways and now I’m thinking about it again and again and over and over again.  Its so hard not to slip into the spiral and then go hide in the space where my little girl Jackie lives when she’s scared. 

Despite all this, I stand by the boundaries.  Because at the end of the day, when you are lying down dying in your bed, it is your life that you are reviewing and if you spent it doing things you never wanted to do for everyone else who may or may not even care or know how much work you put into doing the task for them – what then was your life worth? What was it for?  Did YOU ever really live?

I want to live, and I want to do the things I care about because – its my life.  You have your own life to make your own decisions – I respect them, I should receive this same respect.  However, that’s just not how life works – the ego gets in the way, and we personalize experiences that may not have anything to do with us into our narrative.  Boundaries are a tool that allow you to open the fence to the things you allow and keep yourself safe for the things you don’t want to allow.  Although it’s difficult to see poor responses to your decisions sometimes, even we have to step back a little bit and realize that some things are just not about us.  Yes, our boundaries, yes, our decision and yes, they have a response because of it – but I am only responsible for my response – not theirs. I must honor my heart and my choices because if I am hiding and lying about them, do you even know me? Do I even know me?

In my quest to be the most genuine me I can be, I must take the bad things with the good and just hope I can continue to grow and morph into the next best version of myself every day.  Boundaries play a huge role in this for me.