Author: Unlikelybon

Unlikelybonhttp://everydaybonnie.comFull-time mom, part-time human.
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Bubble up, Holy Spirit

What if you could not trust your senses?

All of your life you were told up was down and blue was green. Every nerve ending tells you the wind is blowing but the people you trust with your life tell you it’s still.

When I was fourteen, I stood in church with my friends, hands lifted to God, longing to feel something. A woman named Grace walked over to me. I remember I was wearing my favorite black dress. Cotton, and nearly floor length. While my eyes were closed and my lips parted in praise to the Lord, she laid her bejeweled hand on my abdomen and proclaimed, “Bubble up, Holy Spirit.” I did not know what to do.

She prayed. And prayed. I knew something was supposed to happen. My mouth was supposed to open and words in an ancient language I had never learned to speak were supposed to come unbidden. The power of God’s spirit was supposed to overtake me and flow through me. You see, this was a tongues church.

I won’t lie to you. I began speaking in tongues that night. I don’t know if it was the Holy Spirit of Elohim or a teenage girl trying to fit in. I just know I did it.

There is this feeling I sometimes get. It’s a mix of excitement and anxiety. It does feel like something is bubbling up inside of me. All the varieties of butterflies that live in me take flight and rattle around me sending waves through my nervous system. When I was a Christian and this happened, I prayed, often in tongues. I didn’t know what to do with this nervous energy, where it came from, or what it meant. I knew my body was sending me a signal and I wanted it to abate.

And I have that feeling right now. But I’m not scared of it. This nervous energy coursing through me feels alive and empowering. There is something bubbling up inside of me but it’s not an ancient angelic tongue or the spirit of a deity. It’s a new wave of creativity and confidence in my abilities and talents. It’s fresh ideas flowing through me, not gibberish words.

When you spend the majority of your life surrounded by people who desperately want to control you, your behavior, and your belief systems, you can start to lose touch with your intuition. Gaslighting becomes all you know. You question your own senses. Is up really down? Is black actually white? Is reason madness and truth just lies? So much of my adult life has been spent trying to make sense of the dissonance between what I could see and what I was being told. People, I’m sorry to tell you, love to lie. I learned that I could not trust myself. The words, “Are you calling me a liar?” still echo in my ears. How many times was I told that what I believed was the lie, despite evidence to the contrary. And what they were telling me was the truth, even though it made no sense. I was the one who was wrong and I needed to just say “ok” and accept what I was being told.

Gaslighting is a special circle of hell for an autistic person. We already feel like aliens in a neurotypical world. We already spend too much of our time trying to understand what we don’t understand. And, to be honest, when we do figure out something on our own we feel pretty proud of ourselves. So to come along and tell us that we can’t trust our own senses is particularly cruel.

But nature is healing, my loves. The wolves of my intuition have stabilized the ecosystem of my gut and the river of my confidence is changing course. (If that sentence seems like gibberish to you, just pretend I’m speaking in tongues. Or click the link about how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone Park improved the ecosystem so much that the river changed course.)

The longer I spend living a life apart from those gaslighting fucks, the more my confidence returns. I’m starting to believe myself, to trust my eyes and ears. My intuition is healing. New ideas are coming and the powerful urge to create, to write, to sing, to be myself unabashedly is stronger than it has been in such a long time. This thing bubbling up inside me is the power of me. It’s excitement at all of the ideas spawning in my mind. It’s the belief that I am strong, smart, talented, creative, and beautiful. It’s trust in myself. And being able to trust myself is such a gorgeous feeling.

I won’t be spouting any ancient tongues today. Instead of trying to rid myself of this bubbling energy, I’m going to let it fuel me to create the world I want to be a part of.

Let’s. Fucking. Go, my darlings. Let’s bubble the shit out of life today.

A poem on change, called Change

I want to get deeper with this. Like so much deeper. I want to philosophize about what change is and what it means. I want to dive deep into the symbolism of the werewolf and the moon. I want to scratch the itch that this laid in my brain. But I don’t have time right now. I have to go see a man about a car. Not a euphemism. I really do have to go take care of a car problem.

Anyway, here’s a poem on change, called Change.

spaghetti sauce stain on a country crock tub: stuff about deep seated pain or something

Sometimes our understanding of ourselves comes at a great price. Sometimes we lose and sometimes we hurt. And sometimes wounds we didn’t even know we had reopen. A wound of mine recently reopened and it changed my understanding of myself on a fundamental level.

As a child I was treated in a way by peers and caregivers that left me feeling insecure about myself as a feminine person. I have never thought of myself as masculine but because of circumstances beyond my control, I was often mocked as a child and told I wasn’t a girl. I was forced to have a short hair cut because my caregivers didn’t want to teach me how to care for long hair. This was the 80’s and the kids in my elementary school teased me, calling me a boy and “Mr. Wilson” because my last name is Wilson and Mr. Wilson was a character from Dennis the Menace. My parents called my sister and I “tomboys” and despite wishing I could wear dresses like the other girls, I was not allowed. I remember when I had to go to a dinner in the fifth grade and I got to wear a dress. It was the most beautiful I had ever felt.

I thought the teasing would stop once I went to junior high but the same group of girls who’d harassed me in elementary school had lockers next to mine. They loudly made jokes at my expense while I pulled books from my locker. I started carrying all of my books in my backpack so I wouldn’t have to go back there.

At other times in my life I was told by male friends that they didn’t see me as a girl. I was just one of the guys to them. “You’re not a girl,” stung so much even when said to me by someone I really kind of hated. I didn’t want to be one of the guys.

On top of all of this my mother spent a lot of time telling me I was fat, not pretty if I didn’t wear makeup, and would never attract a man.

I remember being around 11 years old and thinking to myself that I should just kill myself when I turn 40 since I was clearly so undesirable physically and I wrongly assumed I would start getting wrinkles at 40.

I’m 44, by the way.

This insecurity about my physical form has informed too too too much of my life. And no matter how hard I try to shake it, it remains. I have no idea what it feels like to be a trans individual but I can honestly say I know the pain of being misgendered.

When I am truly honest with myself, I will say I think of myself as a beautiful woman. But something inside grips me like a spaghetti sauce stain on a country crock tub and tells me that no matter how I see myself, no one else sees me as a woman, let alone beautiful. And without being aware of it, I’ve become more and more sensitive to the perceived treatment of my gender.

This schlock, unfortunately, was buried deep in the bricked up wall of my heart, rotting and putrefying, like Fortunato looking for some grappa. I didn’t know why some interactions with people left me reeling from pain so intense I could feel my pulse in my neck. I just knew I was hurting. Deeply, deeply hurting. And I wanted it to stop. I needed reassurance, validation. I needed to know that I was seen as a woman, maybe even a mildly pretty woman. I needed to know I wasn’t any different from any other woman.

But I didn’t know this was what I was looking for. I was just hurt and jealous and angry and sad and confused.

Why don’t they treat me like a woman? Why am I different? Is it my hair? My features? My weight? Is it my mannerisms, my voice, my diction? What in the actual fuck was it? I didn’t know. I just knew I felt different and I hated it. And I hated the crippling pain and depression I went through over this.

All this recently came to light for me when I experienced something so painful it knocked a huge fucking hole in that brick wall in my heart and exposed the corpse of the little girl shanked by mean girls with side pony tails. And, of course, as I processed all of it, I thought to myself, “Holy fucking shit?!? That’s why I overreact and act like an overly sensitive psycho bitch? Fucking hell.” It feels like I’ve unlocked the secrets of the universe somehow.

Now that I’m aware of this I have to accept a few things.

One: This isn’t going away anytime soon.

Just because I see the problem doesn't mean I know how to fix it. Healing is not instantaneous or linear. This will be a process. In fact, even as I write this, the pain of it courses through me like electricity causing my breath to catch in my chest. Nevertheless, I stride on.

Two: I have acted like a crazy fucking bitch sometimes because of this.

The crazy in me has been very strong at times and I have to own it. Looking back over my life and how I let this ruin me is beyond painful. It's straight up embarrassing. But I can't change the past. I can only strive to do better from the moment I hit publish on this post forward. Always forward, never back.

Three: Actions have consequences.

I have to own that my actions have led to hurting people that I love. I have to own that my actions have pushed people away. I have to own that those relationships may never be repaired. Actions have consequences and I need to accept mine.

Four: I am a beautiful woman.

I see myself as a woman. And sometimes even a beautiful woman. I see myself as feminine. So that is who and what I am. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. It doesn’t matter how anyone else behaves towards me. I am a woman and what I think is all that matters in this equation.

Five: The only one I need to convince is myself.

I can’t make anyone see me as a woman or force them to treat me in ways that validate my gender to me. If someone sees me as a dude, nothing I can do will change that. And I need to stop trying. Yes, it will still hurt but, in time, if I continue to work on myself and accept that the only validation I need comes from within, then eventually it won't hurt quite so much.

Once that red sauce stain infuses itself into the elemental makeup of the country crock tub it is there forever, my darlings. And this tub is stained, let me tell you. But even stained tubs continue to do their job. I may be stained. And there may be no way to ever fully heal from this ish. But I’m still out here holding my metaphorical spaghetti. And even though I have damaged relationships along the way to get to this revelation, I am here now. I can start to heal and change.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have the corpse of a little girl to give a proper burial.

Be safe out in this terrible world, bambinos.