For as long as I can remember, in every relationship I’ve had – as a daughter, as a mother, as a wife, as a friend – whenever there is a conflict I’m usually the one who apologizes first and tries to fix the situation. Maybe it’s because I don’t like conflict or maybe it’s because I’m scared to lose people. But I can tell you this: no one is scared to lose me. The people who are closest to me continue, year after year, to walk all over me, say hurtful things, and never once worry if I’m hurt or care. I’m tired of always being the bad guy. I’m tired of no one caring if they hurt me or worry that someday they might push me too far and lose me. I would love for someone, one day to give a shit, but they won’t. Because I’m too forgiving and too much of a doormat. So I need to go hermit mode for a while. I’m tired of being walked on.
Ham
Someone went ham.
I don’t check my stats every day. I really only check them when I’ve posted something new. Gotta get that sweet, sweet dopamine by seeing my views go up. But if I haven’t posted that day or the day before, I typically don’t bother to check.
That’s why it completely escaped my notice that on February 22, someone found my blog and just went nuts. I mean they were reading some really old stuff. And embarrassing stuff at that.
Why was it embarrassing? I would say mostly because a lot, A LOT, of my old writing doesn’t reflect who I am anymore. And rereading some of them I wonder how much they reflected who I was at the time. I suppose they did. But so much of my life was wrapped up in trying to fit into the church world of rural Missouri that I honestly can’t say if much of what I wrote then was me. I censored myself a lot back then. I wanted to speak truth to power but in a likable way. I wanted to rock the boat enough but not tip it over. I wanted to persuade with pretty, witty writing and I feared angering the people in my life.
Yesterday I found myself in a parking ramp I hadn’t been in for about a year. The last time I was there I had a boyfriend and I thought we were in love. If I’m being honest, I hoped we’d be together for a very long time. We broke up a few months later. We’re still very good friends but being in that parking ramp today brought back a flood of memories and emotions from a year ago. And I realized just how much has changed in a year, how much I’ve changed.
Change.
I started this blog over 11 years ago because I frequently had a lot on my mind and I wanted an outlet for it. And yet, I still censored myself and tried to make myself palatable for my readers. Looking through what my mysterious fan read on the 22nd, I can’t believe just how much my life has changed. Especially in the last 3.5 years since my ex-husband left. This blog and my Instagram account (which I started in 2010) have both acted as a kind of public diary for life and the lives of my kids for a long time now. So any time I go in and do a deep dive on either account I get a glimpse into the past, and often I don’t like what I see.
But recent events in my life have been putting things in perspective for me. And something I’ve realized is just how much I’ve been running from who I was and running from problems I didn’t want to face. I took a good, hard look at myself yesterday and realized I had been lying to myself about a lot of things for quite a while.
There are parts of me that are so beautiful and powerful. Parts that’ve been with me since I was young. I see those parts here in my past and now in my present. And there are parts of me that are embarrassing, parts that are corrupt, parts that are dishonest, parts that are unkind. I see those in both my past and present as well. Looking over who I’ve been before and who I am now, I realize how much I want to nurture those beautiful, powerful parts of me. And seeing all the times I’ve lied to myself, and all the running I’ve done these last few years, I know I have to stop running and start being honest.
Whoever you are that found my blog and brought up the past, thank you. You inadvertently caused me to have to take a real look at myself. I have to litigate my past and confront my present. I need to burn the chaff and salvage the sweetness and goodness that is in me. I need to stop running.
I constantly say I’m working on myself but now I wonder if that’s been a lie. I know I will be from now on.
So thanks, Ham, whoever you are.
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The Catnip Paradox, Vibes, and The Real Reason I’m Single.
Is ignorance bliss? Is self-awareness is a blessing or a curse? I don’t have answers to these questions. All I know is me.
If you know me or read me, you know I’m perpetually on a quest to know thyself and that I’m always aiming to improve myself. Reading any of my personal essays will clue you in to the fact that I am often a mess because healing isn’t linear but I never let my messiness stop me. You’ll also figure out that since my divorce, I think and write about romantic relationships, love, sex, marriage, and all that jizz jazz often. Why? Cuz I got dumped, dummy. LOL. Ok, but for real, it’s because like everyone on the planet I want to be loved and wanted and I don’t want to be alone. My fear that I’m inherently unlovable, undesirable, and will always be alone has driven me and not in healthy ways.
So it’ll come as no surprise at all that this personal essay is about that shit. Again. You’re bored already and I get it. I’m bored too. LOL. So for both of our sakes’ I will try to keep this brief.
Here is my latest theory and the reasons behind it, as quickly and as succinctly as my loquacious little fingers can write it:
Theory: I don’t think I will ever be in another serious relationship.
Reasons:
One: I rely too heavily on vibes.
I don’t really give people much of a chance on dating apps. If I don’t feel it pretty quickly, I move on. Truthfully, I find most of the “talking stage” to be so egregiously tedious that I would rather lose the ability to speak (something that might kill me) than to have to suffer through innumerable iterations of the mother fucking talking stage. KMN.
One A: If I don’t find you mentally stimulating, game over.
If I hate the talking stage so much, how will I ever find out if I find someone mentally stimulating? I don’t know, bitch. I don’t make the rules. Again, it’s about vibes. If the vibes are vibing then I’ll stick around long enough to find out if you’re a dumb dumb or not. If I find myself dissociating while you’re telling me a story, we probably aren’t gonna go on very many dates.
Two: I have a type and my type’s type is not me.
It’s cliche but I like me a bad boy with a heart of gold. Or to put it another way, there is a certain type of masculine energy that is absolute catnip for me. However, the type of masculinity that I’m attracted to is not attracted to soft, autistic, nerdy girls. They want the hot, baddie. The girl all the bad guys want is not me. LOL. And let’s be real just cuz Sandra Dee dressed up like a dominatrix at the end of Grease didn’t mean she was really a “bad girl”. I could try to play the part of a baddie, but the reality is I’m not. I’m an emotional, socially awkward, fat girl. (With a wicked sense of humor and entertaining writing style, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Two A: I know that to someone out there, I am absolute catnip. The problem is they are not catnip to me.
I’m talking about catnip a lot. The point is somewhere out in this wide world there are people who like my personality, think my face is pretty, and don’t mind my soft bod. But the people who like me I don’t typically vibe with. It’s extremely problematic. LOL.
I see one likely outcome, one “eh, idk, maybe” outcome, and one “would take an act of a deity to happen” outcome as a result of all this.
Likely: I continue to go on casual dates and make friends and have fun but never settle into another serious relationship. It’s a bummer but I’m starting to accept this as my fate for being such a picky ass.
Eh, Idk, Maybe: I settle for someone who is not my type but that likes me and I get along with. I mean, this could happen. I’ve settled before. I wouldn’t be alone. But I’d probably be bored.
Would Take An Act Of A Deity To Happen: I meet someone I fall head over heels for. We vibe. They stimulate me mentally. They’re a baddie with a heart of gold. And somehow, impossibly, I’m exactly what they want too. I know, sounds unlikely. One in a million.
That’s it guys. That’s my theory and the reasons behind it. I’ll be honest, today I am ok with the likely outcome of being alone forever. Today, I can handle it. Another day, who knows? But for now, I accept it. I accept myself as I am. And for today, I love myself.
I started this post asking if ignorance is bliss. Would I be happier if I weren’t so self-aware? If I wasn’t always reexamining myself in order to improve as a human being, would I just be a happy, ignorant, slut? IDFK. But at the moment, instead of making myself miserable because I’m not loved/wanted/with someone, I am accepting myself and my singleness and knowing that somehow it will all be ok.
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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.
