Without Light [The Process & The Truth #1]
An uncomfortable vulnerable personal essay
“We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time.”
-Dr. Brene Brown
Remember when I said I was gonna get my shit together?
I figured, why not share the process - after all, this is a newsletter dedicated to the beatdown, brokenhearted mental cases and anyone who gives a shit about people like that. People like me.
I’ll be 39 soon and still with all this shit rummaging through my memories - I’ve been avoiding grief in some capacity, because I’m so raw about parenting and hurt (still, which triggers heavy feelings of shame because I believe I should be ‘over it’ by now).
Since putting the brakes on the publication, I’ve had the time to process some hard hitting truths that have flown right into my face the last couple weeks.
Hard Truth #1: I still have PTSD
Hard Truth #2: I still tend to err on the side of martyrdom (because it’s comfortable there).
What if I could journal more positivity? Is it easier for me to run and hide than to show up, take responsibility, and heal? Yes.
It does feel as though there are two halves of me, each trying desperately to integrate into each other and I cannot seem to get out of my own fucking way. The feelings of frustration have now ballooned into something closer to resentment (which explains why my thinking is so distorted, negative, and hurtful). It’s as though I can’t manage to find genuine gratitude on a daily basis for fear of losing that which makes me happy - whatever that is. And that’s not healthy, nor is it the kind of life I want to live.
Sometimes I pull on the strings of my abyss, this place where I’ve shoved all my hurt and pain. When I pull on these strings in a reactive, petulant way, the whole ball of shit begins to unravel and unwind, but things are chaotic and make no sense. The ball unravels all over me, crushing me before I can even notice a singular positive element inside a conversation, space, or person.
So what do I do? I work harder, apply more energy, more thought, more, more in hopes it will be either enough or anything worth acknowledging positively. But when I begin to pull on those same strings in a more calm, curious, compassionate way, the stories in my head lose their ammo.
The power that I gave to the stories now comes back into me.
What if I spent less energy scanning exits and looking for threats and re-directed that energy back into my own purpose and sense of meaning, into looking for the small but joyous things in my own daily life?
The fork in the road is what now? What to do with all of this?
In an effort to align my non-wise, internal scared little girl with my super-wise, still scared Self, I picked up several books from the library, one of which is Dr. Brene Brown’s “Rising Strong” (which I cannot recommend enough) and because Dr. Brown does a beautiful job of explaining why it’s so fundamentally paramount to not operate or live from only one side of ourselves (or what Jungian Analysts call “integration of shadow into conscious Self” (or something equally fancy), her book has me asking myself a lot of hard questions about my light, my shadow, and my work.
I don’t want my emotions to have such a strong influence in my daily life, pulling me away from my creativity and positivity, away from my work. I don’t want to feel so easily dysregulated by events and people, things I cannot control.
I want to be an adult that can handle her emotions, however big and scary and “childish” they may feel, and not get them all over everyone and everything close to me. I think I operate out of my shadow now because it was suppressed by shame as a child and happiness, joyful moments, and experiences constantly felt unstable - like the cards would collapse when someone didn’t respond or react in a way that was considered acceptable.
While sitting in the mire of all of these realizations the past several days, the shape of this newsletter began to really take frame and I’ve recognize a desperate need to shift the global perspective and conversation about complex trauma, mental health, and post traumatic stress disorder.
I, like so many of us, am now stumbling through learning how to live inside all of myself - the shit I dislike about me (my PTSD, hypervigilance, bent perspectives) and the shit I love about me (my ability to write, my sense of humor, my work ethic), because we already know that balance is what leads to wholeness in nature, and so it is too with ourselves.
I see a need to shift how collective society thinks about, communicates about, and educates about these complex and very real parts of ourselves that society has managed to banish, contort, and conflate in a variety of ways. To do that will take a spine built from resilience, honesty, conviction, and curiosity - things I tend to have built into me from my incredible amount of life experience for my age. Why not put it all to good use?
And even though I’ve done my own heavy lifting with research and trying to gain a better understanding of the why of my behavior, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, I still struggle with my shadow and my inner judge. To not admit that very real truth here, to you, openly as I try to write about the very thing that haunts me (and the things I want to change), feels dishonest and disingenuous.
The truth is…
The stories in my head are so damaging, and there are so many of them, that I can quickly find myself collapsing under their weight if I’m not careful. If I’m not curious. As a writer, I get convinced by my own stories, then I go and tell anyone who will listen as a means to further be right instead of be uncomfortable in my feelings and dredging up some amount of curiosity about these stories. Because these stories are not the truth. Not fully. Not ever. And every time I fill a hole in a story with something shitty like I must be unlovable or I guess it doesn’t matter what I do, I build up my experience to be more like the version I’ve made up (confabulated, in social work talk) a lot less like the reality in which the context and curiosity of another point-of-view truly exists (as an aside, I’ve just learned that filling the holes in these stories with negative and false truths releases enough dopamine to give us a little high every time we believe we’ve landed on an “ah-ha!” moment, which then only further reinforces our cycle of being right with the story in our head, so that’s fun).
I know all of these things.
These stories are torturous, pitting me against anyone. Pitting me against myself, shoving me off my path of calm and curiosity into a morass of untruths so thick the residue from their aftermath clings to me and everyone around me.
So what do I do?
I offload these stories as tantrums and resentful thinking.
These stories only make me feel like shit - I have to change the theme, language, and tone of these stories if I want to live in the balance of who I am, which is shadow and light. Carl Jung gives us this wise advice:
Thanks for taking a peak into this email to see what it’s all about! If you like it, I’d appreciate it if you let me know by hearting it or shoot me an email - if you don’t like it, well, I guess that’s tough shit for both of us.
What I do for sure know, now, in closing this uncomfortably vulnerable essay-
I know the process of an adult attempting to do things in an adult way is messy and hard and complicated. I know I won’t write about every bit, nook, and innermost cave, however I also know that I am committed to sharing the truth of my experiences and will gleefully share my pitfalls, foibles, mistakes, and errors in judgement as well as the wins, the lessons, the epiphanies and celebratory moments of expansion because I believe the process is the truth.
And we can’t shift anything without the truth.