Last year around my birthday month, I decided to embark on a new journey on a new path. It was just three months before my mom died. I am so grateful that I made that choice while she was still here to see me taking care of myself a little better.
The thing is, I chose to connect with my own feelings and feel them which is not something I enjoy. I vaguely remember a time when I was very, very small when I lived with my maternal grandparents and had my own little protector in the form of a poodle named Snoopy. He would sleep under my crib and bark and do a Lassie move every time he thought I needed someone to come help me. He was my number one fan. He was amazing. I felt safe then, I think. That was the last time.
I won’t bore you or risk my self by telling you the details but I will say that things that happened when I was very young and things that kept happening since then have not allowed me to feel safe enough to feel my real feelings. The result was that I was like a fictional 50s housewife even when I was telling the world to fuck off. What I mean by that (and I’ve recently come to understand the problems with analogies as communication) is that I was always attending to everyone else and forgetting myself to a painful degree. When I would set tables or get drinks I would routinely get them for everyone but me. Five people, four glasses.
After yet another a truly harrowing experience (that would have been less harrowing if I’d taken care of it earlier) I realized it was the last chance to change course. I could learn to feel my feelings and develop my own way of self-advocating (I cannot stand the competitive, demanding, sneaky, underhanded, selfish bullshit way that most people do it… yes I’m still mad about it because I see it every damned day) or I could slowly lose my ability to live independently and then die. Because I love my furmily and I know they need me, I chose to get my shit together and take care of myself.
Also, I want to be more creative. I want to do art. I used to write, and make comics, and sing, and play instruments, and paint, and dance but I don’t do any of those things any more. Recent psych research and my own experience tell me that I stopped being able to create because I’ve stopped allowing myself to feel.
Now, all that sounds fabulous, good for you and all that, but it turns out it is really not. There’s a great (in size, scope, and quality) reason why I haven’t been feeling my feelings and that’s because they are not pleasant. It turns out that trying to be someone I’m not so that people don’t beat the living shit out of me for being different, or force me to give up who I am so that they feel more comfortable around me, or slowly undermine me and gaslight me into submission is really fucking painful. Dying before your body dies is the worst kind of death and I was doing it to be accommodating. Me, super fuck off punk rock you’re not the boss of me, was hurting myself to be accommodating. I had brutalized myself to avoid the pain I knew others were going to give me.
That is a common strategy in those of us who grew up with domestic violence, not to mention the long list of other ACES I was raised to tolerate and pretend to love. Victims of that kind of violent system will often try to trigger a violent response in the abuser because that way we know when it will happen and how bad it will be. Their primary, more powerful weapon is uncertainty. Not knowing when the pain will come and how bad it will be keeps us in fear and keeps us from rising up against the abuser. So, as a teenager that was my job.
Now, as an adult, I have found that working within an abusive system, where the abuser is not one person, that doesn’t work. My primary survival strategy gave me a massive, catastrophic career fail. It gave me a reputation as a crazy Latina, a diva, a mess. That’s ok. I like that kind of rep. In fact, in my 20s I cultivated a reputation as what we called a “psycho-bitch” because my heroines were always that kind of girl (Lilith, the Morrigan, Morgan le Fay, the list goes on) and I wanted rapists and abusers to know that if they chose to take me on it would be a fight they would regret fighting. It saved me a lot of grief.
But in my line of work it caused me grief. It still does. Sunny happy fake as fuck bullshit or mean and serious bat wielding asshole are my options. That is the law of the land here. I don’t fuck with that. I am still that claw having bitch that people hated when I was 20. I am not going to lie about it any more. I’m also the person who picks up worms and puts them back in the grass. I am also the person who will defend the little things and the vulnerable and I won’t tolerate the glorification of bullies. I will die on that hill.
So here we are. I’m back but I can’t rage like I used to because it will lose me this job.
I will, however, feel my feelings and whatever comes of that comes. I will feel the horrible, devastating hurt that comes from being rejected over and over for just being me. I will feel the heart sinking horror that comes from being the person that everyone wants to give their sins to as though I ought to tell them it’s ok that they tortured small animals for fun or believe that marginalized people don’t deserve rights or that they’re going to hurt me if I keep standing up for the rights of those who can’t defend themselves. I will feel it and if that means I can’t smile and laugh at those who choose to pretend they don’t see the blood on the walls then so fucking be it.
Yep. I’m pissed off and I should be because people show me their ugliness and then turn a smiling face to the world. I wouldn’t care (remember that I’m genetically designed and brutally trained for sacrifice without any credit) except that they hurt other things weaker and more vulnerable than I am and that will not stand.
The end of this is that I need to draw from my allies and from the Earth and from any other places will share their energy with me because I have to live underground at work until I can find a place where I can shine. When that happens, I’ll call the little things and the damaged things and the sweetest things to me and I will protect you, little ones.
For now I need to recuperate and I am creating systems that will make me stronger so I can learn to fight without blowing my own self up. No more falling on grenades, much less my own sword. My fealty is only for those who will go deep with me and will also die on that hill. To all of you who are superficial and can’t take the heat of battle, best wishes to you and vaya con tus propios dioses.
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Blues for Persephone 