Grief is Weird

I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, "It tastes sweet, does it not?" - Rumi

The waves of grief come farther and farther apart as time passes, but they still crash over me now and then.

My mother died three years ago. Yesterday was the anniversary of the day I found out. We are unsure whether she died 1-3 days before she was found. For those who don't know, my mother died of an accidental narcotic overdose after a lifetime battle with depression and addiction.

Grief is weird. Sometimes it's big and obvious and all consuming, especially at the beginning. But sometimes it sneaks up on you. You feel a tug at your heart, a sadness out on the edges of your consciousness, and everything in your life looks a little bit darker, but you don't realize you're riding a wave of grief until it overcomes you and you feel like you're drowning.

I have been stressed at work the last week or so, unusually so, and while there are understandable reasons I feel stressed, it's felt out of whack for the way I usually deal with work challenges. I've not been conscious of the impending anniversary of my mom's passing, so it never occurred to me that I have funky feelings percolating under the surface.

I have also been anti-social this week. I usually have at least a couple nights with loves/friends, either individually or in gatherings. But this week I've been home every moment I can be. I've been introspective and experiencing a sense of processing, but no clarity on the specifics. I've been fuzzy headed and heavy hearted.

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The last three years have been a constant ride of transformation as I open into ever deeper experiences of love and consciousness. As I look at the self-therapy process I've cultivated over 15+ years, it's in the last three that the most visible growth has taken place. I've made significant progress in managing my emotional world, both working with hormone therapy to address the physical causes of my moods and working to understand and manage my emotional triggers when they go off. I've made leaps in consciousness and helped raise consciousness in my relationships and community. I have become brighter as I learn to shine my Light with intent and confidence.

I am a work in progress, but I've progressed exponentially since my mother's death. She catalyzed me. She always catalyzed me. When I became a single mother to two children at 22 years of age, I realized that I needed to pull myself together so that my kids had a better chance of being healthy and happy. I promised myself I would not do what my mother did and send broken children into the world after dragging their childhood through addiction and narcissistic drama. After my mother died a friend told me it was an opportunity to be free of chains of my past and live my life beyond my mother's shadow. I took the invitation to heart.

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I recognize I'm having a new experience of grief this year. It's lighter than previous experiences. I can feel where I have healed. I can feel where I have forgiven. I can feel where I feel great love and compassion for her rather than blame and resentment.

I allow myself to have the fullness of my grief experiences because I know it's vital to moving through. I talk about grief and recognize it in people more than anyone I know. Our culture doesn't make much space for grief. It's meant to be kept behind closed doors at home. It doesn't belong in the workplace, or in the store, or at a party.

At the end of my workday yesterday I had a conversation with a staff member in which she revealed her father is dying. She started crying and she apologized for doing so. She apologized several times in the course of our conversation for perfectly normal grief responses. I tried to tell her that she didn't need to be sorry for her feelings or how she spoke or crying or anything else that comes from grief.

We shouldn't feel that we need to apologize for our grief, however it manifests (as long as we're not causing harm to anyone). I desire to work with people in the heart of the grief process. I've been very conscious of my grief processes in recent years, not just around my mother but in all grief experiences. I'd like to do some study in grief counseling, but I think I've got a pretty good understanding of its complexity and have the capacity to hold other people as they ride their grief waves. I think it's important that people be validated for their grief experiences, no matter how weird they might seem.

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I am changing so rapidly because I am embraced and encouraged in my process. I am held by several dear loves and a larger tribe of friends who know that I'm striving to be a healthier and more loving person. They reflect my light to me when I shine, they help me up when I fall down, and they forgive me when I totally fuck up. I know that if I reached out to them tonight I would have a friend by my side in less than an hour. I don't need that tonight but it's an amazing feeling to know I have it, to know I am not alone. For a girl who used to sit in a dark closet truly believing no one cared that she existed it's an incredibly big deal to feel held like this.

Every day I trust my visibility more. What I've noticed the past several weeks is that I no longer have the desperate hunger for a partner, I'm very comfortable being alone, and I'm seeking validation less and less. I seek authentic relating. I desire connected time with loves and friends. But I don't act out of a unhealthy need to be validated, to convince myself that someone is seeing me, even in circumstances that don't bring me joy. I realize after recent relationship experiences that I have a pattern of compromising myself just to feel seen. I desire to act from a sense of true connection and love rather than fearful hunger.

For three years I have been actively working to understand The Invisible Girl and to give her the love she needs to grow up and become the Visible Woman Who Shines Bright. Tonight I can feel how much progress I've made and how I'm moving away from doing the work of healing within to doing the work of my heart in the world. While I still have healing and brightening to do, I believe I've cleared away enough of the darkness to serve with my gifts confidently and create the career that will allow me to earn my living from serving others in periods of grief and transformation.

Whatever happened to my mother's consciousness when she died, I hope she can still witness the life I'm living. I want her to be proud of me and my children. I want her to see how our crazy life led me to a revolutionary experience of love and community. I want her to know that all I ever wanted for her - and for everyone - is to consciously overcome the fear that comes from past wounding and embrace the love that is possible. My whole life is dedicated to helping every life I touch experience more love and less fear because of her.

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Image Source: Alice Elahi Seascapes

The Need to Serve

"…I would like to beg you…as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Rainier Maria Rilke

As my relationship to Daddy continues to deepen, I find myself plagued with questions about who I am and what I truly desire out of life.

My desire to serve runs very, very deep. Serving the desires and needs of others brings me the deepest satisfaction I've known in my life. I've channeled that desire in many directions - starting a home for teen mothers when I was 19, volunteering for the HSU women's center, tutoring at risk teens, creating The Yoni Endeavor (an art/writing project towards women's empowerment), directing a Welfare-to-Work job training center, devoting my career to service organizations, The Conspiracy of Blessings (an art project in which I sent art blessings to those in need of a bit of kindness), co-chairing the Board of Directors of our local Pride organization, and being a Hostess for the Imps. No matter what is going on in my own life - no matter how crazy or depressed I was, no matter that I worked full time to support my family and was single parenting two children, no matter what relationships I was involved in - I have always needed a place to channel my desire to serve in order to feel any sense of satisfaction in my life.

While I understand that my Servant archetype is a fundamental aspect of who I am, I have struggled with how I feel about where I channel my service and what I receive in return. There is no such thing as true altruism. We always get something from giving, even if it's just pleasure from the act of giving. When we give to a person or an organization or a cause over the long term, it is vital that our needs for pleasure and reward are met, otherwise we experience burn out. I have found that I often reach a point of burn out with the places I've channeled my service because I'm not getting all of my personal needs for pleasure and reward met, whatever they are. For instance, I often serve by meeting the administrative needs of an organization because I'm really good and efficient at administrative tasks, even though I am extremely under-stimulated intellectually, creatively and emotionally by administration. I get the reward of service, but it's shadowed by lack of fulfillment in expressing my other gifts and interests, especially my intelligence and creativity.

I am so very good at meeting the needs and desires of others. As a single mother most of my life, I've always focused on meeting the needs of my children first. I also naturally put the needs of my romantic partners first, not because I believed I had to, but because I truly wanted to. I've always wanted to give as big and deep as I can. I just failed to realize that I have needs to be met, too, and that I would have even more to give if they are met. I have never, ever been good at identifying many of my own needs that can be fulfilled by others (I know how to self care), let alone getting them met. The shadow in my service has been giving all I have until I'm drained and not always knowing how, or feeling I deserve, to get my reserves filled back up with things from others that feed joy to my heart.

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Howard Thurman

I've seen this quote often and I keep asking myself what makes me come alive. While service itself makes me come alive, it's often shadowed by the lack of reciprocity in meeting other needs and desires.

I've started questioning my lifelong belief that I need to serve the world in the biggest (from the world's point of view) way that I'm capable. My entire life has been committed to service in a belief that I am here to help facilitate the revolution of consciousness in humanity. And my desire to serve is so big that I've wanted to figure out where I can have the maximum impact. And yet I wonder if I have been partially driven by ego and partially by the actuality that I've not found truly rewarding containers for my service.

I have always desired to serve through building others up - empowering women who've been abused, supporting teen moms in becoming self sufficient, inspiring welfare-to-work single mothers to dream for themselves and their children, facilitating sexual confidence in my community - and have always tried to build up the person I am in intimate relationship to as well. I tried so hard to build up my ex-husband to pursue his bliss. I tried to build him up so that he'd have the confidence to develop friendship and community. I tried to be emotionally and spiritually supportive by offering insights, ideas and resources for healing and growth. But he didn't want those things. He wanted to remain a bakery driver and spend all his free time in video games because he was afraid to try to be more.

I've had other relationships in which my energy and love towards building up my partner didn't really go anywhere. Either they couldn't accept it or they weren't interested in it.

I realize that I need a much different kind of man than I have fallen for in the past. I need a man who is not afraid to be all of who he is, and who desires a woman who will build him up and support him in his power.

Daddy is such a man. Daddy does big world changing sorts of things in his work. He claims his power in the world, uses that power to make the world better, and then He comes home and claims his power as a Man who deserves all the devotion and worship that His bitch has to give. Daddy is big enough to hold what I have to give and He desires it.

Here's the truth of the matter:

Serving Daddy makes me come alive. Being a source of joy, pleasure, rejuvenation and building up for a man who shines his light so bright and earns my devotion makes me come alive.

The emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical stimulation and intensity of the Master/slave relationship makes me come alive.

The immense opportunities for growth and self improvement make me come alive. Under Daddy's guidance I am improving myself physically (i have an exercise program now), psychologically/emotionally (i am working through insecurities and fear as i claim my erotic power), and spiritually (i am experiencing the Divine Spark in us both).

The conscious use of my erotic power to fuel my day-to-day joy makes me come alive. Daddy calls it pussy power. Being in touch with my erotic power and being turned on all the time gives me confidence and energy, keeps me smiling and makes me joyful in all my interactions, and inspires me to creativity.

I am not saying that I should give my life to Daddy and stop striving to serve my fellow humans in some way. I am not seeking to completely give my self up to a man like that. I know I have all sorts of things to contribute to the world as an artist, healer and community builder. And Daddy knows and appreciates that, too.

What I am doing is recognizing what makes me come alive and what brings me fulfillment in relationship, because relationship and intimacy make me come alive more than anything else. I'm recognizing what feels like a healthy and immensely rewarding way of channeling my need to serve into a container that allows me to express my service in ways that meet my needs as well as His. I am getting so many needs and desires met through this relationship. However things do or don't unfold with Daddy specifically, I now have a much better idea of the kind of man I truly desire to be in relationship to, and perhaps the specific shape I'd like that relationship to take. No matter how long our connection lasts, the rest of my relationship life will be positively impacted by what I'm learning with Him.

I've been telling myself for quite awhile now how unhealthy relationship immersion is and that it's healthier to focus on the work of my heart rather than who I'm in relationship to. But now I'm doubting the truth in those beliefs. I think it's a matter of being conscious of why I desire to immerse in a relationship like this. I'm not in relationship to Daddy because I have poor self esteem (I wouldn't have lasted this long with Him if I did). I'm not giving up any aspect of myself for Him (in fact He encourages me to be healthy by maintaining a sense of self and shine my light brighter). I'm not in this relationship because I'm playing out an old pattern (this relationship is different than any I've ever had). I'm in this relationship because Daddy and i make amazing magic together, magic that builds us both up in the rest of our lives, magic that brings us pleasure and joy every day. I'm in this relationship - that's also been rather awkward and odd some of the time - because it makes me come alive.

I have to admit that I've been looking really hard for how this is unhealthy, but I can't find it. He and I will have shadow patterns play out, as all relationships do. But my heart tells me this relationship is based on a sharing of light (paradoxically through darkness) and reciprocal support of each others service to the conscious revolution.

Coming back to the Rilke quote above, I want to live this question through this journey with Daddy - how can I shine my light brightest and be most fulfilled in expressing my deep need to serve?

Love Letter to the Invisible Girl

I feel lighter and happier today than I have since Knight started his new relationship nearly two weeks ago.

Those who know me well have heard me talk a lot about The Invisible Girl since my mother died nearly two years ago. The Girl is an archetype in me, the way that I have come to perceive my inner child. She is the part of me that never outgrew the pain of the invisibility that came from living in the shadow of a narcissistic mother. She is the part of me that doubts I can be seen and loved for who I am. She is the part of me that is terrified of abandonment, and becomes incredibly sad or throws temper tantrums when I feel unseen or I'm afraid I'm losing someone. The Invisible Girl is the part of me that gets triggered and overwhelms me with fear.

I have been trying to work with this part of myself, to really understand our relationship so that I can manage trigger experiences, and eventually learn to prevent them from happening at all. I have spent a lot of time observing her when she freaks out, especially since I have been in relationship to Knight. While I have had incredible insights into the source of my fears and the reactions they stir up in me, I haven't felt like I've made any real progress in managing the Girl or her triggers.

I've learned recently that the problem is when I observe her, I hold a lot of judgment about her, and even hatred for her existence. I have believed that her existence is evidence of my crazy brokenness. I've blamed her for making my emotional life so difficult. I have been incredibly unkind to her.

What I am learning in my studies into radical self-care is that my Girl needs to be mothered...by me. I need to hold and comfort her when she is terrified. I need to accept our feelings rather than resist them. I need to talk her to with kindness and compassion. I need to help her understand that I don't need her to protect me any longer. I need to find out what we truly need to feel safe and secure (as opposed to what she thinks we need).

Yesterday morning Knight had a date with his new lover. I started out the day all right but by early afternoon, when I hadn't received any texts from Knight, the Invisible Girl started throwing fits. Before and after his last date we had flirted by text and it had helped me feel connected to him. I told him how much it helped. So even though I didn't outright ask for it, I expected him to do the same yesterday (unexpressed expectations = inevitable disappointment).

As the Girl started telling me stories about how he's forgotten me, how I don't matter, how he likes his other lover better than me, etc., I realized I needed to do something to shift the momentum. I drove to the marsh to change the scenery and connect to nature, which always helps calm me. As I sat in the car, I was suddenly inspired to write a letter to my Girl.

While I have resisted the idea of communicating with parts of myself through dialogue or letters, as has been suggested by a variety of sources but always felt sort of hokey to me, I'm beginning to understand what a healing practice it is. For the first time I accepted everything that I was feeling and I felt significantly different afterward. I felt lighter. I felt hope that this may not last forever.

I woke up this morning feeling expansive again.

Here is my letter...

Precious Girl -

I know you are scared. You feel like we are in the dark and it reminds you of the closet we used to sit in when we had no one and truly doubted we existed at all. You wonder if we continue to exist if no one is present to witness us. Do we continue to exist to our Love if he is seeing, touching, loving someone else?

But we are real and we are loved. We are a Divine Spark - a child of the Universe. Not only do we exist, but we are amazing. We are so very strong and resilient. We have overcome so much together. And our story is witnessed by many. We are loved by many. We have never been so visible or loved before. We have touched so many lives with our poetry, our art, our writing, our service to community, our friendship, our vulnerability, and our willingness to share our story to be a light on the path to healing for others. There is so very much to love about us.

We are not alone - even when we are. People do not stop loving us just because we aren't interacting. We are loved every minute of every day by everyone that we love every minute of every day, whether we are consciously thinking of them or engaging with them or not. It is no different for those we love than it is for us.

I know you're scared by this new relationship, but the truth is that Knight made us first, to his own detriment, and we still felt invisible. It isn't about his new lover or him. It's about us. It's about me. It's about how I have been rejecting you when you most need to be held.

I am sorry. I am so sorry for making you more invisible by rejecting you and believing I am broken because you are inside of me. I am sorry for hating that you are a part of me. I am sorry I haven't given you the love we need when you are only trying to protect me.

It's not our fault that mom couldn't see past her own crazy to really see us. It's not our fault that the fathers in our life could not see past their own fear and addiction to see that we needed to be saved. It does not make us unlovable that our parents could not love us well. They really did the best they could.

Mom's illness is not our fault, and it's not hers either. I think she was an Invisible Girl, too, and she never figured out how to heal. Let's love her rather than blame her.

Precious Girl - it's time to heal. It is time to believe in ourselves. It's time to believe that we are our own super-hero and we can save our self.

Really look at our life, our story, and see how we have been our own super-hero all along. We saved our self from insanity. We saved our self from violence. We saved my children from a legacy of brokenness. Now it's time to save our self from this fear of something that is no longer real so that we can have the fullness of love we desire.

It's time to rewrite our story together.

Thoughts on Polyamory

Tonight my business partner asked me if I have really considered that polyamory may not be part of who I am right now. I have considered it, very deeply. What I am experiencing is excruciating at times. I have asked myself many, many times if it's worth it. And I absolutely believe that it is, not only because I believe polyamory is an authentic expression of who I am and what I know about love, but because I also know what I know about fear.

My emotional reactions to Knight's new relationship are all based in fear. The topsy-turvy feeling in my belly is fear. I will not live a life based on fear, especially in my relationships. I have already lived fear, contraction and making myself smaller than I really am. I have watched the people I love choose fear. My mother died at the hands of her fear. My ex-husband lives his life through a computer because of his fear. When any of us hurt ourselves or each other, it is always in fear.

I choose love and I am willing to do whatever it takes to get there. I will sit through the fear, the heartache, the bellyaches, the memories, the insights, the breakthroughs and everything else in order to have love. I will work, like I have worked all my life, to create a life of joy, intimacy and creativity with Knight, my tribe and all the loves who come into our lives in the time we are together.

I know that once I work through the fear, I am capable of compersion. I know what it is to be desired and loved by Knight. It's a gift and one that should be shared. I cannot possess it. I cannot ask him to hold it back from others, to diminish his light when he feels drawn to shine it in sexual and/or emotional ways. If the relationship turns out to be long-term, rather than fear Knight's new lover, I would like to get to know her and to understand the opportunity in her for his capacity to love to deepen.

I believe in love. I know with all of my being that love can overcome my fear. Not just the love between Knight and I, but the love for myself that I am slowly growing, and the love from my friends as they bear witness and support me where they can, and the love of the Divine that flows through me when I am not afraid to let it. I believe that God, my community and I can love me into healing. I believe that the light that Knight shines in his love for me inspires me to burn brighter in my capacity to love (and vice versa). I will not walk away from it in fear.

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As I consider the work of my heart, I keep coming back to something a spiritual teacher told me a few years ago. I was in a state of self-pity about how much trauma I've had to endure in my life. He told me that he felt that my purpose was to learn how to live through these traumas and heal them so that I could help others navigate their way through. Instead of going to university to become a psychologist, I am living the life of healing so that I can share my story and the tools that I am learning to use along the way.

I have overcome so many things: emotional abuse and a neglect as a child, a mentally ill mother, an alcoholic/drug addict stepfather, sexual molestation at 11, teen pregnancy/motherhood, single mothering, a gun to my head, rape resulting in another child, more single mothering, Borderline Personality Disorder (and all the consequences of acting out), and an extremely unhealthy and violent marriage.

What I am experiencing now is nothing in comparison to those traumas. This isn't trauma, this is fear of trauma. I can overcome this incredible fear that came from all of those things I have experienced. What I am afraid of is what happened before, not what is happening now. What is happening now is that I am in the most loving and healthy relationship of my life (even with its issues). What is happening now is that I have found someone willing to give me everything I have ever wanted -- to be known and loved for everything that I am, light and darkness, and to grow consciously together towards less fear and deeper love.

Sitting with my fear and feelings while my lover has a joyful, loving experience with another person is not the most horrible thing in the world. Facing my fear so that I can have compersion for his other relationships is something worth working towards. I believe that all relationships have spiritual purpose--that we are drawn to people who can help us wake up to greater love, if we do the work in relationship to them. If this is true, then every woman that Knight is authentically drawn to has the potential of waking him up to more love, which then allows him to share more love with me. The same goes for me and my other relationships when they happen.

I have been looking for love, and actively desiring to overcome the fear in my heart and home, since I was 14 years old and started reading every book that Leo Buscaglia wrote. I have known about and believed I am poly since I was 21. If you look at my bookshelf you will find many titles with the word Love, or which have ideas about how to experience more love in life. My life is about love, experiencing it in every possible way, as deep as it can possibly go. I can't and I won't choose anything else.

I believe that everything about who Knight is, including his authentic desire for polyamory, is here to wake me up to greater love. I believe that what I am going through right now is absolutely necessary if I am to have the vibrant life of love and creativity that I desire. I also believe it's absolutely necessary so that I can help my community move into lives of vibrant love, too.

I had the thought today that maybe there are other people who struggle with emotional and mental health issues that desire to be poly, but maybe having a more difficult time like I am because of brain chemistry or really fucked up childhoods or whatever. When I read resources about polyamory, what I don't see is someone addressing the deeper issues that result in intense jealousy and fear-based reactions to our partner's other relationships. Some of us have psychological (and spiritual) work to do in order for poly to be workable. I wonder how many people might be giving up too soon because they don't know what they need to make it work?

Just questions for now, but possibly another piece of the puzzle. There are a lot of serendipities pointing the direction towards me doing work with people around emotional-mental-spiritual health.