When life goes into a blender

Today, I’m exploring feelings I’m processing. Without getting into the messy details. This is about what happens when a long, close relationship becomes irretrievably broken. Maybe a parent, a child, a lover, a spouse, a friend. It doesn’t matter. Once you realize that trying to align your needs with theirs can’t work, it’s probably all the same. Trying to make this relatable and also tie it into my creative life, which has gone on hold for the past five days. Because life went into a blender. And it’s on frappe.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago… Nope. This isn’t a fairy tale. Maybe dystopian?

As they were herded around the bonfire, Eleanor saw her life start smoldering at the edges…Also not right. This is not burning history. Maybe it’s a phoenix story?

Where do I start? The first line is always so important… I guess I’ll begin with my lizard-brained angst and engage my frontal lobe as I go. This feels so lonely. But it also feels so important to embrace in solitude. I’ve confided in a small handful of friends, mostly keeping my feelings to myself and a couple of pros.

I want to be cuddled and cry my heart out on mommy’s shoulder. With arms embracing me, telling me it’s going to work out OK. My tears and snot thick and pouring out of my face endlessly, heaving breath and hiccups. Like a two- year- old without enough words to put it into language. To just let it pour out of me, and know that they will hold me until I can hold myself again. But my mom was never that kind of mother. Very different from my angst filled notebooks of my teen years, when I would write horrible songs about not knowing where I fit in, or where my future might lie. Also different from the adult years when I confided, inappropriately I think, in too many people, looking for something that to this day remains undefined and unfulfilled. And despite the self-help that abounds in my world, I’m not going to head down that rabbit hole.

I have had rich experiences and a fraught-filled relationship with my life and choices. Let’s not bother with childhood. That’s water under a very distant bridge. Let’s enumerate the big adult things:

• Cross-country moves that never felt right.

• Multiple careers that led me to financial security with a complete lack of personal and intellectual fulfillment.

• Discovering the joy of being a stay-at-home mom even though it was necessitated by a near-fatal illness.

• Being a working mom but sacrificing friendships and personal interests because my child deserved everything I had. Also, there wasn’t enough time for everything.

• Finally embracing my creativity as a result of deep grief at losing my father too young

• Having to squelch that creativity because the rest of life offered no time to sink into it.

• Watching the world sink into fear, anxiety and depression from the COVID-19 pandemic, while giving myself permission to be grateful for the time, personal clarity, healthy habits and a commitment to the lost creativity I wanted so desperately to reclaim.

• Gradually, like water torture, watching people I love, people I thought I could rely on, break down until I habitually expected less, and less, and less until my expectations were so minuscule they barely existed.

• And then having those expectations unmet. Repeatedly.

In these past few years, having retired a few years early from the workforce, moved to a semi-rural area and started healing from that fraught life, I have also done a lot of work in therapy and Al-Anon (best free therapy source for learning about boundaries – whether you’re in a qualifying relationship or not) with establishing and accepting boundaries, learning to accept and recognize the trauma responses I’ve used as coping mechanisms and basically using training wheels for those skills while I lived with various events that taught me how to use those tools.

Today, and in the next weeks and months, my training wheels will come off, and I will have to pedal faster and harder than I ever have before to maintain healthy boundaries and enforce them, recognize when my trauma responses are triggered and use the tools I have to work through them and not sink into them.

Am I ready? No. Will I do it? Yes. Am I scared? I’m terrified.

You see, it recently occurred to me that the thing that I used to look for, confiding in acquaintances , posting on social media and otherwise laying bare my entire, (metaphorically) bloodied and bruised self out in front of the world for superficial comfort, temporary bandages, was inside me. I just hadn’t done the hard work to find that thing. In the past, I retreated back into whatever toxicity was surrounding me with those stitched together solutions that held me together until the next time. It was the boundaries I've learned and newly found responses to trauma that I have to implement with my two wheels.

One thing that terrifies me most is sticking with my status quo. It’s not good enough any more. It derails me too often. It leaves me knowing I deserve better and not knowing how to find what I deserve. It leaves me thinking that one way or another, I have to prioritize my needs, my mental and physical and emotional health for the first time. And I can’t let that be derailed by the desperate needs (and believe me they are desperate) of others.

I have my third act to live. With peace and hope and optimism and contentment and creativity; all of the things I sacrificed in the past. I have a book to finish. And a book to publish. And as I’ve been hearing for 10 years and 7 months, it’s a complicated and ambitious first novel. I have a Substack to write for, and volunteer work I want to be involved with. I have exercise and eating habits I want to continue and expand on. And when I’m done ensuring those are being taken care of there is glass fusing, wood turning and furniture refinishing that I can spend my time on.

Wish me luck, folks. I know I can do this. I just don’t know how my story is going to evolve.