Hidden In Plain Sight

There is a place.
Somewhere in here, and somewhere out there, where the two meet… the Virgin and the Whore. 
At first there may be conflict. At first one will overshadow the other. At first one will have a stronger, louder, more convincing voice. She will regale you with all the should’s, could’s, expected’s, are’s, is’s, wrongs, rights. All.the.things. 

Eventually she will run out of reasons… and allow the Other a voice. At first that Other voice will be timid. Ashamed. Fearful. Lonely. Sad. Angry. “Why did you abandon me?!” she will cry. 

And you will dance. You will dance them both into your body, and eventually you will dance them out into the world. You will give them space and freedom. Freedom to be, and express. Freedom to take up space… equally. Freedom to merge and become both the strength and softness for eachother. 

And something will shift. 

You will become the Goddess that encompasses both. You will find your power. The power that radiates the feminine. Fearful and Fearless. Nurturer and Seductress. 

Those who are afraid will fade away. And those who are enamoured will step forward with desire to share in your power. Bringing forth their own. And together you will create a Bond. A spellbinding, mesmerising ritual that will stop others in their tracks and ask… ‘how do I have that too?’

And you will smile… and you will hold out your hand… and you will ask them to join the dance. 

And those who hear the music will swirl and twirl and laugh and cry. And you will all be seen as crazy by those who don’t hear it… who don’t feel the call. Who don’t feel that pull to tear off your flesh and go back to the beginning. The time when we were all Gods and Goddesses… beyond flesh and bone and blood and sweat.

You will remember that once upon a time we all heard the call, and we all understood what it meant. 

I asked a question in chat today: 

How do I learn to begin shifting away from an instant gratification mindset, towards a longer-term mindset of health and wellness? Aka, how do I stop continually substituting one quick fix for another?

Some suggestions were made, which I was very appreciative of, however, they didn’t really touch the depth of what I was hoping. 

And then I found this… or more accurately, it found me:

“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”

-Brianna Wiest

sometimes when we talk,

I have to refrain from saying, ‘I love you.’

sometimes,

it still sits so close to the surface.

sometimes I can forget,

and fool myself into believing I’m moving on.

sometimes,

I want to reach out and touch your face.

run my fingers through your beard.

curl up in your arms.

your smell. your warmth. engulfing me.

I thought the pain was gone.

why on some days does it still feel so fresh?

she gave you a bracelet.

a gift to you, yet it pierced my heart like an arrow.

I want to scream and shout at the unfairness of it all.

but I don’t. there’s no point.

there never was.

all I can do is sit with this pain that seems to have made a home in me.

and when I’m alone, allow it the only escape that makes sense.

one day my tears for you will cease.

until then I will give myself grace.

I will hold and forgive the parts that still hurt.

that can’t seem to let go…

It occurred to me recently how much I abandon myself in a relationship. I come away barely recognisable. It’s made me begin to sit back more and observe. Observe others and how they move together. My last experience showed me signs I can see that are so familiar. I observe the women mostly. We are so absorbent. You can tell a lot about a relationship, and the man a woman is with, by observing just her.

I saw a couple that did make me smile this morning though. Their energy flowed between them as freely as their touch. It was so beautiful to witness. The ease with which their bodies knew each other without thought. I realised how rare that is to actually see. He and I didn’t have that. Our bodies knew each other less than our souls… and our souls hardly knew each other at all. Even after 3 years.

I’ve shifted through so many emotional states in regards to us. But now I just feel sorry for us. We struggled so much. I always feel so naive in hindsight. Looking back, reflecting. So many mistakes that I see now could have been overcome had neither of us been so naive. That’s the cruelty of hindsight. Being able to look back and see where things could’ve been different. A pointless pursuit. It’s easy to say hindsight is a blessing to help prevent mistakes next time… but it just leaves room to make new ones.

The thought of a new relationship is absolutely unfathomable to me right now. And to be honest, I’m perfectly ok with that. I kind of like it. It feels peaceful. I still revel in the beauty of witnessing love, and being able to be happy for those who seek it or have found it. I am just feeling a very strong urge to walk this part alone. I’m tired of abandoning myself. I don’t want to be one of those women I keep seeing everywhere who lives in a perpetual state of… what? Exhaustion. Carrying the weight of those around her. Smiling while she acts like glue, yet is silently falling apart on the inside.

As the lyrics from one of my favourite songs states:

“I will not pretend. I will not put on a smile. I will not say I’m alright for you. For you, whoever you are.”

I may not life as others think I should, but I love my life. After a lifetime of seeking distraction and numbing myself, I love the depth of which I now feel and experience everything. I love that I’m remembering to come back to paying attention. Ignoring things doesn’t make them go away. It simply makes me go away.

I Sasquatch 😊

Sasquatching: 

Emerging from isolation so infrequently from the get-go that one is never quite sure you exist at all 🤷‍♀️ 

After listening to a beautiful song shared here this morning, I sat back and thought to myself, “I’m going to start living as though I’m already living my life as I hope to.”

It’s amazing how one thought can open so many doorways to self-awareness. I had a flashback to being a child and having that feeling of “one day I’ll be able to escape from here and be free to be me.”

What I hadn’t realised until now is that I have maintained that belief. My life will start *after* I get out of “this current situation.” But what I’ve been doing is just continuously living that fantasy. There has never been an “after” where I do actually begin living the way I see myself authentically. And that has always been my excuse. Always seeking. Always waiting. Always believing it’s somewhere in the future, beyond my grasp.

So, today I begin living as though I’m already there. Living my life as I want to, as the person I want to be. Because “if not now, when?”

Soubhiyè

That period of time in the morning when no one else is awake but you, and you can have some quiet time to yourself before the household is awake.

For me, it’s that moment of stillness before the world wakes up. A quiet pause just before the birds begin to stir. And then suddenly, everything comes to life. Pure magic. This is my favourite part of the day 💕 

“Soubhiyé is the magical time of silence and solitude when you might be the only person in existence, a liminal space between dreaming and waking, the rest of the house still aslumber. Soubhiyé is an art. A time to gaze outside at the bowl of stars, savor the scald and smell of a good cup of coffee in your favorite mug.”

You think that by me saying I don’t want to be with you again, is a rejection of you. It’s not. It’s a rejection of how you’ve behaved towards me and our relationship.

The rejection, the belittlement, the shame in not being enough in your eyes- not smart enough, not sexy enough, not political enough, not passionate enough… never enough. The constant giving and withdrawal of your affection and love, as I watched you parade your devotion around in front of me with your dog, and your sexuality around in front of me with a steady stream of others. I hoped that if only I could hang in there long enough, be loyal enough, forgiving enough, accepting enough, be… enough… someday those things might come my way. 
The relentless lying.

All of that had consequences. I stopped trusting you. And eventually I stopped being in love with you.

I gave you the power of being responsible for an option. You couldn’t be responsible with it. And eventually I ran out of reasons as to why I should keep asking you to try. So I am merely removing that option from you. That’s all. Removing the pressure from both of us. We love each other much better this way, as we are now.

You will always have a big place in my heart, and if you so choose, my life. But I deserve much better treatment than what either of us have believed all this time. It’s time for me to start caring for myself, and that has to start with us.