Entanglement

The deep clarity that settles when you understand that you spent most of your life in survival mode, is harsh, and heartbreaking. It’s okay to rest now. Day after day, year after year, your mind and body have been working nonstop to feel safe. Fight or flight is an ancient mechanism meant to give us a burst of adrenaline in a life threatening situation, not to live life stuck with that throttle wide open. I asked myself recently, why am I so fucking tired all the time? I’m sure being post menopausal has something to do with it, but then I read an article about coming out of years of being in survival mode, about healing from past traumas and I cried. “You will need rest. You’re not lazy, your body is just trying to catch up on the calm it hasn’t received in years.” So, if you resonate with this, give yourself some grace. Rest. Nap. Eat slowly, it’s okay. Take long showers, because you can. Go non verbal for a day, or two, or ten. All of the things you couldn’t do when you felt ...

I, am…becoming a bridge troll, which feels like a step down from swamp witch, but they’re definitely living in the same neighborhood. This is out of my control, apparently. Estrogen is supposed to drop and stabilize at my age. Pretty sure mine has flatlined. Here’s the real. Let me bitch. I’m getting shorter. My ears are getting bigger. I only have one eyebrow left and she’s sparse. Chin whiskers grow faster than Alabama kudzu. My pits smell like I rub them with the ass of a striped polecat, no matter what I do. My legs have their own agenda some nights and want to go river dancing while I’m trying to fall asleep. I routinely wake myself up snoring. I’m always exhausted, no doubt due to my nightly involuntary thrashing and gasping like a fish out of water while I’m “sleeping.” I’m propelled to the bathroom every morning by walking farts. I forget what I’m saying, as I’m saying it. And of course there’s the mood swings, headaches, joint pain, heart palpitations, anxiety,...

The thing about healing, it isn’t linear. You can be making tremendous strides, feeling all positive in light and love, only to have a crash out come out of nowhere to suck the fucking life blood from your marrow. It is important not to fight it. Whether that crash hits you like a head on collision, or an overcorrection that sends you flipping end-over-end, stay strapped in and hang on no matter how uncomfortable and disoriented you feel. This is where growth begins. No grit, no pearl. Getting mad or upset about what you may perceive to be a negative situation will snowball—fast. Stop asking, why does this keep happening to me. Trust me when I tell you, and I’ve said this before, if you keep asking why, she will answer you with indifference, more hardship and a big ol’ heapin’ helpin’ of, why the fuck not! Been there, done that, too. many. times. In my experience it’s better to ask, what is it that I need to be learning in this moment. Cycles will keep repeating in your life until ...

Did I ever tell you about the time my ex husband tried to jump out of our speeding car in dramatic fashion because he’s basically a whiny little titty baby? Yeah, the memory surfaced recently when I was thinking about how much I miss driving a stick. It was a really nice car, stopped on a dime before he could hurl himself into a ditch. You may be wondering what would drive (no pun intended) a grown man to do such a thing. Well, turns out the asshole who would drive HIS stick into any willing participant, was jealous that I had the nerve to dance with someone who didn’t look like Elaine from Seinfeld on the dance floor. He started a good old fashioned bar brawl over it and nearly got arrested—over me dancing with another man, not over his inability to move his body fluidly to music, although it was an arrestable offense. So, I managed to get us outta there before the cops arrived. Long story short, on the way home, he was so drunk that he unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the passenger car...

My great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee. I don’t know her name. I wish I did. What I do know, is that before she was forced from her home in the Tennessee hills to walk the Trail of Tears, she did the hardest, bravest thing a woman, a mother, could possibly do—she placed her infant daughter, my great-great grandmother, into the care of a local family, sparing the baby from certain death. I have no idea if my great-great-great grandmother survived the Trail of Tears, but roughly one-fifth of the Cherokee population died during the brutal march west. Inherited trauma, generational trauma, intergenerational trauma—however you choose to phrase it, the meaning has been diluted because of over-saturation on socials. From spiritual narcissists seeking followers, to influencers fishing for sympathy and attention, trauma is trendy. Am I wrong? Maybe I just feel things too deeply. Maybe I’m really taking it all in for the first time in my life, that the blood of my Cherokee ancest...

Four hours. Four hours of pacing, panting and panic. We sat with her in a dark closet, sat with her when she crawled under the bed, tried to calm her when she wanted to climb into the cabinet under the bathroom sink and when she tried to wedge herself between a bookshelf and a plant stand—I fucking HATE fireworks. She’s seven years old, so of course we go through this every year, twice a year, for New Year’s Eve and the 4th of July. We’ve tried calming meds. We’ve tried natural supplements and CBD. We’ve tried the thunder coat. We’ve had every TV on to try and drown out the noise. We’ve done ALL the things, okay and nothing helps. Nothing helps when three houses down, people are in the middle of the road launching fireworks that crackle and BOOM through the air, reverbs slamming into the house over and over like a war zone until well after midnight. And we get to go through it all again tonight. Bet. I miss the days of old, when explosives weren’t legal in the hands of drunken (o...