Grieving

Well as you all can see, I’ve been thinking a lot about my life and the past. I’ve been sorting through things with my adult woman perspective, and it has helped me to see that all of the things I hated about myself were normal. And that I was carrying these enormous mental and emotional burdens that were too much for me to carry. And that feeling the way I felt back then was perfectly sane, given the things I’d experienced.

It’s hard to stay sane in an insane world, ya know?

Revisiting the past with my new, self-compassionate, adult understanding has generated a lot of healing in me, but has also caused me to grieve. I can’t think about the past or the years and years I spent living with daily suicidal ideations without wanting to cry for the girl, teenager, young adult, who had too much on her shoulders and somehow managed to carry it.

I’m so glad I live in the time I do, where we have space in our culture to have these conversations. A generation ago, I would have spent my entire life convinced I was the only one who found life so hard. I would have thought my depression and anxiety were truly evidence that I was weak and broken. We all would have thought this. We all would have walked around with smiles plastered on our faces, thinking that we were the only ones who were breaking underneath all of our mental/physical/emotional/spiritual traumas.

I’m also so happy to live in a time where we are allowed to tell our own stories. When I was a child, I remember feeling like there was a certain way to be black and to be a woman. Not surprisingly, I abused tf out of myself for failing at both. My definition of what it meant to be black was influenced by white supremacy of course–there’s no way to be an American and not absorb that shit, unfortunately.

So here I was, this little nerdy black girl, quiet, shy, terrified of everyone and everything, beating myself up because I was performing blackness wrong. I wasn’t tough, I wasn’t down to fight, I wasn’t…I don’t even remember anymore. Just whatever it was I was “supposed” to be, I wasn’t that. I was a terrified little girl who just wanted to stay in the house because I was convinced that everybody would beat me up/ostracize if I went outside.

And of course, this applied to my womanhood as well. Here’s a pro tip for anyone who is considering having daughters in the future: please don’t teach your daughters that men only want “one thing,” but then also raise them to be extremely obedient people pleasers. 2+2=4 every time.

I grew into an extremely ashamed young woman. My religion, where I sought refuge and guidance, told me I was damaged and ugly and going to hell. And what I absorbed from the culture around “successful womanhood” was bullshit like never being dumped, having men pay my bills, having men obsessed with me–nevermind that that’s the shit that gets women killed sometimes. I took things like not having a stalker as evidence that I’d somehow fallen short as a woman.

Women were supposed to be cool. I was not. I was extremely emotionally disregulated and looking for someone to accept me so that I could accept myself.

Every time I had an issue with a guy I was dating, I felt like everyone in my life always told me it was because of the things that were wrong with me. I couldn’t be so clingy. I had to play games. I couldn’t be so emotional.

I wish that someone in my life had had the tools/vocabulary to say things like “If he brings out these emotions in you, it means you two have a toxic dynamic.” Or “There are intimate partners out there who will accept you for who you are and you don’t have to change a thing about yourself.” Or “The way you think and feel are perfectly sane responses to the life experiences you’ve had until this point. There’s nothing to ‘fix’ about yourself. You’re in pain and your pain is valid.”

I’m sure people have said things like that to me in the past, but memory is so emotional, and the emotion I remember feeling for decades was that I was gross and dirty and broken and crazy and a failure as a woman. Poor little 25-year-old Bryoney, still more girl than woman, already haranguing herself for failing at something she’d barely even started.

Now, that I have finally been an adult for nearly half my life and I have some kind of concept of what adulthood and emotional regulation and trauma mean, I look back and I grieve for all the years I wasted despising myself. I don’t want anyone else to waste decades of their lives hating themselves. As my best friend used to tell me, put down the bat.

Let the anger and self loathing and whatever else you built up inside yourself go so that you can feel what’s really in your heart and soul. I was afraid that if I ever let myself feel all the things I’d stuffed down and covered with shame and self loathing, then I would turn into this out of control narcissistic/megalomanic who would have no parameters for living a “good” and “moral” life. I ignored my true nature, which has always been to seek the “good” and “moral” paths in life. I was always a perfectly lovely human with flaws like everyone else. And my god do I grieve for the fact that I didn’t see this sooner. I hope someone who reads this will begin to look at themselves in a more objective way and begin to see that they are a good person with flaws, just like everyone else. And that they put down the bat and let themselves cry and grieve for all the time they spent thinking otherwise.

Singles Awareness Week

Hey everyone! Happy singles awareness week 🙂 How will you spend this weekend?

This year, I’m not just single, I’m single single. I went on two dates recently and both dudes are leaving the country for a few weeks now, which is fine for me anyway because I don’t want to be on a date with someone I don’t know and don’t GAF about on a day of love.

Valentine’s days have been hit or miss for me. In 2017, my boyfriend whom I “loved” didn’t do anything for me because he didn’t believe in giving gifts for holidays (pfft). In 2019, I started up a relationship with the first human male who would have me so that I wouldn’t be “alone” on Valentine’s day. In 2020…I genuinely don’t remember what I did for V-day last year, I think nothing? Probably got drunk?

And then that brings us to this year.

Happy love day yall. Do you show yourself love? Do you ever thank your body for the way it regulates itself and heals and keeps itself well in spite of you?

Do you show yourself compassion? Do you take the time to sit down with yourself and understand why you are the way you are? How do you speak to yourself? Are you nice to yourself? Would you call your mind/body your friend?

I ask this because I was always told I should love myself, but I didn’t understand how to. Like, I literally didn’t know which actions I should perform or which thoughts I should think or which thoughts I shouldn’t or which thoughts belonged to me or which thoughts were shit I picked up and should have discarded long ago.

The rhetoric of self love and self care surrounds us, but I did not know what that meant. I would take baths because you’re “supposed to” for self-care, when I can’t really stand baths for long. My body runs hot all the time, so a bath is just creating an internal sauna for me. I can handle it for about 5 minutes before I drain it and take a cool shower.

I say this because here I was taking baths but calling myself an asshole all day every day for the smallest of infractions. I was getting massages and going to yoga and obsessed with finding a way to blame myself for all “badness” that existed in my life or the lives of those around me.

I was journaling, but I was bouncing between lying in bed for days because I knew in bed I couldn’t “hurt anyone” (whatever that means) there, and spending hundreds of dollars each weekend getting fucking blackout drunk and chain smoking so that I could get past the monumental terror that I experienced as my baseline daily emotion.

Doing “the work,” learning to love yourself, means being able to show yourself compassion. It means looking at yourself and your life from an outside perspective and saying, OK. Whether or not I like these actions I’ve done, I can understand why I did them. Out of that compassion, you’ll eventually approach something like self-forgiveness.

Doing “the work” means apologizing to yourself and thanking yourself and learning to trust yourself. We can sometimes think of 1000 reasons not to trust ourselves, while overlooking the fact that we are our own A1-since-day-1s. Your digestion, your skeletal system, your lymphatic and endocrine systems, your lumbar spine, your pre-frontal cortex, your neurotransmitters, your hippocampus, all of it, every bit of it was designed to be team you. The execution might be poor, but the intention is sincere: You were designed to keep yourself alive.

With that in mind, you can be a teammate or partner to yourself. OK, you have some destructive habits. Ask yourself how they are trying to help you.

In my own case I’ve noticed that I cannot say anything nice about myself without my mind immediately going into the archives and pulling out Bryoney’s Greatest Misses 1986-present, with an eye toward the future. It’s a relentless form of torture, but it’s a habit that I picked up a long time ago because it motivated me/kept me safe when my circumstances were beyond my control. I asked myself how this thought pattern is meant to help me and the answer was it’s meant to keep me grounded, accountable, and honest (do not point out the speck in someone else’s eye without removing the plank in your own type deal).

Now, although the thought pattern still exists, I can work with it. When I notice myself getting ready to tear down the love I’ve generated for myself I just say “hey. I know what you’re trying to do here, but remember that we’ve figured out a kinder and more effective method to keep me grounded, accountable and honest. So we can let the old way go.”

Maybe this sounds like a small example, or maybe I’m going on about things that sound really trite, but my inner world used to be a dark and cutthroat place that told me all day every day that the price of my life was perfection. I needed to be all things to everyone without expecting any kind of love or support in return because I was a burden; an inferior and broken human being who didn’t deserve to live in the first place.

Now, my inner world is a community with lots of different aspects that come together to make me, me. Obviously there are still loads and loads of imperfections within me, but it sure feels better when I feel like all parts of me are on the same side.

So happy Valentine’s Day yall. I hope this bit of writing helps you to love yourself a little bit more.

Shame

As a part of my yoga teacher training, we learned about the seven chakras and their blocks. Chakras are basically points in your body where energy collects. They symbolize different levels/aspects of human development, and they transform energy and sent it upwards so that you can achieve higher consciousness.

Starting at the base of your spine you have the root chakra. This energy point is related to your physical survival. When it is functioning well, you feel safe, stable and secure.

And so it goes, traveling up your spine, you hit six other chakras along the way: the sacral, which is related to emotional and sexual development; the solar plexus, which is related to socialization and self confidence; the heart chakra, which is related to love, compassion and forgiveness; the throat chakra, which is related to communication and interaction with a higher vision; the third eye, which is related to intuition, wisdom and transcendental understanding; and finally the crown chakra, which represents higher consciousness and a clear perception of reality without duality or attachment.

These chakras require care for yourself body mind and spirit in order for them to function optimally. Our experiences in life and the characteristics we’ve adapted to cope can lead to issues in our chakras: they can be overactive, they can be underactive, or they can be blocked.

Lately I’ve been thinking and talking about that third chakra: the solar plexus. This chakra is located in your spine behind your belly button, and it is the seat of your personal power. A person with a balanced sacral chakra will have healthy confidence and self-esteem, and they will be warm and generous.

A person with a blocked sacral chakra will feel overwhelmed, depressed, unable to regulate their emotions, and they will have addictive tendencies. They feel powerless.

Do you know what blocks the sacral chakra?

Shame.

And then I think of all of the perfectly healthy things I have been ashamed of in my lifetime: being afraid, being sexual, being lonely. Needing someone to love me. Wanting someone to love me. Needing approval. Needing acceptance. Not knowing how to “control” my emotions.

I was ashamed of my anger in situations when anger was an understandable response. I’ve been ashamed of my sexuality at ages and times when it was normal and healthy to have a sex drive, from a biological standpoint.

I’ve been ashamed of being “boy crazy” for my entire life, ignoring the fact that there weren’t many stable things in my younger life, least of all a father figure, so of course I would try to find an “easy” replacement for what I was lacking in boys.

Shame.

Shame.

Shame.

Shame for not being Christian enough, shame for not being “pure,” shame for not having a relationship, shame for not being happy, shame for being ashamed.

Now, at this big age of 34, I look back at myself and my heart just breaks for that young human who was so ashamed of herself for being and wanting all the things that we evolved to be and want: I want sex because as a species we are designed to reproduce. I want company because as a species we evolved together–we could not survive alone.

And it’s not just me. Why, ten years ago, were so many of us ashamed to admit we need each other? Why did we think it made us weak to admit that we were young and healthy and we wanted company, and to be loved? Why are we expected to be self-sufficient to the point where it goes against our biological programming?

Why is something like “daddy issues” a cultural joke on the person who had the shitty father? Like they didn’t suffer enough from the actual bad father, they also have to carry the stigma and shame that culture assigns to behaviors that could have been prevented if they’d had a good fucking father.

Why do we do this to ourselves, and why do we do it to each other? I’m so sad and so tired of carrying this burden of shame that is doing nothing except making me feel depressed and powerless. You cannot apologize your way into love and acceptance. You cannot regret and suppress your way into happiness. We have this one life that is made up of an endless present moment, and we are the only constant we have from our first breath to our last.

I mean come on guys, we’re not Hitler over here. Most of us are perfectly alright human beings trying to play the hand we were dealt. Why are we so ashamed of ourselves?

How to be

Growing up, I learned a lot of things, but I feel like I never learned how to “be.” I know we all have stages where we feel out of place, but I remember walking across the school cafeteria painfully aware of my arms and how to swing them.

I can think of situations in my younger life where I literally did not know how to behave in that situation. I was so in my head second-and-third-guessing everything that everyone in that movement said and did and then second-and-third guessing everything I did as well.

I still have that feeling sometimes. The feeling that I don’t know how to “be.” What to do in some situations, or what I would truly do when faced with certain circumstances. I always try to remind myself that my life is the sum of both hard work and good fortune (or blessings, however you look at it). So there are things I have been blessed not to face.

We are the sum of a lot of different factors–generations of factors even–that have determined who our grandparents were, who their children became, and impacted us. Our health, responsibilities, resources, support network, access, resilience. Even, I think, some traumas that we carry that are probably manifested in unconscious patterns we pass down without even seeing it. This is why the field of epigenetics fascinates me.

We have all heard of “genes,” or “genetics.” Epigenetics deals with DNA. Rather than taking a “you get what you get” approach toward our health or skills, epigenetics says that certain factors can influence the way your genes are activated (or not).

Which means that nature and nurture make us who we are. And it’s possible that nurture might matter more. I know that can be a bleak thought to a lot of people who were dealt a difficult hand in life, but I like the idea that we get a say in our health and who we are. To me, it sounds like I can wake up every day and choose wellness (to the extent that my resources allow). I don’t have to have a temper because my parents did. I don’t have to have diabetes because my grandmother had it.

As time has gone on, I’ve learned more and more how to wake up every day and choose life, myself and the person I want to be. I’ve accepted parts of myself that I never thought I could, and I’ve learned how to walk unselfconsciously thanks to a decade of yoga.

All of this to say there is no one way to figure out how to be, but I think it is important work. For me, “how to be,” means what are you when all of your life roles are stripped off? It has occurred to me after nearly a decade since I left everything and everyone even remotely familiar and went to South Korea (woefully unprepared, I might add).

Although my romantic life has been its normal shitshow, the rest of my life is going pretty well (thank God). And I can spend time in the quiet, by myself. My first boyfriend as a baby adult (20-ish) once asked me why I was so loud. Of course I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he told me I was always making noise. There was always loud music playing or something, never silence.

That really struck me, and I’ve tried to lead a quieter life ever since, although of course I have massively failed in that area many times. Lately, though, it’s been quiet. In this quiet, I’ve had to listen to myself and dismantle my old life completely because it was not making me happy or well.

Listening to myself has been really difficult, but the more I do it the more I am certain that my best days are ahead of me. Because I’m the common denominator in my life. To anyone out there who is struggling, I know it can sound absolutely crushing to think that you are stuck with yourself for the rest of your life. My response is that the behaviors and patterns we have as adults are things that helped us survive when we were younger and dependent on other people. It’s not the same now.

As a species, we are designed to survive, so we are on our own side. There is no part of you that wants to destroy you, not even the one(s) that you or other people can’t understand. If you just start there, knowing that your body and mind are on your side, and responding in kind by changing your self talk or behaviors, you will start to feel better.

I’m not a therapist or anything, but this is what has been working for me. No more shaming any part of myself. Just who are you, what do you have to say, how are you trying to protect me?

It really has helped me learn more and more just how to be.