FFS

I’m frustrated.

Four years ago, I had the absolute worst breakup in my life: my ex left me in Paris four days before my birthday. The me who looks back at this story thinks that’s not such an earth-shattering event. But the me who lived it cracked. And blamed herself entirely. And went into her own dark night of the soul.

Before that happened, I had a terror of abandonment that was so powerful that I couldn’t even put it into words. I was deeply ashamed of this fear because I thought it was just one more thing that made me weak and undeserving of love.

When this guy left me in Paris, I sided with him. I wanted to leave my ass too. I’d been trying to leave myself for like a decade at that point–hence all the booze, travel and spending.

I told him and myself that he was right, no, I understood, I was terrible.

Looking back now, I’m pissed. That was a dick move, and my sense of self was so weak that I apologized to him. I often apologized to people who made me feel rejected back then–it was my tactic to avoid confrontation, and to manipulate other people’s emotions by pleasing them. If I pleased them, they wouldn’t leave me.

Why am I thinking about this guy?

Because I realized that I’ve been dating for like 20 years and all I’ve done in that time is be traumatized and heal from trauma. It makes me so angry.

I know that everyone struggles to connect with people at times, but there are definitely people who are fucking better at it than I am.

I feel like I have been eating fruit from a tainted garden, so I had to set the entire thing on fire then wait for the ecosystem to recover enough to begin tilling the soil so that I could plant my fucking seeds.

I’m angry because somewhere during my healing journey, I decided that the only way to be “safe” from retraumatizing myself via a romantic relationship was to choose people I couldn’t be with. My favorite kind of men are the ones who are geographically far and emotionally unavailable. Those men can’t traumatize me because they will never be close enough to me to do so.

I’m frustrated because I’ve healed enough to recognize and talk about my patterns, but without actually changing the fucking pattern. Even the slightest whiff of rejection turns me into fucking Cinderella and I’m over here cooking and singing to birds and shit–anything to win his approval.

Ten years ago, this would have been true in both thought and deed. Ten years ago, I had a compulsion to conquer emotionally unavailable men that I knew was destructive, but couldn’t escape. It’s not that I wanted a romantic life full of chaos, just that I was unable to prevent the chaos from unfolding around me.

And I worked so back breakingly hard to become a person who cultivates peace. I fought for this little core of acceptance inside of me. Many, many versions of me died and were reborn, only to die again. There are lifetimes inside of me, and generations of selves who have had to learn how to work together.

But here I am: a human who is ever-more peaceful inside from doing the work to heal. As my soul has grown and started to “drive” the wheel of my consciousness, I feel ever-more compassionate to the younger versions of me who felt that the only way to survive was to take the sides of the people who were leaving me over my own. Those versions of me were so apologetic for even existing: all they asked out of love was that it stay (and I guess it did stay as I was usually the one doing the leaving).

It’s like…..I expected that when I “healed,” I would get on with things: Be normal. Do stuff that normal people do every day like shower and run errands.

And date.

And instead, there are these echoes of pain/trauma inside me, and healing has involved becoming ever-more aware of them. And ever more gentle. To receive them with grace. And to resist falling into old patterns when they call, because whew child, they will call.

Healing has also involved making different decisions in order to break these unhealthy patterns externally (even if the internal battle continues). For me, it also involves staying on my own side. For so long, I believed that if I didn’t win the approval of whomever was making me feel rejected, it made me unworthy to exist. I felt like I was nothing, and that the only me that existed was the bits of myself I could steal from other people’s perceptions of me.

Or more precisely, my perceptions of their perceptions of me, because we never 100% know the thoughts and feelings and intentions of other people, do we? I remind myself of this thought daily, whenever I start to lose my stance within myself.

As always, healing is excruciatingly slow, as are all other things in my life: I’m not a millionaire yet (hmph!), I’m not writing remotely for some wildly successful yet socially responsible organization, I haven’t won the stock market, I still don’t own two apartments: one in Berlin and one in the DC area, and true love hasn’t idly crossed my path whilst I wandered through this life, blissfully satisfied and secure within myself.

I mean, really. FFS.

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?