Tika Tonu

I don’t like the term “Inner Child.” To me, it conjures images of Wall Street executives ripping off their ties to go snowboarding or jumping through mud puddles. The concept of the “True Self,” though? That’s something I can really get behind. Somewhere under all these onion layers is that kernel of Truth which is the Real Me. From what I’ve read in Adult Children literature so far, the terms seem to be used interchangeably. It feels uncomfortable to me, but I think that is because I recognize my adult child and she is pretty much everything I hate about myself. I’ve spent my whole life trying to make everyone treat me like an adult, but I have absolutely no idea how to actually BE an adult because I keep reacting to life like I did as a child. I am stubborn and petulant and obnoxious and needy because I am ridiculously riddled with fear and self-loathing and I do NOT want you to see that part of me.

So, yesterday was a great day. I had lunch with a woman who I just adore, but hadn’t seen since before Christmas. She is like all the good and all the damaged parts of me lived unapologetically. I feel completely comfortable sitting naked with all my hurt and shame and idiocy on display in her presence. I have never been this at ease with any female ever in my life. I just want to put her in my pocket and carry her with me everywhere so that I can be naked and unapologetic all the time.

THEN, last night, another friend and I drove up to Austin to hear Glennon from Momastery speak. We got there all late so we missed a bit and had to sit near the rafters, but I think that’s how it was supposed to be. I got a lot more enjoyment out of getting to know my friend better over the course of a 3 hour car ride than I did in fangirling over a blogger. (And I so did. You know I walked up to meet her being all, “Be cool, Laurie. She’s just a person just like everyone else,” but I left that place thinking, “Why did I have to be like that? Now she thinks I’m such an idiot.”)

But that’s not the point. I ended up having the same awkward experience with both of these women in the same day. We were standing in a relatively long line, so we had a fun conversation while we waited. About halfway through each conversation, my friend turned to the person behind us who was obviously there alone and drew them into our conversation. Both times I think, “Dammit, you’re my friend, you’re here with me, you’re going to talk to me!” And both times I realize with this thought that I am an inconsiderate, insecure asshole, trying to collect friends like charms on a charm bracelet rather than to actually be a friend to someone.

But THAT isn’t even the point! The point is that I recognized this, made a mental note, and then set it aside so that I could enjoy my time with my friend instead of sitting there, beating myself up about “why can’t I be nice like her?” And bonus, I actually got to be kind to two strangers. Even though I didn’t initiate the kindness, I allowed myself to follow my friends’ lead. Both times, three people walked away smiling instead of me being pissy and introverted or the stranger getting annoyed with being stuck behind these two girls who were talking and laughing all loud in line. Yes, I still have a long way to go, but this is major progress for me.

So what does all that have to do with Tika Tonu and all the various things I have swimming around in my head right now? I don’t know. This post went in a very different direction than I was heading when I sat down. Maybe I just felt I needed to distract you with something that resembles truth before I revealed what was really bugging me. Maybe by this time you will have all gone away bored so you won’t get to the parts that are actually hard for me to say.

Last year sucked for me. It was a time of introversion and feeling overly exposed. I am not a shy person and I have never had a problem sharing my thoughts and opinions with people, but something happened that freaked me out and I went quiet. I felt horribly over-exposed. Even though I had done nothing wrong, bad things were happening in my life. I felt like all eyes were on me, judging me. I began doubting myself – even in regards to things I had been so sure about for so long. I felt like an empty shell, like the Operative at the end of Serenity: “There is nothing left to see.” And just like the Operative, I was ashamed because I had backed the wrong horse. Everything I knew was a lie and I had spouted that bullshit everywhere. I had made it my life’s work.

But that was not from God. And that was not True Self speaking. I had ventured outside my little comfort zone and I got burned. Things did not turn out like I had envisioned; that does not mean that I was wrong to step outside my comfort zone. Nor does it mean that I have to immortalize myself in things I’ve said. I have to speak the Truth where I stand. Tomorrow, I may stand somewhere else and that is okay. That doesn’t make today’s truth any less valid for me today. I have lived a lot of lies because it was the only way I knew how to survive. It has only been in retrospect that I have been able to identify the lie in the truth.

Just as life seemed to be conspiring to destroy me last year, it seems that life is conspiring to give me courage this year. My seemingly empty shell was rather a cocoon and I am slowly emerging – transformed, but as yet unable to fly. I feel like my Inner Child somehow woke up and has found herself disgusted by all these onion layers I’ve used to “protect” her with. I’m saying things again. I am writing and reading and thinking again. I am poking around in my psyche again. I am actually seeing my bullshit and refusing to accept it. I don’t see everything, of course, but I feel like I’m hacking away at a huge chunk of the crap that I’ve built up on myself.

And I don’t know where this is coming from. Obviously, it is somehow from God because what I am doing takes a tremendous amount of faith, but it doesn’t feel like any God I’ve ever known before. Maybe it’s just the end of my rope. Maybe I just finally saw that absolutely nothing can protect me from the hurts that life inflicts so I might as well just LIVE. Maybe I remembered walking down the street with a Reluctant Messiah and discussing the Parabola, that I chose this life specifically, with all its hills and valleys. Maybe it was Tika Tonu. Maybe I just realized that in four years it will be four years later, my kids will be four years older and I will be either in the same damned place for four years or I could be in an entirely different place altogether. Or most likely it was all of that together with God and the universe conspiring in my favor.

Whatever it was, I definitely needed last year’s mud so that I could grow lotuses this year. What that’s going to look like I have no idea, and honestly I really don’t want to know right now. I’m just going to step out naked, putting one foot in front of the other, letting the onion layers fall away and ultimately testing my wings.

And I am going to push “publish,” walk away and let this truth stand as it is in this moment in time.

What Lies Beneath

I’m still getting over some ick which decided to come settle in on me Easter morning (Thank you, Easter Bunny!) – a lovely little sinus infection which still has me horking phlegm from somewhere around my occipital lobe. Dead sexy, I know. Welcome to South Texas in the springtime! We’ve got bluebonnets and snot as far as the eye can see! Today’s post is primarily my attempt to get back in the saddle after this particularly sneezy vicissitude made brain stupid and no thinky. AKA: This post may completely suck, so be forewarned. Then again, it could be just exactly what you needed to hear today; what do I know?

There’s an expression that goes, “Life doesn’t stop just because you got sober,” meaning there is no pause or reset button here. Stuff keeps happening while you’re focused on getting your head straight. Everyone keeps on living their lives like they do because they are not the ones who had some sudden moment of clarity and realized that they have to do a complete 180. People will continue to treat you as if you are the same old person you’ve always been because they are not the ones who have had a spiritual awakening. There’s this WHOLE BIG WORLD out there that has absolutely NOTHING to do with you. Shocking, I know. I still find it hard to believe at times.

Junior year in high school, I wrote a poem talking about feeling very overwhelmed and wanting everything to just STOP for a minute so I could catch my breath. It was an excellent piece and probably one of the best things I’ve ever written (not tooting my own horn here, just bear with me, you’ll see). Poetry was an amazing outlet for me when I was younger because it was a way to acknowledge and give voice to emotions that were bigger than just one word could describe. Anyone who has journaled for recovery purposes knows that once we put things down on paper, they are no longer bouncing around in our heads, trying to kill us.

At the time I wrote this poem, I was nearing the end of my first year at a residential honors school where I generally felt very much like the stupid kid at the smart kid school. Finals were fast approaching and after doing exceptionally horrid at the semester break, I wasn’t so sure how I’d fare for year end. I was soon going to have to face not being able to see my boyfriend and the rest of my classmates over the summer, and many of the most amazing people I had ever met would soon be scattered across the globe and I would probably never see them again after graduation. On top of that, we were leaving that evening for an extended weekend and I did not want to deal with my family. Needless to say, I was experiencing some very heavy, stressful, negative emotions.

All this pressure kept bubbling up inside me to the point that I was almost crying, so, sitting in chemistry class, I put pen to paper and spilled out all that angst. Once I finished, I read back over what I had written and recognized the pressure described there as if I were empathizing with someone else. It no longer belonged to me. Yes, the piece was dark and tormented in the way only a 16-year-old girl can write, but the emotions described there were no longer suffocating me. I showed the poem to my lab partner who was one of my dearest friends, then folded it up, put it in my pocket & went about the rest of my day feeling a little blue, but a whole heckuva lot better than before.

Fast forward a day or two. I was back home with the family, probably being a bratty, pouty teenager annoyed with being forced to deal with the ‘rents, watching TV or playing on the computer or whatever – completely over whatever had been bothering me the other day. Dad called me into the kitchen where he produced the poem Mom had retrieved from my pants pocket while doing laundry. Now, I can understand the concern here to a certain extent. I mean, the poem did conclude by devolving into a dark version of a children’s rhyme much in the same way that a certain Korn song did a couple of years later. The overreaction to this thing, though, was TREMENDOUS! My dad wanted to lock me up in a psych ward. I’m not saying that I couldn’t have used a little therapy at the time, but I’m not a mental case. The poem was not a cry for help or a sign that I was losing it. Quite to the contrary, keeping those emotions bottled up inside WOULD have driven me over the edge.

I tried to explain this to my dad, but he would have none of it. He was adamant that my only two options were destroy the poem or get locked up in a padded cell. I’m not sure how destroying the poem would’ve proven that I wasn’t crazy, but I guess if you don’t see something, you can pretend it never existed. The “discussion” got very heated and with my face red with big, ugly tears, I finally tore up this beautiful thing I had written which so accurately described a huge, unnameable emotion that it nearly got me committed. I have looked back, thinking I should have submitted to a 24-72 hour hold so that I could have salvaged my work, wondering what kind of difference it would have made. Either way, though, there was no way I was ever getting that poem back.

And so it was that I learned that writing was bad. In the year that followed, I studied the works of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in my poetry class. I identified too strongly with their writing and would not suffer their same fate, even if it killed me (yeah, I just did that), so this was essentially the end of my poetry career. I never made a conscious decision to stop writing, but somewhere deep inside me a lie was spoken and it destroyed the conduit which allowed emotion to flow from brain to pen.

 

This is completely NOT what I had set out to write today, but I suppose it’s what I needed to say. I have a lot of anxiety about writing and I believe most of it stems from this one event. Consciously, I understand how ridiculous the whole thing is. Moreover, I can see how I quite possibly am simply using it as an excuse to not write. The simple fact is, there is obviously something broken in this moment that I have to rectify before I can move forward because any time I am encouraged to write more, the anxiety comes and this memory is never far behind.

The world ain’t gonna stop just because I’ve got a little anxiety, though. The longer I put off addressing the issue, the longer I keep living in fear. So what’s it going to be, Laurie? Are you ready to confront the demons that live in this memory yet or do you want to keep on hiding behind them for a while longer? Are you willing to tear away the lie to find the truth that so scares you lying underneath?

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

Here goes nothing

Throughout my life I have been told by numerous people that I have an aptitude for writing and I should do it more often. The thought of pursuing it as a career or even as any sort of regular outlet at the same time thrills and terrifies me. Every once in a while I’ll get on a writing kick and knock out a little poetry, a short story or a chapter of my “memoirs”, but these are generally private ventures. I terribly want to impress you, so I will sometimes share these writings… but then comes the fear that you now expect great things of me and I will be unable to live up to those expectations. This fear takes over and I just shut down again. Rather than picking up a pen to take a chance at something special, “I will diminish and go into the West and remain Galadriel.”

Maybe, just maybe, Galadriel could write down some observations on her journey to the West, though. Perhaps I could Dread Pirate Roberts my way into writing: “Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.” Alcoholics have a way of doing things one day at a time. Maybe it’s time I practiced this principle in all of my affairs; taking this one post at a time. I can’t guarantee this blog is going anywhere. Perhaps this will be yet another false start. “Good post, Laurie. Sleep well. You’ll most likely give up on it in the morning.” Perhaps I’ll surprise myself, though, and remember to treat this endeavor just like everything else. There are no more big deals; life does not depend on whether or not I write; my personal worth does not depend on what you think about my writing; and most importantly… don’t take myself so damned seriously.

This fear of writing has haunted me my whole life. Over the years, I’ve learned that the best way to overcome your fears is to walk through them. Many say, “Fake it ’til you make it.” I much prefer what my friend Anna says, “No! You don’t fake it! If you do, you’re pretending you’re something you’re not and we have to be true to ourselves. What you do is you practice. You decide that you are going to do things differently and you practice until you get better at it.” (No, that’s not a direct quote. I’m pretty sure she threw in a few choice words when she told me, but this was the gist of it.) So this is me practicing. I will fail, and failing here means failing publicly… but that is alright. I will live and I will learn from my failures. Today, I will pick up my pen and I will trust God to guide it. (And I will not re-read this post 700 times picking out all the things I should have done differently.)