the woman in the mirror
If I’ve got some awareness of how an experience, circumstance or relationship can be better, I’m not someone who can live with things as they are, I am driven to confront what isn’t working, create change and propel progress.
This can sometimes be a serious liability.
It can show up initially as resistance to the way things are, with a “fix-the-broken” approach towards people, places, and things. Which is entirely ineffective at achieving that which I yearn for. While also being immature and irresponsible, and sometimes traumatic for those involved.
Learning to come into balance with my own proclivities feels like an advanced curriculum I am destined to flunk, yet I continue to appreciate the opportunity for what it offers me. Yesterday I experienced this tired historical energy, so did the family I live with, which has influenced and morphed this piece into something I feel better about publishing.
I’m looking at the woman in the mirror, it’s tricky to view the characteristics that are both an asset and liability, and even more challenging to calibrate it.
I find it particularly maddening to hold or even witness stuck and stagnant energy in relationships I’m invested in and deeply care about.
I like to clear the clutter.
It’s love, but doesn’t always feel like it, given how I dish or deliver it.
I think love conceptually is grossly misunderstood in modern society, proven by our collective relational dysfunction (especially alive in my family), wherein honest addressing of what keeps us stuck is interpreted as something that it aint.
What do we know love to be?
Might we be mistaken about it?
I think our interpretations have grown backwards.
I’m learning how to surrender and accept people, places, and circumstances as they are. And I’m also learning that acceptance is also love, and very much a felt sense that doesn’t prerequisite living with people, places, and things as they are. This marginal perspective shift drastically changes the how in any requests for changes I make. If I can successfully stay inside this perspective healthy boundary creation is supported, a preservation of love itself for all in the story.
When life and relationships are harmful, toxic, or abusive while also survival dependent, there is no living with it, only surviving it.
I did a lot of surviving as a kid.
My basic physical needs were always met, but emotionally (as I experienced it), childhood held a lot of neglect, trauma, and tragedy. And I really wanted it to be different.
Rebellious energy was the outcome of those survivalist tendencies.
I know now what I also knew then; rebellious humans are hurting children, and I learned early on how to recognize this energy in others, that way I could feel less alone for a bit.
The first person I recall recognizing rebellion in was my brother, the one I wrote about here and here. And actually, writing about him led to these words you are now reading, those writings have been experienced as a betrayal of sorts, and judged to be profiteering.
I guess for as much as I have changed, some things remain the same, I’m still igniting anger in those whose behaviors I confront. I’ve come to understand it matters very little how it’s done, any which way disruption of a controlled narrative comes, is a problem.
I started an acute deconstruction of the entirety of my life a while back, it became necessary for my own survival. From that process came changes and confrontations that ultimately led to a familial divorce.
I ceased placating, embellishing and enabling the illusions built by my parents, society, and the religious culture that surrounded me. The pretense of who these people and systems expected me to be vanished, in an almost overnight messy blaze of glory. I no longer ignored the urgent request from within my body to stop taking responsibility for and caretaking wounded and dysfunctional egos projecting blame and shame, nor their preservation stories. I no longer subscribed to a long history of familial dysfunction.
What was real and alive in me became painfully clear, and an authentic expression (albeit messy) of what I was thinking and feeling started happening with regularity. Problematic reactions came from these behavioral changes and expressions, and the real characteristics of my relationship with my parents showed up violently. The volatility I experienced during that season had a cataclysmic quality, the outcome of all those collisions has been an ugly divorce of sorts, and 7 years of very little to no-contact with any of them.
On occasion an opportunity to get a pulse on the energy between me and those ‘rents drops by. Recently this came via a little mothership stalking right here on substack, the place were I seem to effectively make myself both the bullet and the target.
The purpose here in writing life stories publicly, contradicts the pain that comes from it, I continually work to accept that. Processing this stalking and the results of this indirect interaction has me looking at the aspect of the human nervous system that likes to take things personally, and then out of necessity and curation of “safety” will preserve the illusion of the good self by projecting the shadow of self onto others, usually in the form of blame, judgement and misunderstanding.
And then those that are blamed, sometimes take it personally, perpetuation of our collective dysfunction.
I took it personally, though not as personally as I would have in the past. The projection of blame and the utility my mother finds in these words, isn’t really about me at all. But, I’m not fully inoculated from taking projections personally, at least not when it comes to core biologic relationships. (And I think that’s how biology works, I think in a way it’s supposed to feel personal.)
There’s this kitschy little tiktok circulating that I really like that says something like, “I’ll be the villain in your story if you don’t leave out the chapters on how you created me” I sentiment it appropriately here, I wonder how and why my parents can’t see their own role in the ever widening chasm between us. And if the people they villainize me with know there is vital context missing from the stories they are telling.
Why would a kid go no-contact? A well asked question is half the answer.
So what is it that I am doing here in the telling of life lived, and love lost?
“We are a family of well kept secrets. And they all end up nearly killing us” - Prince of Tides
I will not be the keeper of the secretes that kill us, even if that means the relationship dies, that is the only way any of us have a shot at progress.
An autopsy of the dying is necessary if we are to learn anything from it. The health and vitality of a species wide future calls for an autopsy of the energetic way we relate to one another. I believe that family story work is valuable data for and in the process of shifting the traditional parenting paradigm from toxic to nourishing.
The perpetual cycles of emotionally immature, wounded, and undeveloped human beings entering into dysfunctional romantic partnerships and then procreating and poorly parenting the next generation must cease if we are going to survive the psychic viruses we have developed.
I refuse to live with the toxicity of how we are.
I will be a transitional agent for change.
The powerful asset side of the previously described liability.
I will do for and with my children what the generation that raised me struggles to, I will witness and take responsibility for the role I have played in my own suffering but most importantly in theirs, knowing that ownership, acknowledgment of impact, and repair are the antidotes in the story. I will resource my own emotional reactivity and relational irresponsibility to show me where wounds still need cleansing and healing and I will do that difficult work, and do it daring greatly.
We all are the villains, survivors, and heroes of our own stories.
And I will keep telling mine.