11:11

I wasn’t sure where to begin. How or where to even start. Should I start by saying how it all happened? Was I even sure of how it happened myself? Instead of trying to figure out where I am going to end, instead I am just going to write everything on my heart as it comes to me. With absolutely no agenda other than processing, healing, and a deadline of 11:11.

Beside me sits a bottle of two-buck-Chuck and half a joint. I was nervous to be writing again. I shut my page down when I could no longer afford the hosting. In truth, perhaps I avoid the expenses because I did not want to write because for me, writing is my most accurate mirror. It is the tool through which I am able to most clearly see, reflected back at me, my life. Writing my words and sometimes not even until reading them back, do lessons appear and do outcomes make sense; dots connect in a way that I am rarely able to see in any other way. And yet the truth was, there was no way to make sense of what I was going through.

I was losing my dad to cancer, and on July 25, 2019 at 12:30am, I lost him. It was ten days after his birthday. He never got to eat the chocolate cupcakes we bought him to celebrate the occasion because he begged to go to the hospital the night before (7/14) and he said he didn’t think he would be back. In a way, he was right. His return would be only long enough to complete his transition from earth-bound to the ether.

I find it difficult to begin to share what those last moments were like for me. Here is what I have the words to articulate: being able to care for my dad in that way, with my sisters and in our family home just felt so…grounding. I remember being in Bali and as we visited the family compounds we learned that the placenta/afterbirth was buried at the family home as well as the ashes from each cremation, to be kept at the family’s home temple. In that way, your ancestors were always with you in a cyclical way. I thought, at the time, it was such a beautiful tradition and reminded me of what I’d always learned from witch folklore about the power of ancestral bond even, and sometimes especially in the metaphysical.

Yet when I returned home after losing my dad, I struggled with migraines and overwhelming grief. I cried what felt like the entire time I was home. And then a beautiful thing happened, I started seeing monarch butterflies. One would always appear when I felt particularly debilitated with sadness. Fluttering about, always just the one, and lingering just long enough for me to take notice and pay attention. As I drove many the miles between Atlanta to Nashville, Nashville to St. Louis, and St. Louis to Albert Lea, Minnesota—where I am currently taking refuge (more on that later)—I kept seeing butterflies. Always in these particular instances. Always in the same manner, like the color purple, demanding reverence. I started to simply say, “Hey Dad” when they popped up. I didn’t care if it was just happenstance and butterfly migration patterns, God showed me a butterfly when I needed one.

In one of the last things my dad did for my mom, sisters and I was to write us letters telling us how much he loved us. In mine, he said I was his first child and he referred to himself as my dad, saying he liked that he could call himself my dad. I honor him by doing so, now.

Shortly after his passing, I wrote a facebook post about being ready for the next chapter and set an intention for what it included: art, healing, etc. From that, an old and forever friend’s family offered me a place to stay and to help provide me with therapy while I healed from many traumas so that I could get back on my feet. I said yes after talking with my sister and having her assure me that she would be home with mom (more on THAT, later). Once I arrived I talked to my friends mom about their generosity and hospitality, and she told me that she saw it as being obedient to God’s instruction. I had prayed for this. I had written the words that I wanted some remote writing cave where I could shut off from the world as I knew it and harness my creative energy to heal and process through creation. I had it there in my scripting journal in my own hand writing. I could not believe the opportunity was sitting before me, and yet, I could because God doesn’t give us whims and daydreams for nothing. Dreaming is a form of planning.

I took six weeks and went to EMDR therapy for sometimes twice a week. I talked through traumatic events in my life and I realized just how much I had constructed my choices around seeking my biological father’s approval and relieving anxiety for my mother. A story my mother will tell was that she started thinking she should get married when I got older and started to ditch her for my friends. In truth? I always just wanted to do whatever I could to make sure my mom was “okay”. Now, this measurement of “okay” was totally fabricated by me and my own assessment of the situation, aka neurosis, but it didn’t matter, I believed it. Maybe I co-signed marriage for my mom because I felt she was finally in good hands and it allowed me to be a kid. I’ve often thought, in my therapy reflections that, because I was so whip smart and cognitively advanced, people assumed that my emotional maturity was just as expedited. When, in fact, if anything it was arrested. Perpetually stuck in a cycle of wanting to please and ease.

EMDR helped me face that hurt head on, and give my brain a new understanding, one that let me make a new choice. This must be, I think, what Erikson was talking about when he said what we don’t resolve, we repeat. He said that we have to complete and resolve the developmental task of the stages before we can truly mature. This was my resolution of old, old stuff. Funny, I thought this was going to be about the trauma of my assault or the trauma of losing my dad in fast forward to lung cancer. But we went much deeper than that and I started to understand myself in a new way. If we were to envision self as the tree of life, with just as many roots in earth as branches in air, then I had only been tending to one. My trauma had stopped me from choosing roots, intimacy and vulnerability. Because for me, to be vulnerable was to, “…open yourself up to annihilation,” as I’ve quoted so many times before from Geneen Roth. I could see it in glimpses with my romantic relationships. I exhausted myself quickly by performing the role I thought would win me the most accolade with men, or diffuse the tension with women. I replicated the energy I was used to, I demanded it because that was how I knew to exist in the world. And then the wind gets knocked out of you.

Your dad dies, and you don’t know what to say or who to call. You don’t really feel like you can fall apart with anyone, so you keep it together. Mostly. You start to wonder, if you fell ill, who would be there to watch you die? It’s a morbid thought, but an honest one given the timing of your life. Who would sit by your bedside and keep your medicine schedule, and play your favorite music? Is this an appropriate question to ask on a date? Sure, maybe not a first date but like a third? Is this why so may of my friends had been running towards marriage since our early twenties? They all want someone to watch them die! It made sense to me. Even if it were a question no one would ask, it’s got to be one that you wonder. It’s one that I will, now.

I have fantasies of motherhood. Deepening my roots. I dance around the idea of what a marriage might look like for me, or if I desire one at all. I feel my heart race at seeing my mother’s joy over a grandchild. I recognize that having a baby right now would be more easing, because nothing in my life is stable enough for a child. But I am walking that way. It is a goal I am actively moving towards: stability. For me, having a baby isn’t just about the physical gestation period, it’s also about incubating the environment you want that child to be born into. Being affording the opportunity to plan my family, I want to be as responsible as I can with the privilege.

Sometimes I wonder if I went back to work just to prove to myself that I could get a job. That I was so uncomfortable with the vulnerable space of being taken care of that I jumped into full time employment before my heart was in it. I struggle between considering all the people who do not have the time and space to grieve so freely and absolutely and recognizing my own reality. Yes, many cannot take months off work to attend to their mental and spiritual well being, AND you are being afforded the opportunity, so do not squander it.

I think there is a pressure to get “back to work” because the emotions we feel when we are un- or under-employed are tied to productivity, read: masculinity, and are thus largely socially taboo. I wish I had been more patient with myself. I wish I could be still. When I become still and when I sit in the silence, in the wintery cold, my own fortress of solitude, I am reminded of what my own rhythms sound and feel like. The decay of unemployment had begun to infect my spirit. I was ready to settle, I was actively settling just to get a job to say I had a job. I could see it happening, but I also couldn’t see a way to avoid it. Now, I can say thank you God for your many rejections, your many professional ghosts, your silences! It kept me from moving any further down a path that you had not intended for me. I was always supposed to be here.

Last night when meditating, God asked me to make a promise to be particularly mindful of my whims. When I got strong urges, to follow them. To trust in the gentle breeze nudging me along like a feather riding the wind. Today, my urges were to spend the day applying for jobs and dedicating energy to my next step, and then later on to write. The latter made me hesitant.

I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to spend however long it took to say whatever words were supposed to come, crying and with the eventual headache. I wanted a peaceful nights sleep. But I kept my promise. I spent the day with my laptop. A return. I stripped my site down to its simplest parts and I got back to the core of myself with the intention to deepen my roots. My words.

Just before I got up to write, I was sent a meme that said “finish the book…” I laughed. God is anything but subtle, have you ever seen sunset in an October Sky? let go of the deadlines I’d set for myself. I let go of the chapters I had written. I surrendered anything I had before I and submit simply to the commitment to write. I realized that while it would be wonderful to be a successful writer, that is not my career aspiration, instead it is a necessary means of processing and understanding the world that I have learned to share openly in public forum. I’ve allowed myself to erase the picture of what it’s all supposed to look like. If I’m honest, most of that is because when you lose someone integral to your life, picturing life without them becomes painful and so alternate realities become more probable, more enticing. After my assault I remember thinking, this would be a great time to “reinvent” myself, and no one would question it. Looking back, in some ways I did. I leaned heavily into my masculine energy, intentionally abandoning the soft, nurturing naivety that had landed me wounded. But with some time and therapy in the distance between my assault and now, I feel like a different me. I don’t fear intimacy in the same way, and I also do not take it for granted.

Now, I claim to be geographically imposed celibacy. In actuality, I’m just so content with my own company, it’s going to take someone remarkable to get me to disturb my own groove. I find myself reverent in reflection at my own capacity to persist in the face of so much pain. I just know how much good my heart can do, and I will keep fighting for opportunities to make this world better using everything God gave me, until I, too, return to the ether.