Personal Growth. Self-Compassion. Writing Consulting.
You hope and wish for it every day of your life,
But when the floods of change finally come
All the newness scares you:
“Could it be!?”
“Is this really happening!?”
“Is this for real!?”
“What if it stops?”
Such a peculiar feeling, to not feel and see things the same way anymore.
To see the river finally flow in a different direction
Is a terrifyingly beautiful thing.
🖤
A
We have deeply ingrained expectations of who someone should be in relation to who we are, and so often we are disappointed.
It can feel like a devout betrayal when someone doesn’t respond the way we want or believe we need them to. But in bringing expectations to our interactions we become our own saboteurs.
Our loved ones – including friends – are capable of not being capable of nurturing us. This does not make them bad people. Rather, it makes them human beings on their own journey, just like you and me.
It is incredibly easy to take the road most travelled – one filled with judgement and contempt – when other people aren’t capable of being who we want them to be.
It is much harder to come to a place of acceptance in realizing the necessity in releasing what you think you need from someone, and instead, accepting that this is all they are capable of.
At least right now.
You should be able to do
What I think you need to do –
Mostly, Just be there for me.
But you just can’t
And I know it.
And I want to be generous
I want to understand that you don’t understand
But I’m so caught up in this hurt that we both got
I don’t know how
AS
Sometimes when things are going haywire in the old head, I take a big breath in, and on the exhale I say — “I am mercy.” Because I want to be mercy incarnate.
Mercy: an act of kindness, compassion, or favour — so says one of many definitions.
Mercy to me is release. It’s when you stop trying so hard to win the fight, or look the toughest, or be the best.
When you give in to what you are feeling and just feel it — even if it feels shitty.
Or when you give in to peace rather than going all-out gangbusters on some thought train that’s counterproductive and exhausting and annoying to think or speak of.
Mercy is like, “ugh, this way of thinking makes my skin crawl” so you choose to be compassionate and loving instead of fearful and aggressive.
Mercy is when you breathe through the rage, and plaster a smile on your face and say, “I fucking got this.” And then you walk away in your mind, with the swagger of a 90s supermodel in a George Michael music video because you are that solid on the fact that this love over hate thing is THE WAY to freedom.
Some recently regurgitated poetry below. I say that because I think of so many things in the middle of the night and even during the day that I don’t write down, but they always come back to me in some way or another.
I have this theory that there are hairline fractures in my brain, and if I let a tiny little thought come through late at night, memories and ideas flood my mind.
If I didn’t have to work, it would probably make sense to just get up when that happens, and write down the thoughts until I feel less overwhelmed by them.
For some reason, 2 am me thinks this idea is ridiculous. One of these days though, I’ll have to give it a go, though.
Hairline fractures let the world in,
swallowed up by every person I’ve been.
A style shifting sheep; a tyrannical nurse;
fighting for your love with a worn out purse.
Desperate for cash and twisted affection,
looking for love in a vitamin D injection.
But the sun can’t fix what the clouds uncover,
and the pills have never resurrected what I’m trying to recover.
I can’t sew up my shell until the insides are fixed,
and there’s no way around the work: no short cuts, no tricks.
A.S.
As I’ve recovered and worked toward healing my body, mind, soul, and spirit, I’ve realized how important it is to stand up for yourself. Boundaries are your friend, at least they are now mine. I put those suckers up all the time. And it’s not that they need to be aggressive or mean, they just need to say, “Nuh-uh dude, you don’t get my company, if you talk to me like that.”
Boundaries are hard because they require us to do something a woman is taught not to do: not be agreeable.
But being agreeable and “super easy-going” isn’t working for us anymore. In fact, it’s getting us into a lot of shit. Not only with ourselves, because it’s so insanely frustrating to complain and yet not speak up when you feel you are being treated badly, and also for the other human beings walking the planet.
So the following is little diddy I wrote when I first started the blog in 2016. I won’t tell you who it’s about but I may or may not reference the scenario in my book (yes – I’m writing a non-fiction book about how I recovered from alcohol and drug addiction without any rehab or therapy. Sign up for my newsletter to learn more.)
Either way, I hope you take a little bit of inspiration from my this little free verse of mine and set some B’s (boundaries) in your life.
If you push me,
I will push back.
I’ll inevitably set free,
polite as can be,
some words reminding you,
it’s not OK to be rude to me.
Because it seems when I stay silent,
and don’t speak my mind
you think being mean
is allowed and just fine.
But it’s not, so from now on
I’ll commit to holding my ground
in the eye of the tempests
you reliably throw down.
xo
A
but you can still puncture it.
I earn my stripes
with every last scar,
emotional or otherwise.
So you see,
while I can still handle it all,
(every comment, look, or gust of rejection)
I still ache for peace.
For times when this,
was not in fact this.
I still prefer that feeling
over this one.
xo
A
