This is a hard entry for me to make.  I started this blog because I want to be totally open about my struggles and revelations I have about myself.  Some of my revelations just floor me.  I had one this past week.  I had someone try to explain this to me once but I could not quite understand what he was saying.  Sometimes you have to experience it in a way that is slaps you in the face.  That is what happened.  I am thankful he tried to explain it and I wish I could have understood it then rather than have this humiliating way of learning a lesson.  I don’t think I have had many lessons that were not the universe hitting me with a 2 x 4 because sometimes I don’t see my faults.

I have been told I have a charismatic energy that attracts people in many situations.  I am bigger than life.  I dress in costumes sometimes and draw attention and can hold attention if I choose to or keep myself untouchable and distant.     There are people who adore me and people who hate me.  I realize that is true for all of us.  But I know there is a responsibility that comes with being a person that others look up to or admire.  If you are a person who is a mentor, leader or a charismatic personality people will follow your lead and they will believe you when you say something (at least some of the time).  I say all this to lead into my story of the hat and what really happened.

On Friday I thought someone had taken my hat.  I was positive I had walked in with my hat and had it with my coat.  I could see in my mind walking in with it on my head and someone saying “your hat is so cute”.  I remembered talking to people about my hat and having it with my coat.  When I told people it was missing they said “omg I saw you with it on this morning”  “Noooo I remember you telling us about it”  I just knew I had the hat that morning and now it was gone.  I was heartbroken and others were sad for me and they were trying to find the hat too.  I spoke with someone through text about the hat and she said she would ask around and try to find out who had the hat.  I told my roommate about it and we both cursed about the fact that someone would take my beloved hat.  When I went to walk my dog I went to where I kept my hats and took another hat down and put it on and sighed to myself “I wish my hat was here”  and went out for a walk with my dog.  I looked up at the moon and made a wish that the person who had it would be as happy with it as I was.    When I returned from the walk I stood in amazement because my hat was hanging on the hook I had just taken the hat I was wearing from.  I had looked at that exact spot and had not seen it when I went out.  I was confused and thought I must be crazy.  I called my roommate over and told him and we both felt confused and also guilty that we had been cursing someone for stealing a hat that had never left the house.

So what really happened?  I started googling things about false memories.  Then I started tracing my steps in my mind again.  I suddenly remembered that I had in fact taken my ear muffs instead because I had my hair pulled up with a clip and my hat would not fit over it.  Everything I imagined in my mind about the hat and that day was all my imagination and not only had I believed it wholeheartedly everyone else had memories that were not true as well.   I was blown away.  I remembered what this person had said to me about how I had this ability to make people believe what I said and to persuade people easily.   I realize that in some cases this can be a good thing if you are using it in a positive way but this just felt awful to me.  I did not do it on purpose but I stopped and thought hard about how I must be extra careful about things I think are true.  I have done this same thing in regards to judging a person thinking I knew for certain their motives or how they are when in fact my judgement was based on past experience and not on them at all.  I immediately wrote an apology to someone I felt I had done that too recently.   I felt heartbroken over it.  I felt angry at myself that I did not see this before or understand.  I remember he said that I must know I am doing it… but I know that when I have done it that it was a learned behavior that at one time may have saved my life.  Being able to persuade someone in whatever way I could to not hurt me was a skill I learned and used for several years.  When I am afraid, when I am hurt, when I am focused on thinking everyone wants to use, leave or hurt me…..this defensive skill is my fall back.  He was right.  I did know on some level what I was doing but it was not out of malice it was out of self preservation.  I must be vigilant and examine myself more thoroughly when I am afraid before I speak and cause hurt and embarrassment to myself and others.

I am not sure what I am going to do with this.  I feel like I have been laid bare and open and I am ashamed.   I want to grow.  I want to continue to be a better person.  I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore and I don’t want to continue to hurt myself by pushing away people who care about me.  I will continue to write about this as I process it.  If this has made sense to you in anyway I would like to hear your feedback.  If you do not want to write it here you can email me at goddessphoenixmedusa at gmail.  I would love to hear from you.

Adding on after posting:

I felt right away I needed to add something.  I am taking full responsibility for my actions.  I am not in anyway trying to excuse myself because of my issues.  I am working on making changes not making excuses.  After rereading it I thought someone may think I was making excuses.  I am extremely hard on myself internally.   I feel I have been in the wrong in many situations that I cannot change now but I can do my best to make amends.

I spent this last week making a film with a small group of people.  I knew some of them beforehand but most of them I had never met.  It got to be stressful after a week being in small spaces waiting to be called to set.  I did enjoy it.  I learned so much about what really goes into being in a film and how long you have to wait sometimes.  At least one of the days I was on set for 10 hours for 30 minutes of filming.  It was totally worth it and I cannot wait to see the product at the end of April.

Today was the last day.  I was tired and looking forward to saying goodbye to the people I had worked with all week and head to the gym.  I returned to the room we had been in all day today and the first thing I noticed was my hat was missing.  This is not just any hat.  This is my black and pink furry hat with ears that I have guarded like a hawk for 7 years because I loved that hat.  It had been on the back of my chair with my coat and I knew the minute I walked in it was gone.  Someone had taken it.  It had not been lost because it was on the chair when I went for my last call.  I was so heartbroken.  I had shared in the morning how much it meant to me because several people commented on how much they liked it.    This is one of the reasons I am so diligent about keeping my things together and constantly keep track of where things are.  Especially when I really like something.  So, my hat is gone.  I cannot do anything about it.  I just hate that this kept me from spending the time I wanted to spend saying goodbye to the people I had spent a week with.  I was so upset I went to my car and cried.   I am glad I will see them again in April when we have our opening.  As for the person who took my hat.  I feel sorry for them that they felt they had to steal something from someone.

We spend so much of our lives afraid of endings.  The truth is everything ends.  The lesson of the death card is that there must be death for a new beginning to happen.  This is not just about physical death of our bodies.   This can be the ending of a job, a relationship, the death of a beloved pet, the death of a lifestyle and many other things.  But after death comes rebirth and the fool who is the zero card …the beginning and the end who walks through the whole story of life.

I was musing on this during my workout this morning.  Many times I have held onto something or someone until it was like dragging around a stinking dead corpse.  I was determined to make it work because the letting go always seemed like the end of the world.  But every time I have let go and trusted, wonderful things happened for me and for others involved that would not have happened if it had continued.   I am not a person who thinks everything is roses and singing birds.  Life is full of things that happen.  No one is promised a drama free, no bad things happening life.  If you think you deserve that you are going to be disappointed for your whole life.  The universe is not out to get you, you don’t have bad luck and you are not cursed.  Shit just happens, even to really good people.  I have experienced the death of a relationship and I am standing on the cliff with my flute and my dog and I am not looking back anymore.  I am already seeing some positive outcomes of this change in my life and the positive has not only happened to me.  That is a good sign that this was the right thing.

Time to take the jump off the cliff…..  see you later 🙂

I am done counting days.  I have come to the conclusion that counting days and reading things about how to deal with a break up first thing in the morning only helps for a short period.  The first few weeks it helped a lot.  I felt like I was not alone.  I was able to chat with people who were also struggling and I was proud that for the first time in my life I was able to stick to a no contact agreement I made with my ex.  It was a good choice…for the time.  Then something starting happening.  I was getting depressed.  I was crying out of the blue and felt myself sinking.  Some of the stories were making me worse not better.  The counting of the days was making me anxious.  I was focused on what would happen the first time I had any contact with him and could not stop thinking about how it may be terrible.  I was afraid to go places because I might run into him.  I was on constant alert and I was so tense I was starting having trouble sleeping.  I woke up thinking about the breakup because I got a reminder first thing to do my mending assignment and I thought about it right before bed when I did my check in.  So I made the decision after reading about the pros and cons of counting the days to stop.  I had made the 30 days we agreed on and I had started to heal.  I was ready to move on.  So I made the choice to send him a message we talked about when we made the agreement.  It was simple “I wanted to say hello and see how you are doing.”  I had been warned by my friends in the chat room that this would only make matters worse…what if he doesn’t respond …what if he says never contact me again… but the thing is those things did not matter because I was not sending the message because I wanted to open something up I was sending the message because I needed to move on.  He responded with a similar message and said he was doing OK and asked how I was.  I told him I am doing good and it was nice to hear from him.  That was it.  There was no discussion, no drawn out conversation.  I felt like a million pounds had been lifted off my shoulders and all that tension was just gone.  Yesterday I was able to focus and not think about him or the breakup for almost the whole day.  This morning I woke up feeling lighter and not burdened by being focused on mine and others pain.  I felt like I was finally moving again…I was not anxious or afraid anymore.  I felt strong and I had made choices that for me were the right ones.  I want to stress that this may not have worked for someone else.  Everyone is different and every relationship that ends is different.  I did the very best I could, I compromised and communicated but in the end it was just not a good fit.  That does not make either of us bad people.  It was time to let go of any resentment and just move on.  I want to live in today.  I don’t want to constantly look back on the past and what could have been different or focus on what I could have had in the future.  I have learned some valuable lessons and this relationship brought me closer to where I need to be in my life.  I am learning to love myself more and more.

This morning as I was unloading the dishwasher I picked up one of the spoons that a friend and I had nicknamed the exile spoons.  They were spoons I had loved because they are small and flatter and I need to eat slower and take in less food so they were perfect for me.  But the person I lived with at the time hated them.  I had to put them in another drawer, in exile, because they did not want to even get one by accident.  It made me realize that I had been doing the same thing.  I had put a person in exile in my mind.  I made sure I would never even accidentally  run into them which  made me think about them more.   I refused to hang out with or talk to anyone who was around them because I did not want to hear even one thing that might upset me.  I was not living my life fully because just like those exile spoons it was constantly on my mind.  It made me feel sorry for the person I had lived with who must have always been afraid one of those spoons would jump out of the drawer and into their mouth at anytime and it made me realize that I had made the right choice in ending the exile.  I don’t want to hang out with the exile spoon but I don’t want to be afraid either.  I no longer want to limit where I go and who I talk to.  I’m done being afraid.  I can make boundaries and decide when I am ready to go places and talk to people.  I am a strong amazing woman with an amazing life.  I can handle what the universe brings me.  There is evidence in that because of the things I have already lived through in this life.  So thank you universe for another lesson and another teacher who I walked with for awhile.

Now I am off to spend a day on set for a movie I am doing.  I can’t talk about it right now but I will post about the opening when we are allowed to.   🙂  My life just keeps getting better.

Mondays are hard for me.  They have always been hard but right now they are even worse.

I can’t talk about it anymore.  I have to take a break from this.  I sometimes wish I had something to make me forget but those things just bury what I need to face.

This morning I got up and decided it was time to go to the gym and try a water class.  I chose this gym because of the pool and I had not stepped foot in it since I joined.  The class started at 9 a.m..  As soon as the music started I had some anxiety that somewhere in that play list may be a song that would make me emotional and wished for ear plugs.  It turned out really good.  The play list was empowering songs that I knew all the words too and it felt great to move my body.  When it came time for the cool down and the stretching this song began to play.

As soon as I heard the first few notes my tears started flowing.  I was not sobbing.  This was a different kind of crying.  It came from deep in my spirit.  I was feeling myself opening up again.  I had been so afraid to feel anything.  Parts of me have been closed off for months.  The rest of me shut down almost completely on December 15th.  It was like pulling up the drawbridge and acting like no one was home when anyone came knocking.   But this morning in the water, looking out into the sky with birds flying by and a tree waving in the wind I felt a stirring inside of me that I had not felt in a long time.

I am coming back home to myself.

The last 30 days have been up and down for me.  My feelings were all over the place.  I felt sad, angry, humiliated, betrayed, hurt and numbness.  I wrote letters and deleted them.  I wished horrible things on someone I once loved and everyone involved in the situation.  At times I felt like hurting myself.  Not because I wanted him back, because I wanted the pain to stop.  I thought about just driving my car somewhere and disappearing at times.  I was feeling so sorry for myself that I actually thought no one would even miss me.  This is a pattern that began way back when I was a child.  Being left behind or rejected in anyway sets off this pattern.  Even though I was the one who broke up with him his behavior is what forced my hand.  It was the best thing that could have happened to me because I am finally free of a relationship that was not good for either of us.  So what now?

It is day 31.  This morning I got up and walked B and in the middle of the street I started to cry.  I was not thinking about anything when the crying started.  I was just feeling lonely out there in the street, a street we had walked on together.  I came into the house and went to my healing room.  I lay on the floor and cried for awhile and what came out of that is knowing it is time to forgive and let go.  It is the only way I will be able to heal and move one.   When I say forgive I do not mean I am ok with the way I was treated.  I have learned a lot from what I went through.  I seem to have the same lessons presented to me over and over.  This lesson about boundaries and not doing things to please someone else when it is not something I really want to do…I have been a reluctant and terrified student.  I have always been afraid to stand up for myself.  The times I stood up for myself as a young woman brought physical abuse on me that was not something you forget easily.  There is trauma in my body and I go into yes mode when I feel scared.  It is part of my PTSD.   I am not in anyway dismissing the way I was treated.  I will not forget that.  I will never look at this person in the same way again or the people who were involved.  However, I can look closer and realize that each of us has a road to travel and we all have wounds that we are dealing with.  We are all human.  There is no monster in this story only other people who also have things they need to work on.  How can I a person who has done many regretful things in my life point my finger and continue to  seethe inside over all that has transpired.  I cannot.  I have been forgiven many things.  I am grateful for that.  So today I work on forgiveness.  When my tears were falling this morning I felt like poison was leaving my body as I said over and over “I forgive you and let you go.”  Then it turned into “Rauncie you are forgiven”  I needed to forgive myself and stop beating myself up over the fact that I had broken my own boundaries to try to keep someone in my life.   I am not sure how long I was there on the floor but when I got up I wrote a very short letter in my journal to him that said I forgive you and I hope your life is good.  I also asked for forgiveness for some things that I did.  Nothing is ever black and white and I am not completely innocent.  It is not something I will ever send to him but I needed to get that out.  I do realize that a part of my life is ending and I am moving on to other things.  Right now I do not see myself going back to that lifestyle.  I want to focus on spiritual things and my plan to travel the world with my friend Keith.   Forgiveness and mindfulness is what I will focus on now.  When my mind goes to the past two years I will focus on what I learned and not on what I wish I could change.

I was changed because of this past two years and I am growing.  For this I am grateful.   Someday I will say thank you for being one of my life teachers in person but for today I need to heal enough to say that with a pure heart.

One month has passed since I told him it was over.  For the most part I have been holding it together.  Yes, at times I have missed him.  I am careful about my music so this morning I put on a bluegrass station.  Bluegrass reminds me of being in Tennessee with my family.   It makes me smile and some of the songs make me laugh.  I was pretty shocked when a bluegrass version of Purple Rain started playing and I was laughing at it when the laughing morphed into sobs.  It took me completely by surprise and I am talking lay on the floor deep from my gut sobs.  I had not cried like that since that first night after he left.   I know that even though I am glad it is over there is a part of me that misses the man I shared my life with for two years.  I cannot deny or bury that.  If I do it will just pop back up at the strangest times like during a terrible bluegrass version of Purple Rain.  So I let myself cry and I did not hold it back.  I feel a little better right now.  I had been feeling so numb and shut down that I felt like giving up.  I cannot give up.

I cannot lie

I missed him

It does not mean I want to be with him.  I just missed him.  It made my heart hurt.  I almost cried.  Hearts are so fragile and I sometimes wish I could just get a shot in my heart that makes it all better.

It doesn’t work that way

I should probably just put on Phantom of the Opera and cry it out

I want to kick my own ass for being so sentimental…but it is who I am

It will get better

I think what makes it worse is that I am pretty sure he has not missed me one bit

Anxiety is caused when we have a fear and we start projecting that something will happen that will force us to deal with it in some way.  I have been having major anxiety about one issue in particular.   I have fear about seeing him.  I do not want to see him at all.  I especially do not want to see him with someone else.  My fear is that I will not be able to control my emotions that it will feel like an icy hand gripping my heart and I will burst into tears and he will say “See, I told you she was crazy.”  That is the fear I have and then I start thinking of places I might see him.  What if I am driving down East Avenue and I see him?  What if I am in Wegmans or another store and he is there?  Now the chances of it really happening are pretty slim.  I dated him for 2 years and I never once ran into him with his other gf except for the club and that was to be expected since we all went there.  I feel like I am constantly on high alert about this.  I get especially anxious in Henrietta in any kind of thrift store.  This used to be my favorite kind of shopping.  I cannot do it at all right now.  I pull in the parking lot and start having a panic attack.  There is however a greater chance I will run into him in the parking lot of my job because his gf works here…in the building next to me.  Yes, I told her about a job here and she now works right next to me.  I cannot even go to the place I used to eat at anymore or walk in certain areas for fear of running into her or him.  It sucks.  I don’t regret telling her about the job.  I do however want to get out of here as soon as I possibly can.  So what is at the root of this?  I think it goes way back to when I was a kid and I seemed to constantly have the issue of being rejected by playmates for someone better.  I never understood it.  It caused me to question everything about me and to hide who I really was because I felt since people did not like me I need to fix something.  This led to me having lifelong issues with rejection and anxiety about social situations.  So in my mind I imagine seeing him and then watching him laugh at me while he is having a wonderful life with someone else.  OK, that is just dumb.  He is not a cruel man.    But our minds are funny things.  We always think that the next person will get all the good pieces of this person and “what was wrong with me?”  I have an answer to that question.  NOTHING.  It was not even about me.  So I have to work at making friends with this debilitating fear that is affecting my life.  I have to reason with it and remind it that first of all the chances of running into him are slim and secondly it is never as bad as you think it is going to be.