I know it will get better.

I keep reminding myself that I did not give up a diamond it was more like a turd sprinkled with glitter.  It is still a turd no matter how you try to dress it up.

My heart hurts…well actually it feels like my heart has been scooped out of my chest with an ice cream spoon.   I just feel raw.  I feel like I am on auto pilot most of the time. I am tortured by intrusive thoughts about things I cannot change.  I keep reminding myself that I am worthy of love and I have much to give.  I was loving and I shared everything I had.   I have to let go because I am being dragged by the past.  I am being dragged by memories and questions and wishing for a different outcome.  I am sinking into a bog of bullshit.  The truth is I would not want that relationship back.  If I was suddenly transported back into that relationship I would be instantly anxious and miserable.  The last few months I did not look forward to my days with him and I dreaded going out with him.  I just wanted to stay at home and be with him.  It felt safe that way.  I was trying to push back the inevitable.

I am really contemplating being a single person for the rest of my life.  Not because I am bitter but because I have spent the better part of 56 years coupled up.  I think I had my first boyfriend in pre-school.  None of them ended well and when I am not mourning a relationship I was pretty happy just having close friends.  I think it would be a good choice for me.  It is a struggle sometimes because our society has everything set up for couples.  When you are single people are always trying to set you up with someone.  If you are single you don’t get the best prices and people look at you like “awww look at that person eating alone they must be so sad.”  But I truly believe some of us are just better off being our own soul mate.  I have some great friends.  I need to work on being my own best friend.

So I am going to pack up my glitter kit and stop trying to sprinkle glitter on every turd that smiles at me.   I just end up smeared with shit and having to hose off in the end.

Sometimes we are in the valley, a darker place of contemplation.  At times it is even darker and underground.  I am there right now.  It is a dark quiet place where the voices in my head just overtake me sometimes and the squirrels just pile on me.  This morning I got stuck in a place of pain and just felt frozen.  The squirrels had me tied down like Gulliver and were chattering away.  I forget when I am in that dark place that this is was a good choice.  I cried again.  I need to be clear about something.  Yes, a small percentage of those tears are for the relationship I ended but it is not for the reason you may think.  It is because I was so disappointed in this person as a human being.  But when I really think about it I have to just forgive and move on.  He told me many times that he was way more broken than I could ever understand.  He told me the only thing he could promise was the fact that he would hurt me and he kept that promise.  The majority of the tears are for the years I have lost in relationships where I was trying to fix someone.  I honestly believed if I loved them enough they could be cured and would wake up and say thank you and I love you too.  It never happens.  But here is the biggest lesson I have learned.  I have chosen people with the same wounds I have.  It is like looking at a mirror image of my soul.  I have been trying to fix myself by trying to fix other people.  In the process I lose myself every time and instead of getting better I am wounded all over again.

The last couple of days I have been fantasizing about having a robot partner.  You know like in the science fiction movies where it is so real it is hard to imagine it is a robot.  One that would love me unconditionally and not leave me for someone else.  But the thing is I have been with a robot who had no real feelings.  I used to make jokes about it to him.  He admitted that he felt like one at times.  It is not fulfilling and after awhile I totally disconnected myself.  So my fantasy of a robot that would never hurt me is false.  It would hurt me because the love would never be real and it would be the same as I have experienced over and over in my life.  I don’t want that.  I want real, when I am ready.  I am not ready yet.

So what is the lesson here?  I just have to focus on loving myself.  I need to remember what an amazing bright soul I have and what I have to give to the world.  If I partner up with someone it will only knock me off my path again.  If I give myself to someone I will just have my light dulled again and I will lose my focus.  I have to stay focused.  I need to make a plan and that is what I am going to focus on now.   I have something to do in this life and I am running out of time.  I can see the light to the path that will lead me to the mountaintop from down here and I am putting on my hiking boots.  I will climb that mountain and look back at the cave in this  valley as an experience that was worth every moment.   For now I need to stop looking at my feet as I walk through this place and see the beauty of the cave and the valley.  This place of protection is full of wonderful lessons.  It is a place I can rest and reflect.  Like Inanna I will endure and come out of this place of darkness changed.  

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 but because of the pain he had been causing me it has mostly been relief.  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 when he wounded me.   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.

Today I got dressed in a amazing outfit and went out for the first time since I broke up with him.  I did not go to Vertex.  I went to a party.  It was so nice to see people and some of them came up congratulating me on my decision.  It was just nice to feel supported and loved by friends who have been in my life for a long time. I am truly blessed.

I used to think I wanted to die because I felt unlovable and like there was something deeply wrong with me.  Every man I was ever with cheated on me, left me for someone else, abused me or just did not feel strongly about me.  I took that all on myself.  I always thought it was me.  But the things people do have nothing to do with us.  I have learned much over these 56 years and the biggest lesson I have learned is that I do not need to end my life because someone hurt me by their choices.  I cannot take their choices personally.  It makes me sad that more than once I have entertained ending my bright, beautiful light because a relationship ended.  Today I was in Wegmans and I started having intrusive thoughts about my most recent relationship.  Before too long there was a movie going on in my head about some of the things that happened and I was building up hatred towards everyone involved.  Then I took a nosedive and I started thinking about how living like this for the rest of my life was just not worth it.  I never smile anymore, I am numb and I have no excitement for life.  Right now I am thinking I never want to take another chance on a relationship.  It is just not worth the pain and they always end anyway.  I was spiraling out of control in my head.  I walked out with my groceries and fantasies about how something could happen to just end it all for me.  Then I got home and I thought to myself  “snap out of it!”  There is no reason to go back to that dark place.  I am an amazing woman who has made the mistake of picking people who appear to want to put out my light and keep me down.  It’s like swimming with someone who tries to push your head under water all the time and then laughs about it when you come up for air and tries to convince you this is fun.  I feel like that is exactly what I experienced the past two years.  At first I was having fun but then I was fighting to get my head above the water and being told how silly I was to think I might be drowning.  I have never had this much clarity at the end of a relationship.

I am still struggling.  I have so many more things I want to write but I just don’t have the energy to finish…. I think I just need to rest and take care of myself.

Today my daughter is 34.

Dear Naomi,

I want you to know how much I love you.  I have loved you since the first time I felt you move.  I will never forget the day you were born.  I did not know if you were going to be a boy or girl and when they said “It’s a girl!” I cried with joy.  You were so beautiful, loud and lovable when you came into the world and you still are.

I want you to know how sorry I am that you lived with violence and were damaged by someone I was in a relationship with.  If I could give my life to change that I would.  It is the biggest regret of my life.  My own issues with love addiction led to my children being harmed and I live with that guilt every day of my life.  I want you to heal and be well.  I wish I could make all that pain go away.  It is hard to put the past away but I want you to remember that you are a strong survivor.  You can rise above what happened and help others who are suffering.  You can be an example to your girls now.  Let them see what a strong woman is.  Teach them that they never have to accept any kind of abuse.  Teach them to say no with conviction.  Teach them they can come to you and tell you and you will believe them.   You are not what happened to you Naomi.  That is not your identity.  You are a smart, funny, talented young woman who is strong and a survivor.  Stand tall and never forget how wonderful you truly are.  Never be ashamed to be proud of yourself.  Never be ashamed to look in the mirror and say “I am strong, I am beautiful and I am a survivor”  Love yourself with all that is within you.

When I am gone from this world I want you to remember me as a mom who was not perfect but who loved you fiercely.   You don’t have to look too closely to see my faults.  I have struggled with the very issues that I hope you will overcome.  I am working on eradicating these issues from my life even at this stage of my life.   I vow to dedicate more of my life to you, your brother and the grandchildren.

Just remember…I love you…I love you so much.  I will always be with you. When you miss me watch The Wizard of Oz or sing this song that my father taught me and I sang to you and your brother from the time you were tiny…….

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 the same man.  He has not changed overnight and he will do the same thing to any woman he is with.  I should feel sorry for them not jealous.  I would not want to be in anyone’s shoes who is in a relationship with him for that very reason.  I know the inside story on that deal.  It starts out great and then spirals into shit.  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.  I did nothing to deserve the treatment I got.  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.

It has been 21 days of no contact.  I am still so grateful I chose this route. The insights I am experiencing are causing growth spurts that are amazing but just like when you are a teen and you are growing fast, they hurt sometimes.   As I have stated before I have never gone no contact and I never believed it was the way to go.  I have always wanted to hold on to the friendship that I had in the beginning of the relationship.  I realize today that I never had that with this relationship.  This person never cared about me as a friend.  I was always supply for one thing or another, sex, a place to stay, a car, clothes, food and a gateway to communities that he was not a part of.  Once I set some boundaries I was no longer of interest because a boundary for a narcissist is not acceptable.  You must belong to them completely and be a willing victim that they can drain on a regular basis on their time and when you need them they are usually nowhere to be found.  To be friends with this person and go to them for anything would be like asking to be poisoned again and again “please sir may I have some more??”  It makes me sick thinking about it but it has been my pattern in the past.  The first person I thought of to call when I was in severe pain was the very person who tore my heart out and left me bleeding out.  It also gave me that love addict hit I was looking for and would still my heart for a very short time.  That person was my dealer and I was the shaking, sick junkie looking to make a score.  Any contact helped me in that moment because I was jonesing for that feeling of acceptance, any acceptance.  But in the long run it was bankrupting me emotionally.  Every single contact only prolonged the withdrawal that I needed to experience.  In order to be born again as the phoenix I must allow myself to withstand the flames of purification.  I was always afraid of those flames so I never allowed myself to ever face them fully without keeping a hand on the past and that person.  It felt safer to have someone until I could find someone else.  It made the withdrawal seem less painful when in fact it made it last even longer.

It is a new day and a new experience to go no contact.  I am three weeks out and I have good days and bad days.  I never have thoughts of wanting to be with this person again.  I do have thoughts of deep hatred and anger sometimes that someone could treat me so wretchedly and smile about it.  I do have thoughts of how I wish it would have ended earlier and in a different way.  I cannot dwell on those thoughts.  I have to let them go because I cannot change anyone but myself  and the past is over and I must live in today.  There are things I do everyday to help me to focus on myself and not get caught in negative thinking.  I have to be careful about the music I listen to.  This morning I was trying to find songs for my drag king act.  I picked one and started to listen to it and about three lines in I felt that familiar sickness in my chest and I had to stop the music.  I don’t listen to the music we listened to together and I cannot return to the club I once loved because of the music.  I know that this will pass but it will take time. It brings on PTSD symptoms and nightmares that give me sleepless nights.  I dreamed about him two nights ago.  I did not wake up crying.  I woke up puzzled that I had such a pleasant dream about him.  I never dream about people who I leave, who leave me or who die.  I have only dreamed of my father 3 times since his death 13 years ago and the first dream did not come for years.  But as one of my friends pointed out it is a way for my brain to purge.  If this is what it takes to get all this poison out of me then I am ready to face the fire.  Burn Baby Burn….let the purifying flames cleanse my heart and make me stronger. This morning I kept asking Alexa to play the same song over and over again.  It is a song that has a wonderful memory attached to it and I love the words.   This is my favorite part and what I will repeat to myself anytime someone tries to bring negativity from this most recent past into my shining future.

Here comes bad news, talking this and that (Yeah!)
Well, give me all you got, don’t hold it back (Yeah!)
Well, I should probably warn ya, I’ll be just fine (Yeah!)
No offense to you, don’t waste your time
Here’s why…

(Because I’m happy)
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
(Because I’m happy)
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
(Because I’m happy)
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you
(Because I’m happy)
Clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do

In 19 months I am running away to join the circus.  Well, not exactly but pretty close.  I have wanted to join the circus since I was a little girl.  I spent hours in my backyard perfecting my performance skills and then putting on shows for the kids in my neighborhood.  We had a wood fence that was the width of a balance beam so I learned to walk and do tricks on it.  I also learned to read tarot.  I did not get serious about it till many years later but now it is something I love to do and I am really good at.  I have a plan.  Over the next year Keith and I will be taking his amazing gypsy wagon on a trial tour.  He will draw people to us and I will be waiting in the gypsy wagon to read tarot for fellow travelers of the world.  I feel like every experience in my life has led me to this.  You see tarot reading is not just about knowing the cards.  Anyone can study and know the cards.  Knowing the cards does not make you a good reader.  What makes a good reader is being able to use those cards as a tool to help people to open up and then you read the people.  It is about being able to tap into the universal energy that connects us all.  My skills in this area are high.  People open up to me and then we can have a deep discussion about their life and where they are headed.  Because of my life experiences there are not many things I cannot relate to.  I also know things.  I cannot even explain it but someone once said to me “The things you know is kind of scary.”  Sometimes it feels scary to me too.  Sometimes I know things that I do not want to know.  It is a gift I have had for as long as I can remember.  My mother wanted to send me for therapy over it.  The therapist thought this was a wonderful gift and so my mom stopped the therapy because she thought it was evil.  There is nothing evil about it.  In fact I believe part of this gift comes from being in situations where I have had to be on high alert to save my life.  I learned to see or hear the slightest change in people.  I learned to pick up on interactions between people.  A glance between two people can show so much.  Because of this I know things.  I am almost always right.   It is both a blessing and a curse.

I will retire from my job and run away to travel the world in 19 months.  I will be meeting wonderful people and seeing amazing places.  I will get to travel with Keith who is my closest friend and confidant.  It is what I live for now.  My freedom was paramount to this plan opening up for me.  The universe had just been waiting for me to say “OK I am done playing around with people and things that lead nowhere. Its time to live my destiny”.    I am ready for my close up universe, let’s do this!

If you would like us to visit your festival, fair or party let me know.