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.

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.

I have a monkey box.  It is not a physical monkey box but it is real.  A monkey box is a box with a hole large enough to squeeze your hand through that has something in it.  For a monkey it would be a banana or other fruit they love.  For me it is a person, a substance or a habit.  When you grab the thing in the box you cannot take your hand out of the box and so you are stuck.  The box keeps you occupied for hours and hurts you as you try to pull free with what you see as your prize attached.   Sometimes you walk around with the monkey box dangling at the end of your arm weighing you down and causing constant pain.  The weight is a constant reminder of the thing you cannot have.  My hand has been bruised and battered for years over relationships that were damaging me.  I would take my hand out and walk away from the box for awhile only to return and jam my hand back in thinking this time I can solve this puzzle.  But there is one rule about the monkey box.  The monkey box never gives up the prize.

Months ago I realized my hand was firmly in the monkey box.  The pain it was causing me was the worst I had felt in years.  I kept rationalizing and trying to make excuses for why it was OK to carry the cursed thing around.  I convinced myself that it was not so bad.  I told myself that it would get better and the box was not as heavy as it had been in the past.  In fact it was the heaviest box I had carried in many years.  But I was waking up and I started to take my hand out on a regular basis.  When I would take my hand out I would think about why I deserved to be finished with this pain.  I would write down things that were causing me pain.  I made a list of things that I would no longer tolerate and stated that I would end it immediately if those things continued.  Then one night it all exploded and I tried smashing that monkey box with all my might.  I said no more and meant it.   Of course the monkey box still lives but I have duct taped it shut by making the choice to cut the banana from my life completely.  There will be no talking to, looking at, touching or dancing with the banana.  It will only lead to my hand back in that dark box that leads to nothing but pain.

I have learned so much these past months and I am grateful for that.  I am most grateful for the lesson of silence.  The closure I need resides within myself.  I will never get the answers to the questions I was asking.  I would only be asking for more pain.   The closure I need is to accept my behavior and be OK with it.  I am OK with it.  I am proud of myself for loving myself enough to say no to anything that does not make me a better person and for not returning to the box that will beat me every time.

#monkeybox #breakup #ex #nocontact #mending #Ididntruinmylife #Rauncie

On Sunday morning I got up and started filling a garbage bag with things that were triggering me.  It was mostly clothes I had worn that reminded me of negative things that happened.  I threw out almost all my bras and several pairs of underwear.  I threw out a couple of tops and some sexy lingerie.  I can’t really remember anything else.  I was on a mission.  Then I moved all the  things that I had put in another room into my bedroom and made it exactly the way I wanted.

Then the squirrels showed up…

The squirrels is what I call the attack on my mind that happens when I start thinking and cannot shut it up.  They torment me with things that I cannot change.  They taunt me about how I was not pretty enough, smart enough and no one will ever love me.  They were relentless in their attack about that last dance I had wished for.  “He didn’t even care enough about you to wait one hour and tell you the truth.”  “Why did you ever think he liked you?”  “Stupid, you knew he would choose someone younger and prettier”  It was crushing me.  Have you ever seen that cheesy 80’s Movie Gremlins?  Well, my squirrels quickly morph when I feed them, especially after midnight and early morning.  There is a stripe in the pack who is especially mean.  Stripe talks about how I should hurt myself and how much better off I would be if I just gave up.  She whispers in my ear that things will never get better and I will die alone.  She pulls chunks off my heart and laughs as she eats them.  (yeah I am taking creative license here but its my story.)  When the squirrels morph I am in deep trouble and the worst thing I can do is hide because they just keep multiplying and getting louder and louder.  Just like the Gremlins, light is their enemy.  As soon as I shine light on them and talk to someone who is empathetic they start screaming and running away with smoke billowing behind them.   It is the best way to defeat them.  Sometimes I cannot bring myself to share because I feel ashamed.  Yesterday I said to a friend that I wished I could just have no emotion at all about him that I could have just walked away and shrugged my shoulders.  If I did that I would not be Rauncie.  I am a woman who loves deeply and I always miss someone who has been a part of my life, even if they wounded me.  So the squirrels have been flooding the walls I have built up over the last three weeks and I am trying my best to fight them off by talking about it.  But there is another way to deal with them that I have not been able to deploy yet.  One of my closest friends shared something with me a couple of years ago.  He said “Those squirrels are part of you.  They are just trying to protect you.  They are a warning call that something is wrong and all those words are a way to try to get you to stay away from that person because that person will hurt you.  Instead of trying to kill them invite them to sit on your lap and tell them everything will be OK.  Breathe with them and love them Rauncie”  That was such a different way of looking at this.  I drew a picture of me with the squirrels in my lap and one in a tree sticking its tongue out at me that I was reaching out to and I named it after him.  I need to put down my weapons and invite the squirrels to come and sit with me and talk it out.  I am going to be OK.  I am going to grow from this.  Eventually I am going to write a book about my life.    It will  be a way to share with others that the real answer is within ourselves and how to process and grow from experiences.

Now I am going to try to lure some squirrels in for a lunch time meditation.

#healingfrombreakup #Icandothis  #Ididntruinmylife #itsover #mendingfromheartbreak

I had a hard time today.  I am not always full of anger and I am not always numb.  Sometimes in the middle of the day out of nowhere I get a thought that hangs on until I cry.  That happened today.  I cried because there was one thing I wish could have been different.  I wish I could have had one final night of dancing with him.  Dancing with him was the best part of our relationship.  It breaks my heart to think that the final night we were standing on the edge of the dance floor and I was so happy to be there with him for the first time in a long time…and then I realized what was going on.  I felt so betrayed and broken in that moment that I was too wounded to say…Let’s just dance one more time.  I even shared with him that I wanted to dance with him one last time before he left the house with his things but it never happened because ..well, it is hard to say goodbye.  Our last moment together we kissed and put our foreheads together and for a moment I remembered why I loved him so much.  It was not all bad.  It was definitely hard and at times horrible but there were moments of joy and many of those were on the dance floor.  I think that is why losing him on the edge of that dance floor was so devastating for me.   Our relationship is over and there is no turning back and I know I will never have that moment on the dance floor.   It is the only thing I wish I could change.

It is normal to have some anger when you have been wronged.  I refuse to beat myself up about that anymore.  Being angry is something I have struggled with all my life.  My therapist kept saying to me over the last 6 months “when are you going to get angry?”  Well, I got angry and now I am ready to let it go.  It would be unrealistic to think I will not feel that anger again over the next few months but every time it comes up I will write about it if I need to but the first thing I will say is…..

I am no longer in a relationship with you and I release you to the universe.

So now it is time to focus on me.  It is time for me to focus on how I can grow and transform, take the lessons I have learned and level up.   I have created a schedule and will start out by taking better care of my body.  In addition I will make time for friends I have not made time for.  Our friends are so important.  The first 5 days when I was hurting I had women come and visit with me off and on and one woman Nina who spent the night with me four nights so I could sleep.  Nina is going to have a guest co-blog with me one day soon.  The presence of women made a huge difference.  The mistake I made in the past was suffering alone.  The interesting thing was I did not want to talk about what had happened.  I just wanted to be with them and laugh and be distracted and it worked.  Never isolate yourself when you are going through a breakup it will only make things worse.  It is fertile ground for negative thoughts and emotions that will take you down for a very long time.  I know, it has happened to me in the past.  I was determined to never let that happen again.  I have to say the biggest help has been having my housemate and close friend Keith supporting me and being there all the time.  Just knowing he is in the house comforts me.  Without him I would not be doing so well.  We talk all the time and he is always willing to listen and give feedback.  He is also a master at helping to distract me by pulling a book out and talking to me about something interesting.  He even watched a Pollywood movie with me.  (Pollywood is a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollywood )  He is also willing to watch a netflix series if it is a good one.  Then there is Mr. B short for Mr. Bojangles who went through some mourning of his own but has bounced back the last couple of days and is so helpful to me.   That is Mr. B below and this picture of him really sums up what the beginning of this change was like.  It looks scary as hell and sometimes you stand there for a bit thinking “Do I really want to do this?” and your stomach feels sick and you feel scared. Once you actually get in the midst of the forest you realize that it is a place of growth, love and safety if you pull those who love you close to you.  I am truly blessed to have this little 10 pound dog in my life.  I am truly blessed to have true friends and a wonderful life ahead of me no matter how long or short it turns out to be.

So the focus is on me now.  I will be blogging about my relationships, PTSD, Anxiety, living life authentically, transformation, my experiences, the Goddess, Tarot, my family, my dog, my housemate, our house, food, my job, art, dancing, exercise, books I read, people I meet, my amazing friends, current events, traveling and sometimes I may need to let some pain out.  It is time to let some sun shine through the trees.

I am setting some more goals for myself.  I have been sober for 7 months now, have been off Facebook for over two months and have recently left all my social media platforms.  I have lost 10 pounds since the breakup and I plan to continue on that path.  I will be focused on writing all my food down and exercising in some way daily.  I am leaving my gym I have been a member of for a couple of years.  My x got a gym membership there for his birthday from me right before our break up.  So going there is not a good option for me anymore.  I am going to join a gym a few miles down the road which has a pool.  I am more likely to go if there are water aerobics classes involved in a membership.  In addition I am going to be celibate for at least a year.  That may last even longer depending on how I feel once that year is over.   Sex is not a priority for me anymore.  So I have some goals and I am looking forward to a good 2018.

Sometimes heartbreak is crushing and the whole world seems to stop.

Sometimes it is just a dull ache that reminds you that something is missing.

Thankfully this time it is that dull ache and not the crushing kind.

I still lay awake at night and cry sometimes.

But I do not cry because I want him back.

I cry because I want myself back.

I’m working on that.

On Friday night December 15th, I found out my bf had made the choice to break a very serious agreement we had.  I broke up with him.  I had second thoughts right away.  I started panicking and the thought of him moving his stuff out seemed terrible and overwhelming.  I was crying like I was the one who had been broken up with.  He did not seem to feel anything about it.  Of course, that is never the complete case…we don’t know what a person is feeling.  I think both of us knew it was time to move on.  I am struggling with the break up.  This was the right thing to do.  I know that but it does not stop the pain.

So, it is now a few days later.  I got sick with a virus immediately and am still down with it.  I was lucky enough to have my housemate and friends with me throughout the weekend and my friend Nina stayed overnight with me for three nights in a row.   I was so sick I could not get out of bed without feeling dizzy and nauseated and I have lost 8 pounds.

He took his stuff over two days.  I guess I expected at least some resistance from him but there was none.  The first day he came he made dinner for the house and then he packed things and his mom picked him up.  We sat on the floor before she arrived and I told him that I was thankful for the two years we had together and I had learned much from our time.  I let him know I would miss him and that I felt we were doing the right thing even though it was hard.  I will keep his words back to me private.   Two days later he came back for the rest of his things in his other gf’s car and quickly loaded it all up.  We hugged and said we should not have contact for a while but in the future, we would hug again as friends and then he was gone.

I cannot lie.  When he drove away I was devastated.  He had been my lover for two years and though there were times he was not there when I needed him there were times he held me close and I felt everything was going to be ok.

But you know what? That is that old fairy tale bullshit kicking back in.  The real truth to all this is that I was unhappy for many months.  I loved him at one point but I know now I loved him too much.  At the end of my drinking I was black out drinking to deal with behavior in front of me that was breaking my heart.   Then I made the choice to stop drinking and over this past summer my love started to wane.  As I got better I realized what I had been doing to myself.  I had lost myself to keep him.  I cared deeply for him but I had allowed him to cross boundaries that were the core of my being.  I could not admit that and I stubbornly held on.  I just wish we could have both been honest.  It would have saved both of us pain.  I allowed things I would not normally have allowed when I was going through my recovery because I was vulnerable and not able to break it off.   So, on October 31^st I gave him an ultimatum about this behavior and he agreed to it.  He broke the agreement 5 weeks later.  Maybe that was his way of ending it.  He knew my bottom line statement was “break this agreement and our relationship ends immediately”.

So, what have I learned from this?

Never lose myself again.

Never allow someone to hurt me in this way again.

Love myself fiercely and call on my friends for support and help.

Poly is not for me right now.

I can’t write anymore.  I am too raw and I am still hurting.  I will be healing for a while.  Send me love …I need it.

My days away from Facebook are paying off.  I am learning about myself and my own motivations when I post on social media.  Many times in the 66+ days I have been unplugged from FB I have wanted to post about something I was doing or post a pic.  I have learned however that in many instances what we post and what we see most of the time is just a carefully curated life meant to show the best.  It is a filtered, airbrushed and edited to shine for all the world to see.  In my case I was one of those people who shared everything.  I shared way too much and when I was not sharing too much I was posting pictures of myself so I could get those likes I needed so much.  I was in a bad place in my life.  I was depressed and lonely but the constant checking of my FB feed only made me feel worse.  I turned to my FB friends for advise on my breakup, my loneliness and my journey to stop the drinking I took up during my heartbreak.  The rush I felt when I would see 150 likes or 25 comments made me feel loved and not alone.  That feeling never lasted.  As soon as it passed I was working on my next post.

The thing that has struck me the most is how my carefully curated life on Facebook affected my relationship with some people.  There were people who began to not like me because I seemed so successful and happy.  There were people who assumed that when I was out on leave for some serious personal issues that I was just on an extended vacation.  What I was not posting was the mess my life really was.  My FB showed a very small piece of my life.  It showed me in costume hiding what was really happening in my life that had become very small.  It did not show the nights I cried myself to sleep or did not leave my apartment for a whole weekend.  My posts did not show the internal struggle I was going through.  I was heartbroken but my smiling pictures said otherwise.  I was struggling with the thought of continuing to live a life that seemed to be falling apart around me.

Today I am feeling better.  I am more able to focus.  There are days when my bf sits down beside me and opens up his Facebook and I have to look the other way because I immediately feel a tightness in my chest just looking at it.   I think about whether I will go back and if I did would I be able to just post occasionally and to delete most of the 1500 people on my friends list who I cannot even remember how I met.  I am scared of Facebook like an addict is afraid of mainlining again.  I don’t want to wake up and reach for my phone and my first hit of the day.   So for now I know I cannot go back.  Maybe I can someday but maybe it is best to stay unplugged and live my life instead of curating it.