Twenty, Twenty-Three: The Doctorate Program

Prologue

There is zero chance I will make it out of this existence knowing everything. The universe takes every opportunity to keep that reality in check. When I left Arizona last year, I was open to whatever the universe had in store for me. I was recently reminded of a solid quote, “Change happens when the fear of the unknown is less than the pain of the known.” The pain I was in before I moved made the move feel like a vacation to the Bahamas. Did I have fantasies about what I wanted out of this choice? Absolutely. Did they turn out? Sort of. This year’s blog for the year has shaped a narrative that needs partitioned delivery. Too many things came to a greater understanding that I want to give their proper credence.

I suppose there’s this natural order to events that we all somewhat expect. We’re born, we endure high school/college, get married, have kids, get a house, build a career, send kids to college, marry them off, have grandkids, enjoy the latter years, then you die. The trope of existence is lackluster when the milestones of life are itemized like a grocery list. The details in those moments are what make the movies and books. This year, I knocked a few of those items off the list and let me tell you; the details were not in any book or movie I’ve read or seen. The year 2023 was my biggest coming of age chapter, yet.

Part One.

I rang in 2023 in southern Illinois somewhere. No clue where I was and didn’t care. I had on a smokin’ hot dress, bangin’ shoes, and was at a masquerade party in a speak easy. Solid. The entire night didn’t go how I would have written it, but it set the tone for the rest of the year in a way I am only able to recognize now. For the first time in my adult life, I enforced a boundary in a moment I was truly vulnerable. It could have gone several wrong ways. Fortunately, I controlled the outcome. Nothing like a little sexual assault to kick off a new year! I held my own with dignity and that dude was humbled by a chick he outweighed and outsized.

Over the following few weeks of that experience, I went through several stages of evaluation. None of them included any kind of regret or shame. Which maybe should cause one to pause and seek additional therapy, but somehow this world has heaped an ample supply of audacity on my personality. I came away from that feeling empowered. I used my voice and protected my peace. Wholly. There’s a basket of collateral damage that comes with that kind of experience, though. I got a little colder/harder. Which is saying a lot, because I’m already colder than I want to be. How I emotionally came away from that, set in motion a series of emotional introspective events.

It occurred to me that I rarely give myself the grace to fully embrace my feelings. This was by no means the first time I’ve experienced something like this. However, this was the first time I went into a full, healthy preservation. Letting the anger, rage, disappointment, and betrayal settle on my body took me on a ride. It opened my eyes to just how simply I can rewrite an experience to a state of acceptance. For the first time, I was able to recognize the birth of a delusion and exactly how my mind does it as a defense mechanism.

To be honest, it felt rude to disrupt a behavior I have been quite comfortable with. What’s wrong with creating a new narrative? Isn’t that the power of perception being harnessed? Isn’t perception reality? If I perceive a bad situation as one that I grew from and handled better than a previous version of myself, is that necessarily a bad thing? The answer is a resounding, yes! For this situation, it isn’t a good thing that I was so quickly able to explain away something that hurt me. What this experience showed me is that my seemingly healthy coping skill is in fact contributing to neglecting the big picture/perspective.

I stepped back and investigated some past pain to see what narrative I changed to wrap myself in comfort. Frequently. Here’s what I was able to understand; I can make the best of just about any situation. Especially a situation where I’m wildly uncomfortable. I was able to trace the reason why I do this. I have removed those roots and left them on the side of the path I’ve already paved. Now that I can see how and why I do that, it improved my ability to enforce boundaries. Never have I had the wisdom to protect my peace with calm tenacity.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could use some of our mental defects like that on our resume? Effective ability to create a sense of serenity whilst sitting in a burning room. The years I’ve spent telling myself lies to safeguard my feelings from the truth came at me like a Mack truck. So many things I have hidden from myself for the sake of a perceived safety. What is even more frustrating for me is picking through pivotal events and identifying the clues and the obvious outcomes I could have seen sooner.

There is a fine line between empathy and delusion. To put yourself in another’s shoes to find synthetic sympathy isn’t always easy to do. It is a good thing to find ways to relate to each other. It’s a valiant effort to find ways to understand what makes another person the way they are. Where it can get dangerous is when finding understanding starts to turn into justification of bad behavior. I am an Olympic gold medalist in that level of mental and emotional athleticism. The list of people I have permitted to treat me like shit because I created a sense of understanding is truly embarrassing.

This year brought to me a new aspect of internet. In these months of reclusive living, I have turned to the fellow humans of the internet in sharing thoughts, musings, ideas, struggles, joys, theories, etc. To say it’s been enlightening is an understatement. Information overload. The internet therapists have been interesting. I’ve been frequently inspired to consider new ways to look at something or feel about something. It was comforting to see so many people exactly like me that have this uncanny ability to turn a yuck into a yum and vice versa. The delusional are plenty.

This year, I learned that I’ll never fully be void of creating artistic delusion. I’m ok with this. Now that I know what I do when I’m in a state of any type of fear, those delusions will be meticulously dissected to a healthy level and not one capable of blinding me from the truth. It’s acceptable to soften some of the hard things I can’t control. Those are the delusions I can allow. Situations I can control, you can bet your sweet ass I will face those with all the fervor of a feral cat! I have been paying closer attention.

To say I’m not lonely would be a massive lie. I am extremely lonely. With zero hesitation, I would hands down prefer being lonely than living in any more delusions. This year I learned that being alone is not as bad as it has been before. This version of myself is content and truly experiencing peace. I’ve been afraid of being this kind of alone because of how easily my depression can reemerge. 2023 has been the year of meaningful isolation. I used to be terrified of being alone too long with my own head. Living in my new Tennessee reality is not scary at all. It’s been the most fulfilling year and becoming one of my favorite years.

The What Not the How

 

The saying, “caught up in my feels,” captures so simply something far deeper in complexity. It conveys a full experience perfectly when nestled sweetly in context. Feelings snare so randomly it seems. At least for me. I could be monotonously carrying out daily routine. Then something benign snags and jerks my emotional attention. As if teleported, a memory gets speedily recalled and those triggered emotions are cascading over me again. I'm caught. What now?

Since I have been heavily into deep and mind-bending thinking lately, this simple little idea exploded all over the insides of my head. Honestly, I’m starting to panic a little about where my thoughts take me. This one, was kind of cute, though. In a little piano/writing session this afternoon, the melody I was playing struggled to identify the intent of the energy. It was one of those easy melodies that you would maybe find yourself idly humming without conscious awareness. I la-la’d the melody and searched for words to describe the emotion my body was trying to translate.

It shouldn’t shock any reader of mine to believe me when I say the initial gravitational pull was toward the sadder, darker side of my emotional trove. It was this exact predictability in my own behavior that forced me to stop and be in those feelings for a moment and fight away from the context. Instead of trying to find words to portray a story that matched the sad energy, I allowed myself to just play and sit with it. What now? I just felt the disappointment for a little bit. I didn’t think about what caused the disappointment. The exercise of isolating cause and effect on deeply entrenched neuropathways is exhausting, but totally worth it.

Letting that emotion out for some fresh air, I learned something about one of the bricks in my boundaries. Seeing Disappointment for what it is and not how it is helped me understand more fully what other emotions are connected to it. I sat in overlapping emotions. They started to evolve and reveal their ties to each other. What was wonderful to allow to manifest, was though the emotion began in negativity, there were pathways tied to positive emotions as well. Feeling their uniqueness as oneness. This is how I want to be in my feels. Not all of them! That’s too much. But the big ones. The ones that reach out and cry for attention.

The way my brain has been processing information lately feels very weird, but familiar at the same time. This time alone without the kids has certainly been interesting. While I had certain intentions for the short window of free time, it appears the universe had others. I spent the first couple of weeks fighting it. Whining about being bored. Feeling sort of sorry for myself with all this QUIET! My word, it’s quiet. Then I came across a message that hit me right in the feels. I am in an isolation phase because I need it. What I’m writing you now, has taken me a couple of weeks to string together. My emotions are having a walkabout and I’m listening.

It's been a full year since I left Arizona. This has by far been the fastest time travel so far. Life is beautiful and changing constantly. There are many more experiences coming my way. I am in a very ripe season of family. My family. The family I made. I can’t think of a time that I have ever truly seen my children the way I do now. Their layers are evident, and I am loving getting to really know them. I like being in these feelings and not in those experiences. Growing up takes a long time.

 

What Do You Lie To Yourself About?

 

This past year has been ripe. The amount of positive outcomes continue to blow my mind and leave me in a state of equal parts shock and pride. Can I believe things are as they are today? Yes. However, I don’t have the fullest understanding of how things got be this good! Ever since I brought the kids to Clarksville, things have just continued to settle into a beautiful rhythm. Having all three of my kids close does things to my heart that I didn’t know would happen, until it did. The boys are happy. Visibly happy. My daughter and her husband make me tremendously proud and have me taking notes. They are truly a wonderful example of what “right” looks like.

Right after I bought the house, I had a pretty big job change. Instead of working on post, I now work from home. Which is poetic really. The only place I really want to be most of the time is in this space the boys and I have created. It’s just me and them. The house isn’t always clean. The boys are, well…boys. I went from driving kids to school, to them being on bus routes (LOVE IT). Then for about 6 hours a day, I have this place to myself to just listen to the sounds of this new life. Working from home has put a magnifying glass on so many details of the ins and outs of it all.

I play my piano a lot more than I have in a while. I am working on new material and trying to improve on my skills. The guitar is more neglected than I would like to admit, but it get’s its strings massaged from time to time just to remind it that I haven’t totally abandoned her. I’ve read three books. I’m seriously considering taking some courses soon to maybe actually finish my degree. Things are just all so freaking rounded that I get caught off guard at how complacent I have become with the new, truly joyous norms. The amount of reflection conducted over these past six months has also been fairly intense.

About a year ago, I picked up a prompt journal. I thought it would be fun to have a topic to write to instead my own musings. Don’t get me wrong, I still totally feed the ego with my journal, but there’s something a little more revealing when writing against a direct question or context. This past week, I came to one that sent me down a rabbit hole that had me staring at the ceiling and just shaking my head.

“What have you lied to yourself about?”

Well, shit. Tons!! But I wanted to pick just one to focus on. Because, well… efficiency. Not trying to write a book about my screws up! After a few minutes of mental pivots, I landed on the one that seems to have had the most direct impact to the core of my joy. I have adamantly lied to myself regarding the definition of love I want, need, desire, and truly want to feel. As I was writing about this lie, the unraveling of truth spun off the lines of the paper. Initially, disappointment. But in true egotistical self-preservation, I started to explain it to myself.

Being a hopeless romantic is so irritating, but when the fantasy comes even remotely true, it’s the most wonderful feeling. I have spent a bunch of time unpacking the failures with love thus far. How could I have affected a different outcome? What did I take away from the failure? What will I do differently when I’m given the chance to have that again, if ever? All of those types of questions have been captured in various journal entries. But answering the question about how I’ve lied to myself about what my personal definition is of love, I was faced with something very true.

I redefine love, ie., compromise, to fit the type of love that I am receiving. Instead of having a standard or expectation, I let the person “loving” me take the lead and define what I need for me. It’s so grossly passive that I sort of got irritated with myself. Yet, here I sit at nearly 43 years old and I have identified the lie I’ve been allowing myself to believe has literally been the very reason the failures have occurred. Because I didn’t set my standard and then STICK TO IT, my standards become more suggestion as opposed to supporting the overall outcome I am yearning for. The more I thought about it, the more the ego fought. “But…but…you didn’t really know what you wanted, so whatever you got could have been good enough.” This started making me question whether or not it was a genuine lie to myself versus maybe still actually figuring it out. I hate that wisdom is only achieved through experience (or more commonly referred to as ‘mistakes.’).

Moving forward with this keener sense of my definition forces me to also actually elaborate. Guess what that did? It created way cool new boundaries! Instead of looking for red flags and things I know that I don’t want, I am looking more intently on the details of what I DO want. The combination of those markers has opened my eyes to not just setting an actual standard but have the boundaries to aide me in sustaining it. When I finished jotting down the specifics for myself in the prompt journal, I had to step back and kind of find pride in the fact that I’m truly still growing and seeking the growth.

Crazy side effect of self-awareness, I’m a ton more peaceful and capable of maneuvering through challenges. I don’t know that I would ever consider myself a “gentle parent.” I am a loud mom. I do however, try to stay in a non-confrontation posture longer than before. These little men I’m responsible for need to see what their mother looks like, acts like, sounds like, etc. when she’s in varying states of emotion. The absence of feeling loved the way I want to be has severely impacted things for me both mentally and emotionally. It without question indirectly/directly impacts these boys. As my oldest boy encroaches his teenage years, I am feeling more and more equipped to not just be a good mom for him but also teach him how to be a good man from the perspective of a single mother.

I read once that if a mother has a daughter first, she needed to learn how to love. If she has a son first, she needed to learn how to be loved. It’s likely we can find truths in that depending on the lens you apply to your relationship to your children. I can definitively say, my boys have absolutely been teaching me how to be loved. The combination of their little hearts and my own going through such major adjustments this past year, I am convinced the theory has validity. Alex and Ben open the door for me. They pick wildflowers for me. They snuggle me often (and I’m not a super huggy momma). We are teaching each other constantly and there aren’t any better people in this existence that could have done it better than they do.

Boundaries are cool and not a deterrent, but an attraction put off like a beacon to help find the right match. Energy speaks louder than we give it credit. My boundaries are helping my energy promote the exact type of energy I need to really have this all come full circle. I’m pretty damned excited to see where this new found knowledge will take me. Something tells me, it’s not far from being fully realized. Life is so freakin’ good and my heart is full of gratitude and thank God, comfortable optimism.