tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53774229132553915392024-03-13T06:02:50.597-06:00Mercy's Miracle "In a world that lives like a fist, mercy is not more than waking with your hands open" Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.comBlogger590125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-40900351933522734122017-01-20T20:41:00.001-07:002017-01-20T20:41:16.248-07:00New SpacesDear friends,<br />
I did something brave today. Something i've been meaning to do for quite some time.<br />
I will no longer be writing at this location. Instead you can find me over at http://thegilead.blogspot.ca<br />
Please consider joining me on this healing journey as I embrace fearless bravery and deep honesty. As always, there is space for you and your stories there. Thank you for holding such space for me here over the years.Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-40347984512169032402016-12-30T21:32:00.000-07:002016-12-30T21:32:10.260-07:002016 in reviewI just got home from my honeymoon, 7 days out from saying I do to the love of my life. I'm still in the process of writing out our wedding story, with all its redemptive twists and turns. But my friend Morgan posted these year in review questions and I thought i'd take a moment after all this business to reflect on the huge year that 2016 was for me.<br />
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Getting married was definitely a significant 2016 moment. Committing my life to another person, when I have a messy track record with love, is huge. Along with that getting engaged was a significant event, as it began a journey of examining what i believe when it comes to love and opening myself up to it. Its hard to pick just one event for my third most significant, because there were so many and i don't want to pick one and forget one that was perhaps more significant. But I think the deconstruction of my faith, while it was a process and not a single event, has been very significant for me this year. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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Realizing the sweetness of love through my long distance relationship, finding my tribe and feeling understood, and less alone. Connecting with another person in entirely new ways (physical, emotional, spiritual, mental...), these moments at work where this spicy child will fall asleep with her hands cradling my face, the sacred beauty of forgiveness by someone I wasn't sure I would be forgiven by, coming home to myself in strange new ways. and this current moment, my first night in my new home, smelling the lemon in my shampoo and listening to my husband play video games in the background, because i never knew if i would get this moment</div>
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I got my first full time job, as an early childhood educator. I got married. I made new friends. I finished college. I listened to my gut. I told the truth. I completed a yoga challenge. I overcame a lot of my fears. I survived my long distance relationship (and thrived). I did laundry so i had clean clothes and made sure i didn't die in dirt (guys, sometimes that is hard), i survived the loss of some friends. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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Being engaged was definitely a surprising challenge for me. I found it so hard to be in that space and yet felt like i had to be happy. College was another one of those surprise challenges for me. I loved my first year, so found myself confused when my second year was so very hard. I found myself in a state of deconstruction, pushing against these rules and guidelines that had been set in place for me. It felt like i was on an entirely different track than everyone else, which was a really isolating feeling. and as i worked through issues - personal, faith related and relational - i found myself deeply and painfully misunderstood. I guess work was another challenge, just because i underestimated the toll it would take, physically and emotionally. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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I healed in so many ways this year. The deconstruction of my faith was a huge way i healed, and in turn brought me so much more freedom. Just realizing I don't have to believe everything i was told growing up, or everything that my parents believe, liberated me so much. I started listening to my gut and what felt right for me in terms of working out my faith. I started really questioning why i believe the things i believe, and i decided to stop believing some of the things that no longer worked for me. as a result of this personal deconstruction i got passionate about social justice. i was able to have conversations with people i really care about on things like #blacklivesmatter. i began to openly identify as a feminist. i used my voice to speak up for those who need a voice, who need someone to stand with them. and i let my heart be broken by the injustices of the world.<span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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aside from this huge healing, i've also continued to do some physical healing. i started listening to my body, and am still in the journey of this as i continue to work towards getting as healthy as i possibly can be. so much space has opened up in my body through my yoga practice. and then there is the work i am doing on radical self acceptance, on viewing myself and my body and my heart with love and compassion rather than with such a critical lens. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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I saved this question for last because honestly i don't know what day this year i felt most alive. i could say it was my wedding day, and that is true in a sense. i could say it was the day i got engaged, and that also wouldn't be wrong. i could say it was the day i walked out of college for the last time, and i had this sense of being able to breathe and figure things out for myself and make mistakes, and that would also be true. I could recall our family trip to the mountains this summer, or the road trip i took to new friends' wedding, or these past few days of being away with the person i love most. i don't know if i just have one day that made me feel most alive. I think 2016 was a year of being fully alive for me, the good, the bad and the ugly. i had a string of most alive days. But i think the day i felt most alive was the day i was driving back home after getting engaged. it was my first alone road trip, and i was listening to the radio and i had one of those "if this isn't beautiful i don't know what is" moments. and i had this sense that i had made it. all those hell days, all the days when i didn't think i would make it, all the days when i wanted to end it, all the pain, they had brought me here. and i didn't know what would come next, and it didn't matter. for a moment, just a moment, i felt this perfect peace, this freedom, this knowing that i was on the right path, that i was deeply, beautifully, amazingly alive <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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I had a long season in 2016 of wilderness, of liminal space. Sometimes i feel like i am still there. This summer was an especially hard season for me in that regard. i had just gotten engaged, but we were still doing long distance. i was in the throes of deconstruction, and feeling alienated from the community i once had. there was a while where i didn't have a job, and then it was the transition into the new job and feeling overwhelmed. and in all of it i felt like i wasn't sure where to land. i remember that season most clearly in painting the fence at my parents house, listening to podcast after podcast, hoping to find someone who would say something that would speak to me where i was at. i just wanted to know i wasn't alone. i was fighting against my heart and my body and i was discouraged. some of that has passed as i have moved along that journey but some of that discouragement is still there<span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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I completed a forgiveness journey i have been working on for years. There was always this sense of not being finished with my abuse story, and i couldn't figure out why i kept clinging to it, why there was this feeling of something in it not being finished for me. but after a few tough conversations i was able to release so much of that. I had to give up on some dreams for reconciliation, just because it became clear to me that those people cannot be a safe space for me, not because they don't want to just because of where they fell in proximity to the situation. i was able to make a lot of peace with myself, letting go of guilt and shame and moving on from the pain into the healing journey that allows me to move forward. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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I'm still holding on to a lot of body issues that i thought i had closed the door on a long time ago. my body has a lot of stories to tell, and i'm realizing i didn't make peace with them like i thought i had. so the story of my body - health wise, in terms of my self image, my femininity - those are all things that still need closure. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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During this year, especially in the spring, i was able to volunteer at a women's shelter. being there was probably as much a blessing and healing to me as it was to the women and children i was there to work with, but i was able to touch so many lives that way. And then daily now, through my job, I am learning how to pay attention to others, to meet their needs and meet them where they are at. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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the question of who i grew closer to this year is a tough one to answer, because this year did feel so isolating for me. in the obvious sense, i grew closer to my husband this year, as our relationship changed from dating to engaged and now to being married. i grew closer to other people who were in the same stages of deconstruction that i was, as we had this common ground. i grew closer to my sister, as we began to talk about things that really matter like racism and sexism and how it affects our daily lives. and i grew closer to myself. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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people pleasing. I am a recovering perfectionist and codependent so i lost a lot of myself trying to keep the peace and keep people happy and do what i thought they wanted. i put so much pressure on myself to make people like me and make sure they thought well of me that i burnt out. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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I lost a lot of myself in caring for other people too. my work is a huge outlet for that, and college was also like that for me. i put so much into caring for other people, even if that is a "good" thing that if i'm not careful i can forget to care for myself and end up exhausted. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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And as always i probably wasted too much time on social media. I wasted too much time caring about what i looked like as opposed to whether or not i was enjoying myself. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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I started practicing yoga more regularly, which is something i feel really good about. i started making self care a priority. i showed up for myself, moving away from what made me feel bad and towards the things that excite me. i was able to show up for other people, which at the end of the day is something i feel awesome about. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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I just finished Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult and absolutely loved it. I read Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell this year which was huge in changing the way i look at faith and God. Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton is definitely on the favourites list. <span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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I watched Miss You Already this year and thought it was one of the most honest portrayals of life and death i have seen in a movie. I really enjoyed foreign language films on netflix this year. i don't know if i'd say i have a favorite movie of 2016 but anything that made me feel something made the list of movies i loved<span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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We went to this little french place in the mountains on our honeymoon and i made smart food network like comments about the food the whole time. i think what i remember most about restaurants is the people i went there with, which means my favorite of this year would be Olive Garden the day before my wedding, the cactus club with my choices family, always starbucks (so many of my dates have happened at starbucks) and boston pizza with family<span class="c0" style="font-family: "muli"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
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This question was originally different but since i didn't have a real answer to that one i thought i'd share some of my favorite podcasts of 2016, since podcasts were so influential for me. the \Jesus and Yoga podcast is probably my all time favorite podcast. I am lucky to call these ladies my friends and their insight on life and yoga and deconstruction is amazing. The Romance and adventure podcast is also one i listened to regularly as i asked the big relationship questions (and its hosted by Morgan, who created these questions, and her husband). I am a huge fan of the robcast (Rob Bell's podcast) and the liturgists had some episodes this year that literally took me hours to get through because i had to keep pausing it to catch my breath. </div>
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joy surprised me this year when i let myself be present. when i dropped the business and the trying too hard and the stress and thinking i have a million things to do and when i was still, when i was really present with the people i love, when i allowed myself to breathe into the moment and feel like i had time. joy surprised me when i listened to my gut, when i opened myself up to possibility and stopped trying to fit into the things that were no longer right for me. </div>
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i desire to bring more of that into 2017 by continuing to listen, continuing to get quiet, continuing to show up. i want to be intentional with my time, in being where i am and to not try and be a hundred different places at once. i want 2017 to be a year of intention and getting honest about what matters, a year of showing up. </div>
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Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-61183472210875678952016-12-05T12:18:00.000-07:002016-12-05T12:18:07.580-07:00Love winsWhen my old blog posts pop up on my facebook feed i love to read them. I marvel at the girl I was back in high school, so wordy and wise. I wonder if i lost some of that along the way, or if its still in there somewhere.<br />
I believed I was destined to never experience love. I was broken, fragmented. I had been used and abused by too many guys and victimized by my own heart one too many times and all of it had left me very cynical towards the idea of love. It was out there, just not for me. For happy girls, for pretty girls, for girls with minds less full of noise.<br />
As i approach this season of marriage, I find myself thinking about all those other loves. About the way i threw myself into them like an acrobat on a tight rope dives into a cup of water. They were never enough to hold me, but I told myself if I tried hard enough they could be.<br />
I remember how it felt like my skin was too much for me, how I would scratch at it just trying to find some relief. I remember all the times I told myself this would be it. And i remember the last time, when it felt like my heart was literally falling out of my chest and all I could do was scream. I felt empty. There are still stories there, still words that can be written about my years of searching for love like it was water in a desert. But thats not the story I want to tell.<br />
In 18 days I say I do to the man I love with every piece of me. All those pieces I believed made me broken but really were just in the wrong hands.<br />
He found me not long after I had given up on love for the last time. I wasn't looking for him, or maybe i was. Either way I know those early months felt hopeful and dangerous and exhilerating. I waited, for a really long time, for the crash. For him to decide i was too much, too broken, to leave. I didn't want to be in love but at the same time I wanted it more than anything. I thought he would fix me. But in the end it was never his job to fix me, or to love me. I am healing me. I am loving me.<br />
He is the ocean. He believes in me. He makes me feel whole. He reminds me that I need to love myself first.<br />
I never wanted to get married. But I do know I want to love him well, for as long as i can.<br />
I wrote in my notes a while ago that I love him because all the others told me what I wasn't. He tells me over and over again who I am.<br />
In 18 days I get to be his wife.<br />
The story is still being written. Love wins. Forever and ever AmenAlishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-32541774166840537372016-11-13T14:46:00.001-07:002016-11-13T14:46:49.338-07:00Sitting in hard spacesThis summer i spent hours painting the fence. In the heat, under the burning noonday sun, i made large sweeping brush strokes. I listened to podcasts, swallowing them as if they were water and I was the desert wanderer. And in a way it was true. In my desert i clung to these words of truth, of solidarity, of the wisdom of those who had gone before me like they were water to my parched soul. The spirit is like water, says Mark Nepo, you cannot live dry.<br />
I believed my season of dryness, of living in the liminal space, would end when i got a job. When Cody and I lived in the same town. When i said i do. When the hot season of summer ended and normalcy returned. When i got healthy. When i left my tightly religious circles.<br />
Being engaged has been a liminal space for me. The first few months it felt so strongly like drinking bitter water. I knew it was for me but it was bitter to taste. I longed for the sweet water i imagined healing would bring.<br />
I ached to leave the liminal space. I told myself i was sitting in it only to inwardly fight against it. I grieved and raged and wailed. Then i collapsed. Then things started to change.<br />
I've seen this quote that says all the women in me are tired. And i feel this deep in my bones, friends. I am tired. I am 6 months tired. I am 2 years tired. I am 5 years tired. Maybe i'm even 20 years tired.<br />
I'm realizing you can't rush your healing. I tried. I thought my liminal season should be over. And yet i find myself with this familiar, scratchy ache. I find myself tired. I find myself brought back to the desert i thought i had left. Only this time i am here with the knowing i must sit in this discomfort.<br />
Truths about myself are emerging, ones i'd rather not face. And i don't know how to sit here and hold space for all of this when it feels so overwhelming, so breath stealing.<br />
If you are here, know that me too. This longing to be in another season, i get it. This wild confusion and not knowing the next step and sitting in this mess, i'm there.<br />
Dear friends, how do we sit in this liminal space, both personal and cultural, when all we want to do is run?<br />
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<br />Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-71961190739816569552016-10-21T21:41:00.003-06:002016-10-21T21:41:59.548-06:00Equality and the tableI didn't leave Bible College midway through my second year. But i should have.<br />
I stayed because i thought i should. Because someone told me to stay unless i knew exactly what i should do next and i believed them even though it went against my deep knowing that i didn't belong there anymore. <br />
One quote rang in my head over and over and that was "you need to get up from the table when love is no longer being served."<br />
Its strange to think of love not being extended at a bible college. But thats the way it was for me. At that table, the one where i tried so hard to sit at, love was not unconditionally served to me. The appearance of love was. But not love itself.<br />
Not after i came out as a jesus loving yogi. Not after i disclosed to a few friends that i was gay affirming. Not after i publically said i was a feminist, and what that meant for me. <br />
Lately the body of christ has been making me really uncomfortable. I've had many conversations with friends and pastors and other people in my life about injustices in the church and how in all honesty it makes me not want to be the church. How because of it i don't strongly identify as christian.<br />
Within the church i've seen so much injustice. I remember sitting in church a few years ago when they announced the demomination my church is a part of would not allow women pastors and feeling angry and broken hearted. If my church wouldn't allow women to speak for God what about me? <br />
I remember anger rising up in me when the bible college i attended spoke about the dress code and how it put men's lust on my shoulders (i am sure unintentionally) and body shaming me by regulating what i wore and said and did and putting it out there in the name of protecting our brothers in christ.<br />
I remember all my years of youth confrences and church services and bible school chapels and how i don't remember a woman preaching, or a person of color, or a person with a disability or who didn't identify as cis gendered and straight.<br />
I remember listening to my sister talk about black lives matter and realizing i don't live out black lives matter. The world i live in doesn't live out black lives matter. <br />
And it makes me angry. <br />
When we do this, we are silencing the voice of God. We are furthering the message that God only speaks through and looks like certain people. We are saying only a select group of people get to sit at the table of divine love. We are making an us and a them. We are making others.<br />
Personally i love my others. The people who have spoken God most clearly to me have been women and people of color and gays. In my experiences these people, the people we routinely shush in church services and religious circles, best get what the gospel was trying to say. That it is for ALL of us. That we are ALL in. And there are no others.<br />
I'm still working through my thoughts on these issues. In no way is this my perfect compiling of my thoughts. Its messy, and raw, and real. It comes from a place inside of me so filled with the knowing that the way it is isn't how its supposed to be. God is bigger and more than we've made him or her out to be. And everybody is in. <br />
I've always said i'd rather be wrong in the name of love than right in the name of drawing lines and i agree with that whole heartedly. I want my life to be love, to reflect divine love. <br />
I want to continue talking about this issue because it matters. I want this to be the start of the conversation around equality in the church, and in the world. <br />
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"I want to be outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, second-chance givers, the radical grace lavishers, the ones with arms wide open, the courageously vulnerable, and among even—or maybe especially—the ones rejected by the Table as not worthy enough or right enough."<br />Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-71438692029795206982016-09-06T16:46:00.001-06:002016-09-06T16:46:55.111-06:00"It's not time to worry yet"This past weekend I was blessed with the opportunity to attend the wedding of my childhood best friend. It was beautiful (Seriously, my friend and her new husband are two of the coolest people ever and they are way more artistic than me which sometimes makes me jealous but mostly makes me so happy because I get to enjoy their beautiful art) and I cried more than a few times.<br />
This is the girl I used to sit with when we were just 4 and 5 and 6 and we would dream about the future. We would dream about babies, and being teenagers (which at least in my mind seemed like a big deal to 6 year old me) and play pretend. We decided when we were just little girls that we needed to marry brothers because we just needed to be sisters (which, of course, didn't happen. We've settled for being friends instead, though I still haven't given up hope on being related to that sweet family through marriage some day. We both have single siblings!) <br />
My weekend seemed to be full of marriage related things. My soon to be brother-in-law announced his engagement, and my fiancé and I spent Sunday afternoon on the couch of the couple doing our premarital counselling talking about serious things and less serious things about our special day, and the rest of our lives together.<br />
I remember on Saturday night walking out of my friend's wedding reception feeling this overwhelming sense of love. Because I had just seen such beautiful love between these two people I care about deeply who had just promised to be each other's person for the rest of their lives, and because of this amazing man beside me who will soon be my husband and the way he takes such good care of my heart.<br />
This weekend was full of so many moments that gave me confidence in the decision I have made to engage in this sacred relationship with this human being. I spent most of the weekend in tears, but it was the healing kind, the kind that once they dried left me with life in my bones and the return of this spark, this feeling of rightness for the direction my life is going.<br />
I remember one moment during our premarital counselling on Sunday where we had to walk through the last fight/argument/disagreement we had. It was something I was rather worked up about, for various reasons, and even as we were acting out this argument again, I was struck by his calmness, his steadiness. I wanted this to be a big deal, to be so strongly moved by emotion, for him to share in my dramatic waves of feelings on this particular subject. And during our acting out this argument, someone said the words or something stirred up the words in me that brought an end to all my internal struggle. My mind was still. I got it. <br />
<em>He's confident in us</em><br />
I was reading a quote by Glennon Doyle Melton today where she talks about To Kill A Mockingbird, and how there is this fire that creeps closer and closer but Atticus remains calm. His calmness tells his children "It's not time to worry yet."<br />
It takes me a while to feel sure of a good thing. I am quite introspective, and if there is something to worry about I probably will. But that day, and this whole weekend, as I watched the man I love and his steadiness and his confidence in things, I was reminded that its not time to worry yet.<br />
Everything is still ok, or it will be. I can do hard things, uncomfortable things, and not be broken by them. Come what may, life is about loving more and not less. Even in the face of fear and doubt, even in the face of circumstances you really wish weren't there. <br />
It reminds me of the Joan of Arc quote I've clung to this whole engagement: "I'm not afraid. I was born to do this."<br />
I am afraid, but that doesn't change that I was born to do this. I was born to love, and be loved. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it isn't beautiful and worthwhile and good. <br />
I feel so profoundly lucky to be in this kind of sacred relationship, bearing witness to each other's lives, reminding one another to lean in instead of out, that its not time to worry yet, that there is so much goodness and beauty in the hard.<br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-24045929843453198422016-08-02T11:00:00.000-06:002016-08-02T11:00:08.325-06:00Bitter Water (On Marriage Part 2)There are days this season of my life feels like drinking bitter water. When for so long I anticipated sweetness, I am met with the bitterness of this drink that doesn't taste like I thought it would. Yet I know this too has something for me.<br />
I'm the girl who never wanted to get married. I'm sure I did once, when my head was filled with Disney princess ideals, when I was a little girl still craving that fairy tale romance. But as I was thrust into my teen years, I decided I didn't want to get married. Because I didn't see the point of signing a little piece of paper saying that I would spend the rest of my life loving somebody when I could just spend the rest of my life loving them. Because I had seen so many marriages around me fail, and in some place inside of me that still believed in love I held marriage too high to willingly enter into something I had seen fail so many times before. Because of the negative talk I had heard about marriage, the way I had seen it played out and knowing I didn't want to enter into a union that looked like anything I'd seen played out. And because in those early teen years I was already so distrustful of love and the goodness of my own heart.<br />
I can recall a number of occasions, even as young as 13, swearing off marriage because I had lost my belief in the goodness of love. And looking back on that now, my heart aches over the jadedness of that little girl. Looking back everything makes sense, but of course things always do in hindsight. In the middle of it all I felt alone, and like there was something wrong with me and my heart. <br />
This engagement season for me means revisiting a lot of those girlhood thoughts. It means reopening old wounds and letting this bitter water wash them clean. Even if it stings. Even if my first instinct is to pull away in pain. Even if the healing scares me almost as much as the pain does. <br />
I've been forced to re-evaluate what I think and believe about marriage. Because there is this man that I love more than I've ever loved anyone before and he still thinks marriage is good and that love can be trusted. He believes in standing up in front of people and celebrating love even if I don't. And if there is one thing, I'm finding, that can change my beliefs on love it is being loved right, and good. <br />
So in planning my wedding, and in planning for my marriage, it looks a little untraditional. Because I don't feel like I fit in the world of the stereotypical bride. But I also don't fit in the world of women who have sworn off marriage anymore. I am in this rare place in the middle of not being sure what I believe about marriage but being sure that I believe in love. And that's what I want. To enter into this forever kind of love with my person. <br />
In my quest to reshape what marriage looks like for me, I have become very protective of my ever changing views, and of my relationship itself. I need space to grow and purge and grieve old things and be excited about new things, and this changes daily as to how it looks. <br />
I knew fairly early on that I wanted to be honest about this transitional process. I want to tell the truth, with my words and my life and my love. Mostly because I spent so long not telling the truth. I want, and am experiencing in this stage, brutal honesty. And I want my wedding, and my marriage, to be built on the same. <br />
At the same time as I am simultaneously deconstructing and rebuilding what marriage looks like to me, I am trying not to let myself be swallowed whole by the fear. The fear that threatens to leak my unworthiness all over this relationship, that whispers to me that my heart isn't good, the one that says because I have this beautiful love I need to build higher fences. At the same time its drawing boundaries, and showing up to the hard work of my own heart and surrounding myself with so much love, because I finally believe my heart is something worth loving. <br />
It's a tough balance, and more often than not I find myself stumbling, not so gracefully, through this hard and holy work I am being called into.<br />
I have been reading and listening to podcasts on the Israelites lately, about their encounter with bitter water, and how what tasted bitter was ultimately meant for their healing. That's the best way I can describe this season. It feels like a season of bitter water. <br />
In one podcast I listened to on this topic, my beautiful friend Stephanie from Jesus + Yoga talked about how we belong to each other. "Ubuntu," she said, quoting Mark Nepo, "I am because you are. You are because I am."<br />
One morning after a particularly hard trigger that dug deep into my healing, I was listening to a talk from Gabrielle Bernstein, where she talked about this same sort of concept. She talked about how you have this deep love for this one person, and how the challenge lies in taking that deep love for this one person and spreading it to the world. The same level of love you have for your spouse, have it for that person over there. In this, there is no room for ego. And I can't say I'm there yet. I still cling to my love as this precious flame that cannot be touched.<br />
I remember the story of a candle kept under a covering as to not be disturbed by the world and to be kept burning, while it was the covering that ended up burning the candle out.<br />
When I think about marriage, though, I think about this. Ubuntu. I am because you are, you are because I am. This idea of belonging to each other. And then I think about this love that burns so brightly there is no room for ego. Wishful thinking, maybe. But what I'm trying to get at is I don't want love to begin and end with the two of us. I want to enter into the flow of all the love there is and was and will be. I want to be a part of something bigger than myself.<br />
By entering into marriage, I decided, I am entering not into a legal contract or a lifelong commitment. I am entering into the flow. I am surrendering myself to love. And with everything in me I want the entry into that journey to be sacred, and intimate and beautiful. I want it to be Ubuntu. <br />
In this engagement process, I am letting old wounds be washed clean by this bitter water. I am healing, so I can enter into the Promise Land clean. And I can feel the sacredness of it all as it happens. The purging, the washing out of old wounds, the reopening of hurts, the deep dig into negative beliefs I have about myself and love and marriage and sex and relationships. I am making space, making peace. I know this which is painful is for my healing. And it is good. <br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-11774753419671213122016-07-30T19:09:00.000-06:002016-07-30T19:09:15.115-06:00On MarriageI've been wanting to write for a while now. For a week I've wanted to sit down with a keyboard and my thoughts and tell the world the scary inner thoughts I have on things like marriage. Don't ask me why. <br />
A week ago today I was in a room full of my people. A year ago this month I stepped into the big room at Choices Seminars a little bit afraid, looking for a reason to run. I didn't find one. Instead I found 85 reasons to stay. I found faces that looked at me with such love and wonder. They looked at me like one looks at a caterpillar emerging from a chrysalis. It was like they knew the miracle was going to happen. They knew it, and they held their breath in anticipation, and when it did they let out a little gasp of wonder. They taught me the joy of sober dancing. And it was in that room that for the first time in 18 years I clued into the fact that maybe, just maybe, I was worthy of love. Of being loved by others, and of loving myself. <br />
A week ago I stepped back into the big room at Choices Seminars and it felt like coming home. It felt like a breath of fresh air, like just by walking through the doors a bit of the magic was put back on my skin. And in that big room I got to see some of my favourite people in the whole wide world, being some of the other amazing humans that went through that crazy journey with me.<br />
A few days before I walked into this room, I had written in the memo notes on my phone "I want to be anointed for marriage. To be found worthy of this calling and blessed into it. I wish for the affirmation of my heart."<br />
The words didn't even make sense to me as I wrote them, but I knew that was what I wanted. When people ask me how I feel about being engaged I smile and say I am excited. And I am. I am so excited and have so much joy about embarking on this new journey with the man I love with every piece of me. I am also afraid. I am so afraid of marriage and I've said to multiple people that I don't know if I believe in marriage anymore and its not because I'm having second thoughts about the person I'm marrying or if I want to spend the rest of my life with him. It's because I look at marriage, at what I want marriage to be and think marriage is, and it is a calling I feel unworthy of.<br />
I'm the girl with a bruised heart. I fell in love (or infatuation) with the wrong boy a few too many times and gave away pieces of my heart. I failed so greatly to take care of my own self, to provide for my own basic needs. More often than not I found myself deserving of punishment rather than love. It was easier to starve or cut away the pain than to sit with it. And always I have found it easier to run than to stay. And when I look at this wonderful human being in front of me, the one who wants with his whole heart to enter into this forever kind of commitment with me, I feel unworthy. I feel distrustful of my own heart, and how strongly it wants this and him because of all the other times my heart has led me down the wrong path, and all the other times (which is far too many to count) that I have seen marriages fail. <br />
I walked into that Choices room a week ago today and saw my friends who have become family. And they hugged me and congratulated me. And then, ever so gently, they poked at the tender places of my heart. The places that doubt marriage is a good idea, that doubt myself. At first I was a bit taken aback, because I had forgotten how well these loving humans know my heart just from looking at me. Because I thought I was doing such a good job hiding behind the masks and not telling the entire truth with my life but only living in the positive glow. And then I realized they were right. I had a conversation with a good friend about my fears, about all the negative thought patterns I have around marriage. And she told me that it's ok to be afraid. She asked me what I was willing to lose. Would I hold so tightly to the old thought patterns I had about relationships that I sabotaged the real and beautiful one right in front of me. Would I let fear win? And like a prayer, a blessing, another friend of mine whispered the words over me "You are strong enough to accept love." <br />
It felt like the affirmation of my heart I had been waiting for. I let out a sigh of relief when I saw the only thing standing in my way was me. My heart was good. And despite my past mistakes, or maybe including them, I was worthy of love. I was strong enough to give and receive love. <br />
<em>"I am not afraid. I was born to do this."</em><br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-36056081937239731012016-07-19T13:08:00.002-06:002016-07-19T13:08:56.821-06:00redemption story
<em>It's been a while now since the first day he slid this ring on my finger. And I haven't yet been able to write about it because its a story filled with so much hard, holy ground, with the twinkling hope of redemption and also the bravery that comes with being afraid. I don't know why I am sharing this sacred story now, only that this story is telling itself whether I share it or not, so intricately woven into the very fibre of my being, and I am so grateful to be living it. This story is something I feel I am not enough for, that I keep waiting to be snatched from me. It has opened up my heart in new ways, and brought with is so much healing and redemption. The season I find myself in is a strange mixture of grief and gratitude, of a heart aching from fullness. It's a story so sacred and beautiful I need to tell it, even if I fumble through it at times, even if at points in the journey it doesn't make sense, even to me. So, here it begins with the story of how I got engaged. </em><br />
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I haven’t yet shared the story of how I got engaged because
it is something that I am still processing, something that still feels so raw
and big and monumental that I haven’t yet had the time to ponder in my heart
the way I want to. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be ready. I wonder if
people are ever ready for the events that change their lives, or if maybe we
all spend every single day waking up and realizing we don’t know how we got
here.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I got engaged on the
first of July, under the summer heat, just down off a busy highway by a creek
that ran with murky water. I knew it was coming but the moment caught me off
guard, perhaps as all big and grand moments do. Despite my desire for something
small, lacking in the grand gesture department, I felt the shift the moment
when he came to me by the water and took my hand. Maybe in that moment I knew.
I knew my life wouldn’t be the same. I knew I was walking towards my future in
a way that most women feel when they are walking down the aisle. Perhaps that
is why I lingered by the water a moment longer than necessary, whispering to
the man soon to be my fiancé, “Come, look at this. Do you see?” Do you see this
snail and this slug and this frog, this life that exists within murky waters,
that is thriving in this place that looks like a wasteland? Do you see this
water, flowing, carrying with it everything I’ve left behind?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember once,
during my first year of college, going to the river. I had this burning desire
to create a ceremony for myself, to let go of this heavy pain I had been
carrying since the death of my cousin, the confusion and the inner turmoil and
the desperation that had been etched into my body by his hands before they
turned ice cold. I needed a release for myself, a cleansing ceremony so I could
finally feel forgiven, so that I could stop looking for affection in strange
men and food and self-hatred, to be free of the ghost I was carrying along
behind me like it was my birthright. By that river I begged and pleaded to be
clean. I had forgotten, or perhaps I didn’t know then, that suffering isn’t the
birthright of any human on earth. That to let go, all I needed to do was let
go. I wanted to be clean, free, but what I didn’t know was that I already was.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember in my late
teenage years bringing with me a jar of sand and ash on a family vacation. That
vacation was a purging time for me, when I brought so many toxins into my body
it made me sick, and when I exhaled them with just as much ferocity and
weeping. The jar of ashes represented this grief that I was carrying around
with me, this mournful howling that filled my bones ever since I became so ill
I thought I was going to die. I collected this ash and howled and wept over
this empty space in my body that had once been full, over what had been taken
from me while I was sleeping. And on this particular trip, after having arrived
with grand intentions and my jar of ashes, I slipped out to the pond with the
water that flowed and was recycled and came out new, and I let my ashes slip
between my fingers. In the days that followed I shook and bled and howled, but
when I left I felt the work of refinement that had taken place.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The water, that had
represented so much pain and heartache for me, where I had released and burned
and purged and wept and vomited and begged for forgiveness, the same water that
flowed at the river and at the pond because everything is recycled and flows
and moves, flowed before me in the moments before he took my hand. And I sat
there, with my feet dangling into the coolness, on the edge of a log, and I had
a feeling that this meant something. I didn’t know what, only that this moment
and this water and this log and that slug inching its way across a rock and him
and me and the flow all meant something. I could feel the newness on the wind,
and I wanted to savor the now. I almost had a moment where I didn’t want to go.
I didn’t want to get off the log. I didn’t want to leave behind the water, the
slug inching its way across a rock, this breath. I didn’t want the startling
entry into something new, to be birthed into a world which I didn’t yet have
language for, to enter the flow.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I did. And I
remember that last breath, the sharp inhale before I rose off the log and took
his hand, following him up away from the water. I was stepping into something
new. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I followed him up the
steep incline of shifting rocks and pebbles, the ground shaking and giving way
under my feet. And then I saw it, the words he’d written on the side of a
bridge, the words asking me to be his wife. And I felt the rebirth. In that
split second between my recognizing the words and what they meant and my yes, I
felt the starting over. And I knew I was ready. And I knew I was afraid. And I
knew with every fiber of my being that I was born for this. And I knew that the
water that had always flowed and carried my pain and hurt and agony was still
moving, and I must too. It was time to step away from the old and enter into
the new. It was time to enter into the flow that was all around me and in me
and through me. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My hands tremble with
anticipation and fear and promise and wonder as I stare down at this ring on my
finger, the one I never wanted but am becoming so grateful for. It reminds me
that redemption runs deep, that the old passes away and the new comes, that I
must be willing to step into the flow, that love wins. Love wins and love wins
and love wins and I am and I am and I am. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Adjusting to this new
season has felt thick and hard, and at times I wonder if stepping into new
waters was too much. My legs tremble and leave me aching for the shore, for
what I knew. This engagement season has felt so full of redemption and healing,
the kind of healing that cuts deep and burns through, the kind that purges the
soul and washes clean, like flowing water. It is bitter at first taste, yes,
but it is sweet. There is something for me here, and I am as sure of it as I am
sure of the wind. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. I can feel it deep
within my bones, in the places that I once thought of as void and empty. <o:p></o:p></div>
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-36232430243421044272016-06-29T22:14:00.002-06:002016-06-29T22:14:51.033-06:00The Lion in the wildernessI've been in a season of wilderness for a while now.<br />
It started when I was beginning my second year of Bible school, maybe even a bit before that. But it was during my second year that it really began to sink in. I ached, daily, with a hurt so deep I didn't know what to do with it. I yearned to hear the voice of God in this place that was seemingly so full of it, but I was met with silence. In fact I was met with more than silence, I was met with people telling me God wouldn't answer. That my way of coming before God didn't fit inside the neat box of Christianity. In this place that was where people came to meet God, I was felt like I was standing in a desert. And I wanted to leave that place. With everything in me I wanted to walk away from that institution and I almost did. A number of times I almost packed up and left because I was craving God in such a deep way and it seemed like He wasn't there. It seemed like His people weren't there. I was hurt, and I was lost in all the confusion and the chaos. And I was deep in the wilderness in a place that I was told, and a place that I thought, should be an oasis.<br />
When I did leave, when school rolled around to a stop and I packed up my dorm room along with my hurts, I thought things would magically get better. I would walk out that door and into the outside world where God seemed to alive and vibrant and real to me, and I would get on my yoga mat and write and love and connect to God in the way that I did best and everything would be fine. If I could exit the physical location that had housed so much wilderness for me perhaps I could exit the wilderness itself. <br />
But I came home, and I found myself still in the wilderness. I struggled to find a job. Suddenly I had no community whatsoever (Finding that forced connections made better noise than silence) and long distance was putting strain on my heart. Here I was, thinking I would now hear the voice of God, and I didn't. At least not in the way I was expecting to. It was only me, and the quiet, and the space. <br />
And it was here God began to speak. In whispers at first. It was here that the things I believed about God that had been moving and shaking while I was at college began rumbling and shifting, and I discovered teachings and ideas and concepts that made everything click for me. I stopped pursuing Christianity and "a personal relationship with Jesus" the way I was told personal relationships with Jesus look, and instead entered into the flow. I redefined things for myself instead of trying to fit into someone else's version of Christianity. Frankly I don't know if I fit into Christianity at all anymore. But I do know that I fit into the flow more than I ever did before, fit into God and what He's doing in the world and what He's doing in hearts and that openness and connectedness makes more sense to me than years of pouring over the Bible and trying to fit into conservative evangelical Christianity ever did. (I'm not saying that any of this is wrong. I am grateful for the things I was taught growing up in the church. I'm just finding things that work for me where I am right now with the truth God is revealing to me.)<br />
Still, in the midst of all this coming together, I ached for the things I didn't have. I ached for the stability a job would provide. I longed to be in the same city as the person I love most. I missed community. I remember clearly one morning as I spread out my yoga mat to practice speaking the words "This is a good road. My heart is good." over myself and weeping. Because this doesn't feel like a good road. My heart doesn't feel good. And it's taking so much work to believe it. I keep speaking the words over myself because I know they are true even if I don't feel it. Over and over I am proclaiming this as good. <br />
I am making space for these stories inside me to exist, for these old wounds to be healed. And as I look back I can tell that all this time I was slowly leaving the wilderness. I couldn't leave bible college and immediately be thrust into this world of blessings because I wasn't ready for that. I don't know if I'm ready now. I had to learn how to listen to God's voice first, to be slowly led out of that place. I had to realize that nothing was chasing me out of the wilderness. I had to leave clean, to leave behind me all of the things that didn't serve me anymore. And I am in the process of doing that. <br />
Honestly in the last couple of days I feel closer to that than I have in a long time. I am beginning to see the light as I stumble into it, knowing also that I have not fully left the darkness behind me. I am emerging into something good, and I am leaving behind something that was good in its own right.<br />
And now, as I look back, it is only in retrospect that I see He was there all along. He was the lion. Even in those hours that I begged to see Him in a place that I thought to be so rich of Him, He was there I just hadn't realized.<br />
Maybe this road doesn't make sense to you, and I am only beginning to realize how it all fits together for me. but I know one thing. This is a good road. my road is a good road. your road is a good road. This is holy and hard work, friends. If I can encourage you one thing, let it be this: He is the lion. <br />
<em>“I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”</em> Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-8882685648391531072016-05-28T20:46:00.002-06:002016-05-28T20:46:39.054-06:00Thoughts on Sobriety I've been thinking the last couple of days about being sober.<br />
I'm in a place right now that's pretty alright. And by that I mean I'm not constantly being tempted to fall back into my addictions. <br />
It's like after a storm, when the rain begins to let up a little bit. And you look to the sky and the clouds are beginning to part and the rain is still falling but not nearly as heavily and you turn to the person next to you and you say "I think the worst of it is over."<br />
I don't want to say the worst of it is over, because it feels like knocking on wood or something. I still have struggles in my life but they feel minor compared to the hell I walked through a few years ago, even a few months ago. It's this moment when the rain is letting up and I'm looking to the sky and thinking maybe the worst of it is over. Maybe I get to be happy now, for good.<br />
To be honest, that phrase both completely thrills me and completely terrifies me. Because I don't know how to be happy. Because there is this lull, the break in the clouds, and things get scratchy underneath my skin and I look to the sky, almost begging for there to be another hint of a storm cloud. Because I don't know how to handle being happy. All of my life, I was trained for chaos. One crisis followed another, head over heels, and I got good at dealing with it. And the stillness, the silence, the lull, scares me to death. <br />
I look at my life now, and I feel the squeeze of normalcy tightening around my chest and I want to run from it. I don't ever want to forget where I came from. I don't, for a second, want to forget the hell I fought through to get to this point. The label of being in recovery is one of the ones I am the most proud of, and I never want to forget what I went through to earn it. I want every word I speak, every move I make to be a living memorial to the hell I went through and survived. I don't want to be detached from the pain that made me who I am. I guess in essence what I am saying is that I never want to forget where I came from.<br />
Where I am now, the pain is mostly fallout pain. It's the aftermath of death, the aftermath of my body fighting against me, the aftermath of the addictions. The fog has cleared just enough that I can see where I am going and live my life without being acutely aware of all these things that happened to me. I'm working out and I'm not constantly being sucked into the hatred I had for my body. I'm in my relationship, happy and loved, and not constantly thinking about all the times when I wasn't. I'm sifting through the aftermath and finding out what I believe and seeing the truth about things and it is good and hard and it is all part of recovery. But sometimes it seems the farther down the road of recovery I get, the more I want to turn and run the other way. Back to my addictions, to my self hatred, to the deep dark depression that clouded my days. Because it was comfortable. because in the thick of it all there seems to be an air of worthiness. <br />
I heard a comment by Russell Brand in an interview he did once where he was talking about addiction, and how no matter how far you went there's always the one thing you wish you'd done, the one drug you wished you'd taken. Because then it might make recovery feel a little more earned.<br />
I'm in a place now where I'm finally reclaiming my voice. I'm telling the truth about my story, even if my voice shakes. Even if finding out the truth sometimes reveals cracks in the solid foundation I thought I had. Even if it makes me uncomfortable and I have to draw boundaries where there wasn't any before because I am finally learning that what I want matters.<br />
I guess what I'm saying is that this is recovery too. And I never want to forget the hell I fought through to get here. I always want in recovery to be one of the labels I am most proud of wearing. I also want to learn how to be grateful for the good moments, to enjoy the beauty that I have. And I never want to take for granted what I have, to think that I have reached a spot where I can stop being insistent upon my recovery and being brutally honest about what I feel, think, experience and need. There's no recovered for me, always in recovery. There are ups and downs because that is life, and its a journey. A journey that matters more than the destination. There's always more stories to be told, more layers to be shed. And I never want to stop being in recovery. <br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-44953838576644940112016-05-10T14:47:00.001-06:002016-05-10T14:47:49.918-06:00Christian Mysticism and where I fit in the sacred spirituality I stumbled upon the term today "Christian mystic" and it felt like coming home.<br />
When I think back on my life, I can think of many times where I bounced around within the church. After a particularly life shattering event, I leaned heavily into the religion aspect of Christianity. I was under the impression that God cared what color socks I wore that day. I thought that if I did everything right and went to church and went to youth group and got myself a discipler things would work out for me. I did all of those things, and my life didn't get better. No one told me that this isn't how it works. And so, when things didn't magically get better after I started the radical pursuit of the "good Christian" I thought God didn't care about me.<br />
Early on in my teen years, something in my mind shifted from that "good Christian" mindset to a more agnostic way of thinking. I went to church because I had to, not because I wanted to, or more accurately because I had an image to maintain and something to get from God. The tone in my writing turned drastically away from scribbling out prayers. I had Bibles but I didn't open them for years. I lost myself in the world of love and infatuation, of addiction, of anything I could think of to fill this hole inside me because it was made clear to my adolescent self that God wasn't showing up.<br />
The process of coming back to faith (in anything!) was a long one. I can't pinpoint an exact moment when I started showing up again. I started going to a new youth group, one I went to mainly because I wanted friends and I think secretly because I wanted some kind of answers. I wanted someone to prove me wrong, that all Christians weren't the same, that God was still out there for a person like me.<br />
I think back on my late teen years (from about 15 or so on) and I remember it being a really mystical time for me. Nothing was really working right in my life, one messy situation followed the next. It was one of the biggest times of pain and grief that I've gone through. And yet it seemed so sacred and spiritual. Not because I was reading my Bible or praying regularly again but because I began submerging myself in a world with people who were real about how hard life is (this is how I fell in love with slam poetry). I read blog articles and listened to podcasts from people with different perspectives. Suddenly the things I was absorbing were less about theology and sermons and rules, and more about every day life. I found myself drawn to the Christians who weren't afraid to say the word "Shit" followed by a story about how they encountered Jesus at the car wash.<br />
So for me, it was kind of a funny place to be when I ended up at Bible college. I was submerged in theology all day long. On my first campus visit I remember commenting to the admissions manager I was with that these people were praying all the time. It was so foreign to me, and maybe that's why I was intrigued by it. I made my decision to go to PRBI based on a comment from a guy (he scared me at first, and when I told him this we bonded and became friends) who said coming to Bible College would tear me down and make me miserable. I didn't really like the idea of being miserable but I needed something to shake me up. <br />
My first year at PRBI was great. I learned so much, my care group was beautiful, and I met some amazing people who are still in my life today. <br />
I decided to come back for a second year, but somewhere between the end of my first year and the beginning of my second year I felt resistance. I thought it was just nerves. I thought that because my first year had been so great, how could anything go wrong? <br />
But within a few weeks of my second year having begun, I knew this wasn't what I wanted. Not because I think there's something wrong with being taught the Bible and being in that Christian environment. But for me it wasn't where I needed to be. The theology I was taught became another thing to get through, more studies and rules, and it took all my passion for spirituality. Because of the environment I was in and some of the rules set in place (obviously a community like that needs to have some guidelines in place) I felt like I wasn't free to discover God the way I did best. And the good old Christian bubble slowly sucked the life out of me until I found it a struggle not to be bitter and resentful. I almost quit on a number of occasions, but pushed myself to finish because I thought "How can there be anything wrong with being at Bible College? This must be what God wants for me." <br />
I did have some good moments during my second year. I made connections and was able to build into others and be built into, and I value all of that. Please hear me, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with Bible college. I'm saying at this season in my life, there's something wrong with Bible college for me. Instead of feeding my faith, it shriveled it. Instead of making me come alive I felt like I was dying on the inside. <br />
But being at Bible College for a second year did give me a gift, which was the eyes to see that the ways of Christianity I'd always been taught weren't working for me. I could push and push and push but I don't know if I'll ever be able to encounter God in theology, in organized services, in a sheltered environment.<br />
I want to be the kind of person who sees Jesus at the car wash. I encounter God when I'm on my yoga mat. I see Jesus in the eyes of the broken, the hurting, the every day people. I learn about God most through stories of others. And when I am open to regarding the people and things around me as teachers, I learn so much about myself and about who God is. <br />
I was having a conversation a while ago with my boyfriend about the different ways we view spirituality. The moment I remember most clearly was when we were talking about the importance of Bible reading, and I was struggling to get my point across. Because I do believe reading the Bible is important. I don't have a set Bible reading schedule. I've tried working my way through a specific book and find it becomes just another thing to cross of my to-do list. Sometimes, though, I'll read a story and it will minister to me in a whole new way, and show me something about God and myself that I didn't know before. But when I think of Bible reading, I don't want reading the Bible to be the only way I encounter God. I don't want to read the Scriptures, but live them. I want them to become real and active in my life, and I'm finding for me that doesn't happen by reading them over and over but by going out into my daily life and letting myself be used by God. <br />
My spiritual practice is just showing up.<br />
Maybe everyone else thinks like this too but just isn't vocal about it. Maybe I still have this idea in my head of what Christianity is because of what I've seen and what I know and I think people fit into this boxed idea of Christianity. Or maybe it is as they say, and I am just a little bit of a mystic. <br />
I don't know why I'm writing about this other than the fact that I think its important. Over the past little bit I feel like I've had to defend my view on things and how I do God and faith, so maybe this is part of that. Or maybe its just that I don't feel like being silent anymore about the things that matter. <br />
Maybe this all makes me a mystic. So be it, I've always felt more comfortable out there with the mystics anyway. But if I'm being honest, I think we should all be a little bit mystic. <br />
Jesus didn't come to create denominations and ethical systems, but rather invited them to enter into a life of love that transcends ethics, a life of liberty that dwells beyond religious laws (Rob Bell)<br />
And I think maybe, just maybe, that's part of what Jesus meant when he said "I have come so that they may have life and have it more abundantly" (John 10:10) Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-81738690777279240632016-05-02T18:13:00.001-06:002016-05-02T18:13:04.663-06:00Thoughts on tenderness Every year, in the thickness of spring during the hot transition into summer, I have a little nervous breakdown. I'm not sure if its the warmer weather, or the fact that school is over and I'm changing routine, or the fact that this year in particular I am stepping into so much uncertainty.<br />
This morning, as I set out on the job hunt, I received an email that was particularly discouraging. It was an idea I had put a lot of time and energy into, something I really wanted, and when it didn't pan out the way I thought it would, I got upset. Suddenly the "tone" behind the email was harsh. Suddenly this wasn't a simple decline but an outright rejection of my person. The negative words began spiraling in my mind. (let's just say i'm a wee bit dramatic)<br />
I've never been good at goodbyes. I was introduced to the idea of an Irish goodbye this year, of leaving without saying goodbye, and the idea appealed to me. While I saw the disappointment in the eyes of those left behind, something about the idea of leaving without the long, drawn out farewell appealed to me. Maybe it would make leaving easier. Or maybe, however the goodbye looks, whatever the distance or length between the last goodbye and the next hello, my heart will ache and long for what I have lost.<br />
He left yesterday, this boy of mine, and today I keep looking for his face when I see something funny or sad, keep starting sentences only to remember no one is around to finish them. I've felt hauntingly lonely, like I am missing this part of myself. It's an odd feeling, never feeling quite whole when he's gone. <br />
So when I got the email this morning, everything looked like chaos. Getting out of bed seemed a Herculean task. I flopped into the pile of clothes waiting to be put away and cried. <br />
And I realized in that moment I didn't want someone to come along and fix my problems. I didn't want a solution, or to talk about my feelings. All I wanted was a bit of tenderness. I wanted a reassuring hug, a reminder that everything would be alright. <br />
I felt like a child, acting out to get attention. <br />
I know things will work out, I know this separation won't last forever, I know I can do this. But at the same time all I want is someone to come along and offer me a bit of kindness, a warm touch, an understanding word. <br />
And I wonder if that isn't what we all want.<br />
When shit hits the fan, maybe all we really want to know is that we're not alone, that we're cared for and loved, even now.<br />
Remind me, dear friends, that tenderness exists in this world<br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-17539951995242704282016-04-20T19:46:00.002-06:002016-04-20T19:46:56.183-06:00Caring for dirt I've been thinking about blogging for a while now. I even have little draft posts drawn up and sitting in the folder, waiting to be published. <br />
I haven't been writing lately, though I have had the deep desire to sift through my thoughts in a more public space. Maybe its because the issues I've been coming to conclusions on are more personal, and being discreet is hard and I don't want to give any person or organization a bad reputation. I can only tell my story, but lately my story has been colliding with a bunch of other people's stories and I don't know how to write yet in a way that won't hurt the people I'm writing about. <br />
And I wonder if it's about time I've outgrown this blog. It's been here, chugging along, since my high school days and now I have just completed my second year of college and I'm in a far different stage of life than I was when I began writing here all those years ago. I think about starting a new blog, though that task seems daunting and I don't know if I'm brave enough to be faced with the job of starting all over.<br />
Recently my blog friend Beth has been writing about caring for dirt. <br />
<strong> "because isn’t that what it’s like tending to seeds before they germinate, before they sprout? You water dirt. You care for dirt."</strong><br />
That's what my life has been feeling like lately. I'm waiting and waiting for something to pop out of the darkness, for my dreams to grow and develop, and sometimes I see glimpses of something green, but in the mean time I'm caring for dirt.<br />
I just finished up my second year of college (and it was a <em>hard </em>year, but that's another post) and I'm in that in-between stage. I'm packing up my room, knowing this will be the last time I step into the dorm as a student. I'm going to job interviews and asking questions about what I want my future to look like. My relationship seems to be in an in-between stage. <br />
And I can see all of these green shoots about to poke up, and for things to come out of this darkness, but right now, in this moment, it feels a lot like tending to a pile of dirt.<br />
Its frustrating and a lot of days I end up feeling sad. I dig and dig through the dirt, trying to find the seed I planted there as reassurance that better things are coming but as deep as I dig I don't reach the seed. I'm only pulling up fistfuls of dirt. <br />
It requires faith, knowing that the seed I planted there is still there. All these things that I long for will grow. These fruits that I crave will shoot up from the ground in the form of a tiny green stalk because I planted them there. <br />
I don't know what this next little bit will look like for me. All I know is that right now I'm caring for dirt. And I have faith that the seed I have planted will grow. Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-60326795097290331732016-03-21T16:25:00.000-06:002016-03-21T16:25:19.946-06:00We're here in the first becoming days of spring, and I can already feel the itch for warmer weather, for the promise of summer and adventure and romance and days where the sun doesn't go down in the sky, taking away all elegant ramblings about beginnings and endings and giving way to a beautiful, constant hope.<br />
I've always had trouble with summer. Every year I get a little restless, a little uncomfortable, a little overwhelmed with the wide open spaces that stretch out before me, and at least for a little while I crave the comfortable confinement of winter. <br />
But in this current season I'm in, summer sounds like a relief, a promise. Because I'm having trouble with this season too. <br />
I remember someone saying to me during my first year at PRBI that you should stay in this place until you can answer these 3 questions about your faith (I don't remember what the questions were) and that this is a place where you really can't go wrong when choosing it. <br />
I kind of held to that mindset when I decided to come back for a second year. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I didn't feel totally released from PRBI yet. <br />
This year I'm calling my wilderness season. Over and over it feels like I am repeatedly being slammed into the wall. I'm constantly fighting against something. I've encountered some continued breakthroughs, but I've also been tested in ways that have made me want to crumble on multiple occasions. Everything I thought I knew about myself was shaken, whether that's a good thing or not. And I feel it now, the release. There is an itch inside me, a pulling of "You were made for more than this." <br />
I didn't ever imagine Bible college could be a wilderness place. It is supposed to be a place of richness, and growth. And yet it wasn't like that for me this year. And I'm learning to be ok with that. I'm learning the 'Bible school bubble', the exclusively Christian circle, isn't right for me right now. And that's ok. <br />
I have Isaiah 52:11-12 on my wall. It was a verse handed to me by a friend during a study I did on wilderness, and I have 3 reminders written beside it. Leave but leave empty handed. leave clean. and don't rush.<br />
And oh how I want to rush. part of me reasons that if I can change my environment, I can change my spiritual season, that once I leave this place the hard work of the desert will give way to the beautiful richness that I've been creating. But I don't think its that easy.<br />
I think that once I leave this place, there will be a different kind of hard. My mind is already filled with worries for life beyond here as I stress about finding a job and finding a way to get the training I want and making my dream job a reality. <br />
I'm learning there is still work left to be done here, as much as I want to avoid that work. There are people I need to forgive, commitments that need to be carried out, work that has to be done so that when I leave this place I can leave clean. <br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-14536834636994804752016-03-15T14:40:00.000-06:002016-03-15T14:40:01.560-06:00Showing up and telling the truth <em>"People are truth tellers. We are born to make our unknown known. We will find somewhere to do it. So in private, with the booze or the over-shopping or the alcohol or the food, we tell the truth. We say actually I’m not fine. Because we don’t feel safe telling that truth in the real world we make our own little world and that’s addiction"</em><br />
I've been thinking a lot about stories lately. In one of my classes for school I'm knee deep in research on issues like gender identity and abortion and sexual abuse and eating disorders and self injury and I'm coming to conclusions about what the church should do in these situations. And as my fellow classmates pipe up with ideas about being a light in a dark world and holding to our convictions and not tolerating sin, I feel this tiny voice stirring inside of me that says "No! That's not the way its supposed to be."<br />
There's something inside of me that doesn't sit well with creating opposing teams, creating an us and a them. Because, as Glennon Doyle Melton says, "We belong to each other."<br />
Because I've been that girl and words spoken in a classroom about what the church should be doing are great but they mean nothing when the church isn't actually rallying around the people who are struggling, regardless of their sin, regardless of the nature of their addiction, regardless of their degree of 'not ok.'<br />
Maybe this is a different story, or maybe its all part of the same story, but I don't feel called to be here anymore. Here being Bible College. Here being surrounded by Christians and the church. And its not that I don't love people that love Jesus. It's that I see Jesus in the eyes of the transgendered teen. When I look into the face of a baby at the women's shelter I volunteer at, I feel like I am looking at the face of God. When a teen tells me her story of living with an eating disorder or having been abused, I feel like I am being ushered into something sacred. And its not to say that all of those issues don't exist within the church. They do, we churchy folks are just better at putting on masks and pretending they only exist for people out there. <br />
I've decided I'm one of the people out there. I'm tired of putting on the 'I'm fine' mask and not telling the truth out loud. <br />
<em>“I want to be outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, second-chance givers, the radical grace lavishers, the ones with arms wide open, the courageously vulnerable, and among even—or maybe especially—the ones rejected by the Table as not worthy enough or right enough.”</em><br />
I've been telling the truth. Just not out loud. I remember a moment a few months ago when I was in the middle of an episode where I found it hard to breathe and I texted my boyfriend the words 'I'm not ok.' <br />
It was the first time I had ever admitted it out loud, to another person.<br />
I write cryptically about how messed up I am, partly because I write naturally poetic and have a love for metaphors, and partly because I am afraid of my own darkness.<br />
So I tell the truth in other ways. I tell it through a codependency addiction. I tell it through food, in a way that looks to outsiders like doing what my disordered body wants to do to survive but is really, underneath all the layers, a really neat and tidy form of disordered eating. I tell the truth through excessive time spent on technology.<br />
In all of these things I tell the truth that I'm not ok. <br />
I relate more to the addicts, the prostitutes, the bruised and battered. I understand their cry. At least they aren't pretending they are ok. <br />
Part of deciding to be sober means I have to find new ways to tell the truth now. I thought beginning to figure out my life would be easy, but it turns out being sober gives me a clear head to think of all the things I was avoiding in the first place, and makes me want to go back to avoiding them again. <br />
So I'm being honest. I'm not ok. I'm a mess actually. I'm a recovering everything and I have a lot of issues, as it turns out, with relationships and love and sex and being angry and I'm terrified every single moment of every single day that I am going to screw up this thing that I have now. And I'm trying to tell the truth but I find I encounter things like other people and expectations of who I feel I'm supposed to be and I don't know how to let go of those yet. I'm not ok, but that's ok. Because I'm showing up anyway, and I'm trying my best every single day to be present and feel things and live from a place of freedom rather than fear.<br />
Maybe you're there too. Maybe you're tired of not telling the truth about your life out loud. It's a scary thing - why do you think I spent so long avoiding it? Actually being present in my life and sober is terrifying. People talk about how great it is all the time and encourage you to get sober and feel your feelings and embrace your life, but they don't talk about how hard it is. I thought it would be easy. But its not. I'm showing up anyway.<br />
If you want to show up and tell your truth, there's room for you here. I'll create space for you. I'm on your side, regardless of what side that is. On second thought, I hate sides so I'll just say this: We belong to each other. I've got you, friend. <br />
Let's start showing up<br />
<em>"I like to compare God's love to the sunrise. The sun shows up every morning, no matter how bad you've been the night before. It shines without judgment. It never withholds. It warms the sinners, the saints, the druggies, the cheerleaders - the saved and the heathens alike. You can hide from the sun but it won't take that personally. It'll never, ever punish you for hiding. You can stay in the dark for years or decades and when you finally step outside, it'll be there for you. It was there the whole time, shining and shining. It'll still be there, steady and bright as ever, just waiting for you to notice, to come out and be warmed." </em> Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-81675737128158156562016-02-18T20:38:00.000-07:002016-02-18T20:38:47.493-07:00I can do hard things I've been doing some hard things lately.<br />
This subtle shift of empowerment happened at the beginning of this month. Last month was an emotional rollercoaster. I got sick, spent a few days in the hospital, started school for my second semester but really had no idea why I was here or if I even wanted to be here, and my relationship began to crumble on unstable ground. I needed something to make me feel strong, like myself again.<br />
So in the beginning of February, I started a holy yoga challenge called #loveisourasana. I did a challenge in August, and fell in love. And this challenge was no different. I fell face first into my fearless tribe. I got heartbreakingly honest about the real life shit going on in my life. And I tested out some new postures.<br />
It wasn't easy. 90% of the poses were ones I had looked at other people doing when I first started my yoga practice a few years ago and thought "I couldn't do that." Mid way through the challenge I faced some conflict that I thought could have been strong enough to break me. It brought me face down in my own brokenness. For a while it made me bitter and angry. But then something shifted.<br />
I remember encountering this one pose - one that I looked at and laughed, sure that even now I wouldn't be able to execute it. And then I tried it. And it sucked. I didn't get the posture right and I fell flat on my face. But I posted the picture anyway, with a comment that posting this picture was my act of defiance against all the voices in my head that said I couldn't do it, and maybe I couldn't do this exact (insanely hard) pose yet but that didn't mean I would never be able to do it.<br />
And the next time a hard pose came around, one that I was trying to argue my way out of doing, I tried it again, this time with more success. And the next time, and the next time, and by the end of the challenge I was doing poses I was sure I couldn't do. And maybe they didn't look perfect but I was showing up. Messy and scared and unsure and humbled every time I stepped foot on my mat and broken I was showing up and I was doing the poses and sometimes they looked horrible but in the doing of the poses, I found my brave.<br />
I've been working on telling the truth. It started during the challenge, when I shared my struggle with codependency. It's something that's always been there for me, but something I never had a name for until a friend described her struggle with it and something clicked in my brain. Admitting that, admitting that there is this thing, this addiction that I have and its ruining my relationships and my life was terrifying. But it opened the door for new kinds of honesty. I finally shared the <a href="http://mercymiracle.blogspot.ca/2016/02/what-good-woman-does.html" target="_blank">blog post</a> I've been hiding away for months, never quite feeling brave enough to share my messy story with the world (still feeling a vulnerability hangover from that one.) I confronted some people in the name of love, people who didn't need me enabling them anymore. I got honest with myself, that I'm not as fine as I think I am, that most days I just walk around scared to death, and I shared that with some people that I love. And just today I was able to share a <a href="https://www.smartpatients.com/stories/an-open-letter-to-my-doctor/" target="_blank">brutally honest post</a> I wrote in a 2am fear induced insomnia episode on smartpatients.com, with a world of patients and doctors and med students, and to begin to change the way we look at medicine using the vessel of story telling (I could write a whole post about that though. Working with Roni and his team was such a dream come true. For now I say go read it. Go read my heart for the future of medicine). <br />
I'm facing down the truth about what I believe and why and how what I've been taught fits into the whole story of my life and it is ripping me apart. <br />
So why am I writing all this? Because through all this - the yoga challenge and the honesty and the writing - I learned I can do hard things. I have this incredible sense of bravery and power inside of me, flowing in me and through me. For the first time in a long time I believe I am brave, and I believe I am powerful, and I have a strong knowing that I can do hard things. <br />
Tonight I went to the gym (working out is killing my abs but so good for my soul) and I did that pose, the one I was so afraid to attempt, the one that I did face flat on the floor through tears in the middle of brokenness that ended up looking terrible. I did it, and I did it with so much better than I ever thought I could do it. <br />
I keep showing up. And things change. And things happen. And that, I think, is where real bravery and power lie. Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-8353314785511366182016-02-17T15:08:00.000-07:002016-02-17T15:08:13.874-07:00What a Good Woman Does<em>This post has been sitting in my drafts folder since I wrote it last summer. It always felt too big, too messy, too vulnerable to share. It still feels that way. But I'm learning I don't want to die buried under the secrets that are crushing me. I've spent too long trying not to rock the boat, denying myself in order to do what I thought (think?) was necessary to keep the peace. Shame can't thrive once its spoken, and I have decided I'm not ashamed of my story anymore. This quote from Glennon Doyle Melton confirmed things for me. This is no longer my secret to carry. Its not yours either. But maybe some things need to be said so they can just get out there and breathe. Maybe this is a mistake, but maybe, just maybe, its the beginning of long awaited freedom.</em><br />
<em>...</em><br />
<em>"Don't you think there are some things you should take to the grave?" I thought hard for a moment and said, "No, I really don't. That sounds horrible to me. I don't want to take anything to the grave. I want to die used up and emptied out. I don't want to carry around anything that I don't have to. I want to travel light."</em><br />
<em>...</em><br />
<br />
<em>It's like a story, one that only makes sense if you start at the
beginning. Problem is, I don't remember my beginning. It's like a black hole in
my memory. I can feel the fuzzy edges but what's inside it escapes me.</em><o:p></o:p><br />
<em>...</em><o:p></o:p><br />
I grew up in a paper hospital. Welcoming death and life in split seconds, I
existed neither fully dead not fully alive. Each animalistic howl and fiber of
pain medicated, drawn into submission by drugs and chemicals with names like
Lexapro and Zofran. In this paper hospital, so minimized and contained in
comparison to the outside world, kept safe and sterile in here as opposed to
the germs, the danger of out there, I learned how not to trust my body. My
body, inferior in and of itself, slipped under the hold of modern medicine. Now
I'm grateful for modern medicine for without it I wouldn't be alive. Without it
I wouldn't be one of the inbetweeners, existing halfway inside and half out,
but very much fully dead. But modern medicine, the drugs, the interventions,
the machines keeping me alive since my first moment of life, the constant
scrutiny of my body by those who had gone through years of books and lectures
to be told they knew my body better than I did, they took something from me. In
exchange for keeping my halfways life, they taught me how not to trust myself
and my body.<o:p></o:p><br />
...<o:p></o:p><br />
<em>"There was an ache at this site as old as the world"</em><o:p></o:p><br />
I plant myself on the grassy earth to feel connected to something. The
vibrations in my body - what my sister is calling my bad aura - pick up on the
frequencies around me and as I melt into the grass I feel a connectedness to
every being who has ever lived that steadies me. Maybe its the hippie in me
that feels secure in the arms of what the mystics call mother earth, soothed by
all the death and life that has existed in this grass and under this sky. Maybe
its the poet in me that believes I have so many untold stories inside me. Maybe
this full ache inside me I'm trying to write out has existed inside the roar of
many women. Maybe the earth reminds me of this. Of the holy hum, of the
connectedness that rises up from my trauma, that we're all just vibrating off
of each other. <o:p></o:p><br />
...<o:p></o:p><br />
It was April, maybe. Spring, but still greyish, muddy piles
of snow on the ground. I don’t remember how old I was. It feels like forever
ago. It feels like yesterday. It was a game – truth or dare, because the boys
didn’t want to play ‘would you rather.’ I felt small and inferior, an outsider
because I was a girl, so I went along with it. I don’t remember what happened
first. I’ve imagined it in different ways – more or less horrific in exact
correlation with my mood. I remember, though, the exact moment it started.<br />
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…<o:p></o:p></div>
The next month’s come in bits and pieces. Like a collage, a
hazy flashback movie scene. Spreading apart skin, shaking hands curling around
body parts. His hands pressing down on my hips, my shoulders feeling more
intimacy with concrete. A blanket fort in the basement of my grandparents’
house, my bed, his bed, the old chicken coop, the playhouse, under the blue
sky. Again and again. Not just a game but a given. Not asking but demanding. <o:p></o:p><br />
“Turn around, let me see.” I became only good for my
“private parts.” <br />
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…<o:p></o:p></div>
I held my breath. In the moments of his hands on my skin and
in the ones that followed. He stole the air from my lungs, the voice from
within, the fire in my belly, the softness from my face. Or maybe I gave them
up in surrender, in fear. I stopped breathing, stopped moving, stopped living.
The word ‘Spirit’ in Hebrew means breath, life force. I lost my spirit and I
couldn’t even cry for myself. <o:p></o:p><br />
I held my breath in the moment the curious, unwelcome hands
of a boy touched my softest skin. I froze. Even my inhales and exhales felt
like they belonged to him when I let them exist. So I stopped. I held my
breath. Still I haven’t managed to release it.<br />
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…<o:p></o:p></div>
It was a good number of months later before I breathed a
word of it to a living soul. I just…forgot. The brain, as a protective measure,
doesn’t let you remember the memory and I don’t remember what I did in those
months. I wasn’t going to bring it up, ever. <o:p></o:p><br />
When she asked me if
he’d ever touched me, I lied about the damaged done. I immediately regretted
telling. I felt like no one would ever understand. It was my secret. Telling
it, I soon realized, was in and of itself a powerful act. <br />
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…</div>
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I got my first period on a camping trip. I bled through
everything. I had awful cramps. I bled out my innocence, my girlhood. <o:p></o:p></div>
A miscarriage is, by definition, an unsuccessful outcome of
something, a failure, a collapse, an undoing. That word felt so exact for what
I felt was happening to me. I named it after the season of abuse and mourned it
furiously. Something died within me. <br />
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…<o:p></o:p></div>
People believed him. It was dealt with quickly and quietly,
no one asking me how I felt. My rights as the victim were constantly denied. I
felt unentitled to my feelings. I learned that the only person I could trust
was myself. Still the sacred act of telling became like an epidemic. <o:p></o:p><br />
I told everyone, not
only to see their reactions to my horrific news but because the act of telling
became therapeutic for me. By saying it over and over, I could manipulate the
telling of the story so it didn’t sound so bad. I liked the attention I got.
Maybe I told because for me it didn’t feel real. Maybe I kept trying to justify
and explain it to myself. The act of telling became more about me and my
perceived inadequacies and failures than it was about what I was telling.<o:p></o:p><br />
…<br />
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I swallowed God and religion back at age 11. And perhaps it
was that lack of fulfillment, that mania from pursing my addiction without
constant and consistent relief that turned me off from God.<o:p></o:p></div>
The other addictions are easier to pin point, each
accurately reflecting my growing self-hatred and desperation. <o:p></o:p><br />
The days when I crumbled at the sight of a sandwich,
counting calories, the razor blade, the pills, the porn, the men. Each boy,
each drug, each behavior, they were all attempts to numb the strong anger I
felt. My life became a survival act. My addictions, however destructive,
centered around survival.<br />
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…<o:p></o:p></div>
My life became dependent on the idea that I could make
myself feel (and not feel) things. I got fat. I got skinny. I cut my hair. I
cut my thighs. I flirted with strange boys. I poisoned myself. I threw up. I
isolated. I tried to die. My body needed to be punished. I couldn’t trust it.
All the feelings I felt were transferred to and inflicted upon my body. The
pain, the sadness, the anger, it was all kept inside my body. I needed to
release it, purge what he’d done to my body, or it would kill me.<o:p></o:p><br />
I wasn’t an addict because it felt good. I wasn’t an addict
because I loved getting high, or being an emotional rag doll, or inflicting
pain. I was an addict because I don’t know how not to be. My body didn’t feel
like a body anymore and I needed to feel it again. I was attached to no one,
tethered to nothing. I wasn’t a soul or a person or even just a body. I was an
‘it’. And I learned you can only wander around empty for so long before you
collapse. When a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to see it, does
it make a sound?<o:p></o:p><br />
I am a tree.<br />
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…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
I wonder what the secret formula to thriving as an abuse
survivor is. Or are we all just lost souls, gorging ourselves on our own
leftover remains as if our bodies were the thanksgiving feast?</div>
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…<o:p></o:p></div>
He’d been killed in a car accident. Killed, not died, taking
away any immediate speculation that he’d done it on purpose.<o:p></o:p><br />
I fell to my knees on my purple yoga mat and howled.
Something inside of me snapped. My body held together by the surviving act of
hatred died. My heart formerly beating cold nearly stopped, freezing over. My
thoughts were an ever changing contradiction. <o:p></o:p><br />
Relief, then howling. Love, hate. Missing him and seconds
later it would all come rushing back and I hated myself for my grief. When I
left that room, my grief took on everyone else's. They told me how to feel. He
was dead so no one spoke ill of him. I convinced myself it was true, that he
was a great guy. What happened had been a mistake, that’s all. I loved him. His
death revictimized me and I ran from it.<br />
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…<o:p></o:p></div>
The dead boy couldn’t possibly be a monster. I called it a
judgment error, a lapse in reason. It was a mistake, not abuse. I’d been so
close, so connected to him. I should feel honored. <o:p></o:p><br />
When the air inside the grief house got unbearably dense, I
retreated outside. The air was cold, the snow hauntingly beautiful. I made it a
few feet down the driveway before I collapsed. Inside, the strings of me
snapped. <o:p></o:p><br />
I felt left, abandoned, neglected. All of a sudden the world
felt too big for me. All of the feelings inside of me were like a waterfall,
rising only to plunge to their death, never to be seen again. I screamed over
and over, “Dear God” and “I’m sorry”, “I love you” and “Come back.” I would
have done anything. The feeling of being separated was so profound and vast. <o:p></o:p><br />
I prayed for
forgiveness repeatedly. Like I’d caused his death. Like I’d plunged a knife
into his chest. And maybe I had. Maybe I had by keeping his secret and playing
his game. I didn’t know any better then but in that moment it felt like an
admission of guilt. <br />
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…<o:p></o:p></div>
When I saw his body, so pale and lifeless, I ran to the
bathroom and threw up. I’ve spent the past 2 years running.<br />
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…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
I went to a concert tonight my friend put on in a coffee
shop. As he sang I looked around me. I held in my hand the hand of the man I
love. I’m surrounded by so much love and hope and creativity and light. So much
of what I’m only now learning is possible. I’ve spent so long running, numbing,
constricting, isolating, denying, punishing. I spent so many years dressed in
shame, wearing it like a monogrammed robe. “My name is…”<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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But that, all this, isn’t the end of the story. Today, this
love, that is how I have decided my story will end.</div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(You can find the song this post was named after <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZmqo9FGHlo" target="_blank">here)</a></span></div>
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-53637602463720252782016-01-26T15:47:00.000-07:002016-01-26T15:47:15.938-07:00<em>It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way -- and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it.</em><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve held the belief for a good number of years that the
rigid eating patterns surrounding GSD were similar to the rigid eating patterns
of an eating disorder.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
If you asked, I could quite easily tell you a list of "good" and "bad" foods. I remember the early days of not eating, of sticker charts on the fridge and for every meal consumed I got another sticker on the chart, and when I got to a certain number I got a treat. It was a desperate attempt to get me to eat something, and yet it was possibly the beginnings of my issues with food.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
I remember the exact day I started eating. People praised me for it. "Look at you," They would say, "Guess you finally just wanted to be like the other kids. I can tell people there's hope." But for me eating wasn't about being like the other kids. It was about control. Some people stop eating to feel in control and I started. There were times I would wait for my parents to leave just so I could sneak forbidden snacks out of the pantry. I remember the time I cried in front of a turkey and mayo sandwich. I knew exactly how many grams of carbohydrate and protein I should be eating at each meal, and became skilled at calculating in my head the exact number I should be eating. I hid fitness magazines under my bed, idolizing the skinny models with flat stomachs, free from g-tubes and scars. And still they called me a victory. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
I also remember the day I stopped eating. The memories stored in my body became too painful. And in a way, it was an act of giving up. No more food, no more mental agony, no more sickness. I felt like a dog who had curled up under a tree to die. I looked at pictures of food on pinterest with envy. I admired the foodies. But for me, food had lost its joy. It had become just another thing that sucked the life out of me. It was always a means to an end, never being able to eat simply to feel pleasure. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<em>We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel</em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
Recently, with my current health issues, I've had to readdress the way I relate to food, and to myself. I knew as I began to work through the things I was hearing and processing that I wanted to write about it, but the moment I sat down to put pen to paper my hands began to shake. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
I remember long car rides where I would imagine addressing a room full of people about this issue. I would say that food can be healing, that its not the enemy, that just as important as physical aliveness is mental wellness. I would speak to them as if I had overcome this issue and made some ground breaking discovery. Which leads me to the realization that even at a young age, I knew there was something wrong with the way I was relating to food, and that I still had the small spark of desire in me to fix it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<em>And.. are you willing to go all the way? To understand that food is only a stand-in for love and possibility and spirit? Because if you aren't, you will get caught up in gaining and losing weight for the rest of your life. But if you are willing, then the portal to what you say you want is truly on your plate</em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
What I really want is passion, and pleasure, romance and adventure. What I really want is a life of spontaneity and indulgence. And I live in a body that feels as if it has robbed me of all of these things. It is a demanding time keeper. I say I have all these issues surrounding food, and what I mean to say if I feel controlled by this force that is both me and not me. There is no joy, no marvel, no intense flavour when I sit down to eat. There is forced, coerced nutrition lacking vibrancy and zest and life. There are rules, and white powders, and necessities. And at times I think this way of relating to food is enough to kill me. It is enough to make me feel uneasy in my body time and time again. It is enough to make me feel separate from myself. When I say food, I mean this illness. Funny how in my mind they have merged into the same thing. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<em>At some point, it's time to stop fighting with death, my thighs and the way things are. And to realize that emotional eating in nothing but bolting from multiple versions of the above: the obsession will stop when the bolting stops. And at that point, we might answer, as spiritual teacher Catherine Ingram did, when someone asked how she allowed herself to tolerate deep sorrow, "I live among the brokenhearted. They allow it" </em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
</div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">quotes from Geneen Roth </span>Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-88416752098590723962016-01-25T15:59:00.000-07:002016-01-25T15:59:07.998-07:00Fragile HopeThis morning I got out of class early enough to watch the sun rise over the trees as I practiced yoga. Last night I stood around a fire with some of my friends and we told scary stories and laughed until our toes froze and then after I crawled into bed with friends and we read books and listened to accordion music on an old cassette tape. A few days ago I crawled into bed wearing only a bright red, extremely oversized mickey mouse tee shirt I stole from my dad and wouldn't get rid of, knowing that I had saved this shirt for an occasion such as this one, and that perhaps that was my little girl heart refusing to give up on a dream that was now, in the most unlikely of ways, becoming a reality.<br />
I've been thinking for a few days how to write about this part of my life. I spent months in the thick of illness, the rough middle of grief. Life felt like survival, where every action was focused only on keeping me alive and everything narrowed, like a funnel, all pouring into this one thing.<br />
And then there is the magical moment when the treatment begins working. I'm a bit hesitant to write out the word <em>hopeful</em> but I am. For the first time in months, with this new schedule and new drugs and my ability to remain stable for longer than 24 hours, I feel hopeful. <br />
This hope I feel, though, is also dark. It's bright but the light hurts my eyes. At times it is overwhelming. And I wonder what to do with this, as I have emerged from the woods, rubbing my eyes as they adjust to the light and banging the mud off my boots and smoothing out the tears in my clothes, left with only the scars from the battle. <br />
I've learned to operate under extreme amounts of stress (albeit not well) and the changing in that pattern has left me feeling almost empty. I don't know what to do with this space inside of me. On one hand it thrills me, and on the other it leaves chills running up and down my spine. <br />
And are there even words to convey this hopefulness right alongside the intense fear and sadness and grief that still remains? There is this bright new thing unfolding before me, but still when I close my eyes or when I run my fingers across my skin there are scars from what previously unfurled. <br />
I am more aware of it now, like walking with a limp. I was writing an email to a friend today and I realized I can't very well recount the purely scientific details of what happened without feeling emotional. I feel the weight of it on my shoulders still. People ask me how I am and I can only say I'm improving, because I am, but there is no language to convey the state of my heart.<br />
How at times the realization of everything that happened feels like it will suffocate me. How sometimes I still feel sad. How I always feel this empty space inside of me now, and how it will take time for that to become my new normal. How I am still trying to recalculate how I feel in this environment and in this body. How I still feel small, and fragile, and vulnerable, like I need to cling tightly to the people and things around me because if I let go for even one minute, I will drown here. <br />
I am hopeful, yes, but it feels as if even that is made out of glass. Fragile. <br />
<br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-35963647271133139702016-01-22T14:49:00.003-07:002016-01-22T14:49:41.634-07:00the animalThere are days when this whole thing feels primal. I write in metaphors, but only metaphors about a wolf with a thorn in its paw, how my first reaction is always that with a degree of ferocity, that my hands shake and my head spins and it takes me back to this place inside of myself that I can't control with reason, or logic. It is the deepest part of me, the most animalistic and raw, the most untamed and wild.<br />
<em>There is an ache at this site as old as the world</em><br />
For a sense of overall well being, it has been said that people need to feel safe in their bodies. I heard this line in an interview I was listening to with Bessel Van der Kolk, who researches trauma and the effects of traumatic stress on individuals, and it took my breath away. I was on my way home from the hospital, after an encounter lasting months on end that had left me feeling unsafe and assaulted within my own body. I have been searching for all of those long months for language to describe this. <br />
Trauma is stored in the body, and at times, if I sit very still, I can feel the roots of what is happening to and in my body in trauma. It is a traumatic relationship with my own body, and I lack the words to explain what this means for me, and the ripple effect it is creating in my life.<br />
How is it possible to feel traumatized by one's own body? And yet because of this experience, I have begun to recognize myself as separate from my body. I feel separate from this skin, as if it is only a vessel that houses my being. There are days, more often than I would like to admit, that I feel trapped by it. The fact that there is so much immediately surrounding the core of my being that is out of my control is terrifying. At its best, it is primal and animalistic and messy and loud, full of shrieking and roars and midnight howls. I have become an animal. <br />
There are also times when I feel a distinct partnership with my body, but still then my efforts to relate to it are as if I was relating to another being outside myself. <br />
I think that's the hardest part about illness, or particularly my illness in my body. It separates me from myself. I am both myself and not myself. I am trapped within myself, unable to recognize this body as part of me and unable to control it. It moves and acts of its own accord. <br />
This primal noise escapes whenever I open my mouth, the scream that trauma built. <br />
I have been known to participate in things that bring me back to my body, to a sense of feeling. Yoga, meditation, kissing, touching another person however innocently, even holding my own hands, music and sounds and words, a desperate search for anything that makes me feel remotely human again. <br />
That's another thing illness stole from me: the ability to be human. I have become this creature, this other. My blood sugar rises and falls like the tides, seemingly defiant to every attempt at getting it under control. I sleep (or I don't) and I eat (my body relentlessly greedy in the pursuit of nourishment) and all of these things happen separate of emotion, perhaps leaving no room for emotion, and when the earth gets still I can feel the animalistic core. <br />
Sometimes I write just to hear the sound of my own voice.<br />
I look in mirrors to make sure I still exist. <br />
I feel like an animal, acting out things that are so primal and basic, eating and sleeping and forcing nutrients into this body that I am helpless to control, that acts as it wills without warning. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-1837328483583540202016-01-19T17:15:00.002-07:002016-01-19T17:15:41.088-07:00It has been in the last few days that I have really begun to sift through the layers of trauma that have built themselves a home in my body. I had grand ambitions of sitting here and writing out where I've been over the last number of weeks (it seems that trauma gives me an unquenchable thirst to write) and yet sitting before the computer screen, my fingers moving over the keys, all I feel is inadequate to handle such a task. <br />
I wrote an update letter to my friend today, beginning it with "These are just the facts, someday I'll be able to tell you the emotional side of this story." And that's how I feel. I feel like these moments are very much about my acute, physical need and that to begin to dig through the emotional trauma buried beneath the physical would be too big a task. <br />
I have a file on my phone, thoughts and bits of wisdom from doctors and friends and random things I heard that I have been meaning to sit and work through, and yet I sit here unable to begin to dissect any of the layers of this traumatic experience.<br />
In a recent interview Andrea Gibson did, she talked about how there was something quite freeing in speaking to an audience while she was onstage at a poetry slam and saying exactly what she was feeling. If she was anxious, or nervous, or afraid she spoke it from the stage. <br />
And as I begin to try and sort through this mess the only way I know how, I must begin with what I am feeling, if I can put words to such a thing.<br />
I am afraid. I feel vulnerable in the sense that I have been stripped bare, that so much of my life in these days has been displayed for the world and it able to be judged, or commented on, and there are so many varying opinions on what I should do that I have forgotten the sound of my own heart. Or bigger yet is the idea that I picked up that my heart is not something to be trusted. <br />
I returned back to normal life after a short hospital stay (one for which I had high hopes that went unmet, that illuminated just how big and scary and unknowable this diagnosis is) and upon returning was brutally thrust into people and conversations and inquiries. I should be grateful for this as it is a sign of care but in moments it feels intrusive and blinding. I am grateful for the concern and love from those around me and yet I need time to orientate myself with the world once again, and not the old ways that I once inhabited but this new way of living. I want to wrap those I love around me and sink into warmth, huddling together against the storm. And the lack of this, despite care being given, feels cold and at times cruel. <br />
I find myself hopeful in spurts. The hope of a new treatment, a new possibility leaves me feeling comfortable only to have the small thread of hope cut with each failed possibility. There is grief that exists in crevices I have not yet been able to reach alongside the raw emotion that spills out without warning and while at times I want to feel the bulk of this thing that is happening to me I am also grateful for self preservation. The brain's job is to protect the body, and while the physical ailments (relentless as they are) don't seem to be able to be contained, my brain is protecting this small thing. the feeling of grief existing inside my body is new, heavy and uncomfortable, and at times I want to collapse under the weight of it. It is a mysterious thing to not feel safe within your own body. <br />
And still this trauma doesn't only affect me. I see it in lines on the faces of those I love. In a way I feel entitled to that grief, want to roar when someone mentions it as their own, and at the same time I feel helpless to prevent its rippling. <br />
As I was driving home last night after a crash, feeling the weight of all I have lost, I thought that anything would be better than this. Give me an illness for which there is knowledge, give me physical pain, give me heartache. and yet if we saw the problems of others, we would long for our own. and yet, with hearing the story of a friend's grief today, I realized that grief, while a solitary thing, is collective. <br />
I wonder if I begin to speak these words, if I can rattle the chains of the trauma. Perhaps this - what I am feeling- will begin to tell the story not only of physical medicine but of narrative medicine, of grief, of the human condition. <br />
this summer I went through an intensive process of re-learning how to love myself. grief in and of itself is because of love. I wonder, even if I don't feel the roots of love right now, if this feeling and telling and grieving isn't also a part of loving myself. <br />
<em>"I was made to breathe and move and give, which is to say love. love. I was made to love."</em> Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-13384597990933314282016-01-11T09:36:00.001-07:002016-01-11T09:36:17.175-07:00I believe you<em>"I'd love a 5 minute spoken word poem that said 'I believe you' over and over."</em><br />
There are the dark, ugly things inside. The things people don't talk about. The things I don't talk about because it feels like this soft, fragile outer shell and I am afraid even one wrong move will crack its gentle interior.<br />
I used to write openly and perhaps what some would define as bravely about my struggle with chronic illness. But the bold days of undiagnosed (where I had to write to give this thing a voice and the only other option was to be suffocated by it) have faded into these days of knowing exactly what this monster is lurking inside your body but being unable to fight it because it is both in you and of you, and I of it. <br />
Some days I am wildly accepting of this truth in my life. I accept that my illness has created this order, even if it looks like chaos to me, and that rather than rage against what I cannot change I must find the courage to embrace it. I accept that some parts of my body look different than others, the same way leaves on the trees are different shades of green and yellow and red, and yet we do not yell at the tree for having such colors. There are days when I can settle in with my breath, in this body, when I can whisper to every single cell in my being, "Show me what you have to teach me today."<br />
Those are my becoming days. It is on those days I feel strong, feel like I am doing this whole life with chronic illness thing right. <br />
But there is no guidebook on living life with a chronic, genetic illness that is both in you and of you and at times feels like it has it's hands around your throat. And I am not always accepting of this reality.<br />
There are days when the anger inside me bubbles up, and I cannot contain its strength. I am angry at this body, at myself for not protecting myself from this unknown invasion, at my emotions for daring to feel the heavy brunt of this load, at the world around me and the sun for daring to shine and people for daring to smile and my friends for talking about skating on frozen ponds and crushes while I am confined to life inside this body. <br />
I suffer from the need to be near to people, find myself clinging to their warmth and security when I feel I cannot muster up my own. The ones closest to me, I turn their bodies into blankets and pray it will keep me from this oncoming storm. <br />
And I am afraid. I am so afraid and I wonder how it is that I can be afraid of myself. There are times in the night when I wake, my breath caught in my throat, unable to think or make a noise, unable to escape from living inside my head. The night is worse, when panic runs wild and I cannot distract myself with the regularities of the day.<br />
There is sadness too, the kind that makes me want to stay in bed all day with the covers over my head. Because my life has changed drastically and sometimes I am unable to cope with everything I have lost. I at times feel hysterical (though according to Eve Ensler, "Hysteria is a word to make women feel insane for knowing what they know.")<br />
It is a world I don't expect anyone to understand, one I don't even understand myself. And yet I feel as though I have to defend my right to live in it. With no one around me understanding the depths of this, I must scream out my own feelings and fight my own battles and find courage to keep getting back up and daring to live life in a world that has repeatedly assaulted me over and over again even when I feel there is no courage, and at times I feel too small an animal to handle these tasks.<br />
It is lonely, in this neck of the woods.<br />
When I heard these words from the poet Andrea Gibson this morning, tears pricked my eyes. How wonderful it is to know that another soul on this planet has felt, and desires, the same things I have and do. They are the words I long to hear, as my hands shake and the emotions cover and I am gasping for air and sense in this maddening world. And as I crave them deeply, I say them back to a world that has not given me them as many times as it should have: "I believe you, I believe you, I believe you." Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-24892233846116904552015-12-31T16:13:00.003-07:002015-12-31T16:13:44.055-07:002015I sit down to write another year in review, and it seems nearly impossible that a whole year has gone by. How drastically my life has changed in this turning of the calendar year. For the past few years on this day, as the world waits with held breath for the new year and a fresh start, I sat dreading the year that was to come. Now, for the first time in a long time, I wait with anticipation for 2016. <br />
2015 was a good year. It marked the end of my first year at college, and the beginning of my second. It was in January of 2015 that I got my first tattoo, and in December of this year that I got my second and third. <br />
On a magical day in January a handsome, charming and sometimes insanely awkward young man asked me to be his girlfriend, and I said yes. It wasn't until he left for the summer to go back to Calgary that I realized I loved him. Loving him is one of the craziest, most beautiful things I have ever done, and I don't regret a single minute.<br />
In July of this year, I walked into a room filled with 80 odd strangers, and walked out with those strangers being my family. It was in these days spent at Choices that I got my ass kicked, literally and figuratively. I saw all the ways in my life that I choose others and neglect myself. I stared down my past, and the things I wish I could run away from. I danced, wild and free, for the first time in my life and it was beautiful. I began to believe that what I say matters, that I am beautiful and loved and strong. I learned about how to relate to the world around me, and how to create a little bit more of what I want in life. I could talk forever about the changes in my life since that moment, but what I do know is that I will never stop being grateful for my Choices family. I am a free woman, creating a space of sacred love.<br />
It was also during the heat of the summer months that I participated in my first yoga challenge: #thisisagoodbody. It was a deep, brave venture into loving myself. It was scary, and at times I would have rather done anything than write out my soul and express the deep rooted issues I had with my body. But the work I did then was the beginning of something wonderful. I realized the work of saying this is a good body didn't end when the yoga challenge did. Now, as I face uncertain health issues, it is more of a struggle than ever to look in the mirror at my own self and say that this is a good body. And yet it is such important work, the kind that starts movements. I look at the little girls in my life - the ones I spent the summer playing princesses with and eating watermelon and laughing - and I don't ever want them to know the feeling of criticizing or hating your body. And so I do the hard work for them, and for me. Because freedom is worth it, friends. I am learning that.<br />
The big moments are also peppered with smaller moments, smaller victories but none the less important and beautiful. It was the year I wrote a beautiful collection of essays over the summer, work that I am so proud of. I witnessed the birth of my cousin's baby (on my birthday none the less). I also said goodbye to some very loved people. I learned how to be on my own, which taught me many lessons about myself and where I fit in the world and womanhood and the kind of life I would like to have someday. I began telling my story, the one I have kept locked away for so long for various reasons and even now the telling of makes my voice shake but it is a story that has lived without a voice for far too long. <br />
And in the midst of all the beautiful, there was pain too. There were (are) moments when my health is unstable, and it takes strength I don't know if I have to keep fighting. Coming face to face with my past, while beautiful, illuminated some things it would have been easier to keep in the dark. There was the moment when I realized love was a powerful enough force to gut me. As I walked into my second year of college, I met situations that had the power to shred me if I let them, and resulted in many tears, much frustration, anxiety attacks, and showed me more of what I don't want in life. This year while I laughed loudly, I cried in equal volume. I danced, but I also grieved. I spoke boldly, but there were also moments when it felt like my voice had been taken from me and all I could do was howl in mourning. I lived, and yet there were moments I thought that I would die. I loved, but I lost.<br />
And all of it has brought me here, heaving and panting, to the finish line, to December 31, 2015. <br />
When the clock strikes midnight, a new year will have arrived, with new memories waiting to be made. More tears, more laughter, more joys, more sorrows, more victories, more failures. And yet when the clock strikes midnight, I will still be the same person I was in this year. The memories I have and the things I've done will carry over. <br />
It's nice to think about new beginnings, but to be honest I don't want one this year. I don't want a clean slate, a fresh start. I just want to move forward, another chapter, filled with more. <br />
Welcome here, 2016. I've been waiting for you.<br />
Thank you, 2015. You've served me well. <br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5377422913255391539.post-79767400986288746662015-12-16T17:14:00.001-07:002015-12-16T17:14:29.058-07:00Joy with teeth It's taken me this long to sit down to write a piece about joy, and I still don't have the words to say.<br />
I don't have it in me to write about the soft platitudes of joy, the sun rising behind the clouds, the nights that turn into morning.<br />
There are days, like now, when the pain of life feels so thick I can barely move through it.<br />
Death crowds in close. Pain is my constant companion, and instability keeps me up all night. I am functioning in a sort of daze, never quite having a good grip on reality. <br />
I have become unwelcome friends with anxiety, with the fear that grips the heart, the slow moving hour hand of the clock, with tears that seem to permanently stain my cheeks. <br />
I am hunched over like the old and sick, grasping for oxygen, still trying to curl my fingers around hope and peace, the parts of advent I can relate to. <br />
My heart is cloaked in too much heavy sorrow to understand joy. And I realize that in a time like this, I don't need the gentle, bubbly character of joy like the one who lights up the TV screen. I need joy with teeth.<br />
I need joy with grit, with fire, with fierce determination. <br />
I am grasping for the strings of joy that are found in the little things: in hugs and the frost glistening in the sunlight on the trees and inside jokes and the reminders that I'm not alone.<br />
Joy is stubborn, hanging in there despite every reason to fade into nothing, being found in the most unlikely of places if only I look for it.<br />
It is in the ugly beautiful, the breaking open, the rawness of this season. <br />
Joy doesn't feel like it used to. Joy is rough around the edges, gasping as it is birthed into this world. It is this bloody mess, this screaming thing, and yet it is there, and it begs to be noticed in the tiny details. <br />
Joy is here, here too. Joy with ferocity and grit and teeth and fire. I'd rather the simple Hallmark greeting card joy over this kind that is laced with so much pain and darkness. <br />
And yet, when I close my eyes and imagine a world living in such a thick fog, where Jesus penetrated the veil and entered into brokenness, I imagine a joy similar to that. <br />
Of breath finally releasing and gasping for air as this messy, uncontrollable thing slides out onto the ground. A broken hallelujah, a heaving sigh of "We made it."<br />
We made it here, to this.<br />
And in the middle of the broken, there is beautiful. <br />
<br />
Alishahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00910431130113359402noreply@blogger.com0