On my way home from a trip, I posted about working the magick of having corrective experiences for past me. I posed these questions:
What would I want to have gone better/differently/kindly/gently in the days and years before right now?
What can I do to rewrite those stories?
Create new memories?
Offer myself new neural pathways and reactions?
Bring myself some grace where I was not offered it and where I did not offer it to myself?
I got responses that this work resonated with folks.
So, let’s talk about it more.
(Prepare yourself for a mix of metaphors. This is not as linear a process as I hoped it would be.)
‘Corrective’ isn’t Quite the Right Word
I realize that ‘corrective’ sounds punitive or just wrong for a healing process.
Realizing you want new things or different thinking patterns is not about right or wrong. What I’ve thought and experienced is just what it is: my past.
But as the past keeps trying to influence the present and the future, I want to go back so I can move forward more freely, with less baggage.
I saw the signs of needing to change in the responses I started to have in my life. I would get so angry about certain situations, certain feelings, and certain interactions. These moments were never dangerous, so the responses seemed out of context.
I would be unable to think straight. My breath became shallow. I was certain everyone hated me. I was convinced I had made a mistake somehow. I was scared. I would hit my hands on my legs. I would record long, rambling voice notes.
What the heck was going on?
(Go Ahead and) Look Back in Anger
I don’t like to look back. I focus on what I CAN do about this moment, but my reactions and responses were held back by old patterns I wasn’t acknowledging.
It was like being in a puddle of wet mud and trying to get out, only to get more stuck and sunken with each attempt.
The best approach is to stop and collect yourself. Let things settle so you can find solid ground again, so you can reach out and pull yourself out. Dirty, but unburdened.
All this time in being-on-my-own land has shaken trees in my body. Fruits falling everywhere, bruised, barely ripe, underdeveloped. EVERYWHERE.
The apple of my unexpressed rage.
The cherry of the things I should have said to their face.
The hard pear of distrust in myself and my desires.
The pineapple that I once choked on and now can not look at without stepping back into that moment where no one knew and I couldn’t understand why no one helped.
There’s shame hanging in them thar trees.
There is shame in those memories existing, in somehow thinking a younger me (or a much younger me) knew what to do or could have known what to say. There is a weight that comes with recognizing your best was not good enough.
And my best is what I cling to the most as a flotation device, a cipher, a tarot card that confirms what I have always known to be true.
And it’s still not enough. Even when you know the things.
A Process of Naming Desires
When I turned 46 last year, I decided to write down a list of desires (46, of course) that I wanted to experience. It started out simple, like a shopping list, and then it wandered into the erotic and the expensive. But as it grew—more slowly than I expected—I noticed I was writing down things I had done before, but wanted to do again in another way.
A reclamation, a revolution, a naming of wanting more.
Perhaps even feeling like I deserved more?
While this journey walks in the orchards and fields of shame, and there are puddles everywhere, and I constantly forget my rainboots, the desires whisper of somewhere else. Something beyond the field of rightdoing and wrongdoing (so said Rumi, maybe), there is a field where I can meet myself.
I can meet the infant who had to stay in the hospital alone after meeting the world earlier than expected.
I can meet the toddler who cried when she saw strangers.
I can meet the child who just wanted her own room and her own stuff instead of sharing all of it with siblings and relatives.
I can meet the teenager who never cool enough to be cool, but was also smart enough to be friends with the ‘uncool.’ The teen who always felt like she was in the wrong group at the wrong time.
I can meet the girlfriend who lied her way to love. Contorting and claiming to be perfectly fine.
I can meet the bride who hid behind cars, smoking because the celebration was too loud and she just wanted everyone to go home so she could eat cake and not do the whole ‘witnessed and perceived’ by people thing that everyone expected.
I can meet the woman who felt invisible and undesirable, who was left behind and told she should have given up more to solve a problem with no name but so many faces.
I can meet myself in these spaces, and I have.
I have soothed the little one who just wanted to be held. I have given pep talks to my teenager and young adult and broken poet.
I have held myself. I have let myself be held. I have looked myself in the eye in the bathroom mirror and said I was good enough, even if I didn’t believe a word of it.
I have written and shared that writing, though the spaces bled and what was secret now had a home for people to see. I have let myself be known in my breaking.
I have traveled to places I wanted to go, because I wanted to go. Because I wanted to move beyond where I was and onto what might also welcome me. It is tiring work, this work of holding yourself.
Help Arrives and Gently Pats my Head
Sometimes, I need help.
And that confession does correct me. Gently.
It stands in front of me, nods, and points out that I might carry shame, but I also hold hands with my own deserving. I squeeze her hand back.
What happened in the past can have a new story with a new ending.
What happened can not be undone, but it could be faded. Like a bruise, still a little tender somedays.
If I have been so good at holding on to what hurts, I could be quite good at reaching for something softer.
When I remember there is something else, something more than what I have been offered or accepted, it might sit at my feet and ask to hear more.
One story at a time.
***
Want to learn more about my courses, presentations, and writing? Go to my website: www.irisanyamoon.com
This resonates so much 💛 thank you for sharing 🙏
I recognise a lot in this, so, here's what I've learned in case it helps. Being angry has been really good for me, it's helped me rebuild myself and change my perspective. Looking back, I think I was good enough. I think that because I'm now living a life where I get to be good enough and I get a lot of positive feedback about what I'm doing. I haven't really changed what I'm doing, but I have changed who I am doing it with, and for. I think maybe I was always good enough and that the problem was that I wasn't appreciated enough, and no one came to meet me half way, or shared responsibility before. I thought everything was my fault, my failing and that I couldn't inspire love, or enthusiasm or desire and frankly I was wrong about that, because I can and I do. So I'm forgiving past me - I could not have tried harder, and it wasn't me. Maybe it wasn't you either, maybe you just weren't being appreciated enough.