healing thru experiencing

She did create a new blog, and she gained weight and looks beautiful and happy.

It made me so glad.

You probably won’t read this, but if you do, you look beautiful, Maira.

I don't know why I feel the trees will make it, roots still intact beneath the rubble. Arms that stretch into concrete and glass.

They cover us and we become them. Millions of years of rock bury the mistakes. I can breathe now, and love without pain.

Red Moon, acrylic paint on 3ft x 2ft canvas, Dana Gabrielle Espinosa

*~*~*

A woman is carried by her astral self, in the form of a black panther, thru the dense jungle of her subconscious, as she bleeds.

Original painting is for sale, as well as prints:

The Dead Dad Club by Dana Gabrielle Espinosa

You can find prints of this drawing here: ishtarsreturn.bigcartel.com

*~*~*

I only started processing my dad’s death

11 years after the fact,

I can’t explain why exactly, your brain sort of

goes into this

subterranean state in childhood, submerging

itself beneath the trauma,

buried in the heaviness of the memories

in your head, like a rotting sunken shipwreck,

and

as you get old, you let the flora overgrow,

hope in vain that the pain will let you go if

you just forget it in the depths.

If I simply forgot the sound of

his ghost’s clear voice in my room one night,

or the blowing of his silver whistling,

cleansing our home from beyond the grave,

unbeknownst to us all,

I thought if I told him to just go away,

stop speaking so loudly in his death, that

the wound of it would heal, imperceptible,

not even a scar,

to the human eye,

and I could be normal and hide--

Normal,

meaning, not connected to

what can’t be seen,

not accompanied by a phantasmal protector,

not shrouded in his pearlescent veil, safe from

unseen harms all around,

not purposefully isolated from the ordinary and

the bound.

It took me 11 years to learn this was less of a

hindrance,

and more of a gift, a sacred perspective,

an archetypal membership,

a bridge between forgotten worlds in

this waking Hell.

I speak freely with him now,

acknowledge what he does for me when it

comes around,

witness his secret messages, like,

a colorful moth perched just in my view,

a snowstorm erupting at his grave in the

evening,

a sunny glittering of his face in the rearview

as I’m driving.

I learned to reply to him in his symbolic

language too, that is new,

an abandoned tongue, long repressed,

now expressed,

with my own rituals and lore;

light a candle in the night,

write a poem by its flickering light,

dance and get the heart pumping,

then, quickly now, begin the drumming,

while the sky breaks out into triumphant

trumpeting.

~ * ~ * ~

Brain Cactus.

“Albert Camus speaks of the theater as a place of truth where the lights of the stage put the actors bare.”

Because spellcraft is particularly hard…or that magic is complicated.

It’s because we’ve all been systematically traumatized at an early age to ignore our creativity and sense of play.

We’ve been taught that these things only exist in kindergarten. That we must leave these things behind…but why?

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I kept getting involved with people who would say, “Oh, I’m a bad person” any time I brought up ANYTHING that was the least bit of a disagreement. 

Like, “Please don’t leave my X on the floor” would get, “Oh, I’m a horrible person!”

HERE’S WHY THIS IS A HUGELY PROBLEMATIC BEHAVIOR, and if you think I”m calling you out and you think you’re about to shut down, take a breath, remember that this is about learning, and keep reading.

What is important is what happened after. My boyfriend might say, “Oh, I’m just an awful boyfriend” and instead of him acknowledging the BEHAVIOR and working on fixing it, he’d get me trying to buck him up for the next half hour, telling him he was a good person. The behavior that started it all would not change.

Well, things led to things and I went back home to live for a while, and found that the same exact thing was happening… with my mother.

And then I learned about pattern arguments. Pattern arguments are the ones where you keep having the same nonproductive argument over and over again. They don’t all follow this pattern, but this is a really common one.

The trick?

BREAK THE PATTERN

First you have to know what the pattern is. In this case: 1. Grievance 2. Self deprecation 3. Ego stroking So, with my mother, we started in on one of these, and she said, “I guess I’m just a terrible mother.” And instead of reassuring her, instead of derailing the issue and letting it go… I said, “When you say that, it makes me wonder how terrible a daughter I could be that you would think you were a bad mother. We have this conversation this way over and over, and the problem that I have always gets pushed aside in favor of trying to make you feel better. When you’re willing to have a real conversation about this, I’m happy to talk to you, but I’m bored with this argument, so I’ll see you later if you want to really talk.” And I left the room. Now, my mom is a reasonably self-aware person, and does a lot of hard emotional work, and so she got it, very quickly. 10 minutes later she came out and found me, and we had a real conversation about whatever the hell the issue really was, and we have literally NEVER had that particular pattern argument again in 23 years.  Boyfriend came to visit. I was upset about something, he started in on the “I’m just a shitty boyfriend” thing… and my response? “Yep. You are.” His jaw dropped. He blinked. And I said, “Look, that’s what you do. You say shit like that and it means you don’t have to change your behavior, and I’m tired of the pattern we have where I tell you something isn’t working for me, you tell me you’re terrible, and I spend half an hour making you feel better. I’m tired of it and I”m not doing it anymore. If you’re willing to have an actual conversation about this, and not just the same old argument, I’m game. But this thing we do where you talk yourself down and I butter you up? Is boring. And I’m over it.” We also did not have that argument again. (The relationship finally ended for real a while after, but it ended in a grown-up way, and not with a ridiculous meaningless fight.) When you knock yourself down, the gut instinct for the people around you is to pick you up. But that means you’re not pulling your weight in the relationship. You’re making them do the work and you’re not actually hearing them. So that brings us to another point:

How to deal with criticism

Okay, so if you’re not going to knock yourself down when someone says something negative about you, what DO you do? We don’t actually train people to take criticism well. But it is an art and a skill and NECESSARY to finding emotional stability in the face of a critical world.

I see it as a flow chart, but since the flow chart I made for it ended up in a book that I don’t own the copyright to (not a big deal) I’ll write out the decision tree here instead: 1. Someone offers criticism (constructive or not!)

2. Listen and think about it without immediately trying to defend yourself. You can say, “Okay, I need a moment to take that in and think about it because I want to understand it.” Or something else appropriate to the situation. It is okay to ask for time to think in most circumstances. Most people will appreciate that you are thinking about their words instead of immediately getting defensive or counterattacking. Think about whether what they are saying is valid, might be valid or is not valid. 

3A. If it is valid, then you have a choice. You can try to fix the behavior or you can acknowledge that it is a valid criticism but decide you aren’t likely to fix it. Start by acknowledging the validity of the criticism, and then say what you’re going to do to fix it, or say that it’s valid but it isn’t something you’re willing (or possibly able) to change, or say that it’s a valid criticism and you’ll need to think about possible solutions. They may have a suggestion. Taking it or not is also a choice. 

3B. If you’re not sure it’s valid, but it might be, tell them, “I really need to give this some more thought.” or “Can you tell me more about this? I’m not sure I understand the issue well.”  Or “If you can point me at some reading material or search terms, I’d like to study this before I decide what I’m going to do.” 

3C. If you know it is not a valid criticism, STOP a moment, and look at WHY they are making it. This is where Active Listening can be very helpful. “I hear you saying that X is a problem. I don’t see it that way right now but I’d like to understand better why you do.” Or if you think they don’t have enough information, “I hear you saying X, but my understanding of the issue is Y. Here’s what I know about it if you’re ready to listen.” If they’re just looking for a fight, tell them you’re not interested in fighting, and disentangle yourself. 

4. If the criticism is something you are going to listen to and take action on, tell them what kind of action you’re going to take. If it’s something you’re hearing and thinking about, tell them that. If it’s not something you’re going to do anything about or it’s just wrong, thank them for their input and move on.

Literally never is it going to be helpful to say, “Oh, I’m just a terrible person.” That’s very much like a nonapology-apology in terms of how unhelpful it is to any conversation. It’s kind of worse because it actually expects emotional labor from someone who is already having to bring up something unpleasant with you. Think about what they say Decide whether you’re going to do something about it Do the thing, or tell them you’re not going to do the thing.  Don’t demand emotional labor from other people when you were the one who messed up.