The Truth at the Bottom of the Pain
This piece I wrote a year ago is one of the most scary vulnerable I’ve written. It details some of the hardest work I’ve done on this journey, and the work I’m proudest of doing.
In the time since I wrote this piece, I’ve stopped saying my heart is not healed enough to love someone.
Words are powerful in creating or limiting our lives, and those are no longer true.
I still have no idea what it would look like to be in relationship with someone, but something has shifted.
In one of the most vivid and profound dreams I’ve ever had, my beloved I write about here swept me up to dance.
I looked up at him in terror, saying “But I don’t know how to dance!“
“Neither do I,“ he replied, twirling me around the floor.
“All I do is take the next step.“
Later that day, he randomly emailed me.
Let me just tell you, this is not a person I hear from.
He will occasionally answer an email or text, but he is not a person I hear from out of the blue.
In fact, I had NEVER heard from him out of the blue before or since that day.
He sent me a podcast interview he'd done, in which he was asked what advice he would give his 25-year-old self. In one of the most stunning moments of my lifetime, his answer was essentially "Just take the next step."
While it's certainly not the world's most original advice, I don't think I had ever heard him express anything like it before. I know this because when I woke up from that dream and grabbed my phone to jot down those words - something I'd never done in my life - I racked my brain trying to remember if I'd heard him say that before. While I've heard much wisdom from him, that was not among anything I recalled.
It was just crazy,and I'll never forget that day.
So, as it always is, every moment after this one is a mystery.
I don’t get to know what’s going to happen, and I still don’t know how to dance.
But my heart knows what’s true, and I am ready to take the next step.
Aug 23, 2017
This is going to be one of those scary vulnerable posts.
All of my posts probably seem scary vulnerable! But most really don't feel that way; I've been writing my story for so long that most of them simply feel like breathing.
This one feels scary.
If feels that way largely because I believe I have no right to feel what I feel. That I have no right to love the man at the center of my heart, and no right to feel the things that rise in me when triggering things cross my path.
I certainly believe that I have no right to give a voice to those things, even if I feel them.
Well, I do feel them, and I am giving them a voice.
If you're a regular reader here, you know that I have long been in love from afar with a man I am not with. That love has been the center of every discovery you've read here these past 3 1/2 years; it's the most profound gift I've ever received.
While I love this man with a depth I never imagined possible - and in fact I had no concept of what love of any kind was before he walked into my world - it has remained intentionally from afar, because my heart is not healed enough to love someone without inflicting my wounds on them.
I don't even know what it is to be in relationship with someone ... I have so much more work to do.
It has never, then, been about pursuing him or making something happen; it has always simply been about healing my heart, and discovering the truth of love.
It's been about learning to embrace and honor what I feel rather than criticizing, denying, or dismissing it, and to trust what my heart knows.
Those things changed my entire experience of this world.
So, about a year into my journey of loving him with everything I am - a year I was miraculously able to spend in the space of not knowing what his story was - I discovered that he was otherwise involved.
Given what this has always been about for me, that discovery truly didn't change anything, but it shattered me nonetheless.
More than what his being otherwise involved meant for my life, which really was nothing, what shattered me was a particular detail about her, and its connection to a horrific wound left in me by my mother.
My mother taught me that I was worthless if I wasn't thin.
She taught me that I would never, ever be loved - even by her - if I wasn't thin and beautiful.
That understanding was so fundamental to her that when I was 10 years old, she put a padlock on the pantry to keep me out, and began controlling every bite I ate. She did this with no regard for nutrition - we did not eat healthy meals - only portion control so I wouldn't be fat.
I was absolutely not fat ... I was far from it. That didn't stop her from seeing me through the lens of her deep wounds and calling me names like "Fatso."
At 10 years old.
This girl, right here, was called Fatso.
By her mother.
In all my work here, the most painful thing I've ever written is the truth that I was hungry from ages 10 to 18.
I was hungry from 10 to 18.
I disassembled all my food to make it last longer - took sandwiches apart, scraped the cheese off of pizza to eat it separately, and even divided pancakes into layers - and to this day I am the slowest eater on the planet.
I was also completely humiliated for every moment of my young life, living in a home where I "had" to be locked out of the food like an animal.
I not only learned that I was worthless if I wasn't thin, but that I was incapable of making the most basic decision in life.
As she was keeping me from having adequate nutrition, she was teaching me that my hunger meant there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
Amidst that craziness, my mother also taught me that men don't love.
That any love I saw in men was a lie, or simply a means to an end.
She taught me that men have no emotional capability at all.
This all sounds ridiculous, and I have certainly had men in my life who have shown me otherwise, but let me just assure you: All messages are not created equal, and those planted by your mother are really fucking powerful whether they make any sense or not.
So, a huge part of my healing journey in the first year was discovering the truth that men do love. Jonathan Jackson was the first powerful bringer of that truth.
After he laid the foundation that something different could be possible, this man I love showed up, and was a force of that truth the likes of which I never fathomed could exist.
I was stunned at the things that came from this man. He was so vastly different from anything I had ever encountered, and showed me in no uncertain terms that my mother had been wrong wrong wrong.
After I had spent a year of serious work unraveling the lies my mother had taught me about men - that they only want one thing, they could only ever value me if I were thin and beautiful, and that they have no ability to love - I discovered that this man I love, this man who was so vastly different from anything I knew existed, was otherwise involved.
With a model.
I have no words for the leveling devastation of that moment.
It wasn't just that I couldn't be with him.
It was that it felt like my mother was right about everything she ever taught me.
It felt like every vicious lie I'd spent a year of my life unraveling was true after all.
I saw and felt every bit of the difficult healing work I had done - every moment I'd spent clawing to discover what was true - disintegrate before me.
Even for this man who was so different - this man I know values what matters and feels and loves so deeply - you still have to be a model to be loved.
I shattered into a million pieces of absolute nothingness.
It was horrific.
After feeling every ounce of that excruciating pain - spending endless hours weeping under the weight of some of the heaviest hurt I ever recall experiencing - I found the truth that's to be found at the bottom of all of our pain.
The idea I was wrestling with - that she gets to be with him because she's thin and beautiful and I don't because I'm not - is not only fundamentally flawed, but completely unfair to everyone involved.
So, what, she ONLY has value because she's thin and beautiful? I have NO value because I'm not? Thin, that is ... I am beautiful, by damn. Not to mention that whole idea doesn't give a lot of credit to this man with the most stunning heart I've ever encountered.
So, after unimaginable pain - and I do mean unimaginable fucking pain, this work is not for the faint of heart - I came to some deep truth.
First and foremost, their relationship has absolutely nothing to do with me.
I'm pretty sure she was on the scene long before he ever heard of me, and even if that's not the case, our relationships are just not tied up with or defined by each other that way.
It is certainly not the statement on my fundamental worth I imagine it to be, and her presence in this world does not take a single thing away from mine.
None of it made my mother right about anything.
Also it's important to say that all my words here are only about what goes on inside me. His beloved is absolutely lovely, and is in fact one of the very few women on this planet who actually feels like a safe presence for me. None of this is about her in the least.
Knowing those deep truths, however, does not keep me from being thrown back down the spiral that existed for my whole life when something triggering crosses my path.
So, these past few weeks.
On a couple of occasions, her name has appeared amongst friends I didn't know we shared. And in one particularly fascinating instance, I thought she appeared, but didn't! More on that later.
In the case of these friends, though, I was shattered to see her name.
I was shattered because my heart believed I instantly became less valuable to those friends.
I believed that they were going to disappear from my life - and hate me - because they somehow belonged to her now.
This is the part that's scary vulnerable, because I imagine vicious voices screaming at the absolute stupidity of that. Rolling their eyes at the idea that I could possibly believe something so ridiculous ... Rather than embracing with love and compassion the little girl whose parents and experiences TAUGHT her to believe those things, and the excruciating pain I have felt for my whole life as a result.
I truly believe to the core of me that the presence of his beloved on this planet renders me completely worthless.
Not just to him, but apparently to everyone in any room she walks into.
I truly believe that people who love me are going to stop loving me when she walks in the room.
That.
That is the fundamental belief I have carried every moment of my life ... That the people who love me are going to stop loving me when others appear.
It is fucking craziness.
It is also not a place from which I can possibly have a relationship.
This is the kind of thing I have to heal before I will be able to love someone.
That craziness is the way I grew up being TAUGHT love worked.
My mother taught me that when she left us and then told me it was because I had taken my dad's love away from her.
All of my parents and stepparents taught me that in their relentless comparison of me to their students and my cousins and my friends and every other kid in the world they wished I had been.
Those lies about love were planted in my precious little girl heart by Every. Voice. That. Mattered.
So, now for the really funny, and amazing, and scary vulnerable because I look really stupid, part of the story!
A few weeks ago, I was at an event where Jeremy Cowart - stunning celebrity photographer and dreamer and human - was speaking. He had just redesigned his website which wasn't up yet, but he scrolled quickly through it to give us a little preview.
As he scrolled through some of the Featured page, full of portraits he had taken since he opened his studio to the public, a photo went by that I was certain was her.
My heart shattered right there in the middle of this event.
It was a shattering I could physically feel.
My mother was right again.
There was his beloved in all her model beauty, gracing the portfolio of this artist I so deeply admire.
Or so I imagined, as the figure I assumed was her whizzed by at 90 miles an hour.
As it had felt seeing her name amongst our mutual friends, it felt like Jeremy whom I had miraculously come to know was going to disappear now, because he somehow belonged to her, too.
Just as my mother disappeared, because she believed I'd taken my dad's love away from her.
I don't think we have any idea how much of our past we are carrying in every single moment, and how deeply it colors our experience of everything that happens.
So, I walked through the next few days feeling the weight of being worthless and nothing in the shadow of her beauty, and the heavy weight of abandonment as I imagined losing my value to people who matter to me.
Then Jeremy's new website launched.
Because apparently I like to torture myself, I scrolled through that same Featured page, to see if it actually was her.
I mean, for all the truth I had discovered working through my horrific pain, this was a professional photographer's website, he does know her, and he had actually asked for some models to come in, so of course she would belong there!
I was sure I'd find that it was her.
Guess what?
It wasn't her.
I had created this entire shattering scenario in my head.
What's more, I was not prepared for what I saw when I scrolled to the bottom of the page.
She was nowhere to be found on this amazing celebrity photographer's website.
But I was.
Tears flow to this day as I think back on that moment of discovering my photo among all of his beautiful portraits on that page I was convinced only she would belong on.
That just can't be an accident.
It can't be an accident that I went down that whole spiral of pain and unworthiness, only to discover that this artist I so deeply admire deemed me worthy of gracing the portfolio he shares with the world.
This little girl who was locked out of the food in her own home and taught by the most powerful voice in the universe that she would never be loved or valued if she wasn't thin, is featured - literally - on the website of a photographer whose subjects include every star of Hollywood and TV and music you can name, and President Obama and the pope for good measure.
It blows my mind.
It's been a long road to this moment on my journey.
I say that writing my story here feels like breathing, and it does ... But boy there's been some hard painful work.
Maybe I do deserve to grace his beautiful page of character studies after all.