Sanctuary

Have you ever been to a zoo, one with a section just for butterflies? A butterfly sanctuary is a place where we can experience these beautiful peaceful creatures, right?
But is it really a sanctuary?
It's beautiful to us, it's mesmerizing, enchanting even, to sit or stand so close to the silent creature that we long to see on a spring or summer day. Glancing at it's wings before it hides in the safety of the sun's rays, draping your arm above your eyes to try and see it's wings one last time, it's almost as if this tiny creature wants to fly away. As if they know that given the chance we'll try and capture it. No intentional harm is done, but harm can be done regardless. 
So instead it flits from one area to the next, reaching high before dipping down in a wonderful dance with nature.
In these places where we capture those moments and try to recreate them within the confines of a shelter, it's an illusion. They are not on a journey, they are not moving from flower to flower until finally reaching their destinations, they are trapped.

I feel trapped.

If my adult life was built by a deceitful person and was only illusions, does that mean that the world I live in might be like one of these sanctuaries? What if the way I felt in my happiest moments were just concoctions, experiments, a test to make him feel the way he wanted to feel and brighten his own reality? My beautiful home really just enough room to move around in, but not flourish and grow?

I really do wrestle with thoughts, like we all do, trying to pin down exactly the emotion churning in the pit of my stomach. The insecurities abound, ones that on a normal day we would be telling ourselves in our finest "guuurrrrlll" voice, "you be trippin, yo. it's not like that and you survived, you build your own reality" .................no? just me? I guess my inner sista comes out when I need a pep talk, she makes me smile........

I do try and talk myself out of these kinds of thoughts though because I realize that how someone else's deceit affects me is my choice. I understand now that how I felt was real, and the pain I went through is completely valid. That just because I didn't know the whole story doesn't mean my character was not experiencing the plot. The journey I was on was a guided trail but the future is all mine, I have to know that the choices I made are simply that: made. The past, however full of lies, is something that I can't change, it's something that I can't control, and something that has brought me out of a confinement and into something so much bigger.

So instead of feeling trapped, like the walls are coming closer and the ceiling is getting lower, like the air is stale and the flowers are fake, I will just peel a bit of my shell off and continue to let the truth absorb in my freshly freed skin. I have a beautiful world all around me, my children are wonderful and I accomplished goals that I didn't think I would do. If you go back and read some of the previous posts, I talk about being a self sabotage junkie. How I would stand in my own way. Then after things with my marriage fell apart I realized I needed to do this, go back to school, for me. For my kids. For my future...and I did.

I graduated. That flower in the field wasn't fake, it was full of a sweet nectar that is sustaining me on this part of my journey. 
I got hired at my dream job...no not a figurative 'it's in my desired field' dream job, legit dream job. I wanted to work here since 7th grade, I never thought I would, but I am and it feels amazing. To provide for my family, to go forward and know that I have a good future ahead is something big to a girl who most of the time didn't know where she would be sleeping the next night. It's something that my little girl looks at me with pride and it's something when says she wants to help people too.

So even if some of my journey was housed in a sanctuary, where things were out of my control, it's ok. Because a big storm came and destroyed that false safety and pushed the butterflies into a real world that is terrifying and wonderful, so full of opportunities and hardships. Even if when the builder of said sanctuary tries to entice the creature back into a "safe" place, the new creature has seen outside the walls, outside the illusion, and isn't wanting to ever go back inside.

Hello again, dear friend

I just updated my other blog "Shedding the Shell" and this is what I wrote. I believe that it should be joined in to this one. That the posts I put on here or there will be shared, because when I created two different blogs I had wanted one to be separate, to keep my secrets. Now, I want to be me. Just me, in all the glory and messiness of it all. So enjoy.

Let's be real.

I like to journal by writing in my book, a collection of pages bound together, where I can see the tear stains, the coffee spills, and the emotional outpour that went into that days events. I will treasure those words, my most sacred words, for a very long time. It could be that I'm a pack-rat, it could be the need to keep my thoughts, but regardless it is something that I will keep in a box hidden somewhere until I stumble upon it accidentally. I will sit on my bedroom floor and relive these harsh chapters of my life with either a shake of the head, some tears or regrets, or a smile for seeing how naive I was. I like to feel the pages, to change up my writing style, and just let it all out because I can...without retribution for feeling a certain way. It's glorious really.

But......................there is this massive part of me that likes to share and write about my experiences because someone somewhere might benefit from it. So I'm going to try again. To put some of what I go through on a blog, an online journal, a place where I'm 'anonymous' but not at all really. Someplace unlike facebook, where if I say something and people want to hide behind a screen and judge me they can and then smile to my face. I don't know if you 'like' this, I don't know if you've even read it, but at least I know it's for me and not to prove something to my friends or to be retweeted.

So what's new with my transformation? Shedding the shell started out as a weight loss journey and expressing my vegan experiences, but what I never expected in the past three years was to literally shed my life skin. I've changed in major ways and experienced things that I never even considered an option. In my youth I learned quickly that people can be messed up, that life is unfair, and that trusting someone, even yourself, can be a mistake. I used blogging as the beginning steps of letting go of shame. I tried to give only snippets of what I was going through because admitting some of the truth was less painful than realizing all the truths at once. I didn't want to say what I really needed to say. I didn't want to share all of the horrors, but only some of the frights. I let others tell me that I couldn't say anything about what was happening because it affects more than just me, but in the journey to healing there needs to be a moment when you're free to talk about what has happened. There needs to be consideration for the parties that were involved, the ones that need to be heard, so that others might find comfort in something other than isolation. I turned into a compartmentalizing, hollow shell of the person I always was. In the past three years I've come to shed that shell and experience who I am under all the junk that just that piled up. I didn't choose that moment to break the chrysalis, but rather had it shattered for me. I needed to, at my own pace, pull those pieces away and climb out.

It's really bright out here...in this new life.

It's different and the same. It's a life I built and love, and a life I was tricked into and try not to regret. I wasn't ready to completely let go, but knew that the safe cocoon I was living in was no longer there. 

Where do you go when there is no place to go? The life I had built wasn't as real as I thought, and the future was unclear. There wasn't a going back or forward until I had shed the shell, slowly becoming the person I am. 

A person. A human at the basic level. Vulnerable, in all my strengths.

mon beau désordre de la vie

My life, Beautiful mess.

This is in no secret from the movie For Lovers Only, but I couldn't help be inspired by it. It defines life at all moments and in any state. There is no negative or positive to it in it's whole, there is only the tone in which you state it. That's how life is though, the situations we get ourselves into, are defined by how we handle them. The moment is shaped by our person, the future is shaped by our choices.

There is something so honest and so bittersweet about that, isn't there?

An update on my life, in case you are new to the blog and go back and read old posts...you should know that there was some very intense and private matters that I couldn't write about, let alone put online. I would like be more open, but there are still some things that I may elude to that are not okay for me to say so I apologize in advance.
Well, it's been a year since my husband moved out. I can't say it's been easy or hard. Really it depends on my mood, the tone if you will, of how my life is going and what is happening in it. I am finishing up school as a surgical tech, my daughter will be starting kindergarten, and my son will be three soon. I've lost 70 pounds in a year since going vegan, and it's been amazing. I am starting to explore flirting and dating, which is fun, but also kind of scary. I've been with my soon-to-be-ex since I was 18...how am I supposed to pretend I have any idea of how to navigate the adult dating world?? haha. I know that God has my perfect person and that it'll happen when it's supposed to and I'm in no rush...I didn't listen before when the signs were there, but I don't plan to make that mistake again. I have no regrets however, because I have two of the most amazing little humans now.

I know that things happen for a reason, I live by the idea that pain perpetuates change. As long as you don't wallow in the pain, allow it to consume you, then you can take away the good aspects and leave the bad...learn from it and let it help shape you.




And I'm in love with this song...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsYa6xGl7eg

Line Define

Driving down the street we stay within the lines. These lines dictate the direction we take and the signs along the way tell us how fast we'll get there and it a bump is ahead. We apply these rules to our daily nondriving lives as well. Why?
Why do I decide that it is "normal" to do this and this is the speed at which I should get there, and then feel bad if I don't?

Being without my husband in the home has opened up this whole new world of being accountable to only me. I used to run errands, clean, and mother on a schedule that meant everything would be completed by the time he got home from work so that he didn't give me that look, you know the one. The look that says "I wish everything was done and the kids were in bed so that I could just relax, but no, now I have to do more work." I HATE that look, and have realized that I don't have to accept it. My house isn't super tidy, but it's not a mess either. My kids are happy, fed, and content...why scold them when they just really want to say goodnight to their dad? I've missed being me. I am a person who likes bright colors, finds momentary joy and applies it to the long haul. I am someone who likes to laugh and enjoy the night, worrying about cleaning for another time...I don't want to miss the moments with my kids because I am too busy barking at them to clean up their room.

Getting a text stating that he wants to see the kids doesn't give me the feelings that I thought it would. It makes me glad that he is missing them and that when he shows up I can be proud of my house. That I am on top of it all...on my own time...and that I am exceeding his expectations for what I would be like without him. I know that he figured it would be devastating and that I would just fail without him, but I know how to survive and have done much worse than this. I like to prove people wrong about me.

Getting me to crack under pressure is like getting blood from a turnip.