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.