Healing is Possible
I lost hope, and then I found it again
Hello Beloved Friends
I fixed my flat tire today
I strongly believe that Wednesday at 10am is the perfect time for an errand.
I had to get a tow, and I rode along with the tow driver to discount tire. I took my laptop and worked in the space.
It is the last week of my EMDR class and today Bessel van der Kolk, author of the body keeps the score , came and spoke to my class
he honestly kinda freaks me out, and I was feeling scattered because of needing to arrange a tow, so I didn’t end up joining, but I’m looking forward to the replay.
I have been saving money so that I can lay in all the onsens and eat all the food in japan, and so even though there was a sushi and steakhouse located next door to where I was getting my tire changed, I resisted going there.
However, the longer I waited for my tire to be changed, the more I began to think about food. I googled the steakhouse menu, and learned that it is actually an atlanta establishment!
The inside is beautiful. If any of you readers visit Atlanta we should go here together. I ended up getting Salmon pan fried in a sake butter sauce.
Thank you for being on this journey with me
Over the past six weeks, I have written two newsletters a week, and I have gone live twice a week!
Many of you came to these lives, and have been actively reading the newsletter and talking to me about it!
Thank you!!!!!!
I am grateful to anyone reading this, even if you never tell me, and I am especially thankful for the special community that is surging around these blog posts! Thanks for getting deep with me guys, it’s one of the highlights of my life.
I’m soooo excited to pop in here and share my Japan adventures.
This newsletter is my last newsletter that will happen on this schedule! Over the next few weeks I hope to sporadically pop into your inbox with joyful photos and unexpected stories from my travels.
Join me for my final live
I’m going live today at 12pm EST/ 9am PST on instagram, linkedin, and youtube. You can watch all my past lives on my youtube.
I will be sharing the story of my healing journey, and something I truly believe, which is that healing is possible.
Some of you may know that even before I identified as trans or intersex, I was just a kid growing up in the south with a body that did not look like anyone else’s. As a result, I experienced a lot of cruelty as a child from my peers, my teachers, and my friend’s parents.
As I aged, the cruelty morphed into violence and harassment in public spaces. These experiences were extremely difficult because no one else in my life could relate, and I had to learn how to de-escalate and navigate violent situations.
As my life changed and my incidents of harassments decreased, I was still left with the trauma of the expierence. In my early 20’s I was determined to heal it as fast as possible, but I quickly burned out.
burn out, and losing hope, are different than acceptance.
Healing is non-linear and cumulative.
As a taurus, I can sometimes try and force things into existance. Sometimes it works, sometimes I just tire myself out.
With healing, I had to come to terms with the truth that I may, for the rest of my life, expeirence the impact of trauma on my life. This was a devestating truth for me to wrap my head and heart around.
There can be so much grief when your life is ruled by your trauma, and it is extremely humbling.
I released the expectation that I would expierence healing in my lifetime, because the dissappointment was devestating.
As I let my hope for healing die, I closed my heart to life
To have hope is vulnerable, and while we may choose to avoid vulnerability, that choice also leads us away from engaging with life fully.
we have to take off our armor.
Our lives are about more than keeping ourselves safe, we have to let ourselves hope and engage with life. We deserve to soften and open.
I was called in to openness and out of cynicism
I was in a training, learning an energetic healing modality, and I made a comment about accepting that parts of me will never be healed, and my instructor gently encouraged me to re-evaluate.
In that moment, I felt an incredible amount of righteousness, attachment to the idea that parts of me would never feel, and general resistance to the openness. Observing those reactions, allowed me to release them, and I found myself crying. Relief flooded my body, as I opened to the idea that parts of me that I had internally doomed, could heal.
Healing is possible
Healing is unexpected and miraculous, and I truly believe that life and our soul collude to arrange conditions for our healing. Sometimes, we subconciously choose people and situations that trigger our wounds.
Because the wound wants to be healed.
Sometimes when I mediate a conflict, I say to someone in the conflict, “this is a papercut that is opening up an abcess”
That is to say, sometimes we get upset over small things, but the feelings unleashed are so big, that they are actually about something that we never healed, but buried in our spirit. The unhealed wound becomes infected and swollen over time, and we become bloated with feeling, until it pops and we ooze.
Ultimately, we have to drain the abcess. We have to feel our feelings, clean the wound, and clear the infection.
Healing can be disgusting
we think of it as a sweet time where we do yoga and laugh, and it is those things. But it can also be ugly and difficult and hard and confusing. Maybe thats why I use the example of the paper cut and the abcess, because abcess’s are pretty gross.
Ultimately, I believe that individual healing is innately connected to collective healing, and we need both for a liberated future.
When I think of violence in the world, from Sudan to Democratic Republic of the Congo to Palestine, I know that hope is a political practice. That people who are surviving extreme violence need the generous and loving vision and resources of those of us surviving significantly less violence .
Last weekend I was able to witness my brilliant friend, Banah ,present a Black Palestinian feminist solidarity timeline and it ignited the fire in my belly!
Hearing stories of the pivotal friendships of people in the past filled my heart with joy, and reminded me of how groundbreaking and world altering friendship can be.
I feel like each day I am learning that while our movements need to be principled and rigorous, they also have to be loving, caring , and playful.
I feel grateful to this newsletter as a space of resistance, and a site of political introspection and play.
