Winding up 2023 with gratitude and tenacity

I’m starting to suspect that at some point in the recent past I somehow sent out a signal to the Universe – “Hey, I’m tired of existing in this apathetic and frozen rut… send me something to shake me awake?”

It began in 2021, of course, with the shattering of my ankle and the life-altering intensity of sitting in a body of deep pain and helplessness. The transformation of that experience was… indescribably everything (I truly have so much gratitude, even as I am still working through endless scar tissue).

But this year has been one riveting plot twist after another. 

(Can you relate? 2023 seems to have been quite an eventful year for almost everyone I’ve talked to about it.)

Nearly 4 weeks ago, I went to visit one of my best friends as a recovery effort from all the intense caregiving I recently went through with my mother (and my way-too-amped-up nervous system as a result). It had been a couple years since we had seen each other, and we enjoyed lots of wandering, hiking, driving, eating, and all the things one does with a sister friend.

However, right before I left her house to drive the 6.5 hours back home, I was notified that I was heading into a scenario where my world was being turned upside down and inside out.

Plot twist.

Within 3 days of arriving home, my partner of 21 years had been arrested and taken to jail for the foreseeable future, and my kids and I were left with our heads spinning and our jaws on the floor.

Five days later, an aggressive detective showed up at my home and harassed me (thankfully my children weren’t home), leaving me with PTSD symptoms and a kind of paranoia I hadn’t experienced before.

There have been a LOT of emotional rollercoasters the past few weeks. Days where I feel strong and motivated, other times where I just lie awake in the middle of night in a puddle of panic. Visceral nightmares, laughing fits with my daughter, dark jokes with my closest friends. 

It’s real life.

The emotional depth of kindness from acquired family (so much kindness - my sisters-in-law are the best humans I know - love you both). So many loving people who have reached out to ask what they can do to help (I wish I knew the answer), and radio silence from others in a media age where community pretends to look like pixels (we’re all overwhelmed, I know).

The limbo state of having zero control over what is happening and having no idea what is going to happen. And working through focusing on the things I can control and surrendering to the things I can’t.

Checking in with my nervous system, recognizing overload and sitting with it instead of trying to fix it. Relaxing into the tension instead of fighting it. Hearing the downward spiraling chatter in my brain, without attaching myself to it and instead just listening and then letting it flow on by. 

Exhaling it all out as deeply as I can.

Letting go of my cold hard grip on the steering wheel of my life, throwing my hands in the air, and saying, “Okay, whatever powers that may be… Let’s go whatever direction you’re dragging me toward.”

The Mother Wound Strikes Again

Abusive childhoods where you cannot trust the person who is supposed to be your safest, warmest rock teach you to be hypervigilant and a control freak. I absolutely am both of those, despite my calm outward demeanor.

We live in a world that is in no way under our control, and our mammalian instincts gave us the beautiful connection of the mother-child relationship to ease that painful awareness. That warmth and safety of always being able to hypothetically climb into our mother’s laps, where we can let go and let God/dess. 

(Until the awful day that our mama crosses the rainbow bridge, and we have to learn how to cultivate “mother” by ourselves until we join her.)

But what about those without healthy mother-daughter bonds?

I know an awful lot of you follow me, because we’ve talked about the Mother Wound. A lot.

What happens when life throws us INTENSE curve balls and we don’t have warm mother laps to climb into for deep restorative healing and a sense of safety?

For the vast majority of us, we get tighter and tighter as life drags us along. Our necks are more like rebar, our joints ache, our guts churn, we need way too many naps + have chronic sleep issues, and we just generally never feel entirely well. Chronic, genetic, epigenetic health problems sneak in. We become increasingly bitter and jaded, anxious for seemingly no reason, and sadly (for some) the light begins to fade from their eyes.

Why?

Because we are holding the weight of the world in every single cell. We have nowhere to set down our burdens and just breathe in safety.

Some of us find amazing partners who are incredibly healing, and who become a proxy mother of sorts (bless them and their perceptive, big hearts). Some of us have nourishing fathers who can stand-in with the love and care our mothers can’t offer us.

But many of us do not get to have that experience (at least not to the extent that is truly needed for healing), and instead we find ourselves kicking and fighting with life or trudging along in exhaustion and apathy.

This often leaves older women in shambles, with a tangled web of unhealthy relationships, bitterness with their own children (patterns, patterns), careers that never really took off, limbo patterns they never overcame, and addictions aplenty.

Long maternal lines of pain and abandonment, deep-seeded stories of The Bad Mother who is too stuck in self-survival mode to nourish and nurture the next generation (bless them all).

What does any of this have to do with my story?

Everything.

It’s a Lot Harder to Defrost Than it Seems

Though I have tried over and over again, it has been next to impossible to recover from the permafrost of the frozen nervous system state I was left with after my childhood. It left me with debilitating social anxiety, brain fog from hell, chronic fatigue, relationships I couldn’t transform (too exhausted), and patterns I just couldn’t shake no matter how educated I became or how beautiful my mindspace became.

I was in lockdown on the inside.

But this year?

Confrontation came to me. 

She said, “You shall not avoid me any longer. You will learn to be *in* the fire without shutting down. You will learn how to reclaim your healthy fight instincts once again. You will be the badass woman on the outside that you are on the inside. NOW.”

And, just like I did when my ankle shattered into four pieces, I took a deep breath and said, “Okay, let’s do this. I’m all yours.”

You know what the absolute best part of getting older is? 

(If you’re focused on healing and self-awareness, that is.)

You stop giving a shit about the things that plagued you so hard as a young 20-something. You’ve got enough life under your belt that you have created far bigger reserves of resilience. You have (hopefully) cultivated a relationship with yourself of self-love and self-protection.

And if you’re really all about living your one-precious-life (bless you Mary) with your eyes wide open and your heart wisely leading the way, you’ll know that the fire is the place of transformation. To avoid the fire is to start digging your grave before you are dead - such a waste of precious life.

Here You Are Seen and Heard

I see you, sister. I see you huddling in your frozen state. I see you fawning to people who harm you and who can never SEE you or value you. I see you surviving. I see you daydreaming about thriving. I see you longingly looking out the window, wondering where you went wrong… Wondering if you’ll get another chance to try again.

I see you crying out for your mother… the mother you have likely never had.

I see you holding your babies with as much love as you can pull together - drawing from a chronically dry and disintegrating well. I see you adamantly giving them what you never witnessed firsthand. I see you self-sacrificing so they can have the safety you will likely never feel.

I see you defending your sisters from their abusers. Bringing them meals. Gathering up the cash for them that you yourself do not have. Offering to watch their children when your own kids have you all but climbing the walls.

I see your quiet acts of bravery. I see you practicing for the day in the future when you will Get Out of Stuck. I see you trying, failing, and then trying again. I see your fire, hidden away for a day when it will feel good to let it out without fear.

Sister, I am you and you are me. We don’t live the same lives or have the same stories. You might have the most loving mother on the planet (or a good enough one), and an abusive partner who terrified you into this frozen state. Or you might be surrounded by good humans, yet are still carrying the deeply heavy weight of the pain of this planet (it is so very heavy).

We are the women around the world, too. No, we don’t know what it’s like to lose children to bombs or to be lost to sex trafficking in countries with massively corrupt governments. We don’t have a front row seat to war or know how to navigate a refugee camp. 

We are lucky in so, so, so many ways.

And also the nervous system doesn’t understand our pain through the lens of culture or logic. It knows terror and fear, how to put us into safety-seeking mode, and how to make sure we don’t forget trauma so we remember to avoid certain kinds of situations.

Our brains and nervous systems REALLY want us to survive.

However, lucky for us, we aren’t just a brainstem and a mammalian brain. We also have part of our brain that is capable of self-reflection and learning new ideas (the human part of us). We will never be entirely free of our triggers and pain (and that’s okay - they make us powerful too). But we can reinterpret how we sit with them, how we love ourselves, and how we re-mother ourselves.

We can learn to surrender, we can learn when to fight (releasing ourselves from the Good Girl Syndrome), and we can slowly defrost our frozen nervous systems so we can finally live life fully awake and alive.

This takes time. In fact, it takes the rest of our lives. There will never be a destination of “done healing” because healing is forever, until the day we take our very last breath. 

That is the part that requires surrender and radical acceptance. Acknowledgement that being a human is really damn messy, and that’s okay. We will never have what was our human birthright (grieving this is essential). But we can have an experience that is really damn beautiful, regardless. And we can reclaim that birthright for our babies and for the generations after them.

I truly believe this for each of us. And through the power of healing sisterhood, we can also cultivate re-mothering with each other. This impacts women and children, but it can also provide the necessary foundation that men need to heal as well. 

Because the mother is the center of all human connection, and all relationships come back to how we relate to and connect to “mother” as a person and as a cultural archetype.

We have what we need to find healing, to embrace the scars, and to create a sense of safety *together*.

This is the biological blueprint we evolved with and are designed for, and when we reclaim our magnified power together, we can truly transform it all. I am a forever optimist.

Showing up for the mess of life with bravery is what being a good future ancestor looks like. Being kind to ourselves, healing our sister wounds, and believing that when we take responsibility for our inner world it has a healing reflection on the outer world around us.

You cannot make the world a better place for women and their children if you are operating from a Sister Wound, a Mother Wound, or a Wounded Healer state. Can’t happen, my friends.

I’m holding love for all of us, no matter where we are in our journeys. I’m sending out bravery, empathy, grace, forgiveness, righteous anger, powerful boundaries, and the beauty of healing sisterhood to all of you. 

May we hold the remaining embers of the year with both embodied power and deep surrender.

We truly are more capable and resilient than we could ever imagine…