my therapist said i should go back to journaling to work through some heavy feelings I've been carrying from all the years of internalized self-blame and self-colonization. this is my journal! I want to heal.
I don't want to write long screeds anymore. focusing on the details:
Work is the last place besides my family of origin that can set me off and trigger all my conditioned fears and anxieties. All my trauma was designed to focus me toward "legitimate" and "respectable" forms of production. mmhmm.
Every voice in me is screaming for me to find a path toward self-kindness here. Every voice in me has at some point been pushed into the proverbial plug suit and forced to pilot the Eva in some way but they're not asking for a pound of flesh or apologies from me. They're not begging me to heal or fix them... whatever that might mean for metaphorical swells of spirit and mind. They're all screaming for me to please just be kind to myself. To stop blaming myself including for not being able to heal faster. This isn't a demand. It's a loving wish.
That thought has sent me crying in showers and in the middle of conversations multiple times this week. All my wisdom, hopes, strengths and talents, all these frameworks I've adopted to try to get the strength to overcome... they don't want me to get stronger anymore. They want me to know I'm loved.
They want to give me something that I can only give myself, but it's a gift that takes time and patience. Unlearning is a discipline. Kindness is praxis. I've been called so many kind words by people who have known me but none of those words stay in me. I've been taught in so many ways in formative periods of my life, before I had my own words as a baby, that love is at best conditional when it's directed at me. As an adult it's still hard to believe otherwise. But I'm seeing now that I don't exist just to provide comfort to others and hope that's enough. I see that I wasn't supposed to be parentified and abused. That I was neglected emotionally despite being given material resources to ascend (that I didn't even want). That I was a victim of covert incest and so many other kinds of trauma specifically meant to control me.
I wanted love. I wanted the love I gave to be understood and received as given and not turned into crude narcissistic supply. I wanted to be seen. Work still triggers in me from all the years of alienation, self-dispossession and dissociation, exploitation, lies and attempts to make sense of it all, the wage and time theft... And it has nothing to do with the work itself or even my employers/colleagues. This is all stuff I carry with me because I was told to get strong instead of get healed.
This should be a little bit funny to me if only because I've healed SO MUCH in all these other domains. I can hear in me the call to express my own deepest feminine self in every move and breath. I feel the ancientness and incredible life wisdom flowing through every living creature including my own silly mammal self. I've come to so many philosophical and intellectual resolutions over what used to feel like conflicting ways of seeing the world. I love me in ways I thought impossible and can look in the mirror with a feeling of care and dignity I thought I could only offer others.
And yet I'm still flattened to an anxious mess by these embedded shocks and fears that demand of me to become something else. The demand to be instrumentalized or rather to instrumentalize myself to survive. I haven't had panic attacks in like 8 years and I thought it was over, but I never healed these wounds.
what does healing look like for me? I previously tied my healing to this narrative that I cobbled together from what everyone around me was telling me: Both my family and the whole earth need me and my special god given whatevers to fix them before I am allowed to heal and dignify myself. Guess when the healing was finally going to happen if I held to that. Guess how impossible of a goal that narrative laid out for me. The people and goals I chased to overcome my pain were distractions. People sensed my big heart and hurt me/prevented me from caring for myself properly to get what they wanted out of me.
That's the actual narrative I'm working with now. I have to live kindness toward myself. I can't do what I used to do and dissociate into a self-hurting machine of progress and insight. I can't live as a party trick for broken people in power. I'm not a show pony or a tool (of the government or anyone else, snake). I'm just a person who was forced to stare into the hurricane as a child and told to become a pillar. I learned a lot of things I never wanted to learn and those things remind me of the pain.
This last weekend my partner and I were almost carjacked at a filipino fundraiser event in downtown LA. My partner already made it into the passenger's seat before I could get to the door when someone ran out of a sedan straight to me demanding my keys. All the things I've trained for immediately clicked into place. I scanned all the area for accomplices, his current state of mind, if he had weapons and looked trained or out of control. He looked desperate. Whether or not I could take him, I could tell he didn't want to get hurt in the process because he wouldn't commit to charging and tackling/hitting me yet. I had to position myself to keep him away from my partner, locking the car before either of us got to the door, and squared him down when he kept charging until he'd stop trying to scare me into backing down. I eventually held ground and deescalated with words without having to actually fight or give up my car or endanger my partner.... but like... that situation only amplified my feeling of being this weapon/tool. This person who should never have had to learn all the things I believed I had to. We alerted event organizers of that attempt to protect other tiny filipinas from having to run into that. In a way it was lucky I was the one he came for... but in so many ways I just want to scream. While I still need the strength to overcome and be resilient.... I just want everyone to have a nice time.
dededos
annaxmalina
kaledo-art
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
origamiaround
