The Beginning of Being My Own Wild Self

I think I am at a beginning place. I am hesitant to write this because throughout my life there have been so many times when I thought I was being given a chance to start again, only to find out weeks or months or years later that I had once again believed in something that wasn’t what I thought it was. One of the effects trauma has had on my brain has been a tremendous ability to play pretend. I don’t know for sure but I’m guessing it was my source of hope up until recently.

Make believe made anything was possible. I could pack up my car, move across the country and go to a private college where I would learn everything I needed to know to become the next great psychologist. The student debt wouldn’t matter because I’d be a famous clinician and writer someday. No problem. I could have a baby with a man I hardly knew, move to a city I didn’t feel safe in and excel at graduate school despite the fact that my husband rarely came home from his drinking and I was having seizures and becoming agoraphobic. No problem. I could marry a man whose needs required me to stifle myself, mother three children in poverty, all while my chronic illnesses were piling up and my trauma symptoms were refusing to be ignored any longer. No problem. I never stopped to ask what was sustainable or what was true. I was surviving.

I have spent the last four years taking a very hard look at myself through a lens of honesty. I don’t want to live a life of make believe any longer. I practice yoga to learn to live in my physical body because I AM alive in this body and because when I am inhabiting this form I can feel deeply into things in a way I can’t when I am floating somewhere above myself. I spend a lot of time processing trauma every day because it is only then that I can understand why I am the way I am. And processing allows old scary stuff to shift and either dissipate or change into something new. Being in my body combined with these transformations is making me stronger and wiser and my life feels more spacious.

Lately I find that I’m not always content with my resting activities of coloring and healing gaming. Not long after I started living on my own I realized I had not energy or motivation to do any of the things I loved. It became a time of waiting. In April of 2020 I wrote the following:

The truth is, where I was once a prisoner to my abuse and then all the things I did to survive it, I am now lying in the cage I built and the door is open but I will not venture outside of it. I do not know how to live a life that is not driven by the deep need to survive. I have been severed from what inspires me by the energy it took to hide, run, or blend in and not be noticed. I had expected that once free, I would leap and bound into the wide fields of life and relish in my liberation. I am discovering that I don’t know how to be my own, wild self.

I think I’m experiencing the sensation of beginning right now because I am learning how to be my own wild self. Thoughts come bubbling up about the bloomers I’ve been wanting to make for 2 years and with a little nudge I find myself getting the fabric out, ironing and cutting out the pattern I made. I’ve been thinking about making a felted light up toadstool for my mother for her 70th birthday and today I’m going to put my basket of roving next to my bed and begin. Maybe this is me and my alters stepping out of our self-made cages and taking cautious steps towards living our truest most beautiful life. We’ve certainly waited long enough.