Twenty Things

number 30!!!

We’re almost at late February, how did that happen?

Time is strange like that.

I recently re-read a line from Mojave-American poet, Natalie Diaz, that hit: “Trust your anger. It is a demand for love.”

I’ve been recently thinking about anger, an emotion I’ve suppressed for a lot of my life, believing that it was uncouth and ugly; that as an emotion it was better to sublimate, rather than face.

I was talking to one of my besties James about it recently, too, both of us expressing how little we knew how to be angry, how neither of us really understood how to be with it, to tend to the fire and rage. I’d seen a parent completely consumed by it, so I refused to fall into its shackles… Yet, I’ve realized, through TCM and ayurveda, if you stifle your anger it goes back directly into your body. When you have stomach ulcers, you have acid reflux, eczema or skin conditions this is all an example of excess fire, all the anger you’re not releasing is going back into yourself… but if you learn how to express healthy anger, as in, at the very least, you are able to witness your own and name what is making you angry… this means you can actually then learn how to channel it.

This has been a profound journey for me, learning how to release my anger. My therapist, E, would tell you that when I first started working with her in 2019, I had convinced myself that I wasn’t a very angry person. This, of course, was code I had written for myself, my own self-mythology. These last few years, I’ve been breaking a lot of my own self-narratives, and have been attempting to reimagine a more whole version of me that admits to all my flaws, instead of blinking at them really fast so I pretend they’re not there.

Until I was about almost thirty, I wanted to believe I was a “good girl” and I was obsessed with that narrative, even if at times it usurped the actual reality of who I was. Not that I was a bad girl, lol (I mean depends who is asking 😈) but I felt like if I showed certain parts of me that were “unlikeable” I couldn’t be a good person, so I denied and discarded parts of myself, acting as if they weren’t real or “honest” parts of me… and instead parts that I could amend. Four years after starting therapy, I’m happy to announce that I do recognize my own anger, and I know it doesn’t make me bad. I can’t always admit it, but I’m trying to more and more each day. But, it’s a process. Finally being in a romantic relationship where I actually feel held, and seen, I’m being allowed to be all the parts of me in the safety of someone else’s love.

In the last few years, since identifying my rage, and by expressing it, I’ve healed my own eczema (it’s true if you didn’t know I had an acupuncture column for two years where I documented my trial and tribulations with eczema!!!) and every day is another relearning of who I am through the process of deep listening to myself, by actually acknowledging and speaking to all the lost and broken parts that I had denied existence. These were my shadows.

So these days, I try not to proselytize myself to myself… and I try to stay away from making any new self-mythologies. I am just a person in life trying to spiritually ascend and so that means I can’t be in denial of who I am. What if healing is actually just facing yourself?