Hush

My voice is something I’ve spent a lifetime battling with. There’s been one person in my life that has heard my whole voice and never asked for it to be quieter, for the thoughts stumbling from my mouth to be different. Nearly every person in my life has asked me to be different, whether it be spoken or unspoken, at some point. There’s a lot of awareness coming about around fully communicating your needs with those around you, which is excellent, but the thing is, for those of us who have lived a life of directness, it is often misconstrued as sarcasm or “rudeness.”

Direct communication has actually been a rather isolating experience. I have spoken up and have been shut out. I have asked for friendship and been met with turned backs and silence. I have asked for community and been directed to talk to someone else. I have spoken of my ills and pains and have been told there is "nothing wrong.” I’ve asked for help or companionship when needed, to be met with “we’re all struggling.”

I’m not sure the problem can be chalked up to just not directly communicating, a lot of the problem is not actually listening. Not being taught what true community looks like. And trying to forge a community in a world that doesn’t accept the ways in which you show up in it, you are forced into rugged individualism.

How does one find worth in a vacuum? When you have to constantly overextend and over do and live in a perpetual state of burn out just for some one sided companionship, how does one find fulfillment in that? How does one become so invisible while being so vocal?

I have a voice but it’s quieting.

Seeking

How do you build a community with the people around you when most seem entirely uninterested in building a relationship with you and letting you in? How do you open the hearts of those who were raised in a society not focused on community building to the wonders that could happen if we just sat with each other through our whole, messy lives?

Musing on this a lot lately.

Letting go

This time of year used to hold so much wonder and twinkly-ness for me. Getting to see a family that I thought was so solid and full of love. Once that thin string, that I didn’t see was holding it all together as a child, broke so did the magic of the season. My adult years have been filled with letting go of what once was, the lie I had been fed, and I’ve been slowly working on figuring out what this season means for myself.
Working on not feeling a deep sense of sadness that I cannot muster the busy-ness and glitz of what I thought this time should be filled with and finding that a silence and stillness is what calls to me, from deep within the earth. It’s a process, of grieving, of hope, a death life death cycle, over and over again.

So for now, I’m sitting in the acceptance of knowing what I thought was, wasn’t, and finding that the melancholy of that isn’t something to hide from.

I’ll be here, sitting with a cup of cocoa, if you’d like to join me.

Clearly

When is the last time you asked for exactly what you needed from someone? In your friendships? In your family? Have you ever done that act of love for yourself?
What happens when you stop speaking in innuendos and sentences that require reading between the lines and just speak plainly? Are you afraid of being seen in such a vulnerable way?
I personally know it’s painful to ask what you need. For me, I find it so difficult when I let someone know what I need or ask for company and get turned down. But, I know that at least, when all is said and done, I spoke what I needed at the time into existence. It’s powerful. I just hope for every person, that they are surrounded by people who understand them.
May 2022 be when we really show up and show out for each other.
I love y’all.

Embodied.

To myself in every moment I have had before and will have later, feeling like my body is too tight for my soul, I want you to remember this moment now, this feeling of embodiment. It isn’t something that can’t happen or won’t happen again. This is the proof. That feeling of relief and satisfaction when you slide the last puzzle piece in and it’s one complete photo and being, when it was fractured just moments before.

Inadvertent Death Doula

I find myself, a bit over two years later, after losing Natasha, ready to share the trauma of the last few months of our friendship, where I realize that perhaps my role in her life at the time was to be a comforting hand, a gentle soul to walk with her through to the end. It wasn’t the role I wanted or the role I wish I had, but it feels as if that was what life handed me anyways. We had planned to live out our lives together, as a different type of soulmate, one of understanding that feeling of being alien, being too much, too soft, too feeling, in a world that values only intimate type of relationships, my family and I were ready to embrace Natasha into our lives. We dreamt of her moving here to join me for morning coffee everyday after Joey would go to work. To toil away in a studio together, creating in our own messy world that would include so much laughter, so many tears, so many dance parties that the world would deem terrible, terrible dancing.

There were so many plans and when she left my house in June, we knew this had to happen but towards the end of that summer, something dramatically shifted. Suddenly she was in a deep despair, deeper than when she was deeply betrayed by the person closest to her that she never ever expected to betray her and be purposefully destructive with her heart a couple years prior. And while that is not my story to tell, since she was very guarded about that part of her life, I wish to touch on the deep impact we have on others lives. We had spent a year and a half working through a lifetime of trauma. Childhood traumas, betrayals by friends, when we had betrayed ourselves, betrayals we never expected, nothing was too much for us to talk about with each other. Nothing ever made us look at the other like they were too broken. We held each other through things that had never been spoken aloud. We wrote them down. We made images expressing things that were just unable to be uttered. We created a story with it.

There was a deep sense of relief to had found a friendship, that we both struggled through our lives to find, that we felt whole in.

And then, I remember it clearly, a day I broke down and told her how scared I was for some health issues I was having at the time, auditory hallucinations, constant migraines, visual hallucinations, and I was terrified I had brain cancer. She listened as I told her all of this and then when the fear became too overwhelming for me, I changed the subject and made a joke, as I do, to lighten the mood. But her response was out of character, she didn’t hold my fear with gentleness like she had done every time before and started lecturing me on what it means to be a good human, questioning if she was one and subsequently if I was. That was the moment that everything turned with her. We worked it through and I reassured her that I loved her and that her having a “freak out” did not freak me out. But more was happening behind the scenes than she was telling me at the time. From that moment on, it was a two month decline and her feeling endlessly guilty about her lack of gentleness during that time.

She was questioning her heart, her soul, her place on this earth. She was honest about her ideation but also that she was going to therapy and checking herself into the hospital when needed. I would check in constantly, often to silence, or her saying she was incapable of love, that she didn’t know if she ever truly loved anyone ever on this earth. It was isolating to be with her in this space. I constantly go back and forth on the ways in which I walked with her during this time. I encouraged her to reach out to people that were closer to her, physically, but for many reasons that were hers and were valid, she didn’t feel comfortable doing so. I didn’t want to be another person who betrayed her by going against her wishes and the only person I knew how to reach was one that was a huge source of pain for her.

It felt as if no one else existed in these moments and that potentially anything I could say or do could be more detrimental. It’s two years later and yet, time for me is still stopped in September-November of 2019. So many people have told me to let go of the guilt but I do not think it is something that is possible for me, nor would I want to. I don’t hold it as a punishment. It lives in me and forever has changed the course of my soul and the way in which my brain works and how I approach friendships now. Guilt over this doesn’t mean I am not simultaneously healing while grieving, or knowing that I was doing the best I could with the information I had at the time, but how do I not feel guilt over being the one walking with her through the end of her life, even if I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time? That, that is the source of the guilt, I didn’t know that’s what was happening, but now I can see that. It’s guilt for not seeing it at the time.

There’s a lot of trauma I’m working through over her life and subsequent death. It has stagnated everything else. Being able to even comprehend the loss of my grandmother-my mother figure, and the loss of my dog-my first baby.

Others talk of Natasha’s presence in their daily lives, how they still feel her around. But I don’t. I did at first but I often wonder how much of that was my own subconscious needing to hold on to her because of the feeling of failing her, of trying to ease the overwhelming guilt. I don’t feel her. I’ve tried to connect and there’s just silence. Maybe it’s the weariness of my soul. Whatever it is, it’s lonely.

Natasha had a painful life. I feel it’s important to recognize that. I know we all want to feel better when someone we love dies, about the goodness of the life they had, and while she certainly had beautiful moments and connections in this life, because she was beautiful and endlessly loving, she also had a lot of people around her that traumatized her from a very young age and didn’t hold space for her pain or beauty. Trying to silence her, constantly. She had people telling her she felt too much, was too much, taking advantage of her endless capacity for love and deep deep wanting to be loved, wholly, in return. The parts of her life that were magnificent was hers. Her creation. She believed in the goodness in everyone. She deserved so much better.

I remember how when I received this text, after months of her being convinced she didn’t know how to love, I smiled and felt a sense of relief. I thought this was a corner being turned. I wish that were true.

<3
Katelyn

Learning to be okay with silence.

There were so many moments we were supposed to have. And now we have none.

Every cup of coffee I drink reminds me of the dreams we had to live so close we could drink them together every morning in person. There were so many hugs we were supposed to have. So many dreams we had to fulfill. And now we have none.

I’m left not knowing how to “friend” anymore. Crying out to the world with very little response. Silent whispers but no hand held out to grab hold of. Dreams of closure I will never receive. Of friendships that will never be. Lessons learned on over extending and desperation. Learning that I have enough.

People have shown me my place in their life. Now I’m learning how to listen.

I miss you. It wasn’t enough time.