A few days ago (or maybe more at this point – the days are kinds running together due to the pace at which my life is currently moving) a girlfriend asked me how my book was going. My answer to her was “which one?” She seemed a little shocked at my confusion and said, “well, your novel, of course.”

The truth is my writing is more important to me than I think it has ever been. Mostly because it is less stifled, more accepted by those I care about, and something I am starting to feel less self-conscious about.

But I am still feeling self-conscious. It’s a feeling I am working on. Mostly because I know it is real. Mostly because I know it is ridiculous. Yes, that was two “mostly”s. Yes, I know how math works. No, this isn’t a math problem.

One of the hardest parts of putting nouns and verbs together on the page these days is the feeling of unworthiness. I think I may have mentioned this publicly before and I am currently resisting the urge to stop typing and go search to see. I won’t because the intention of that act is unproductive. If I were going to do it as a point of reference to further the work, that would be one thing. It isn’t that. It is simply a stall tactic. A visit into the past so that I do not have to stay present here, in the now, in the midst of this current work.

And I digress. I digress because I don’t want to address the idea of feeling unworthy. I attempt to skirt it for a few reasons, I think. But the most overwhelming one is, in the words of the wonderfully blunt Simon Cowell, it feels indulgent.

It has the air of wallow and the assumption self-deprecating behavior that begs for those who encounter it to shower me with platitudes of my wonderfulness. It feels like it could be misconstrued as the worst type of fishing expedition.

I have analyzed that idea for longer than maybe I should have. But that’s just my way. There’s probably a whole conversation I could have about that (and perhaps will), however for now, I will just leave it right there and you will just have to trust that I know myself pretty well and gave it more than a shallow thought. And after much contemplation, it isn’t indulgent or panderous (which isn’t technically a word but should be).

What it is, is honest. It is the way I feel. It is the accumulation of a lot of years of self-doubt and manipulation. It had it’s culminating moment when I heard someone say to me, “I don’t know why you write the way you do. You look silly. You write like you are somebody and you are just not. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s just that I love you and I don’t want you to make a fool of yourself.” That kind of shit, as fucked up and asinine as it is, will stick to a person. It stuck to me. It rooted and cross pollinated and had little demon spawn like a weed infestation all in my brain.

More than once I have crossed paths with folks who look at me like I am crazy. They have disapproved, publicly and privately, about my life choices. For a while I considered giving those opinions some weight – or at least time for consideration. Fairly quickly, I decided that wasn’t how I was moving into the second half of my life.

Keeping with weed analogy, I’ll explain it this way. When I was a kid, my dad would burn our yard every few years in the colder months, right before spring was scheduled to do what she does. It was supposed to get the junk out so the grass could grow back fuller. I later learned that this happens in forests and tree farms on occasion when the undergrowth starts to take over. The unproductive gets burnt away so that the good, the intentional, the real, can flourish.

I participated in a bit of “scorch the earth.” It probably wasn’t my finest hour, but I own it. And, even in hindsight, even when I see all the ways I could have done it different, even when I know I could have been better, I still don’t regret it. It was one of the few times, up to that point in my life, I lived in the present. Because I hadn’t done very much of that, I wasn’t very good at it. I am getting much better.

The scorch took care of a wide range of ills. However, as anyone knows, the process looks ugly, and it takes a while for the new and better to grow back. During that time, you have to be watchful for the weeds that survive, the hearty ones with deeper roots, darker places to hide. They will grow back. They are familiar and comfortable and will take back over if you let them. They will have the help of shit fertilizer more commonly known as the judgement and opinions of others who only see your mess. The crazy thing is, part of you will want to let them grow. You will look at the shit and put stock in the idea that maybe the others are right. There is the comfort of the things you know – good for you or not, and the exhaustion from doing the work otherwise.

I lived that part too. I weeded and I weeded and I weeded my new growth. It was hard and uncomfortable and draining. But the work was good. The tiredness, the soreness, was much like that physical feeling of a job well done. I am also fortunate enough to have a broad-shouldered husband who carries what I cannot. A family who gives me life. Friends who give me respite. I have moments when I feel weathered and acutely sense unfairness. It is in these times I look around and see how amazingly blessed I am. Those blessings are my strength.

I sit here tonight, over a week after I first started putting these thoughts to ink, and I can’t really remember all the places I intended to go when I first started. My husband and I exchange more words with each other during a day than I think most people do with every single person they come into contact with. There have been two recent conversations that give my initial sit down with myself a completely different perspective.

The first addresses ridiculous feelings and that I have come to terms with the fact that I have them. One of the greatest gifts of being overly self-aware is that I understand that just because I feel something doesn’t mean that I am, or anything else is, that something. It simply means I have a feel. My feelings are not a representation of fact – they are a suggestion of opinion and an indicator of external factors. Therefore, just because I feel unworthy doesn’t mean that I am unworthy. It simply means that there is a feel, a fear, that I need to root out and dispatch properly. It probably means I am giving the opinions of others more weight than they merit.

The other was a little more ego boost with a touch of tough love. Truth is, we have had this conversation before…more than once. Sometimes it takes more than we would like to make sure the message takes hold. Honestly, I am mostly okay with that. I am 42 years old. I spent a long time dealing in unhealthy habits attempting to function in disfunction and presenting to the world an “everything is wonderful” face. If that takes me a bit to work all that out, so be it.

My husband adores me. He makes it a point to make sure that I know that there is nothing I could do to change that. He makes it a point to be clear that he loves me just the way I am. In fact, in the very beginning of our reconnection, when I knew that he loved me, when I knew he wanted to be with me, when we knew how many challenges that created, he offered to let me go. He made the offer with the assurance that he would love me anyway, as he had always loved me. He had loved me a long time without having any hope that I would love him back. He didn’t see how that would change. He didn’t ask me to do or be anything for him. He asked me to be and do for me. That’s how he loves me. And if that meant him, great. And if it didn’t, well, he was okay with that too.

He reminded me again the other day his love was unconditional. I could function inside myself without fear. That if we agreed or didn’t wouldn’t change the fact that I was his girl and he had me. I could step into whatever it was I stepping into and know, with certainty, that he was there. And, because that is true, if I choose to keep holding myself back, freaking myself out, getting twisted in my own head, well, that was on me. I can’t blame that one anyone else.

In the words of Mike Trepagnier, “Choices. We all have them. I can only control mine.”

This. This was the unfinished journal musings from November that made yesterday’s go at Freeman a tangled mess. Now that this is addressed, I can get back to the other…

November 25, 2018
The idea had actually lingered for days. Better put, it seeded more than a year ago. A recent conversation, one that incidentally shouldn’t have mattered to me at all, sparked a need to flesh the idea out, to put real thought and understanding into the wisp in my brain. To understand it better because it was a route to understanding myself better.

I have long been aware that the way in which people know, or think they know, me is varied. I think all people, whether they acknowledge it or not, can claim this statement true for themselves. As individuals, we consider ourselves for ourselves. When we consider others, or are considered by others, additional histories, perceptions, and ideas come into play. More importantly, we rarely offer the same pieces of ourselves to others uniformly. What I share with my closest is different from what I share with my casuals, with my family is different depending on how we are family, with professionals is different than personals. And what I am and share with my beloved is wholly different and in a league all its own.

That awareness is paramount in my work to release myself from the effect that the opinions of others have on me. In the not so distant past, those effects were pretty embarrassing. More than once I have berated myself for being a grown woman and still not having better control over my own emotions. I am all too aware of the debilitating effects the thoughts of others can have on me. I have made it no secret that Mike’s support and simple council – the motives of people who seek to make you feel a negative kind of way are always suspect and should be disregarded as unimportant – has been instrumental.

But I still get caught. I suppose I will always have moments when I get caught. As such, I have revised my intention for the work. To think that I will never be moved by the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of others is unrealistic. It’s not that I can’t do it; I won’t do it. It’s not who I am as a person. I am not that hard. I don’t have those kinds of edges. Moreover, I don’t want to be that hard or sharpen those edges.

I feel compelled to note that I do not see those traits as negative. Mike has them and I love it about him. He is my rock and his shoulders carry a lot of weight. I am able to be more fully who I am because he is my safe place. In return, I provide a safe place for him to rest. He has found the balance that allows him to be all the things that he is. That balance has become the new focus of my intention.

I was described as weak. I am certain it is not the first time. I have long held suspicions that this was an idea held by others who make assumptions about a life they know very little about. I’ve never thought too much (relatively speaking) about it. I understand how the opinion could be contrived. To be completely truthful, I take a small amount of pride in knowing the secrets and nuances that make it untrue; a knowing others wanted to have but never obtained. Maybe it was larger than a small amount…

Maybe it was that pride that gave me comfort and counterbalanced the feelings of anxiety that come when you put too much stock in another person’s opinions. Before actual words were conveyed, there was also a vagueness to the assumption. I wasn’t entirely certain it was being said and, therefore, couldn’t be certain of the other opinions that extrapolated from there. It was easy to make up the asinine things being said about me and then neutralize their effect with laughter.  After that, the work was pretty much over in this regard. I was able to move past my tendency to lose myself in what I assumed the opinions of others were and I was satisfied.

An unfortunate fact of life is that fake monsters are much easier to defeat than real ones. While getting past made up shit in my own head was great practice, facing the real thing took a bit more work. Instead of assumptions and guesses, it was concrete and tangible. That I was thought weak was definitive and clear. The causes and effects were included. The whole of it was in writing, the gift of which is to be able to revisit and reread as many times as your crazy brain desires. 

I am a little embarrassed to tell you how much this instance affected me. But, my experience has shown that if I speak it, name it, call it out from the push back and into the upfront where we can all see it, the work to dismantle it and make it appropriate is much, much easier.

I was angry. Angry at all of it. Interestingly enough, being called weak was at the bottom of the list of things about the situation that pissed me off. I realized I didn’t even care that this particular person held this opinion. I have learned that we are notoriously famous as people for transferring the things we despise about ourselves onto others. Like if we can identify it in someone else (correctly or not is unimportant) then it must not be true about ourselves. It is for this reason you will almost never hear me refer to others as loud, sensitive, or selfish. These are foremost thoughts I have about myself so I know that I am likely to misattribute them to others. Therefore, I was not surprised in this instance that “weak” was the adjective used to describe me. It is probably one of the foremost things they are afraid is true about themselves. They won’t admit it, they aren’t there yet. I get it.

Here’s where practice with the fake monsters shows its usefulness come game time. The opinion of others – the focus of the fake monster work – is found in the primary “April is weak.” I have fought the illusion of this monster before. I found the actual to be pretty much what I thought: an opinion offered by an irrelevant person whose motive is not in my best interest, born out of their own unaddressed inadequacies as an attempt to shift focus from the consequences of their personal choices by creating a version of reality that allows them to blame someone – anyone – else.

Understanding this made getting past the whole “April is weak” pretty quick and short work.

But the nag in my brain was obviously still there. It became increasingly frustrating and emotionally exhausting as I went back to the old hurt, over and over again, thinking maybe I hadn’t let it all go. But each time I went back, there was nothing there. It occurred to me that I was not finding anything because I was continually going back to a place I already looked – the primary.

The fuckery was in the ancillary. It almost always is. That’s why it is so often hard to get to, tough to identify, complicated to remove from the mess. So I put the entirety of the conversation back together again, the whole of the situation, the perspectives of all the parties. Then I felt around in the weeds, looked for the soft spots. Once again, the primary wasn’t it. But the bruise was all around it.

“April is weak” was couched in a history that wasn’t mine, tactics that weren’t his, and a truth that isn’t ours. And that’s where my anger lived. While I was encouraged that I found it, I was confused at the same time. This was more of the same, it should follow the same path as the original work. It didn’t. The only option was to put it through new work.

“Am I afraid?” This, in so much that I can control my process, is always my first question. While I hold love as a higher emotional priority, and the question is essentially the same if I phrase it, “Am I feeling love or fear,” I have found that I am capable of being more honest with myself if I directly ask the question, “April, are you scared?”

I am not afraid. The anger comes from a place of protection, not defense. That is my truth. I fought pretty hard to be comfortable speaking it and getting real with myself and those around me. To have others take second and third hand information and have the audacity to attempt to have any confidence that they can begin to know a sliver about me is insulting. I am angry that my story was hijacked, sensationalized, and wielded by mouths who hold no honor for it.  

I immediately went for the easy route, the path that laughs at the audacity of others to put names in their mouth that they have no frame of reference for. That shit really is funny – most of the time. I could not find it funny today. I considered maybe I was taking myself too seriously. I decided that just this once, I was not. I was angry and I felt justified in my anger. Today, that emotion was not going to acquiesce to the more civilized, “Fuck ‘em, they’re stupid.”

There are moments when I will concede that my emotions get the better of me and they are unreasonable. However, that does not mean they are always unreasonable. There are times, such as this, where my ire is created by an encroached boundary.

And now that I have had better than a week to process and work through, I have come to a place where I realize the goal of my anger is to ensure that I have clearly stated my boundaries, not really to you, but most assuredly myself.

My truth is an ever evolving, dynamic discovery that was breathed into being before me, molded in my yesterday, experienced in my today, and unfolding in my tomorrow. It has been hidden, muted, condemned, manipulated, misunderstood, edited, abused, ridiculed, and despised. I did those things. My truth is my responsibility and I take ownership of every unfortunate thing that has ever happened to it. I have apologized to and forgiven myself for living a life that was less than in exchange for what I thought was less strife and conflict. I have also promised to work every day towards becoming a person that protects my truth from such slights.

In that work I know a few things. One, not every argument, accusation, threat, slight, opinion, deserves a response. Depending on the narrative or the narrator, it is often beneath me to address it directly – especially when I haven’t been addressed directly. It’s hard to take opinions about you seriously when those holding them are incapable of adult conversation.

Two, because it is mine, I have the option of responding whenever I chose. I need no reason, good or otherwise, to engage when called out. It is ignorance to assume you can continually exhibit behavior for the express purpose of eliciting a response and then clutch pearls over the response you receive. There’s an old saying, Moses maybe, “Don’t start no shit, it won’t be no shit.” Actually, that was Lil Jon, but I am sure Moses thought it too.

Lastly, I am not ashamed to be a complex person. I am love and forgiveness. I am also cut you off and kiss my ass. I am enlightenment and growth. I am also a little trailer with a healthy helping of petty. A little bless your heart, a little fuck you. No, those aren’t the same thing.

Really last, you are welcome to think me weak. Better have thought worse. Smarter have been wrong.