Past

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The past. A four-letter word loaded with emotion. It has been on my mind lately in more ways than one. The holidays will do that, especially this year. It is almost impossible not to compare to the years prior. The years when both of my grandfathers were alive, and we were still creating memories instead of just looking back on them. The past is nostalgia. The past is also pain.

This year for Thanksgiving I was not surrounded by family, but I was lucky enough to be with close friends. For that, I am grateful. It is 2020 and I am still alive creating new memories. These are words that not everyone can write. This year has taken a lot from people.

In therapy, we talk about the past a lot. Sometimes we focus on the more recent past – what happened yesterday, last week, or last month. Other times we travel back to the more distant past. Childhood. We are constantly discussing our families of origin.

I’ve struggled with this. Looking backwards. Does it help or does it hurt?

At times it has felt like unnecessary dwelling. Why would I want to spend dedicated time reliving painful experiences? Been there. Felt that. I’m paying you to make me feel better.

Other times it feels circular and I just feel powerless. I’m focusing on experiences that I cannot change. It goes something like this:

Me: I feel shitty. Help me understand why I feel so shitty.

Therapist: Remember, you’ve had some shitty experiences.

Me: Oh yes, now I remember.

Me again: ……still feeling shitty……

I imagine this is why plenty of people don’t go to therapy. This dwelling on your pain. It either feels pointless or overwhelming. I feel you, people.

But the thing is we relive the past all the time, sometimes without even realizing it. We relive it through our behavior. Every.Damn.Day. Our earliest joys become what we strive for. Our pain becomes the makings of the shields we build to protect ourselves.

Seek joy.

Avoid pain.

Repeat.

So I don’t have a choice, but to go back and to hold on to it. Really hold on to it. Even though I don’t want to. This is something I’ve realized only recently. I’ve let myself believe I’m a pretty open book when it comes to sharing my past. In some ways I have been. But I’ve been selective regarding the memories I share and the way I’ve shared them. I say the words, but more times than not, I haven’t felt the feelings. Not really. I’ve said the words as if they are someone else’s story. As a matter of fact. “I felt pain,” I say, straight-faced. Perhaps I throw in a little self-deprecating humor afterword or a cliché.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”

I can probably count on two hands the number of times I’ve broken down in therapy. In over a decade.

Maybe it is strange, but I want to break down. I want to loosen the grip. I want to feel.

So I will share my past and it begins now:

When I was young, very young, around four or five years old, my mom started struggling with significant digestive issues, ulcerative colitis. I can’t remember exactly when I became aware of this, but at some point I realized she was sick. She was at the doctor a lot and then the hospital. My grandparents were over a lot.

Maybe around seven or eight years old, I had trouble when she left the house and at night. I remember like it was yesterday running to the window and watching her pull out of the driveway. I would plant my face against the window and watch her drive away until I couldn’t see her car anymore. If I could not get to the window, I would panic and worry she would not come back.

At night I would tell my family goodnight and I love them over and over again. Either until I fell asleep or my parents urged me get to bed already. When my sister and I shared a room, I would make her face me as we both fell asleep. I would beg. She would get annoyed and complain to my parents. Other nights I would be unable to fall asleep unless my dollhouse was in perfect order down to the miniature silverware on the miniature table. It would nag at me if anything was out of place.

I was a child living in fear. I know this now. I’m not sure if I knew it then. I don’t think I did.

What I felt was “not okay” and I grasped at what I could to feel okay and get through the night.

The other thing I felt was “different”. I knew enough to know this was not exactly “normal” behavior. I did not see my sister and brother doing this. Instead, it was something we joked about and still do from time to time. Crazy Sarah.

Even after all these years it is hard for me to go back to that place. To be honest, I don’t think it is the pain and fear that I do not want to address as much as it is the shame. I still want to rewrite my past and change the way I coped. I still feel the urge to laugh these memories off despite how much they have shaped me.

I would rather share how my family banded together to get through those difficult years. I would rather share how my dad would come up with games to play in the car on the way to the hospital so the drive would be less difficult or so we could temporarily forget that this was “our normal”. Those are happier memories. Those are memories I’m okay looking back on.

But the other memories exist too. And they are part of me.

Cue ‘Holocene’ by Bon Iver

Safe

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You may have read my last post and thought, “Okay. Sarah doesn’t like the treasurer.” But that is not true. It is gray and today I am sitting with it.

I feel vulnerable in that relationship. I feel silly, even a bit unhinged, for fearing an adult friendship with someone who lives in the same building as me. But I’ve promised myself that I will not sugarcoat my feelings.

The truth is I feel vulnerable in every relationship to some degree. I am terrified of the connections I so deeply desire. With her (and many others) I can’t get a good sense of how she feels about me. Am I a friend? Or just someone she will inevitably see since we share the same front door? A friendship of convenience and shared financial interest?

My barometer for acceptance in relationships is how much I hear from you, how much time of mine you seem to want, how consistent you are. With her we talk and hang out in spurts. It is frequent and then it eases up. When communication is consistent, I feel calm. I do not worry as much about how she feels about me. I feel accepted. When there is silence, my feelings of doubt remind me they are my most consistent and reliable friend. The doubt is still with me. To “protect” me. To whisper just loud enough that I’ve been here before. “Be careful. People like you…until they don’t.”

Growing up I was bullied in middle and high school. By girls I thought were friends. Best friends. A memory that has stayed with me over the years is when they wrote a love note and pretended it was from the boy I really liked. They put it in my locker and watched me read it and get excited. I then heard them laughing hysterically. At me. At my excitement. Was the thought of my crush liking me ridiculous? Was my excitement funny?

Then there was the time girls left the Oompa Loompa song from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on my voicemail. It felt like they could see my insecurities and threw them back at my face. I felt mortified. Ashamed. Exposed. Alone.

This was not the beginning of my mental health issues (that was elementary school), but I think it was when they began to spiral. It was when it went from anxiety to depression. From feeling a bit different to feeling completely alone. Years of secret anguish and plans of escaping from a world that was hurting me.

It was the beginning of keeping you at arm’s length. It was the beginning of self-sabotage. Of getting close and pulling away. Of living in my world of doubt and convincing myself it was reality so I could keep being alone. It was not the place I wanted to be, but it was safe.

During that time and for many years after, I did not feel safe. I didn’t know how to. What if I seek solace in the arms of someone who would just end up hurting me? I did not push everyone away completely, but I learned not to trust. Like I said, I kept you at arm’s length. And I held my breath. I never wanted to be caught off guard again. By anyone or anything.

There is more here to unpack and over time I will. Today, I will just share that I’m grateful I’m lightyears beyond that place. That horrible, lonely place. Today, I can let you in a bit more. This blog is evidence of that. But it is hard and it will probably continue to be hard. I’m learning how to unlearn behaviors and thought processes that, during that time, I thought I needed to survive.

I still struggle with relationships. I can very quickly time travel back to my 12-year-old self. I can assume your silence is a rejection instead of busyness. I can assume it must only be about me, my weaknesses, the parts of myself that are not attractive. The parts that are “too much”. I have to slow down and remember to breathe.

The struggle can be exhausting, but I’m okay with it (most days). Connecting with you and pushing through the vulnerability has taught me so many things. You’ve been hurt too. You may have been bullied. You share many of my fears. You are a work in progress just like me.

This has been a powerful realization. We are the same kind of imperfect. Weathered from life’s experiences. I wasn’t alone then and I’m not alone now. And despite the chaos in this world, I feel okay. I feel safe.

Cue ‘Scars’ by Lukas Graham

Pain

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I am angry, but I cannot yell. I am sad, but I cannot cry.

Two months ago I flooded, almost six months to the day from when I bought my condo. It was a glorious six months of first-time homebuyer bliss. The flood was not minor. My condo filled with about a foot of water throughout the 1100 square feet and I lost a lot – furniture, electronics, pictures. Most things can be replaced, but it isn’t the same. The replacements will be similar, but not the same. The memories will be different. And then there is the money aspect. So much money to so many different people – plumbers, mold remediation experts, general contractors, lawyers. Money I don’t have.

My life has been turned upside down, but, yet, I cannot express the real, raw emotions – the anger and the sadness. I’ve cried for approximately 30 seconds in the last two months. On Tuesday, I finally came close to an outburst. I should not even call it that, but that is what came to mind first. Expressing emotions feels like an “outburst”.  Anyways, my frustration boiled over. I reached some threshold. It had to come out in some way.

The stress over money has been building since the flood happened. All in this will cost between $40-$50 thousand. I don’t have this kind of money laying around. Luckily, I have some insurance coverage, but the hook is it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the condo association. The condo association made up only of first-time homebuyers. This makes things significantly more complicated and…slow. So despite the fact that the flood happened to me, impacted only my condo, the money is not mine. This makes me angry. I’m trying to have perspective since it is better to have some money than no money but what I really want to say is, “Fuck perspective.”

Of course, I don’t say this.

On the outside I pretend I’m keeping it together and am told things like, “Wow. I’m impressed at how you are handling all of this.”

Tuesday was particularly stress-inducing because I had to write another $6,000 check to my contractor. Apparently they want to get paid for doing work. I wrote the check, but I knew I could not clear that check. Leading up to this I had been messaging the treasurer of the condo association who is in control of the insurance money and she was not responding. I asked for a payout from the insurance money and I got crickets. Let me tell you – shame plus anger is a lovely combination. A lovely combination that set me up for my “outburst”.

The outburst wasn’t really an outburst. I asked my parents for more money (which led to more shame) and, as directly as I could, I told the treasurer I was upset by her lack of responsiveness (downplaying my anger by reassuring her that I understood she was busy).

I got out of the crisis logistically, but how did I handle the emotions? I binged and purged. I had to rid myself of the discomfort, of the heaviness caused by negative emotions.

The truth is I feel ashamed that at age 34 I still need to ask my parents for money. I feel like a failure.

And I’m still angry. I’m angry I’m in this situation and I’m angry at her specifically. I’m glad I was able to express some amount of frustration, but I do not want to spend the rest of my life downplaying my emotions to make the other person feel more comfortable. I do not want to feel forced to put my emotions into a generalized frustration bucket when they are anything but that.

I don’t want to impress anyone by my lack of emotional response.

I want to scream.

And I want to cry.

I want you to see my pain.

Because maybe if you saw it, I would not have to secretly try to purge it away one binge at a time.

Cue ‘Wish You Pain’ by Andy Grammar

Identities

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We all have them. Plural.

I am a woman.

I am a daughter.

I am a sister.

I am an aunt.

I am a public servant.

I am a sexual assault survivor.

In my last post you learned of another one of my identities.

I am bulimic.

When I’m struggling this feels like my only identity. I know it isn’t, but it feels like it. When I’m hurting, my rational brain doesn’t soothe my bleeding heart. Knowing doesn’t take away the feeling. As much as I try.

In college I took a course titled “Us vs Them”. This was probably my first real introduction to identities. Obviously I knew at some level they exist, but I had never put much thought into it. How do they form? When do they matter? Why do they matter? When do they go to the extreme?

I think most would agree they matter a whole lot. Wars have been raged based on identities. Violent wars. Cultural wars. Wars within ourselves.

They seem to be growing in importance or at least that is how I perceive what I’m seeing on the news or on social media. This feels especially relevant today of all days. It is the day after election day. We still do not know who our next President is. Who is going to win? You or me? Democrat or Republican?

Yesterday I felt anger. Your identity made me angry. How are there still so many votes? How are so many people still identifying with him? I’ve been struggling a lot with the bulimia, but yesterday this other identity took over. Political affiliation. Its importance amplified. Suddenly my brother-in-law more of an enemy than the day before. Suddenly my best friend and I felt worlds apart.

It is hard to feel this anger. I hate it in fact. I feel guilty for writing what I did about people I really love. But it is also the truth. The truth about how I felt. There was an anger that I could not shake.

If I really sit with it, the anger, the discomfort, the emotions, I know the feelings are deeper. I think acceptance and our identities go hand in hand. At least I think mine do.

When you vote for him and I vote for the other guy, I feel threatened. It feels like you are disapproving of me, of my way of life. It feels like your vote condones his behavior. All of it, even the stuff we’ve previously agreed on. I go back to living in these extremes. I go back to the us versus them. How are you doing this to me? Don’t you care about me? Your identity is an attack on mine.

Rationally I know your vote was not about me, but it feels like it was. And again. My rational brain does not exactly always win. I can’t speak for everyone, but it seems like a lot of us may be feeling this way.

One of my deepest desires is to be truly and fully accepted. All of me. The good and the bad. When I’m happy and when I’m sad (yes I just rhymed). I’ve never felt accepted and I’m terrified I won’t find it. I’m terrified that I’ll find it and lose it.

If I feel threatened, like you don’t accept me, I wear my identity as a coat of armor. I wear it to cover up the pain. I wear it to protect myself. I find others whose coat of armor matches mine so I can feel part of something. I’d rather be on a side than alone.

With the election, I want my side to win. I do. But what I want more than that is to wake up tomorrow and to remember that political affiliation is just one of my identities. The next time I spend time by the toilet purging my food, I want to remember that being bulimic is not all that I am.

I am lots of things and I am enough. And you are too.

Because on November 4th in 2020 I could use this song right about now…

Cue ‘You Need to Calm Down’ by Taylor Swift

Quiet

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I’m trying to practice what I preach. I’m trying to slow down. I’m trying to breathe.

I will admit that you are meeting me at a vulnerable time for reasons I will delve into in future posts. Maybe this vulnerability is why writing is especially important to me right now. I’ve recognized the importance of this process, the process of getting the thoughts out of my head and onto paper. The process of searching for the gray and holding on to it. I’m in a black and white moment and this is me actively finding the gray.

I am writing tonight in one of my more anxious states. At the current time my thoughts are something along the lines of, “chips and queso, chips and queso, chips and queso.” Why? The most simple explanation is that earlier for lunch I ordered chips and queso along with my burrito bowl. I did not eat the chips. I was distracted with work and I was pretty full from the bowl. In other words, at the time, I did not feel I needed the chips to satisfy me.

But now it is 10:25 pm and the chips are calling my name. The thought of them being a few feet away nags at me. I have to keep refocusing my brain on something else. It is hard work. There is no denying it.

The more complicated answer to the “why” question above is that food and I have a messy relationship. Food is my comfort. Food is also my drug. It is the reason therapy was a necessity years ago and it continues to be one of the reasons I am still in therapy to this day.

I was 18 or 19 when I stuck my fingers down my throat for the first time. I am now 34.

It has taken me approximately 16 years to admit what I just did. I gave you my name and I shared something so very personal about myself with you. I am bulimic. It is part of me. It has shaped me. But it is not me.

There has been an undeniable fear of writing these words. A fear that these words would take on an identity that I could never rid myself of or that they would be turned into something so meaningless, so degrading.

“Oh you know Sarah? She is bulimic.” As if that is all that I am.

“Oh you remember Sarah? She is still bulimic?” As if that is all I have to show for the last 16 years.

I realize now that many of the fears I put onto you were projections of my own self-hatred.

Eating disorders and shame go hand in hand. At times, it has felt like I am living a double life – the one where I keep it together in front of other people and the one where I privately fall apart. But this double life has come at a cost – my sanity. Secrets are dangerous and they are heavy. They weigh you down.

Over time I will share more about the eating disorder and many other things.

For now I will focus on tonight. I got home from a date. I was feeling pretty good, but I was also feeling anxious. I’ve learned that anxiety is not all bad emotions. Instead it seems like an excess of emotions or sometimes extreme emotions. For me, anxiety is almost always in the form of racing thoughts that won’t turn off. That is, until I find something to focus my brain on. This is where chips and queso come in. Focusing on food offers this false promise of a quiet brain. I go somewhere else when I binge. It is temporarily quiet. When I’m anxious I crave this quiet even if it lasts for a very short time.

And part of me, even after 16 years, is afraid to let it go. I want to let it go. And then I don’t.

It is not one or the other. It is both.

And it is gray.  

Cue “Secrets” by OneRepublic

Gray

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What is the color gray? A color between black and white. A color without color. But is that all? It can also be a combination of colors. You can mix equal parts cyan, magenta, and yellow to get gray. Or you can mix green, blue, and violet.

In psychology, gray is thought to be an unemotional color. It symbolizes a state of detachment and impartiality. It is controlled. It is balanced. It is dependable.

What do you think of when you think of the color gray? I will admit these are not always the words that come to mind for me. Sometimes it only seems dull, boring, lifeless. Does this mean that dependability is boring? Is balance boring?

My mind is always searching for an answer, the answer. I want to know why things happen. I want there to be a reason so my thoughts stop spinning. I want to avoid the things that feel bad and steer myself in the direction of the good. But life keeps teaching me that it is much more complicated. Filled with nuance (there is that word again). I am learning through my experiences that it is less about truth and more about perspective.

I am trying to accept this. I am trying to embrace this. It hasn’t been easy.

I’ve been in therapy for years, for over a decade at this point. It isn’t because my life depends on it, not anymore, but I continue to be better off for it. So I keep going. When I first started it was more out of necessity. I was unhappy. I was lost. I wanted to be someone else. Sometimes I still feel this way, but most of the time I do not.

While I think there is less of a stigma around therapy, I still do not think it has been embraced and fully accepted. Too often it still seems like a last resort in people’s minds. It is only for acute and significant mental disorders. It is meant to be temporary. I just need a quick therapeutic jolt. “Oh, I don’t need therapy. I’m not that bad.” “It is okay if you go, but I’m not at that point.” We think it is a sign of weakness. We could not fix ourselves. That is hard to admit to others, but I think it is actually hardest to admit to ourselves.

It took me awhile to realize that therapy isn’t a fix. It is about finding perspective. This realization has been powerful. When I only saw it as a fix, every day I still struggled felt like a failure. Why isn’t this working yet? What is wrong with me? How weak am I? This mindset was based on the assumption that therapy could take away my pain. That being “fixed” meant never feeling pain or any other uncomfortable emotion.

For me embracing a world of gray means embracing perspective. It means accepting that the world is not black or white. That I am neither healed nor broken. Your truth doesn’t have to be my truth and vice versa.

Nowadays the world seems extreme. It is certainly stirring up extreme emotions. Try not to lose perspective. Try to let the other colors seep in. Those that move us away from a black and white world. Those that mix together to become a beautiful gray.

Cue ‘Change Your Mind’ by Sister Hazel

Life is amazing.

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And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again.

And in between the amazing and the awful it’s ordinary and mundane and routine.

Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary.

That’s just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life.

And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.

L. R. Knost

I discovered this quote recently at a store in Rockford, Illinois while visiting my family. I love meaningful quotes about life, but this is probably my favorite for its truth. These words serve as a perfect reminder for what life is and what it is not. It is not perfect. It is messy and it is gray. And gray is beautiful.

If you know me personally you know I am always thinking. I am always searching for my truth, searching for the answers, making sense of my life and the world around me. For the last few years, I have wanted to write a book. I have wanted to put onto paper all the things in my head, all the things I have learned. But instead I struggle to even journal consistently. I started writing a few pages a couple years ago and then I stopped. This is the pattern. I start and stop. And start and stop again. Why?

As much as I love the beauty of the written word, I think I fear it as well. Words seem both meaningful and meaningless. More so than ever there is a permanency to them. We cannot even google search something without it being linked to us. The words we type get saved and are used to understand each other, to figure out what we are in the market for. Does everyone now know I’m in search of a new eye cream? Instagram knows. Instagram always knows.  

On a more personal level, we hold on to the things people say. They affect us. They become part of our story. They can even be misconstrued to be our whole story. I’m sure we all have countless examples of when something we said was taken out of context. “That is not what I meant!” “It came out wrong!” Or examples of when something someone said hurt us. This scares me. This undeniable meaning, this permanency that words have holds me back. Once I link the words and my name, that is it. I can’t take it back. What if my words become a label? What if they push you, my reader, away? Or even worse, what if they push away those I hold so close?

On the other hand, would they even mean anything? Would they be met with indifference? More so now than ever, we are drowning in words. It seems everyone has something to say…about everything. The meaning behind our words is getting lost in the volume of them. I can only read so many comment threads in a day before going mind numb. And what are words without action anyway? Sometimes words are just that. You say something kind and then your behavior is opposite. You say you will do something and you don’t. This scares me too – that I could pour my heart and soul into my words and they could mean nothing to you.

So again I stop.

But there is a difference between what scares us and our truth. I refuse to let my fears be my story.

And so I write.  

This blog is about me and maybe you and what is great and what is not. It is about the gray. The nuance that is all around us but is so hard to accept. It won’t be perfect and may not always flow, but that is life.

The first thing I’d like to tell you is my name – Sarah Newman. I had butterflies in my stomach just typing that, but I did it.

Until next time.

Cue ‘These Words’ by Natasha Bedingfield