Maybe, and also maybe not, you’ve been wondering where I’ve been.
Honestly, I’ve been trying to figure out where I’ve been, too.
Or, at least, how to tell you about it.
I just returned from the tiny, perfect PNW town I’ll be moving to later this year, where I was visiting for my final break before completing massage therapy school. In June, I’ll finish classes and clinic, pack up my life, and come home. In more ways than one.
A major reason for this most recent visit was beginning the process of finding a house with my partner. It’s a collection of firsts for me — living with a significant other at all, much less in our own home together. It’s so much real and regular life stuff… that’s all actually way bigger and braver than I used to believe. In fact, all of these very real and regular things are things I used to believe would never be for me.
For years, I hid my desire for this kind of belonging and settling down so deep and far from myself that for most of my life, my entire personality was organized around loudly stating that I was the type of woman who didn’t want these things… because I was the type of woman who didn’t need them.
I was above them, somehow, in the freedom and independence of my aloneness and self-sufficiency.
But over the past year and a half of this journey of being and falling in ever-deeper love with my partner, and subsequently opening to so many additional forms and expressions of love, I’ve often thought about a moment I experienced at a retreat hosted by my friends Hillary and Lisa in November 2019.
I was two months out from leaving a 2-year-long abusive relationship, and living in the very messy beginning stages of healing. I was at that point, post-breakup, when you’re finally beginning to feel the space and permission to let some shit go. Which was perfect timing for being at this retreat — in the company and visibility of twenty other women, also looking to let their shit go. It was exactly what I needed to begin re-opening to love and vulnerability, to start feeling safe in my body again.
But maybe you know: the Catch-22 of this specific Post-Breakup Point is that you’re also still sort of resisting experiences like this precisely because of how vulnerable and loved and safe they have the potential to make you feel. And when you’re not totally sure yet if you’re ready to be that open, you can close off by wearing your Pain Story disguises loudly and proudly.
For me, at this retreat, that looked like claiming, any chance I could find, just how much I didn’t care about partnership and love anyway. What did it matter? I’d been certain since I was a child that I never wanted any of it — never wanted to be a wife, certainly never wanted to be a mother… in fact, I found the whole cultural display ridiculous and uncreative.
I was a different kind of woman. And I was convincing everyone.
So I thought.
During a session debrief, post-somatic exercise that found me screaming “no” over and over as (apparently) necessary catharsis, I was, once again, passionately stating my complete lack of desire for those “uncreative” things I was uniquely and impressively immune to. As the group moved into a break before the next activity, a fellow attendee pulled me aside and asked if we could talk. We didn’t know each other that well, but I liked what I’d sensed of her so far. Something about her energy felt grounded and sure.
She was herself, in fact, a wife and a mother. Like many of the other women there. I agreed to chat and she led us both out into the sunshine from the shade of the yoga barn as everyone was dispersing. She looked at me, half squinting because she had placed herself to face the sun, ensuring I could see her clearly. I remember her shielding her eyes with her hand and gently saying, “You know, it’s not beneath you to want to be loved and chosen. And it’s okay to just be sad that it hasn’t happened to you yet.”
Now, it’s important to know that she said these words to me during a prolonged infamous season of my (online and offline) life where I was a hairpin trigger of activation towards anyone that challenged my persona by inviting me into even the slightest bit of vulnerability. Looking back, I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of courage this woman needed to muster to look anyone in the eye, much less someone as perpetually poised to strike as I was, and tell her (essentially) that the jig was up.
Her act wasn’t actually fooling anyone.
Fascinatingly, though, something about that moment, that woman, and the way she looked at me when she said it only served to soften me. This might have had something to do with all of that screaming I had done only minutes prior, letting long-suppressed energy move through me and regulate my body a little more.
Surprising even myself, I didn’t react. I just stood there, slowly breathing instead. She was looking right at me… and I was letting her see. This was new, and also pretty fucking uncomfortable, so my mind went blank for a second. All I remember now is that all I could say was “thank you”. And it came out as a whisper.
I recently realized that this life-changing journey of opening to love that I’ve been living and documenting for the past year and a half deserves for its roots to be traced all of the way back to that moment, actually. Pre-psychedelics, long before I found my partner, not a 12-step spiritual awakening in sight. That moment, with that woman, was the honest to goodness first step on the path that got me here: beginning to not just live but thrive in a life that looks exactly like everything I used to judge, that challenges every single one my former ideas of womanhood.
And it only happened because another woman was brave enough to see through my persona, my protection, my guarding… and compassionately call me into integrity. A woman so grounded in her body and in her knowing that she was unafraid of what the response to truth might be. A woman so tuned in to what is most needed for the highest good that she is willing to open herself up to risk and vulnerability — because she is confidently assured of her safety with herself, with life, and with God.
What I want to tell you about where I’ve been these past few months is that I have been quietly, enormously, permanently changing in ways I don’t know how to explain yet, and that I feel some fear around trying to explain at all.
Because in order for me to tell you about about what I’ve lived, what I’m learning, and how it’s reshaping me… I have to become willing to embody the same posture of that woman who changed my life by courageously offering the most direct communication of the most compassionate message.
In other words: I have to tell you the truth.
And the truth of these past two quiet months has been: miracles.
Miracles in my own life, relationships, and body, and miracles in the lives, relationships, and bodies of my clients, too. All kinds of previously unimagined possibilities suddenly brought into the realm of the real.
For weeks now, I have privately witnessed and experienced what’s truly possible when we commit to presence, compassion, and (most importantly) self-responsibility in our minds and bodies, and it has completely reconstructed my paradigm of reality, as well as my understanding of things like attachment, resilience, bravery, and love.
And I’ve been bursting to write about it, but, listen, I’m also a little nervous for one very specific reason. And where I’ve been is that I’ve been running from telling you about this one very specific reason — attempting 6 different essays about completely different topics before finally catching up to myself and figuring out what I really want to say.
The reason writing about all of this makes me nervous is because of the way I fear it may threaten my belonging with other women. Because I’m not denying that I’ve got attachment wounds that have influenced my sexual and romantic relationships with men, but only now in my mid-thirties am I realizing that some of my deepest fears and insecurities are about my sister-to-sister relationships with women.
In fact, I’m realizing that this may even be the truest, most significant, and longest running expression of codependence in my life.
I don’t know if you do this too, but I’ve (apparently) got this bizarre tendency of actively trying to not let myself be seen and experienced as a woman who is as happy or as satisfied as she actually is. It’s a strange form of self-sabotage that I’ve come to discover goes back pretty far as a survival mechanism and was actually created by my earliest experiences with my sister. Because at some point, when I was very young, I tuned into an awareness that my presence created difficulty in my sister’s life. So I eventually learned to orient my movements during my developmental years around making sure I was not too alive or loved or special, thereby taking something away from her. Which I understand now is not how it works, but when I was a kid that’s simply how it felt.
That my vibrancy was somehow taking something away from her.
I need to name here that I’m only comfortable writing all of this and sharing it publicly because this is plenty out in the open between my sister and me. We’ve talked through it in increasingly better and kinder ways for over a decade now, and we’ve come to understand that the dynamic at work in our family impacted us differently, but equally.
The short version is this: my mother had my brother and sister with her first husband and when she divorced and subsequently married my father, he became their father too; and first, years before he became mine. And his family became their family. The story goes that my sister was the apple of my dad’s parents’ eyes… until I came along. Then, she feels, she only existed as an extension of me, often held in contrast and found lacking.
Now, some people in our family might not think that my sister’s version of events conveys the full truth of the matter. I’d bet that if my grandmother was still alive, she’d deny ever having done this. And I think she’d genuinely believe she was telling the truth.
But the thing is: I remember feeling it, too. Frequently sensing it in the room. Because I loved my sister. God, I loved my big sister more than I loved anyone else in the world. She was everything to Little Me. And eventually I started to notice that whenever attention was paid to me, it made my beloved big sister sad. And there was absolutely no worse feeling in my tiny body than my big sister being sad. So, eventually, I started deflecting and doing whatever I could to make sure she was the one in the spotlight, not me.
Sometimes it worked, but it felt the worst when it didn’t. I began to blame myself for all of it, deducing that I was the problem, internalizing a story that my existence was something I needed to apologize for, my happiness or specialness something to hide. Of course, this dynamic isn’t the only thing responsible for instilling that disposition in me. The religious trauma didn’t help — I’d say being told from a young age that god needed to kill someone to make me lovable contributed significantly.
But God wasn’t on the other end of the line when I was standing on a lower Manhattan sidewalk in 2010, yelling into my cell phone about not knowing how to resolve our life-long conflict with one another because I couldn’t “make myself stop existing and it seems like that would be the only acceptable solution for you”.
No, that was my sister.
That moment was a necessary rock-bottom for us both. As soon as I said those words, the resistance between us evaporated and we both burst into tears. Stating it so plainly shifted something, and my sister began hastily explaining that she’s never wanted that. She’s never blamed me. She just wanted me to see her, to see the difference between our experiences and the pain her experience caused her. It was the beginning of new understanding and relating between us.
We’ve both learned how to bear increasingly compassionate witness to our own selves and each other in the years since. I respect her enormously — the mother, the woman, the person that she is. We disagree about plenty of things, and she has more integrity than anyone else I’ve ever met. So I love talking to her about the things we agree and disagree on equally because I know she always arrives at her conclusions honestly, thoughtfully, diligently, and in alignment with her values.
We genuinely enjoy each others company and delight in each other’s happiness, success, and well-being. So as far as families go, we’ve got a pretty stellar dynamic at work here presently. I’m so proud of us for how far we’ve come and I’m so grateful she’s my sister. I couldn’t imagine my life without her. She was, and still is, everything to me.
And also, you know, bodies remember. That’s kind of my whole thing.
Our minds can see and comprehend the present reality, while our bodies hold the memory of our earliest ordeals and try to create expectations, assumptions, or even new experiences to confirm whatever beliefs were initially instilled. To stay inside of what feels familiar. My sister and I have resolved so much, see each other more clearly than ever, and have an adult perspective that sees all sides and places blame on no one.
And when it comes to my understanding of how I’ve moved through the world and why, it matters that my first conscious memory is standing in my grandparents’ living room being asked a question about myself by my grandmother, and before I answered freely, I turned first to read the face of my sister.
This is all top-of-mind these days because I’m feeling the acute tension of my expansion into… historically complex feminine archetypal roles — (supported) wife, (satisfied) lover, (successful) businesswoman, (step) mother (that one is a doozy, let me tell you). For women, there has long been a specific kind of belonging in a club of dissatisfaction that creates complaint, deference that creates codependency. I know because I was quite proud and happy to belong to that club for years.
And I’m afraid to be seen like this instead.
For a long time I believed that it was most vulnerable to let yourself be seen when you’re not doing well. But I’m beginning to understand a deeper truth: that it actually becomes harder to let yourself be truly seen the more well you become. Leaving behind an old disposition, a former frequency, is easier said than done because you’re leaving old resonance behind, too. With people you love, and community you have traversed life’s landscape alongside, creating the kind of bonding and belonging that is forged in the hardest places.
But what happens when you start to grow and change? When you start to see the world differently, and then start engaging in the world differently than many of the people you used to feel the deepest connections with? What happens when it starts becoming unsustainable to keep the private transformations private anymore? When the only next step is to start telling the truth about who you are and what you know and just how good it’s all turning out to be?
These aren’t questions I’m sharing here to teach you about something… these are questions that I am very much still living into right now.
Remember, I’m just telling you where I’ve been.
Because there are some specific things I really want and need to write about these days that necessitate me telling the truth about what I’m discovering and experiencing in love, in relationship, and in embodiment. And I recognize that those truths could inspire judgement, projection, and rejection from other women in response. Because the things I have to say are very different from the things I used to believe.
But the core of why this has burned in me for the past two months, why those six other essays just wouldn’t work, and why I cannot let this go is because I want women to be free… enormous, vibrant, alive, profoundly well and deeply happy. All of us. Every last one. And I’ve learned some things lately that I’ve been sort of prototyping in my body and, y’all, they’re working in ways that defy so many of my former opinions, judgements and even assumptions about reality. I genuinely feel more alive and satisfied and happy than ever before.
And I feel desperate for you to know that I’m not special. It is for you too.
This personal path combined with stepping into the lineage of bodywork over the past year has changed everything about the way I move through the world now — especially how I do my job. Because I’ve seen these same paradigm-shifting transformations in my clients too. Which is something I can tell you about where I’ve been these past few months: prioritizing facilitation again and loving it more than ever before.
Perfect timing too, since my massage school education is coming to an end, allowing me to re-open my availability to take on more coaching clients again. I’ve had a limited capacity for the past year, but I have a deep desire to make facilitation my primary focus again. Because it’s the easiest and most fun place, for now, to communicate honestly and clearly about those miracles.
So if you want to know more about working with me, please reach out! Probably unsurprisingly, I’ve recently found myself working with people (mostly women!) on the edge of burnout, realizing they’ve got some deep seated survival stories that have been causing them to try and outrun their bodies. You know, like I used to be. They’ve sensed there’s a better way to feel, but haven’t known how to get there. And through our work together, they’ve discovered that there is a shocking amount of abundance and satisfaction and thriving found in partnering with the pace of their bodies instead.
I’m also co-leading a workshop around these very same themes at the end of the month, if you’d like to come! This will be my second time hosting Body To Body Medicine, with my collaborator and partner-in-multiple-projects Dr. Joan Chan. You don’t need to be a doctor to attend, anyone working in any form of health/ human care is welcome. Practitioners and facilitators of all kinds! We’d love to have you join us on April 29th + if you’re curious about working with me 1:1, let me know!
Maybe you can relate to the stories I’ve shared here today. If so, here are the two biggest questions I’ve been sitting with lately. I offer them to you as an invitation for introspection, to sit with your body and allow them to tell you the truth about what they feel, what they want, and what they know:
Do I want to belong or do I want to be well?
Do I want to be right or do I want to be happy?
Until next time, here’s to being brave… 🖤
Okay, Jamie, I was so proud of you through this whole thing, absolutely giving with the message, and then you had to just knock the wind completely out of me with this question: “Do I want to belong or do I want to be well?”
JAMIE!??!!!?!!!?!
I had to go lay down. It’s been hours and I’m still agonizing over it because I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE RIGHT ANSWER IS!!!!
I guess what I’m saying is thanks for the existential crisis. 😭
*tears*
(it's prolly allergies, tho)