And the Wheel turns

It’s been a while since I came to visit here and even longer since I actually wrote something.  Just as when visiting a once-familiar place, I found myself checking my favorite blogs that I used to visit every day much the same way one has a regular coffee shop or bookstore – cozy spots and havens where I would go and simply breathe in the energy of the space.  Understandably, though no less disheartening, I’ve found that most of them have dried up or closed.  I was met with an odd feeling, similar to that which one may experience when having come home after being away for a long time – everything has changed and suddenly what was once a familiar and comforting place now feels strange. Yet, all this is to be expected since I haven’t been here in months, written here since May.  Cycles, change, beginnings, and endings simply are.

Samhain is quickly approaching and bringing with it the last harvest, the end of the year, and the beginning of a new one.  As I reflect on the past year, looking to see where and who I was at this time 360 some days ago and all the events and experiences I have had since then, it continues to strike me how much has changed – not in a disbelieving way but quite the opposite.  It is an amazing and wonderful thing to see that the traits and patterns in my Self that I released last year I no longer carry for the most part (or at least not in the ways in which I carried them last year) and to see that the things that I asked the Goddess and God to give me this year have manifested.  This year certainly has brought with it a lesson in the importance of semantics in regards to how to ask for the things I want to be brought to me for the coming year (Momma is a bit of a trickster in that regard).

This past year has been full of new lessons for me, and a dominant theme within those is the element of Earth.  In my spiritual beliefs and practices, Earth is associated with abundance, prosperity, finances, security, job/career, health, home, nurturing, and generosity (to name some of the bigger associations) as well as their contrary counterparts.  One of the most powerful aspects of these lessons has been centered on the question, ‘What is home?’  I have learned that home is not the physical place where I live and return to after being out in the world all day.  It is not the physical dwelling of my human parents or my parents themselves.  It is not the place where I was born or where I spent most of the early part of my life.  Home is Momma and Papa, the Goddess and God.  Home is Their Presence that I carry with me everywhere I go.  It is Their Essence that fills my Self and the physical dwelling that They have provided for me and that They share with me. And though initially that Truth was alarmingly frightening, now it is a great comfort.

This is a time of year for taking stock – recognizing the lessons learned and celebrating with gratitude for that which was provided as well as noticing those that went un-learned and why, those that still need work in the coming year.  As the day of Samhain approaches, the energy around us gets heavier, oppressive almost, reminding us to do this work, to stay and turn with the Wheel.  The God is now the Horned One preparing to offer His life to and for us and the Goddess shifts into the Crone, the Wise One.  In the natural world around us, the leaves are turning colors as they begin to die, the weather gets colder, animals migrate or gather in what they need in preparation for the cold months to come, and the light continues to wane as the darkness waxes.  This is the point in the cycle that is the Wheel of endings, of releasing, and of letting go for we cannot receive when the time comes to begin again if our fists are full and closed.

Come on out! Wait – just kidding…

Every year, Atlanta has a Gay Pride Event that includes a festival and parade run by the Atlanta Pride Committee.  The event spans a weekend each year which has typically been held in the summer.  This year, however, the Committee moved the dates toward October in an effort to host the event closer to National Coming Out Day (October 11th).  Except they moved the event to Halloween weekend.

When I initialy discovered this on their website, my first reaction was largely superficial in that Halloween is a time when lots of people go out, party, and potentially endanger themselves, though I also sensed that this was just a very bad idea for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time. Later, though, I was talking to my beloved about it, and she pointed to a larger, much more significant issue.  Halloween is a holiday where, in mainstream American culture, the point is the dress up as something you are not, to hide behind another identity.

The more I sat with this idea, the more appalled I became.  Here is a weekend and an event that I have seen as a time when people who identify as GLBTQIQ (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersexed, Questioning) can be out in public simply as themselves, to celebrate that, support others and be supported.  A time when the people who fit into these minority categories don’t have to worry so much about their safety or sense of belonging or being misunderstood.  And the annual event, the time and space in which they can feel this sense of safety, this sense of belonging, this ability to simply breathe and be who they are, is being held over Halloween – a time of dressing up as something you are not.  The mixed messages are enough to give one a migraine if one sits with it long enough.  No, it’s not really okay to be yourselves.  No, you should still, just as you may do every day on some level, hide behind a mask or costume or identity that’s not really you.  No, we’re not really okay with who and what you are.  No, we don’t really want to reveal our faces to the outside world and the greater Atlanta community.  Sure, we’ll be united…kind of.  Because people who identify as GLBTQIQ don’t live with enough of the US population throwing shame on them for simply being themselves (sarcasm).  Here – have some more by the very people (the Pride Committee) who claim as their mission to want to promote your self-esteem, your mental health and wellness, who claim to want to increase visibility and a positive image of this culture.  What an incredible display of internalized homophobia/heterosexism.

I have no idea what the Committee was thinking.  Maybe they weren’t.  I went to Pride in 2007 but couldn’t go last year and had been looking forward to attending this year. When I found out the dates for this year’s event, I was disappointed on another level – it’s being held over Samhain, so I won’t be going anyway as I’ll be celebrating that holiday.  But even if I weren’t celebrating Samhain, I still wouldn’t go.  The Pride event is free of charge.  How much easier it will be for idiot, homophobic individuals to go and cause trouble since they’ll be wearing costumes and no one will know their identity.  Because 20 miles outside of the city perimeter, is very un-gay/freak-friendly territory that covers, oh, about the rest of the entire state.

We had truly begun to move forward (albeit slowly, still) in terms of increasing tolerance and acceptance of individuals who do not identify as heterosexual, and the election of Obama was a big step in that direction.  In many ways, Atlanta is considered the NYC of the south.  The ripples of this event this year and the messages it carries with it can go a long way to moving us backward.  Can we really afford it?

Rebirthing and transformation

For the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed that I  have had the feeling of being pushed out of the space that I am in.  I have been challenged to move out of my comfort zone that I have grown accustomed to and in which I feel “safe.”  When I have looked around at the people that I know, I’ve seen that most, if not all, of them are feeling and experiencing something similar.  I do not believe in coincidence, and when I encounter situations such as these when so many people seem to be going through the same experience, each in their own ways, I look to see what’s going on in the universe via astrology, I look to the Wheel of the Year to see if what we’re experiencing is reflected there. As of yet, I haven’t found a credible and reliable source for astrological events, which means that I’m focusing on the Wheel of the Year.

This time of year is one of birthing and rebirthing as spring begins in earnest.  When I began reflecting on the process of birthing, Momma pointed out that birthing can be a very difficult and messy process.  Even the “easy” births are usually filled first with pain and difficulty, so it’s understandable that the more complicated births be even harder, more painful, and messier.  Then I read some comments on Sue Ann’s blog about leaving our comfort zones in order to grow. What else is the womb but the ultimate comfort zone? Yet, we obviously cannot stay in that space forever. There comes that point when we have to leave the womb, that safe haven, that point when staying in it becomes dangerous even to our Selves. Perhaps that is part of what is going on right now.

The opportunity for rebirth (transformation) throughout the course of a single life time presents itself again and again. When we have grown as much as we can in a certain space and energy there is nothing left for us there, staying there means stagnation and static, and can even be painful. Yet, it’s become comfortable and safe for us. We know that space. We have chartered its territory and there are few, if no, surprises any more. We adapted and learned the new “rules” and experiences of that space. New manifestations of cause and effect. We forget as time passed that when we first entered it that it felt terrifying, harsh, unpredictable, unsteady, unstable, perhaps even unknowable. This forgetting disables us from seeing that we moved through that time, that we grew through that time, possibly and probably more than we thought we were capable of. And so we freeze as our safe space begins to poke us and prod us to leave because it knows we cannot stay, we are not meant to. We resist and fight in order to stay and make our journey even more painful in the process (we create our own reality). We see previews of the new manifestations of cause and effect in the new space and allow our fears to rule us, paralyze us, underestimating our Selves the entire time.

I have forgotten what it took to get me where I am. I have forgotten that when I left the last space I was in that I grew in ways I never thought I could, that I experienced great joy and love through the lessons the most recent unfamiliar-turned-familiar space I walked through brought me. The new space that is awaiting my full arrival and presence right now  is one where I need to fully embrace Trust and Surrender, more so than I ever have before. The landscape appears unnavigable from where I sit right now and most of the tools I currently have will not suffice. I remind myself that I felt the same way the last time I was being evicted from my comfort zone and choose to trust that I will find new tools, I will find new ways of using the tools I have. I choose to surrender, to leap and trust that the net will appear.

If you’re like me, then you also, when confronted by uncomfortable experiences, focus almost solely on what your fears dictate.  Let me offer you a reframe for this time to counter what your fears are saying: a (re)birth is a beautiful and fabulous thing.  It is something to be celebrated because you could not be experiencing it if you had not grown all that you could possibly grow in the space in which you’ve been.  You have learned all the lessons you could in that space and now you are ready and are capable of learning new lessons, of having new experiences.  I invite you to take Joy in that and find Peace in knowing that you’ve been through this experience before, and you can sail through it again. Many blessings as you continue on your journey.

More on self-acceptance

I’ve had a lot of hits on my post about self-acceptance being a pre-requisite to self-love, and a lot of those have been people that were also searching for the term NA (Narcotics Anonymous).  This leads me to believe (and I would certainly welcome any who found me through those search terms to comment and provide me with some feedback!) that self-acceptance is a huge part of the recovery process from substance dependence/abuse.  That being said, it’s not just for people in recovery – it’s something that I truly believe is for everyone.  A good bit of time has passed since I wrote that post, and I’ve had more experience with the process of self-acceptance, so I thought I’d take some time to share more of my personal experience with it.

Self-acceptance is a process.  Did you get that?  It’s a process. It is not a one-time-get-it-done-and-it’s-done-forever deal.  I’ve found that as soon as I learn to accept myself in one moment, something will inevitably come up later that will show me some other pieces(s) of me and/or my behavior and choices I’ve made that I have to deal with and work through.  I’ve mentioned before here that my partner is a theta healer, and during my healing sessions with her, I almost always find things that I would identify and label as ugly that are lurking around in my head or that were the fuel for poor choices I have made or patterns of behavior that I have been, up to that point in time, unable to figure out and change.  A “technique”, for lack of a better word, that I’ve begun employing is that of witnessing these things, standing apart from them and recognizing that they are not who I am.  I want to be clear that this is not a form of denial -  I own fully and take full responsibility for the fact that these thoughts are in my head, that the choices are choices I have made.  The difference comes by not attaching these things to my identity as a being, not defining my Self by them.  Witnessing them allows me to stand in a more objective point of reference, free of judgment.  So when I find them, I can take any stance from, “Hmmm…isn’t that interesting” to downright laughing at them.

All that being said, witnessing in this way is also not easy.  I slip up a lot and fall back into that judgmental thinking and exclaim things like, “Shit – I sound so horrible!”  And when I do, I try to catch myself, I breathe, and I try to move back into a space of non-judgment.  Our society and most people in it train us to think that we are what we do, what we think, etc.  This simply is not true.  Attaching these sort of things to our identity feeds our ego (here, I’m using the term ego the way that Eckhart Tolle uses it in his book A New Earth) and allows our ego to have control over us instead of it being the other way around.

I firmly believe that we each create our own reality.  This can sound damning to some and can spark a defensive reaction – truth be told, I don’t really care.  It is what it is.  Because we create our own reality, we have the power to change it if we want.  And while certain things may not be able to be changed, we can change how we choose to  interact with them.

There are certain things that threaten self-acceptance, and I see one of the most significant as maintaining a victim stance and victim energy.  If you’re not sure if you’re in this space, here are a couple hints: 1) if you’ve said to yourself, ‘but it’s not my fault!’ or ‘yeah, but my life’s a lot harder than yours’ or, ‘I didn’t create this mess!’ or something similar at any point through the course of reading this post, 2) if the part about creating our own reality hit your ‘fuck you button’, or 3) if the dominant emotion you’re feeling (now or in general) is self-pity then you probably got yourself  stuck in victim energy. You chose victim energy.  And just as you chose it, you can un-choose it.

I’m a practicing Witch.  Scott Cunningham (one of the most fabulous people to ever walk this planet) compiled a list of 13 goals for a Witch.  And while these are specifically directed to Witches, I believe the very first one is pertinent to all people of whatever life style, religion/spiritual affiliation, background, etc.  It’s “know yourself.”  Knowing your self is a crucial piece of accepting your self.  And besides that, knowing your self means knowing how to differentiate what is really you from what’s just behavior or thoughts that you ‘put on’ that might describe about you but do not define you.  Changing anything about you can be difficult but is very possible.  But just like how people suffering from any kind of substance abuse or dependence need to hit rock bottom and get to a point where to stay the same is more painful and more uncomfortable than changing, so it is with any kind of change.

I want to reiterate that self-acceptance is a process.  It’s a path, a choice that needs to be made over and over and over again.  It’s work, but it’s work that holds unestimable value. 

Momma’s serenade

This one goes out to one of my favorite people on the planet…

The easy way or the hard way?

A number of people whom I care deeply about are currently getting their asses kicked by – choose your preferred semantics – the Goddess (Momma), the God (Papa), the Universe, Divinity, their Higher Power, etc. (for me, it’s usually the Momma).  I have been in that space before.  Hell, I set up home there for a while shortly after beginning this Path in earnest.  I know what it’s like because I have lived it.   My beloved and I have talked previously about the way in which we choose to (or choose not to) learn our live’s lessons.  We have talked about how usually, the Momma will give us a few tries to learn a lesson the easy way.  Some people pick up on that pretty quickly.  I was not, when I first started, one of those people.  If we don’t opt for the easy way, we get the hard way.  Enter Kali.  Kali is one of Momma’s many faces/aspects, and She is a harsh Teacher.  To put it in the most straight forward sense, She basically comes in, finds everything that you’re holding on to which is a load of bull shit and takes it away, usually making you absolutely miserable in the process until you reach that rock bottom point when you have no other option than to walk through your shit and get it on straight.

I was one of those who required Kali’s appearance.   Ever since I took a non-western mythology course in undergrad where I learned about Hinduism, I was fascinated with Kali (this is certainly not a requisite of Her manifesting in your life).  Many people who know anything about Kali are usually scared of Her (at least initially, and if they aren’t, they probably should be) with Her big ass tongue, Her necklace of severed heads, Her waist garland of severed human arms, the wild expression usually depicted on Her face.  Most people know Kali as the goddess of destruction, yet, She not only destroys, and She certainly doesn’t destroy just for the sake of doing so.

I subscribe to Exotic India’s newsletters which get sent out once a month, I think, and regale bits and pieces of Buddhist and Hindu thealogy.  The most recent newsletter is all about Kali, and I see this as no coincidence when I look around and see all these people in my life who, whether they know it or not, are currently dealing with Her. Though I had known that Kali’s destructive workings were for the point of making room for rebirth, I had never realized She was a triple goddess, but the newsletter clearly states She is.  She is death, birth, and life.  The newsletter aptly describes Her saying,

“The dark-hued Kali, who represents
in her being darkness, suffering, death, deformation and ugly, is
the most potent source of life, light, happiness and beauty – the
positive aspect of the creation. She destroys to re-create,
inflicts suffering so that the delight better reveals, and in her
fearful form one has the means of overcoming all fears, not by
escaping but by befriending them.”

I see Kali’s long tongue designed to lick up the blood spilled when She cuts away at the illusions in people’s lives.   Her necklace of severed heads taken from those who cling to false ideas and realities.  The garland of severed arms taken from those who were constantly reaching for illusion so that they may only now reach Truth.  Her darkened skin representing the darkness from which all Life must come.  In all this, She not only destroys, but tends and nurtures and brings back to life. The newsletter makes a beautiful point in recognizing that a journey that begins in lightness terminates in darkness, but a journey that begins in darkness will always conclude in endless light.

Sue Ann over at Always Embraces All Ways recently wrote a fabulous post in which she makes the point of delineating the difference between Compassion and sympathy.  Sympathy stems energetically from a victim mentality while Compassion stems from Love.  When my Teacher is acting on Momma’s behalf, kicking my ass, and confronting me with the fact that I don’t have my shit on straight (an act of supreme Compassion), and I say that it sucks or that it’s hard, her compassionate response is some variety of, “Yeah, so?” or “And your point is…?” That is Compassion.  Fierce Compassion.  If she were to say something more saccharine like, “Poor you – I feel so bad for you, etc.” she would be doing me a disservice.  Sue Ann and I shared comments about how the Divine Feminine is active, not passive.  Her point for us is to move through our lives, to grow, to change, and that is antithetical to receiving/giving or wallowing in sympathy or self-pity.

Sue Ann also made the point that most of us don’t understand what Love really is, that our society has purported a definition of love that is conditional, that confuses love with need, and I agree.  It stands to reason, then, that most of us would similarly confuse and misunderstand Compassion, which stems from Love, as only something that is fluffy and soft when it is not.  My experience with Kali was one of ultimate Love and Compassion, and I can tell you without a doubt that it sucked ass until it was over.  And then it was amazing.  Then, I could see it for what it truly was.  Then, I was beyond grateful to have had the experience that helped me grow, change, and become more of my True Self.

It’s the little things…

That make me happy.  Here are a few from the past couple days (through today):

1.  Vacuum cleaners that really suck (I have a new one that I am in love with)

2.  Shower heads that increase water pressure (again, a new one about which I am ridiculously excited)

3.  Katie Perry’s song “I kissed a girl”

4.  Fuzzy, purple slippers

5.  Papaya body lotion

The body as sacred

Right now, I’m involved in a specific type of healing training, and a major part of the work we’re doing is digging through our own shit in order to be more competent healers.  One of the main topics we’ve discussed is projection.  Despite my being in a professional counseling graduate program for almost 2 years now and having taken classes on counseling interventions and theories where we covered Freud and projection, I’d never really “gotten”  what projection was until I was reading a book on shadow work  by Debbie Ford and read her definition of projection which comes from an energetic (instead of purely psychological) standpoint.  Basically (I’m heavily paraphrasing), I understood her as having explained that when we “disown” traits or parts of ourselves, we’re disowning that energy and because the universe is all about balance, that energy is going to keep flying in our face until we recognize it and own it as a part of ourselves.  In my spiritual path, I’ve found the same thing true when it comes to life lessons.

It is much easier for me to spot other people’s lessons than it is to see my own.  Since some time around Samhain, though, I’ve been trying to work on this and check in with myself whenever I notice what I think is someone else’s lesson to see if it is mine as well.   However, I hadn’t bothered to really look back to see if there were some previous lessons from prior to Samhain that I had missed.  Until today when Momma, surprisingly gently especially given how much time has passed, brought one to my attention.

For the past few months, issues with my body have catapaulted to the surface.  Over the last year, I’ve lost almost 20 lbs (pretty unintentionally).  I was not overweight at all to begin with and hadn’t set out with the intention to lose weight.  I just stopped exercising and began eating a lot less when my appetite began to decline.  I’ve known I had body issues to work through for probably several months or so now, and I was slowly (as in, a turtle looked like The Flash compared to me) beginning to delve into them.  My beloved and teacher, however, over the last two visits we’ve had, began to kick my ass – per Momma’s instructions – because the situation had escalated to the point where I was (and probably still am, though I’m now consciously working on it) malnourished.

Earth, which is the element associated with the body, is my weakest element, and I’ve been working for a while now on bringing it into balance with my other elements.  One of my challenges is that I have a hard time staying present in my body.  I frequently focus all my energy in my mind/head (associated with the element of air, which I find amusing right now).  But today, something clicked for me.  I thought back to a conversation my beloved and I had over a year ago concerning some of her body issues.  At the time, she was having difficulty honoring her body and drew the parallel that she would never leave the element of earth out of ritual, so why would she leave it out of the rest of her life (though I think she said it much more eloquently on her blog).  And though our specific issues with our bodies are different, when I step back and look at my situation with hawk vision, there are important parallels that, though they now seem obvious, I had not realized.

If I acknowldge that everything is sacred and say that I want to be (though it is a definite work in progress) living my whole life honoring the Goddess and the God – that, in essence, there should be little difference between the time when I am in circle and the time that makes up the rest of my days – how imbalanced and incongruent it is for me to be neglecting and thus dishonoring this part of myself. Furthermore, since another one of my lessons over the past year or so now has been surrender, how can I surrender completely to Divinity on the levels of body, mind, heart, will, and spirit when I am not even in my body enough of the time to be able to surrender it in the first place?  I cannot give what I do not truly own and inhabit.

And because it’s exciting for me to be able to see how I’ve grown, I was almost as excited about the fact that after I experienced this obvious revelation, I was not upset, discouraged, self-deprecatory, or dejected as I would have been several months ago.  I was uplifted, joyous, and energized in recognizing this piece that has been missing and encouraged to begin working on it and moving forward.

Dreaming a new dream

When I was younger, I had the dream of finding romantic-till-death-do-us-part love in the face of a man like many girls raised by heterosexist, ultra-conservative Christian parents.  I dreamed of what he might look like, of having a family together.  Lots of girls dream of their actual wedding, but I never really got into that much.  I didn’t have the ceremony constructed in my head, the menu, the guest list, the color of my bridesmaid dresses, etc.  As I got older, I did dream of my dress a little (it was never one of those froo-froo dresses with yards and yards of toile), but that wasn’t as much self-driven as it was influenced by one of my best friends who would go to theknot.com and plan her wedding in complete detail.  None of that was as significant as the man himself.

And then, as I’ve written here before, a year ago, Momma turned my world upside down, and I fell in love with an amazing woman and eventually entered into a polyamorous relationship.  A couple years ago, before my beloved and I got together, she gave me a Theta healing appointment over the phone.  It was the first time we ever talked on the phone.  She knew then about my dream of finding this mystery man and described him to me, telling me he would come into my world in October.  He didn’t that year, and after entering into my relationship with her, I let go of it.  Momma had given me something so much grander than I had dreamed for myself.

During my last visit with my polyfamily (who I will refer to from here on out simply as ‘my family’), toward the end, my beloved did a tarot card reading for the three of us to gauge where we stood and look at the upcoming years.  One of the spreads brought some surprising information: that man that I had dreamed about before was going to come into my life in the next year, and I could choose which relationship I wanted to pursue with the Knowing that Momma would bless whichever one I selected.  There was no right or wrong – I had “proven”, so to speak, to Momma that I would do what She asked of me and follow Her so that now I was being rewarded with a situation where it just came down to my preference.

After having spent so long trying to do only what the Momma told me to and then being confronted with a situation where it was genuinely my choice disoriented and confused me greatly.  How would I know which one to choose?  As I sat there with my beloved wrapping me in unconditional love, not clinging, and telling me that whatever I chose, she would still love me, I cried.  Over the course of that day, I reflected on my former dream as I sat in the loving comfort of this new dream.  Which would I choose?  I imagined not having my family in my life in the capacity in which they are right now and felt a deep and painful sorrow and loss.  I imagined not seeing the amazing baby goddesses that are my love’s children, and my adopted children in my heart, grow up, learn to drive, have their first significant other, date, etc.  I imagined living a life with the man I used to dream of, having children, pets, etc.  I imagined coming home to him.  I imagined coming home to the family I have worked with to create.  Only in one of those situations did I breathe a sigh, did my heart fill with love and comfort and a sense of safety and a true feeling of being “home.”

My love said to me when we were discussing the tarot spread that maybe our relationship was just to prepare me for my relationship with this man.  I think she said something about not wanting me to settle.  After imagining what the future could hold in either situation, I realized that settling would look like going back to my old dream.  I have grown and changed in so many ways that the dream of him no longer fits, in the same way my favorite outfit when I was 7 yrs old no longer fits me today.  It is no longer my dream.  Now, in this moment of true choice, I choose to dream this new dream, this dream of not romantic-till-death-do-us-part love, but of soul-deep-connection-forever-sacred-rock-and-shake-my-world-to-make-it-a-most-amazing-unconditional-love-filled-place love.  And I have never felt more at home.

New layers of old lessons

When I was in elementary and middle school, I was not remotely assertive.  I had a horrible group of manipulative friends.  They told me off just for the fun of it and were downright mean.  I was shy and insecure and for a very long time I just took it.  Eventually, I began to mimick them and I remember one day telling the one girl off because she was being obnoxious, but it wasn’t me being assertive.  It was just me being mean, and while I gained the respect of a few for having done so, it didn’t feel good.

In junior high, I had a new “best friend” but she was just as manipulative as the girls from elementary school.  She always had to be the center of attention, would do stupid things to gain that limelight, and she frequently betrayed my trust.  By the time 9th grade rolled around, I was done.  We were on a band trip in Virginia and coming back on a charter bus after having been on some tour.  She was staring up at the reading light pretending to be tripping on drugs.  It was ridiculous, but people do a lot of ridiculous things in 9th grade.  When we arrived back at our motel, I didn’t wait for her before getting off the bus.  She eventually caught up to me and asked what was wrong.  I cooly told her nothing was wrong.  She asked why I was mad at her. I, again cooly, said I wasn’t. She continued asking me these questions, and when we got up to the room we were sharing, she once more asked why I was mad at her.  I told her I wasn’t mad at her, but that I didn’t want to be friends with her anymore.  I spent the next five minutes telling her I was sick of her mistreating me, that I didn’t deserve it, and that I didn’t want anything to do with her anymore.  Adrenaline coursed through my veins as I stood up for myself for quite possibly the first time ever.  That was me being assertive.

After that, asserting myself became easier, but it feels like somewhere along the line, there was a break.  I hadn’t realized it happening, but I began noticing it when guys would ask for my phone number, and though I didn’t want to give it to them, I would.  I notice it much more now when dealing with my parents.  I hadn’t realized my difficulty with them as a lack of assertiveness, but I just started reading a book for one of my classes that has helped me to identify it as such.  The book is called “When I Say No, I Feel Guilty” (Smith, 1975).  At the very beginning of the book, the author lists what he terms “A Bill of Assertive Rights.”   They are as follows:

I.  You have the right to judge your own behavior, thoughts, and emotions, and to take responsibility for their initiation and consequences upon yourself.

II.  You have the right to offer no reasons or excuses for justifying your behavior

III.  You have the right to judge if you are responsible for finding solutions to other people’s problems.

IV.  You have the right to change your mind

V. You have the right to make mistakes – and be responsible for them

VI.  You have the right to say, “I don’t know.”

VII.  You have the right to be independent of the goodwill of others before coping with them

VIII.  You have the right to be illogical in making decisions

IX.  You have the right to say, “I don’t understand.”

X. You have the right to say, “I don’t care.”

You have the right to say no, without feeling guilty.

As I was reading through them, I was struck by numbers II, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and X, particularly concerning my parents.  They have continually warned me throughout my life of others manipulating me, and yet, after looking through these and reading the first 30 pages of this book, that is exactly how they treat me.  I was so relieved when I read, “If parents…want something, they have the power to make their grown sons and daughters feel like anxious little children” (p. 3).  Ahh!! Other people deal with this, too!?!  Other people’s parents treat them like mine treat me!?  And when I say this, I come from a place of sincere ignorance and gratitude of realizing how not alone I am in this. I have always felt the need to explain and justify my decisions to my parents and have always felt small in some measure when I feel unable to do so, when I cannot communicate and know that they understand what I am saying.  Now, I realize that I don’t have to!  What an amazingly fabulous feeling!

As this year comes to a close with Samhain being only 8 days away, I know that this is something I sincerely want to work on for the coming year.  I want to find that elemental balance of being able to calmly and clearly stand up for and assert myself.