Come As You Are Podcast
Orbital Motion
Hi, I'm Allie Hamilton, and I'm so happy to welcome you to the Come As You Are podcast. Every week we'll be talking about some aspect of healing, usually around childhood wounds and complicated familial relationships. The topics will always coincide with my personal essay of the week, and this will be a place where we can take a deep dive together. I'm so thrilled you joined me and delighted for you to always come As You Are. Hi there, welcome to our talk today. The topic is orbital motion, and I was writing in the essay this week about a lot of different things. I'm a little under the weather, which you can probably hear in my voice. I'm going to try not to sniffle into the mic. It made me think about a lot of my experiences growing up, but it's also about, I dropped my son off at college about a week and a half ago, and I went into New York and we interred my mother's ashes, so it's been a lot of loss and grief and change in the last week and a half, so I wasn't really very surprised to wake up feeling sick the other morning. I've been on a couple of planes in the last week and a half, a couple of airports, a whole bunch of subway cars, I was in New York City, so you know, there's all of that, but there's also the emotional component of dropping your firstborn off at college, not having gone through that before, not really having a sense of what life is going to feel like after that. The ongoing, I feel in the last few years, and this is something I've been talking about pretty regularly, is just the loss that is kind of intrinsic to this time of life. I'm in that sandwich generation moment where I have teenage children and two out of three of my parents have passed in the last few years. My mom and dad, my stepdad is still kicking, but I'm in that space of being responsible for people and being pulled in lots of different directions. As your children grow, obviously their needs change the way they need you changes and so all of that. I think that part of what doesn't get talked about enough as far as entering this chapter in your life, which I prefer, like I just like the middle years, the way that that sounds to my ear is so much more poetic than middle age, which I was writing about, makes me think of instantly a guy on the couch, like some sad dude with a belly on the couch, just bad back or whatever, or the women that they put on the cover of the AARP magazines, they're like 70, which hey, they're gorgeous and beautiful, but they're not 55, so it's very interesting the way that society sort of visually gives us messages about what middle age means, whereas my experience has not been that at all, it's been a very, it is a period of time where there is loss, there's no doubt about that, and certainly losing both of my parents in a pretty short amount of time and my mother in a very traumatic way through ALS, which is just devastating motor neuron degenerative disease, it was brutal, and the grief that I felt over my mother for the year after she died, and ongoing, but really that first year just was, I've never experienced anything like it, and in the comments this week, there were a lot of people chiming in who were saying you don't really, there are certain things in life that you can't know until you know, and one of the people who commented said that he's lost his mom, and actually we're on a similar trajectory, he lost his mother around the same time I lost mine at the end of 2021, and he just ran into a friend of his who just lost her mother and was saying to him, I don't think I realized at the time like how awful this was, like I don't think I expressed my condolences in a meaningful enough way now that I know what this is, and re-exchange some comments back and forth, because I also experienced that, you know, when my mother passed, I received some unbelievable condolence cards from people that were just people I didn't even know that well, or people that didn't even know my mother that well, who reached out and you really can feel when someone is reaching out because they understand they've been there, and they've been through this tremendous loss, versus people who might not have gone through this yet, or not every situation is the same, like anything in life, it's not, you know, we can't paint any experience or, you know, any group of people with one brush, but, so there are people who have had to, who are estranged from one parent or the other, both for self-preservation and so when the parent passes, they don't experience this exact, you know, it's different, and the difference between my grieving process for my mom and my dad is wildly different, so I'm not, you know, not saying that everyone has the same sort of untethered feeling that I had when I lost my mom, but I did feel that I felt, I felt unmoored, and then I think also when my dad, my mom died at the end of 2021 and my dad died in July of 23, and so that's also a strange sort of like, it's a weird feeling, you know, as a grown woman to, and with children of your own, to feel orphaned in this way, but there is something really strange about being on a planet where neither of your parents are anymore, there's something profound about that experience. Anyway, he was saying that this woman had expressed to him, you know, that she felt like she didn't convey a deep enough expression of, you know, just condolence when he lost his mom, and there are, you know, I really, I really related to that sentiment because you can feel it, and that's okay also. There were people who I think expected me to, you know, quote unquote, feel better after a few months because they haven't been through it, or even, you know, it's like that year mark, people are kind of like expecting you to turn the corner, and I think you do in a way in the sense that the grief is not, you know, doing you in, and you learn to, you can get used to anything, I think, and you can learn to live with anything after enough time has gone by. It doesn't mean it's easy, and it doesn't mean it isn't like a constant ache, but it's not that same level of grief that's just like doing you in, and so I did start to experience around the year mark, like a way to integrate the grief into my daily life, and you, you know, and to understand this is just, this is just with me, and it, it can soften you if you allow it to do that, and I think that the way that I lost her also was just so painful, and I had a lot of trauma around that after I, it was not, she did not go peaceful even though I was with her, and, you know, stroking her hair and holding her hand, it's just the nature of that disease is so horrific, and it ravages people, it's very painful, you know, to lose someone that way, and to see someone just like wasting away in a bed that was a force of nature, her entire life, and it's just like stripped down to bones, you know, it's just devastating, and we had our own difficulties, my mom and I, which I've written about a lot and talked about it, it was not an easy relationship, I loved her so intensely, but she did, she was not someone, she didn't make it easy, she first of all was an alcoholic, and like would not acknowledge that or get help or, you know, take any kind of responsibility for her behavior because of that, things that she would do or say when she was drinking, that she wouldn't apologize, or, you know, and so it was, it was difficult, a lot of my relationship with her had to do with boundaries, physical boundaries, like I moved to, I moved 3,000 miles away so that I could partly figure out who am I, not in the context of my mother and her alcoholism, like who am I was so entangled in that identity of being her daughter, that it was really hard for me to figure out like how do I disentangle myself from that identity and figure out like who I am in a different context just as me, and so part of that involved like having to physically and geographically create space, and then some of it was other things like the time of day I would speak to her, obviously we're 3 hours earlier in Los Angeles when we are in New York and so it's always doing the math in my head like when I would call her or when I would answer her call. If it was after 5 or 6 o'clock New York time, I generally would not pick up the phone if she called because I knew there was a good chance she would have started drinking or that maybe she'd already been drinking, and I would never call her at that time. I would always try to call her like mid-morning Los Angeles time was good because that was like afternoon New York time and usually for my mom the Chardonnay would come out around 5. And so doing that math in your head is not ideal obviously when you're in a close relationship with someone having to create space and boundaries is not comfortable or ideal but you know depends on the situation for me, I did love her and I did want her in my life but there were times it was incredibly painful regularly she just would say things and do things when she was under the influence that were really painful she would go for my jugular she would say things that were inappropriate or unkind it was difficult and so it's constantly you know maneuvering and managing and trying to keep my own heart safe and not wanting to write her off she was also a wonderful grandmother you know she had a lot of amazing qualities her drinking was not the only thing about her you know so that whole you can't ever paint anyone with one brush she had incredibly loyal to her friends and there was always if you know any of her friends fell in hard times there's always a room at our house she's very smart very you know funny could be really kind but could also be really unkind and had a very very terrible temper and so it was just it was a mixed bag loving her you know she's really impressive in so many ways and really scary in ways and it was just it was not easy but at the end of her life when she could no longer speak I really feel like that is when she and I started communicating in the most open and honest way that we had probably ever because I didn't care about any of that anymore and I think that's part of what I was trying to write about this week is you get to this point in life and you start to realize how fragile it is and how fast it is and how difficult it is also to be a human being you know orbital motion is like the forward motion of the earth and then there's like gravity and the way the sun is pulling on the earth and that's what's keeping the earth spinning and orbiting around the sun and just like this realization that we are on the spinning planet in one solar system in a vast universe we're never gonna you know that's expanding and expanding and expanding and you get like a blink of time and none of that is easy those are not easy parameters once you realize I don't know how much time I have I don't know how much time anyone else has you know that's a that's an intense amount of vulnerability to have to face and integrate and accept and we as human beings we really like to pin things down and plan things and know what's coming next and we have our routines and we have our you know like our our things that we do I use this example a lot but you know it's been teaching yoga for a long time it's like people like to put their mat in the same space people like some familiarity some routine something they can count on and you know you don't want to start the day and kind of like there's nothing I can count on except that anything and everything could change today like you know the nobody wants to really be thinking about that all the time in the forefront and I don't think it has to be in the forefront of your mind but I think what happens is that it just naturally moves to the forefront of your mind as you enter this era because things are changing so drastically so you know losing my mom losing my dad just really you know it was painful and my dad was different I was starting I was mentioning that earlier because I had just such a I mean if my relationship with my mother was complicated my relationship with my dad was just like he was just not he just wasn't a good dad I you know those are the simple words you know for many many reasons most of which had to do with his own sort of self-obsession and he was a very self-obsessed kind of person and is self-absorbed and self-oriented you know everything in his life was kind of like about him and how he felt and what he needed and all that and so that was from the time I was tiny and but it was a real kind of you know mind you know it's just not easy because when I was little I really thought he hung the moon like I think most kids think you know and I he was always the victim so you know and he was fidelity was not his he cheated on everyone you know his first wife with my mother and then my mother with multiple people and actually I know from my half-sister my mother was not his first affair and he just went on that way he just really hurt every woman in his life all three of his kids so it's just painful but I for whatever reason at the time that I came into the picture he really leaned on he would talk to me he would confide in me from the time I was like tiny you know four five six at all the way till I was like 13 and I'm like oh wait a minute now that I have enough autonomy and experience out in the world to kind of see like you're the problem you're not the victim you're the perpetrator it's not these women who won't share you it's you who cannot you know keep your yeah so and he just had no sense of boundaries or he really made it impossible for me to have any kind of like normal childhood because he was talking to me like I was a therapist or his wife and then as I got older when I was like a teenager and I said at 13 I was like I don't want to come over anymore I can't I'm done I can't do this anymore I don't want to listen to your problems you are the problem you're the one creating all this pain for everyone around you and you know maybe stop getting married if you can't be faithful why do you keep marrying people and hurting them and hurting all the women that you sleep with like maybe you just should not do that but anyway I did keep spending time with him but after I created the boundary and said I don't want to hear about this anymore he really didn't know how to talk to me about anything there wasn't anything he really wanted to talk to me about because he wasn't that interested in me and my life he said that he was you know he said he was really proud of me I think he was in the sense that maybe like he thought I made him look good but he wasn't really you know invested in me or how I was or if I was okay and if he had been he never would have been like laying all that stuff on me as a as a child so as I got older I mean just things were you know when I was like a teenager 15 16 17 18 and all the way like through the rest he would like it if people on the street thought we were a couple that's like not normal and I know that because he would say it you know he put his arm around me under like 15 or 16 we're walking down Columbus Avenue and be like look at all these men like looking looking at you and wondering like how this old coot got this hot young it's like dad that's disgusting you know that's disgusting for you to want people to think that is not normal but I didn't have the language to say that I just had the emotion I had the rage but not the ability to express it and that's a big part of what I was writing about this week is that throughout my childhood I had a lot of physical symptoms I had asthma when I was little it's very interesting because like we had a cat when I when I entered the picture my mom and dad were living in the apartment where my mom stayed and my stepdad still resides on the upper west side in New York City and my mom there was a we had a cat named Bosco and I loved this cat apparently you know I I was two when Bosco died so like a little over two I think maybe two and a half but so my memories of Bosco are cloudy but I apparently like cat allergies don't show up until around two and I was just reading so so interested when I started thinking about this cat allergies often don't show up until around two it can happen earlier but usually that's when kids will become symptomatic and apparently your potential for being allergic to cats goes up if you're exposed in the first two years of your life which sounds counterintuitive to me because it feels like if you're exposed to sort of cat dander and all that like early and the saliva it's something in the saliva with cats and they were looking there far and then the fur is going everywhere and I would think like being exposed to it would give you sort of like the you know it's not antibodies exactly but like you know I would think that it would it would have the reverse effect that you'd be less likely to be allergic but apparently that's not the case or at least that's not what they think as of now so anyway we had a cat but eventually I became incredibly allergic to cats and horses and dust mites and I would I mean it was it was bad you know I would have all the things you would expect like my eyes would get itchy and teary and my nose and I would break out in hives but then eventually got asthma and asthma for a kid is really scary I think it's scary for anyone that feeling of not being able to breathe like you are using all of your strength to try to suck oxygen into your lungs and the available space feels like so tiny and there's this like wheezing you know feeling and sound that accompanies that effort and no matter how hard you try you're just not getting in enough air and it feels like every breath you take you're getting in less and less so it's it's really scary you know but when I was growing up I wouldn't be scared if it happened around cats or horses in fact I was taking horseback riding lessons for quite a while at Claremont Stables and I I was writing about how crazy that was because I would leave I would leave that lesson and I mean my eyes would be swollen shut I'd have hives all over my body be wheezing but I wasn't scared when it was happening around horses and cats because I knew why I knew like I know that I'm going into this lesson and I know I'm gonna need to take medication as soon as I come out sometimes I would take it before I would have to shower soon as I got home and try to like get the you know just get all of that like stuff off of me but when it would happen because I was emotional and that's the part that like my parents would not acknowledge really if I started crying hard I it could tap you know kick into an asthma episode or if I was angry any emotion that created a lot of the created a change in breathing right because that's what's happening when you're having a nervous system response fear or rage or you know deep grief anything that's impacting your nervous system in a profound way is going to affect your breathing and all of us if you you know if you are in a state of fight or flight first thing that goes is the deep breath you have that like chest breathing and what would happen for me as a kid is that I would feel that feeling and I get scared because I would know that I'm not going to be able to breathe soon and that fear of not being able to breathe soon of course creates more anxiety and more of a nervous system response it's just like vicious cycle and then you're wheezing and then you can't get enough you know breath and so and my parents would say that it was happening for no reason you know like it's not cats it's not horses you're just having this you know experience and that that was scary because the messages like this could happen anytime anywhere for no reason there's no way to prevent it there's no way to predict it there's no way to control it could just happen and that is when it was really scary for me and I had other things I was grinding my teeth very loudly at night so much that I would sometimes wake up my mom in the next room and she would tell me in the morning or at my dad's first apartment after the divorce they got divorced when I was four there it was like a big open space and there were two lofts loft beds in that space and he would sometimes climb up my ladder and shake my foot to get me to stop and I remember the dentist telling my mom that I had like very deep grooves in my teeth like you shaped teeth from all this grinding so I was saying that like in today's world you know if you have a little kid who is having asthma attacks when they get upset or is grinding their teeth so loudly at night they're waking you up in the next room you you would figure it out right you'd be like hey something's going on it could be anxiety it could be it could be a lot of you know it could be a lot of things here but you would be trying it and I think in the 70s it was just it was just different and definitely my parents were wrapped up in their own stuff there's no doubt but I also think that Gen X is like there are a lot of similar personality traits and coping mechanisms because it was this time of like you know the 10 p.m. public service announcement like it's 10 o'clock you know where your children are like it was just a different time it was a different world and children were I think kind of again I'm not painting that's everyone in the same brush but I think there was this expectation of like you know you're to be seen and not heard and you're supposed to like do well in school and listen when you're spoken to and you know be quiet when you're not and and all of that and it's funny just just as I was talking I just for some reason saw this thing Jennifer Aniston was saying about how when she was a kid she was like maybe like eight or nine or something she was sitting at dinner with her family and she was excused after dinner because one of her parents said it's time for you to go in the other room you don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation because you're a kid she's like terrible messaging you know but we just all it's like and then I grew up in New York City and I was a latchkey kid I was going back and forth you know three nights at my dad's four nights at my mom's and then four nights at my mom's three nights at my dad's it alternated every week I could never remember like where I was going or you know especially when I was a little as I got older it made me a very um I became really like schedule obsessed you know like I always when I got to be a certain age like I wanted to know where I was going and what I needed and make sure I had all my stuff with me made me very intense in that way of like do I have every single saying from my mom's that I'm going to need for like three or four nights at my dad's you know let me not forget anything because they wouldn't like meet meet up and you know you can't always you can't always I mean in their case it wasn't that far we weren't very far apart we were like you know I don't know 10 blocks away but I knew that that wasn't going to be easy and they they had an acrimonious situation was like the more I could avoid that the better and um there are a lot of other things you know that happened along the way neither one of them I think that like my mom was 28 when my parents split and her mom had just died she for the last year of my parents marriage she knew this it wasn't going to last because she knew about all the infidelities like it they just continued and continued and I think she was so heartbroken and enraged and deeply disappointed and embarrassed like all these things um but she wanted to keep up appearance she'd want her mother to be worrying about her because my grandmother had breast cancer and the last year of her life was really difficult my mom did not want her mom to be worrying about what was going to happen to us or knowing that the marriage was not going to last so they were keeping up appearances and literally like the week after my grandmother died my dad left so my mom was going through her own you know post-traumatic experience and I think also had lost her dad at 13 like my mom had a lot of trauma in her life that she never got any help with you know she was not somebody who would go to therapy she was not somebody who was going to learn how to like calm her nervous system or manage her anger or you know her understandable anger like she wasn't someone who was going to go and get help or admit that she needed help and that made her life and mine a lot harder than I think it needed to be and it makes me really sad if there's one thing that I have so much sadness over it's like I just wish she had gotten some help along the way because I think she could have been so much happier and she wouldn't have wanted to numb out every night I think that was you know huge part of what was creating the alcoholism was this deep need to not feel this way to get some relief from her pain and her rage and they're obviously like better ways to to process your emotions than that and that's again like what I was writing about is that when you repressed this stuff which I did I learned from both my mother and my father my rage was not welcome and neither was my sadness or my fear or my you know my grief um I have written about this and I I'm writing about it in my memoir but I'll share it with you anyway like when I I remember when I was six six I my parents had been split split for two years and my dad came to get me from my mom's and I heard them arguing in the kitchen over money and women and you know it was very it wasn't pretty and I was standing in the hallway and I was listening to this and then my dad yelled for me to come and I was you know four feet away anyway came into the kitchen we left but I am my mom like she didn't even look up you know like her face was like twisted and just like anger and upset over their interactions when I came into the kitchen I had my little bag whatever like she didn't you know hug me goodbye like I just I left with my dad and I hated that when I would leave my mom's I could still get emotional about it um you know it was just it was a terrible feeling to leave her and not have any kind of like you know anything on my way out the door and so I left with my dad and um and he instantly as soon as we hit the street was like talking about like this woman or that I mean it was just you know it was never ending and he used to we would stop we would walk from my mom's to my dad's the 10 blocks and like we would stop at this little candy store and he would always get a small bag of roasted salted cashews and I would get a small bag of red Swedish fish and so we went in I was in a really bit in fact I think it happened before we went in we got to the we got to the store I didn't want to go he had asked me if I wanted to I didn't want to I just was I was not okay and I think we stopped outside the store and I just started bawling and he was shocked because he had been talking to me you know whatever um and so he got like down you know and I and I said I wish I had never been born and I was six you know and and I think about my own kids at six and like that is a devastating thing for a six-year-old to be feeling you know it's just like oh I mean what is happening um and my dad got down in front of me and he was he turned purple and he was angry he was like don't don't you ever say that don't ever say that you know and I I just like I was like oh you know I started apologizing to him you know and he hugged me and yeah so like I ended up taking care of him in that moment you know he's like you're you know you're the best thing that ever happened to be don't you ever say that you know and I'm sure he had a lot of like horror over what I had said but it didn't come out in a way that you know wasn't like why do you feel that way or what is going on or what you know what's happening it was don't you ever say that again and I received it as like I'm in trouble and then we went into the store and I was trying to act you know normal whatever that means and we got the the Swedish fish and the cashews and left the store and I remember trying to swallow those effing fish over this giant lump in my throat and how painful it was so there's a lot of my childhood that I spent repressing you know emotion just like normal understandable emotion and it would come out in these other ways and one of the ways aside from like the asthma which there are a lot of things right it's like it's not one thing I mean my grandfather had it so there's very likely you know a predisposition definitely allergens but also emotion and that's the part that got like washed out of it like that just wasn't going to be addressed um and the teeth grinding you know I mean I maybe there were other causes aside from stress I don't know but none of that was sort of like dealt with or looked at and my anger or my sadness anytime I express that around either parent it was like that's not okay because now you are um you know you are I'm gonna turn this down now you are like in a situation where um you're not you're editing out your feelings to make other people comfortable you know you're kind of um you're being forced to um take care of people when you yourself are in need you're in a lot of need and so that is that's a lot for a kid to manage you know it's a lot for a grown-up to manage being in a situation where you're trying you know you're having a nervous system response that absolutely makes sense given the situation and you are then tasked with managing other people's feelings about your feelings um it's like kind of you know it's very gaslighting also but I don't think it was intentional I don't think there was like a manipulative you know component to it in this case with my parents I think they just were incapable of taking that in or taking that on at the time and I think for my mom she does not have the tools to be managing my anxiety and her rage and the stress of like being a single mom in New York City with a four-year-old and like dealing with a grief of her mother yeah like it's I think I was just too much and so I learned I have to be good and I have to be easy and I have to try to be helpful and I have to listen to my dad and try to like help him feel better and see if I can prevent my mom from like getting angry or wanting to drink and it's that's just it's too much you know it's too much for certainly for any kid but really for anyone for any one of us just trying to push down your feelings like that leads to other problems when I hit puberty I started getting these wild migraines like you know lose my peripheral vision end up crawling or you know nauseated I mean violent serious migraines where sometimes I'd end up at the hospital because the pain just was so intense that you know what you want when you're in that kind of it feels like a broken bone in your head you know just like screaming pain and at a certain point you just want to be put out of your misery so that started happening when I hit my teenage years and also disordered eating and body dysmorphia and I you know just like develop this perfectionism and very very like type A loss of list making and you know making sure I had what I needed and knew what was going to happen and trying to predict things and avoid problems I was just on high alert I was on high alert all the time and it took a real toll on my physical well-being and my emotional well-being but I would get like strep throat every year I would get bronchitis I've had pneumonia three times in my life I had H1N1 I've had covid twice so I mean I've had a lot of long related things and that's part of what I was writing about is that at a certain point and today that's not the case I mean covid notwithstanding I did get covid twice but I'm pretty healthy like I really rarely get sick and if I do it's usually because I'm like run down in some way like this past week there's a lot of emotions or dropping my son off at college or going to bury my mother's ashes like these things are super emotional plus I'm like on planes and trains and you know all that stuff so I wasn't surprised but it's pretty rare for me to get sick I have tools now right like I when I was 20 I started doing yoga and I find it interesting and funny that I was drawing me I'm not funny really but like that I was drawn toward that because it's a practice about breathing deeply and consciously and it's funny that I started my life struggling with that and that the last you know 30 years of my life have been so much about breathing deeply and quieting my mind and really giving my mind something to focus on that's happening in the now because I coming out of that childhood and young adulthood and adulthood it took a while you know it wasn't like it wasn't it wasn't overnight you know it wasn't overnight but I would say the last kind of like 30 years of my life have been very much about healing and about finding tools to call my nervous system and slow down my breathing and quiet my mind and just find some ease inside myself and also to get comfortable with uncertainty and that's the name of a book to P. Mr. There's like P. Mr. Drone has written a few books that are so great when things fall apart comfortable with uncertainty these are like some of my favorite books she's brilliant but I do think that's part of this phase of life and I feel very grateful that so much of the philosophical practice of yoga is about that is about understanding that everything is in a constant state of flux that's like the one thing you can count on and to try not to grip and I was someone who really did a lot of gripping and trying to control and manage and plan and nail down and you know like I liked routines and all of that and I learned along the way like life just feels so much better when you hold things lightly and loosely and when you can be in more acceptance that everything is in a state of flux it makes the experience the ride the orbital motion you know is it there's just so much more joy in the mix and as much as it was I mean it was I was you know I was sobbing as I drove home after leaving my son at college as soon as I got home and we texted and I knew that he was he was doing well like he had already gone to Trader Joe's with his roommates and he was going to like an event with his girlfriend like I was fine then I'm like okay he's okay and if he's okay then I'm okay you know and I'll get used to not having him in the house even though he's been in the house for almost 18 years you know he's gonna he's gonna turn 18 in November like it's it's a big big transition and it's another one of those times where it's really interesting because the people who've been through it understand instantly the people who have teenage kids who are about to go through it understand but and then there are people that don't have kids at all who who really seem to understand you know because there are just people in this world who are naturally I think or maybe it isn't natural maybe they've just been through their own suffering and their own losses and so they recognize what that is in any form there are people that are just so beautifully able to express their love their support their solidarity their understanding and then there are people who don't really get it and that's okay you know because there I think there are some things that you only learn by going through them and there are some people who only learn by going through things themselves and you know there's it's not one brush it's like there could be there can be people who understand some things without going through them but not others you know it's like whatever it it is what it is I don't I have zero issue if somebody like you know somebody and if I say like oh I just dropped my son off at college and someone's response is like oh wow big chapter like okay you have no idea you don't understand but that's okay because maybe you will at some point maybe you won't you know whatever but the people who are like oh are you okay you know those people have been there or they just understand it or you know so I think that so many things in life and to try to give people some grace because that is ultimately what I was writing about is that there is so much loss wrapped up in life and you might not realize that until you get to these middle years but you're going to realize that eventually there's so much loss wrapped up in the experience of being human and so much change and so much flow and so much absolute inability to know what's going to happen next even though we like to know that the more you can get comfortable with that just like the softer you become the more empathy you have to extend the less you feel like you know everything you know it just humbles you and it opens you and it I think it really makes some of the best people you know if you can just kind of like open your hands and open your heart and open your mind it really makes everything better and it makes you realize how fragile it all is and how fragile you are and how your best option is to really love like love loudly love you know demonstrably like really show that and express that and if there are things that you feel are not as they should be in the world around you like fight you know try to like make things better for people like just do anything and everything you can to leave it all on the field because you know you just don't know and I think that like the older you get the more you confront that and you either confront it you know in a in a peaceful way or you fight it and I just I really recommend the former it just feels better when you accept that as like part of part of life right so I hope that this was helpful if you are grieving or if you're moving through intent to change in your life right now if you are you know if you're struggling like somebody in one of the comments under I think it was this week's essay um might have been no might have been another might have been moving violations but as someone was saying it's so it's exhausting like healing is exhausting because you know you try to heal from things that have happened in the past but then there are things that keep happening in the present and I think that that's like the last thing I'll say is a first of all I totally recognize that feeling um but also I think my definition of healing has changed over the years and over the decades like I I think healing has happened when whatever ways you were let down betrayed abandoned whatever happened in your early childhood experiences when those feelings are no longer controlling your behavior right your decisions your actions like whatever that stuff is whether you have abandonment stuff that arises or you have you know um avoidant tendencies because you intimacy was not a good experience for you as a kid you were you know hurt or left or harmed or whatever may have happened abused you know like that when you're able to kind of unhook your journey from these things that happened in early childhood because I do think that most of the stuff that we struggle with is stuff that happened in the first four to five years of life for sure and probably the first 10 you know we're so tender 10 12 years like we're just we're just little sponges and so things that happen things that people said or did like there's such an impact on the way you feel about the world or yourself or your place in the world or your role you know like what it is you're supposed to be or do or feel when you're able to just say like okay I can recognize these things that happened and I can recognize the coping mechanisms that kind of resulted from that and I know what my triggers are and I have tools to manage those things when they arise it's not like the wiring it might be dormant but it it's still there you know like it's still there and you can still get triggered it can still get tapped somebody can hit a nerve but as long as you're able to like oh there's like that there's my old friend that like abandonment fear of abandonment like you know as long as you can kind of see it and name it and extend some compassion to yourself and quell it you know like allow that feeling to arise and then give it the attention and the understanding and then it'll it'll flow through you know as long as you're able to work that way that to me is healing right but also I think there's some component for me now too just like integrating that right like just being able to there's certain things you know I'm not someone who feels like I think forgiveness is something you do for yourself you know not the other person there are certain things in life like certain ways that people are abused or let down they're simply like that's not a person you're gonna want your life anymore but to me like forgiveness is just okay that was all a reflection on that person things that happened to me when I was a kid like that doesn't have to do with me that's someone else especially we're talking about an adult which is you know we usually are um to be able to understand that to me is like that person is in a deep amount of like pain or dysfunction or you know something's deeply wrong there they don't feel empathy or whatever it is I can recognize that I can sort of like forgive that doesn't mean I want to tell the person doesn't mean I have to contact them or ever see them again but just to be able to move along with my life and not be weighed down by something that was not my fault and was no reflection on me I think that's I think that's part of what happens too and the softening is that you just realize certain people are bent in these ways by life you know things happen and it really impacts the way that they're they've grown or what they are capable of or what they you know what they're aware of and I just find that the older I get the more able I am to just kind of release release those feelings you know release the stories even from releasing them on a keyboard um they don't live in my heart in that same way and so yeah I hope this was helpful to you and I'm pretty easy to find if you want to talk or you know express your thoughts like I love reading your comments and appreciate when you share things and just I just love this community so much so I want to thank you for spending some of your very precious time with me I don't take it lately and I'm sending you lots of love until next time [Music]