Didn't you used to have a husband?
Life changes + Tonight's call LINK
I had this question posed to me last week. Now. In the interest of honesty, I should say that this is probably not exactly how the asker phrased it.
It’s more that this is what I heard.
If you’ve ever noticed how words often pass through the filter of your own history, you’ll understand that what is said and what is heard can be different things.
I met the moment with pantomime faces - ‘cringe’, ‘oops’, - ‘grimace’ - before revealing my true face, which was delight.
Even I could see that my smile was radiating such truth & peace & happiness, it confirmed the obvious without me even having to state it.
Yes. I used to have a husband. Two, actually.
And while I know my private life is ‘nobody else’s business’, I think it’s a fair enough question and totally valid to at least be curious about what changed that I, at 50 years of age, suddenly realised I’m queer.
My free self met the moment playfully. And she was able to because my mothering self is holding a new boundary against the internalised patriarch, his endless encroaching & demands to EXPLAIN, JUSTIFY & DEFEND MYSELF.
But that was before I started pulling apart the web of beliefs and values that — to nobody’s surprise — were never mine to begin with.
They were imposed, stealthily. By society, culture & our traumatised elders who all should have gone to therapy but didn’t.
And who all made clear, in all the ways these things are made clear without anyone ever saying anthing, that there’d be a cost if I didn’t comply.
The cost was my truth. My autonomy. My safety and my joy.
I came to understand that there was a hierarchy of command and as long as I obeyed it, then I could do/be/have whatever I wanted.
The fact that I dissented & rebelled made me believe I was free. What I didn’t know yet, is that true freedom does not feel like shame.
Shame is the voice of my internalised patriarch. I call him Séamus. I depicted him once in a journal spread I find disturbing.
Only now am I beginning to understand what I was trying to tell myself then.
Reader, I have fully spent the last decade & more becoming the woman who’s clacking away at this 13” rose gold macbook keyboard to you right now.
I can’t even begin to tell you about the path I have travelled to get here. But let me share with you the poem I wrote about it.
I wrote that in 2018. Again, it would be another 8 years before I would understand fully what I was trying to tell myself.
The shift is one of values. “Home” for me, is not triumph. It is belonging.
It blows my mind that my creativity carried this wisdom to me long before I had the capacity to understand it. And that my journals were the place I captured and held what was true while I did the work of untangling myself from all that wasn’t.
I’ll be honest and admit there were roads in there I would not travel again for love nor money.
There are tears I’m still crying.
There’s truth I’ve had to retrieve & dig out of the places I had very deliberately buried it.
There is trauma I didn’t even realise I’ve been carrying.
Since 2009, I have been inching toward my butterfly era. Only I was dead certain that it would arrive looking like accomplishment.
Like me, finally, getting my shit together. Achieving the thing. Becoming someone of value and merit, in a patriarchal sense, at least.
It genuinely never occurred to me that my butterfly era would just be… me, coming home to myself.
That all the struggle & strain was never leading to achievement at all. It was leading to a person. This one. The one finally out of the SHAME closet, typing these words to you.
My Ultimate Ride Or Die
I am endlessly grateful for my one constant companion on this journey.
Every unravelling, every ache that didn’t have a name yet, every morning that getting out of bed was my entire day’s achievement.
She’s not my therapist. She’s not my mother. Or my closest friend.
She is the meeting place where my heart, mind, body and soul get together and figure out what they know.
She is my journal. That is my practice.
Some days she helped me by taking lists. Some days it was letting me scribble so hard I’d tear through her pages.
Some days she watched me illustrate words from a poem that made me cry, others as I’d chase myself down yet another spiral, having been snatched once again by the cruel & dirty clutches of Séamus.
It never once mattered how ‘good’ my journaling was. What mattered was that I showed up to our meeting place, no matter what.
And every single time I lost the thread of myself, my journals were the place I went to pick it back up again.
I tell people that Journaling changed my life.
It’s probably more accurate to say that journaling saved my life.
So. Have you journaled today?
Amanda xx
Weekly online journaling call information are “below the fold” for paying subscribers (thank you). Scroll all the way down.
p.s. Want A Free Art Journal Lesson?
For years, I disqualified my art because I don’t like to draw.
I thought those limitations meant I’d never be a ‘real’ artist.
I was wrong.
THIS IS A NO STRINGS ATTACHED FREE LESSON
It’s happening next weekend.