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No, I am not dating anyone, not seeing anyone special, not engaged, married or even thinking about a man, but I took myself out on a date for the day and came home to pure joy, and I am in love.

I hope I have the courage to take the next step and let go of trying to control who I am, I don’t know if I do yet.

I am no longer fighting, or flighting, or playing dead. I am accepting everything about who I am, so that I can decide who I want to be.

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I thought that who I created to survive was really me, but it wasn’t. My defense mechanisms are not my personality. I do have needs, I do have wants, I do want to be loved and treated like I am special. And before anyone else can meet my needs, I have to be honest with myself about where I came from and meet my own needs. In accepting the child that I was and all that happened to her, I am also accepting her strength, resilience and beauty.

What do I want next? I have come so far from the woman I was, who didn’t speak her mind and remained quiet in toxic situations. I feel like I am finally at the point that I am starting to look forward, and not back. Now, instead of being motivated by what I don’t want, I want to intentionally move towards what I do want, but what is that?

Whatever happened to me in the past, in my childhood and my marriage, doesn’t have to be what happens to me in the future. I can chose to protect myself, and to be around people that appreciate what I have to offer.

I had no idea that becoming sober would lead me to heal my past, and literally become a different person. Maybe different is the wrong word, because I am truly myself now. I am no longer a collection of other people’s needs of what they want me to be. Sobriety allowed me to come out of hiding, and show my authentic self. I no longer look back at the child that I was with a heavy heart, but with pride and happiness. I hope that my mother loved me, but I am no longer in desperate need of her love. Because I have learned that love is not a desperate and needy exchange of validating each other. Love is a calm and steady state of being, that requires no outside validation or substance. Love is already in us, we just have to let go of all the messages that tell us that we don’t deserve it.

I had put yoga above everything, and I had disengaged in being fully present in the rest of my life. Tulum didn’t let me float through my 8 days there in my yoga poses believing that I was superior to others because of my dedication. It broke me down flat, it made me engage with others, it took me beyond my physical comfort zone to the point that I wanted to leave 2 days after I got there. It brought me to a place I didn’t want to be; the present moment.

I used to hate January because it marked the end of the Holiday Season and all the twinkling lights came down and were put away. It made me sad not to have the lights of the holidays to warm my heart and bring me joy. January always seemed dark and cold, with no days off from work. I never used to see January as a new beginning, more of a month to get through so that I could get to warmer weather, and something to look forward to. But this year, I feel different.

This will be the year of not wanting anything, because what I want is irrelevant and secondary, to what I need in order to embrace my power and create more love in my life.

Sharing my journey through writing is my purpose. It is my contribution to society for anyone who is in the dark place that I was in, and wants to get out. The dark place is really the weight of other people’s opinions about you, that you have taken on, that most of the time are not true. And to make it worse, often times the person that is manipulating you, is also your source of validation. I am here to show you, that you can untangle the web of confusing wanting love, with needing attention and validation at any cost.

The first step to making meaningful change is to take a step back from your current life. I had to create space in order to make changes. All my actions and thoughts that created my life to be a certain way, had to be analyzed and challenged. I wasn’t happy, so I couldn’t keep doing the same things, and expect to be happy.

The invisible bubble around me is what protects me from being completely dependent on outside sources to make me feel alive. It is my world; the real me. It is what other people are attracted to, or repelled by when they meet me. It is the space where I can decide to say yes, or no in the moment. It is the space that protects me from entering toxic situations.

I don’t think I ever truly processed all the hurt from my mother until she passed away. When she passed, she took away any hope of resolution of our relationship. She took away any chance that she would see me for me, who I really was, and who I really am! I didn’t want to be seen as a one dimensional object for her to reflect her emotions, I didn’t want to be her mirror anymore.

Lately I have been realizing that life is not a race, and life is not linear. I am working towards being healthier both emotionally and physically, but I will work on this for the rest of my life. There will never come a time that I will be done, and there is no final goal to reach. If I am not growing and learning in some form, then I am stagnant, and dying.

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Survival mode is about minimizing pain. It is about doing the basics so that I can have a place to live, eat and support myself and my daughter. It isn’t a place to relax into, and plan a future. I couldn’t see my future in survival mode because I was too busy trying to make it through the day. But I am slowly walking out of survival mode, and taking my time to see all the options that are available to me.

Finally, almost a year after I left my marriage, I accepted the work that I had to do on myself, and stopped dating. Facing my own demons, without being able to blame them on my marriage, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I saw my own judgement of myself and others, and my shallowness and selfishness. I wanted the people around me to make me feel good about myself, but that was not their job, that was my job. I started to see how little I was really taking care of my mental health, and realized that my real work was learning how to hold space for myself to heal, and to dream again.

Despite my sadness and feeling lost, I knew I wanted something for myself, but I didn’t know what it was. I had hundreds of vague ideas of what I wanted my future to look like, but when I verbalized them, I felt stupid. I wanted to have my own business, I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be an artist, I wanted a deeper fuller relationship with a man, I wanted to have closer friends. These were all ideas that would float through my head, and the one thing that they had in common was that I wanted more love in my life, and I wanted to be more engaged in life; I wanted to feel again!

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I see now that I had been approaching my writing like I was approaching my life. I was giving all my efforts away for free, in hopes of acceptance and validation.

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It was easier for me to think about the future or the past, when I was unhappy in my life. The present was a hard place to be, when I wasn’t ready to acknowledge that I needed to make big changes in my life. It was easier to have a cocktail then to do the work I needed to do on myself.

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Two years ago, I bought a one way ticket for Los Angeles, boarded a plane, and left my marriage.

These last 2 years, I have been swimming alone in that cold water towards the peaceful island in the distance. There have been storms, big waves, and there have been sunny warm days too. I kept my faith and belief that I was swimming towards what I wanted, even when some days the fog completely covered the distant island. But these last few weeks I feel like I have finally reached that island. I am walking up onto the warm sandy beach and looking back at the tiny life raft way out in the ocean. Was this island always here? It was, I didn’t see it because I was so focussed on holding on to that small life raft that now is just a speck on a distant wave. I didn’t need it after all.

There is a whole world of touch and affection that I have yet to feel, and I want to be present in my body for it and let go of thinking about what it means. My experience last summer opened me up to being present in romance, and going with my feelings rather than being guarded. Even though it ended and I had a hard time letting go, I still smile when I think about him. I would have never experienced his blue eyed lustful gaze if I didn’t walk away from someone who saw me as a chore to deal with. He was part of my transition out of my past, and into my future.

Last week my daughter came to live with me. After almost 2 years of living in Southern California alone, I am no longer alone. She is the last piece in the first part of my journey. Her coming here marks the end of the generational toxic family pattern in our lives.

It made me realize that the past five years have been all about escaping from the clutch of toxic situations and becoming aware of them. The heavy lifting is done, and now starts the real work of healing that insecure me underneath.

If you had asked me on that day two years ago when I boarded the plane alone for a one way trip from Portland to LAX in hysterics if I thought my daughter would move here, I would have hoped it with all my heart, but not believed it.

It is not selfish for me to do the things that feel aligned with my true self. This is who I am, and I can’t be anyone else without faking it.

Now my daughter joins my journey in Southern California and starts her own. I am so excited to see what this next chapter of both our lives will look like.

I was meant to write and tell the story of my family who hid their whole lives, and died with their secrets. I am here to take away their shame and show their light through my words and my eyes. Because through all that they suffered and endured in life they had hope and a belief that a better life was possible, and that is the energy that they passed along to me.

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