it’s my birthday

i can cry if I want to

Welcome back! And welcome to all the new faces around here! Yup, Tarzan got me all weepy and emotional with her loving words. Thank you, TK! 🥰

Taking a month off from writing newsletters or writing at all has left me a little rusty. The website is coming along nicely, and we are pulling it together with an incredible creative team and will be launched next week. (watch your inbox for that news and other exciting links)

The site is going up as the world I once knew crashed. Not just in reinventing my work online, but someone I deeply trusted turned me inside out emotionally and my world upside down.

Relationships are complex, and the strangest part is that all the work put into these relationships prepares us for extra-super complicated stuff. If someone told me that, I wouldn’t believe them. 

(Haven’t we all been through enough, I asked myself?)

My therapist assures me there is a better chance “than a snowball in hell” of surviving this shipwreck. This sounds serious, and it is, but there is hope. I admire my honesty when it comes to recovery. It is one of those challenging moments where I want to talk about how I returned from the darkest days I have ever endured, but I can’t. 

1. Because I am not through it yet

2. It is not mine to share

Today is my birthday.

I am 51 years old. 

Yes, many cycles of my life feel complete. 

But, my patterns formed in the earliest years of my life are still present and as normal and natural to me as the air I breathe. The connection I longed for at 5yo is still with me today. There is an emptiness in me that grew an appetite for many things in my life, primarily outside of me. Food, alcohol, sex, money, intimacy - I used people and substances to fill me up, only leaving a gaping hole to fill, and everyone involved was mostly unsatisfied. 

Thankfully, necessary conversations are happening with and without drugs and with the help of professionals. In my quest to examine my intelligence and research, I have learned I need to be different. I am a cycle breaker, so I take this stuff seriously and the time to reflect.

This year the gift I am giving to myself is Consent. What do I want? To know consent is to know me and to express and stand for what I truly desire.

I did not consent to what happened in those relationships, but it has helped me understand my part in being hurt and hurting others.  

I am immersed in the study through The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent by Dr. Betty Martin with Robyn Dalzen. I am also taking long walks, slowing down and noticing how to navigate my romantic, social, business, and political relationships with integrity and generosity. That will have to be enough.

My heart and my life are expanding inward. I was born on a Tuesday; this time, I am doing things differently.

Happy Birthday to ME.

Love,