Choosing me. No longer apologising. Standing in my power. Speaking my truth. Owning my worth. Taking up space. Compromising my values for no-one. Respecting myself before others. Honouring my boundaries. Not allowing anyone in my life who chooses not to. No longer giving away precious time and energy to those who have not earned these things. Keeping my circle small, and close. Walking in grace and mercy. Living in authenticity. Accepting my flawed, messy self. Refusing to turn back. Allowing those who want to leave, to do so. Having nothing to prove. Learning, always. Growing. Making mistakes. Rebelling against fear. Leaning into courage. No longer being who I think I should be. Unafraid of who I really am. Still healing. No more hiding. Taking risks. Burning expectations to the ground. Dancing in their ashes. Forgiving myself. Calling the word NO a complete sentence. Falling asleep drowning. Waking with poetry in my lungs. Finding joy. Laughing more. Breathing in grief. Breathing out hope. Becoming stronger, yet softer.

Learning to love the darkest places within this winter solstice woman; this complex, conflicted, complicated contradiction existing inside the cusp, ruled by the moon and pulled by the tides, forever drawn to the ocean, ever-changing, never still, living somewhere between victory and loss, loving the only way I know how; with reckless abandon.

This is 40. This is me

Here’s the thing about trust.

We can’t just say we’re going to trust someone and expect it to happen that easily.

It doesn’t work like that.

Contrary to what we’ve been told, trust isn’t something we can just choose to do, or feel. Trust is the product of relationship. We cannot trust someone more than our relationship with them at this time allows us to. It is something that grows the more time we spend in a loving, growing relationship with someone. It is something that grows the more we come to understand and believe we are loved, and valued, and safe in relationship.

This is even more true for those of us who suffered betrayal as a child, especially from a parent or someone we sought to protect us. That kind of betrayal influences how we see the world and whether we can depend or rely on others. It often creates an unhealthy striving for autonomy and independence that can be hard to let go of; we have only known trust to be a dangerous thing and entering into relationship with the expectation that trust should be immediately present is not only unrealistic, but setting ourselves up for failure.

It isn’t so much about someone earning our trust or trying to prove they are worthy of our trust through an impossible list of expectations, but more about the gentle wooing of our hearts to trust the more we allow ourselves to become secure in the love of another. Trust is cultivated with time and patience and the willingness to accept and believe we are worthy of love. When we are able to believe we are loved without condition or agenda or strings, we are able to allow ourselves to surrender to trust within that love.

There is no such thing as trust outside relationship; you can only trust someone to the degree you know you are loved by them. We can’t just choose to trust but must enter into a slow dance where we will find the courage to step closer to another and allow ourselves to be drawn into the safety of their love; only there can our hearts be won over to the fullness of trust.

The more I begin to heal the less I find myself apologising for it.
It would be easy to say sorry.
Sorry for the ways I have pulled away.
Sorry for the ways I have let you down.
Sorry for the messages I have not replied to.
Sorry for the calls I have not answered.
Sorry for my absence.
Sorry for my silence.
Sorry I can no longer meet your expectations.
Sorry I can no longer meet your needs.
Sorry I can no longer put your needs above my own.
Except, I’m not sorry.
Because, the thing is, it isn’t me that needs to heal.
It’s the little girl within me; the wounded child that nobody protected. Or stood up for. Or put first. Or made to feel mattered.
The girl who was not heard, or seen.
The girl who grew up believing the needs of others were more important than her own.
That her body was not her own.
That her voice would never be heard.
That she wasn’t worth the respect of others.
That love was something to be earned.
That boundaries could be crossed by whoever so pleased.
That her value was not in what she could give, but only in what others could take.
I am fighting for her, because no one else ever did.
I am putting her first, because no one else ever did.
I am standing between her and the world; honouring her, protecting her, nurturing her, allowing her the time and space to mend her brokenness without more being taken when there is nothing left to give; without more of the world pulling her in every direction with its demands and expectations.
Because she matters. Because I matter.
I am choosing to heal the way I need to; my time, my way.
I am choosing me.
And I will no longer apologise for that.

Have missed many days but this is Day Nineteen and Twenty combined of #coronapoetry – Us and Work

On a perfect October day, I arrive ten minutes late for my Uncle’s memorial service. There is only one seat left in the room, next to my Dad. I sidle in, ask if the seat is taken. He doesn’t immediately recognise me; I could count the number of times we have seen each other in the last ten years on one hand. We live separated by 400 kilometres; more so, four decades we have sought to reconcile in our own ill-fought ways.

As the tributes for my Uncle begin, I glance down at my hands. Mindlessly, my eyes draw toward the hands of my Dad, casually positioned in his lap. I realise they are my hands. Or maybe mine are his hands. I have never had the chance to notice this before; the protruding knuckles, the long fingers, the prominent veins. I shift in my seat, pull my hands back in closer to my waist.

For thirty-nine years, I have been angry at the man alongside me. I did not know my Dad as a child. Although we shared the first few years of my life together I have no recollection of this time, only the yawning hollow which followed until we met again in my early 20’s. I have heard his version of events, also my mother’s. The contradiction between both. I do not know whose version is true; if either. Regardless, it has been easy to blame him for not being there during my childhood years. To hold him responsible for everything that happened in his absence. To punish his absence by offering mine.

What I do know about my Dad, is his hands are good at fixing. People, in his many, many years as a paramedic. Engines. Motors. Cars. Anything In The House. Everything In The Shed. Of the fatherly wisdom he has sought to impart in the last two decades: idle hands are the devil’s playground and every man needs a shed. For many years, I hoped for those hands to fix all that was broken, and sad, in my life. Like all little girls, placing my Dad on a pedestal; the hero who would swoop in and save me from the evil villains I had been placed in the care of. Every birthday, I waited with anticipation. This would be the year he would surprise me. It never was.

I am repeatedly drawn to thoughts of grief lately; they appear in my journalling, in articles I read, podcasts I listen to, television shows I watch. It has become the resounding theme biting at my heels. I ponder the different griefs I have seen in my own life: Grief from Death, Grief from Loss, Abstract Grief. Dissect how each variance of grief has affected me. Recognise the aftermath of each that still lingers in my life; underhanded, yet culpable for the less-than-enlightened choices I have made; often still do make.
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Here in this room my cousins grieve for the beloved father they have lost; I grieve for the one beside me never really found. This is perhaps what I mean by Abstract Grief – defining abstract as, “existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.” Grieving something we never had. Trying to fill our wounds of gaping scarcity with bare, empty hands.

They say the final stage of grief is acceptance. I have been holding out on this, knowing with acceptance comes letting go. Of anger. Of blame. It has felt too much like exoneration, and I’ve not yet been ready to grant such pardon, even though I know death is not interested in the illusion of time we like to clutch to our chests, as if we could ever reign over anything so supreme. Such begrudging now seems futile when surrounded by the humbleness of dying’s wake. I am not willing to accept the effortlessness of which this could have been my Dad being laid to rest. There is too much here unsaid; unfinished.

I look down at our hands again. Ours. In this moment I feel intrinsically connected to something other than myself, for perhaps for the first time I can remember. There is a grounding; an anchoring. A softening. I want to reach over and take his hand in mine, but I don’t. Not yet. I think of these things as I drive the 400 kilometre trip home. How no matter the trauma, or the grief, some things will always remain terrible. We can never change what has been. Sometimes, when all is said and done, all that’s left is acceptance.

** This piece originally published in Anti-Heroin Chic, please do take some time to check out this most stunning literary magazine **

I’ve not managed a poem for a number of days now.

It’s impossible, this whole situation. To find minutes to myself each day to write. I don’t know who these people are who are writing and learning new skills and chilling with Netflix and whatever, because it’s sure as hell no woman I know – we are all stretched desperately thin trying to balance at-home children and at-home school and caring for everyone else’s needs as well as still trying to hold down our own careers in the midst of a global crisis.

I’m exhausted and barely getting a minute to catch my breath each day, let alone find any kind of creative energy to write. There’s much that could be said for how women become the load bearers at times like this; how we carry more than we can manage upon our shoulders but do so anyway. How we often sacrifice the most and struggle with the greatest loss of identity and are left to grieve the lives so unexpectedly taken from us. But I’ll keep that rant for another day.

On top of the physical demand is the ongoing emotional upheaval. The anxiety, the fear, the stress, the worry, the uncertainty, the lack of sleep. I have found some days I manage these emotions, and these are generally days I can write. However, as soon as these emotions crowd my head space there is simply no room for anything else. Not for thoughts or words or creativity or joy or laughter or anything that is essential for survival at this time. The battle in my own mind is perhaps the biggest one I continue to face.

This week I’ve had moments of being angry at myself; that I cannot even write one fucking poem a day. Most days at the moment I achieve nothing, just survive. I have to remind myself that’s enough. To have no expectations. To do the best I can. To be gentle on myself. To cry when I need to. To still seek out the joy. To celebrate the small wins. To accept the losses. To find grace for myself.

Today was another day without a word written. Instead, I spent the afternoon seeding a paddock which has been a break from the iso grind and a chance to switch off and catch my breath and feel myself again, at least for now.

Which for today, is enough.

It’s enough.

Once again combining two prompts as I missed yesterday – everyone’s all like, hey I’ve got so much time on my hands, and I’m over here somehow busier than ever and finding it impossible to catch a few minutes to myself each day to get a poem done.

I’ve written this as a Tanka Poem, which is a Japanese form of poetry that translates as “short song.” There are 31 syllables in a Tanka, divided into five lines to make a 5 – 7 – 5 – 7 – 7 syllable structure.