As I’ve been unraveling the experience that led me to the ICU earlier this month, I’ve encountered emotions like a stop-motion film: jerky and awkward, with pauses of nothingness followed by rapid swells of everythingness. I tried to get it down on paper, but initially, my words were list-like, as if getting all the facts straight would somehow make it easier to process. The wound on my back throbbing; Feeling faint and having to kneel on the bathroom floor; the thermometer fluctuating between 103.5 and 101 and 104; the needles in my veins; the sunglasses resting on the EMT’s forehead; no one looking at me or the tear rolling out of the corner of my eye; people focusing on the parts of my body as they worked; more needles and IV lines and “you’re really sick”; and seeing my son and daughter walk into the ICU and hearing a guttural sob escape my throat before I could stop it. Those were the facts. They seemed important.

I thought that if I could find logic in the experience, it might right-side everything that felt upside down in my brain. I know that’s not how it works, but I think this logic-building exercise is a natural part of the process. It’s the brain trying to protect the body by keeping all the feelings from flooding the nervous system at once.

When I returned home from the ICU, I tried to act normal. I didn’t want anyone to worry. I turned the volume way down on the emotions that roiled within me during my hospital stay, and I silently repeated my childhood mantra, “It’s okay. Everything is okay. I’m okay.” It was over. I was fine. Life could resume. The next day, my somatic writing cohort was scheduled to meet. Although my body was puffy from fluids and medications, I felt a pull to join. I felt a need for their strength.

The moment I saw everyone’s faces, I had to blink back tears. I was enveloped by this beautiful group of women, led by . They held me in the womb of their healing love and care, and in deep, deep knowing. In that session, Jessy read us a poem titled “not quiet as in quiet but” by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, then asked us to use that form to capture whatever our bodies were calling us to write. This is what came from mine:

Not Surrender as in Surrender But…

As in giving up
As in hoping someone else knows best
As in I'm scared and I don't know my options
As in there's no menu of procedures presented
Asin I'm at your mercy
As in it will not be safe to fight
As in I don't have the strength to ask questions
As in I don't know what questions to ask, whose hand to grab, who to plea with
As in who will save me
As I'm too tired to keep my eyes open, to be vigilant over myself
As in darkness
As in closing my eyes, blocking it out
As in wishing this away
As in silent prayers
As in accepting I need their help
As in letting control slip through my fingers
As in letting go.
As in going inward to survive.

I realized then that the list was only the first step toward healing. The first step out of the cave. Now it was time to surrender to the healing process. It was time to feel my own pain, my own fear, my own uncertainty. It was time to acknowledge the helplessness and the repressed resistance that lived in my body as people swarmed around me, giving me only moments before inflicting pain.

After the cohort ended, I spent some time letting the experience cycle through me, letting one thought unlock the next, until I felt the emotions I had carried throughout it. I wrote frantically and incoherently as the memories pushed into me. My writing was messy, but my words were clear:

I don’t want to be here. I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I’m scared. Everyone is moving so fast. Do they know I’m here? I see people on both sides of me, holding my arms, both looking for veins. I don’t want this. I feel panic rising in my chest. I want them to stop, to see me, to ask me if I’m okay. Do they know I have a wound on my back? I want to scream. They keep moving me, and everything hurts and I’m tied. I want to cry but fear is gripping my tears like a noose. They talk to each other but not to me. Not me. Not me. I’m right here. Please no. Please no. Please, no more IVs. Wait. Please wait. Don’t I need you to numb the wound before cutting out the stitches? Please wait. No one waits.

I continued for pages. It’s clear I feel helpless and scared, but what also surfaced is humiliation. I can’t exactly pinpoint why yet, but it was embedded deep within my words, and for some reason, that hurts me far more than the IV needles, the opening of my stitches, or the failed IUD removal. I was a child again, and I couldn’t control anything. I kept the screams and pleas to stop behind gritted teeth, and all I can do is go back to that moment, stand beside myself, stroke her hair, hold her hand, and tell her I’m right here, right by her side, and that I am strong enough for both of us. I will absorb this for her.

Writing this stream of consciousness helped me identify the layers of emotion I absorbed for her. Although I was still unsure where in my body I was holding these emotions, it helped me become more deeply connected to what I was feeling.

Panicked: Please stop. Please wait. I don’t want any of this.

Exhausted: Please let them leave the room and let me sleep. All I

Confused: This is all a mistake. Why are they calling the ambulance? Why are they talking about toxic shock? Why are they talking about foreign objects in my body?

Embarrassed: They are going through too much trouble for me. What if all of this is a big misunderstanding? Do I have to use that bedpan with everyone watching? I don’t want someone else to take off my pants and underwear.

Lonely: No one is touching me in a soothing way, as my mom would. No one is wiping the hair from my face or stroking my cheek. 1:45 a.m. in the ICU is dark and still, with the constant interruption of beeps, the air of my blood pressure cuff filling, and my spiraling thoughts.

Scared: Be brave, hold your breath, brace, this is going to hurt, baby breaths, exhale, stay alert, notice their faces, plead with them to slow down and look at your face, to notice you’re here, that you’re hurting, that you want to feel safe. Please ask me if I’m okay.

Helpless: I am not safe. I have no choice. It all sounds so bad and I don’t want to die. I need to do what they say, even though I’m scared and I know it will hurt.

Angry: This is a newer feeling that is surfacing. Why did they unstitch my wound and not bother stitching it back up? Why didn’t they get a gynecologist to examine me before trying to take out my IUD? Why did they continue to hurt me when I was voiceless?

These are top-level feelings, but they are a critical part of unraveling the experience and accessing the emotions within my body. For me, once I find the feelings in the sinews of my thighs, the base of my neck, or the lining of my gut, I can understand them. They become my allies. I can work with them, talk to them, gently coax them out of hiding, and hold them with compassion. This is my path toward healing.

I’ll admit, this process generally involves tears and gentle, loving words for the version of myself who endured the experience that caused the feeling I’m communing with. It’s a ritual of self-compassion and acceptance, mostly about dispelling any beliefs that I wasn’t strong enough or brave enough to handle it during the experience.

Do you have any recurring thoughts about an unpleasant experience? Maybe something you swept under the rug long ago, tallying it up as just something that happened but wasn’t really a big deal? If you’re still thinking about a negative past experience, please trust me when I say IT WAS A BIG DEAL. Your psyche can trick you into thinking you’ve overcome it, but if you haven’t allowed yourself to sit with the emotions and identify where they live in your body, they will continue to define you in one way or another.

I had an experience the summer after fourth grade that has haunted me ever since. Yet, for all these years, I’ve told myself it wasn’t a big deal and that, in the end, nothing really bad happened. I’m fifty, and I’m just now working to excavate the buried emotions from within my body. This experience has become my litmus test for everything that has happened since. If something lingers in my mind after the fact, it matters, and I need to give it the space and time to tell me how I can heal.

I believe this applies to any adverse experience we have in life. It’s not okay to “just get over it,” “suck it up,” or simply move on and forget about it. The body does not forget - ever. Our body is our first and only home. It holds everything that has happened, both good and bad, and it is ours to listen to, care for, and tend with loving compassion.

Life will try to interfere, throw us off course, and sometimes even spin us in circles until we feel completely lost. But there is always a path that leads us back home to ourselves. I’ve created my path back home by finding the lost emotions within my body and mapping them to physical sensations. There is something about feeling the specific sensations an experience triggered in me emotionally that allows me to sit with them, soothe them, and take one step back toward myself.

This medical trauma threw me wildly off course. It affected how I saw myself, my ability to endure, and my sense of invincibility. Seeing my kids looking down at me in the hospital bed made me feel like I was shrinking, Alice in Wonderland style. I felt so little and helpless, and scared that I couldn’t protect them - that I wouldn’t be able to protect them. That feeling, I am realizing, was/is/will be the hardest part, the lowest point for me. It far exceeded the physical pain. It was a deep, aching pain that I still have not released.

I’m working toward healing. I’m working to map the physical and emotional pain. I’m working to come home to myself. What I know, but have to continually relearn, is that this process takes time and the timeline isn’t entirely up to me. It takes what it takes. I’m not sure when I will complete the map or how I will feel when I sit with those specific hurts. I’m not sure what the path looks like yet, but I have faith that it will illuminate if I keep looking inward and asking my body what it needs and how I can help.

I hope my experience and my process for walking out of the cave of trauma help you in some small way. Maybe not now, but perhaps you will remember it one day, when you are struggling and find yourself in the dark caverns of a cave you never expected to be in. I am here for you, as I know you are for me. I am grateful beyond measure to be sitting here, writing these words, processing, and ultimately healing.

Yours till butter flies,

Jo

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p.s. If you missed the first part of this, you can read it here:

For the past two days, I’ve been processing these simple facts: On Wednesday, I was totally healthy, doing all the things one does during the day to keep husbands, kids, and animals alive. I woke up the next day feeling icky enough to go back to bed - something I rarely do. Two days later, I found myself in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) with toxic shock syndrome and a lot of very worried faces looking down at me.

“You are very sick,” the doctor simply told me when the ambulance dropped me off at the ER. “I’m so glad you listened to your body and came in when you did. Had you not, we would have far fewer options now.”

I’m glad you listened to your body. The perplexing thing is that I’m always listening to my body, dropping call-and-repeat signals into my gut all day, every day, trying to assess and calibrate how I’m feeling at any given moment. But during this seven-day window, I most certainly was not listening to my body. It was my husband’s prompting to call the doctor, who in turn led me to go to urgent care, thinking I might have shingles - both of which I fought against doing. I was tired and didn’t want to move. I honestly don’t know when or even if I would have caved and called the doctor on my own. I’ve wondered how loudly my body would have to scream for me to have heard it clearly.

Thankfully, they listened to my body and saved me. Now, because I didn’t die, it sounds dramatic to say I could have, but that is the reality of toxic shock. I remember, as a teenager, reading the warnings on tampon boxes about toxic shock. It didn’t seem like a real possibility, but I certainly wasn’t going to leave one in longer than a few hours, just in case. Turns out, it’s a real thing. Ironically, I am learning this the hard way many years after the last time I ever wore a tampon.

When I got to urgent care, I couldn’t sit up, and they couldn’t get a reading on my blood pressure. When they did, it was hovering around 60/40. They called an ambulance, and two gum-chewing dudes with tans and sunglasses resting on their foreheads asked me my name and then kept calling me “ma’am” as they fought to get an IV line started in my hand. They shared a seemingly funny story with one another on the ride to the hospital and, with little to no pomp and circumstance, transferred me to a bed in the ER and left.

I’m going to stop here for a second because I want to call out what’s happening. I’m writing about this experience I just had, but it’s as if I’m hovering above it, right? You aren’t there with me, in my skin, feeling anything — because I’m not letting myself feel anything either. It’s too close, too hot, too fragile. It might shatter into a million pieces if I move wrong. So I stay above it, a witness, telling and sharing the facts. The facts are always safest.

I know I’m doing it in this moment, and yet I cannot, or am not, ready to do it differently. I’m still bracing. I haven’t processed it, so it doesn’t feel safe to lean in too close. There have been countless times in the past when I’ve written like this and was completely unaware I was hovering over the scene. In fact, I wrote the entire first draft of my memoir while hovering. It would take me five more years of processing before I felt ready to go back into the scene, into my body, and express what I was feeling and how I experienced that feeling in my body.

Right now, I can see myself in the ER bed, shivering so violently that my shoulders are bouncing off the mattress. I hear myself asking for blankets, but I am told I cannot have more covers because I have a fever of 103.2. I hear the doctors contemplating the cause of the sepsis, their conversation huddled by my feet. Was it the recent incision from a mole-removal surgery she had, or could it be another foreign object inside her? Could it be her IUD? Should we open the wound? Should we take out her IUD? I hear all this as I wash in and out of consciousness. A lead vest of exhaustion is lying on my chest.

I know the consideration set scared me. I didn’t want any of that to happen, and yet, in the end, it all happened. I was in a state of discomfort greater than I may have ever experienced, and still, people kept transporting me from gurney to gurney, like cargo, telling me “this will sting a little” or “you might feel a burning sensation in your arm” or “one-two-three and a quick poke.” I was aware this was all happening, but I wasn’t in the state of mind to know what was happening. They rolled me onto my side to remove stitches from a freshly sewn wound, then scooted me to the end of the bed and told me to let my legs relax open, saying this “generally doesn’t hurt.” But it did hurt. It all hurt.

From the moment I entered the ER, I thought, now I’m safe. They’ve got me. I can relax. I’ll be cared for, and my pain will be eased. They will make this go away. They will make it better. But they could not do that for me. They did their job and they did all the things to help my body fight the infection so it could heal, but they could not provide the relief I desperately wanted. They still needed to take blood every two hours, press new meds into my system, and keep all the drips dripping into my veins - and that required me to continue bracing.

Again, I need to pause. If I had processed this experience, you would be with me on that gurney. I could show you how my toes stayed flexed throughout the entire event and let you feel the tension in my hands as I held my thumbs in my fists, as I do when I get really scared. You would feel my heart beating at 99bpm in your chest and taste the metallic sourness in my mouth from the CAT scan injections. I cannot give that to you now, though. I am still doing all those things. I have not left them behind.

That is the main difference between writing within the cave of pain and writing from beyond it. Beyond it, there is space to touch and to retreat; there is a sense of psychological and even physical safety, and a knowing that you are okay right here, right now. When you are still in it, as I am now, nightmares still spin uncontrollably in your mind. There is darkness and fear, and a compression that requires feelings to stay safely tucked inside. The mind is controlling the show.

The mind is a critical part of this healing process. I write a lot about the body and how and where feelings show up, but the interplay between the mind and body is the bridge that ultimately helps us move from within the cave to beyond it. The mind and the body have to make peace with what each carried through an experience before true processing and subsequent healing can happen. It’s as if both the mind and the body have to reach a level of alignment for the doors to open.

I passed out when I was transferred to the ICU out of relief? Exhaustion? Fear? The very kind nurses were talking to me as they put an IV in my other arm and began hooking up lots of machines. I didn’t flinch. When I awoke, the same doctor from the ER was at the foot of the bed. He looked at me and said again, “I am so glad you listened to your body and came in when you did. You’re very sick right now, but we’ll take care of you.”

We’ll take care of you. Those were the words I most wanted to hear. And they did. I am recovering, and I am home with my family, and I know I will be fine. All the little ailments, aches, and puffiness will go away, and I will recover.

But right now, I’m still processing all of that. I am in the cave. In fact, it was when I first tried to write about this medical scare that I realized I’m still in the cave. It’s like backward induction. I write to know what I am feeling or not feeling, where I am in the arc of processing, and what step I need to take next to find my way out. It’s the only way I know.

Today, I can list every fact. I can still see and feel everything as if it’s happening now. I can feel the needles going into my veins and the sticky pads of the heart monitor being applied to my breasts and ribs. I can hear the beeping of the machines (so much beeping), and I’m still bracing the whole time. But I feel nothing.

Tomorrow, when I am beyond the cave, I can tell you how I felt emotionally about this, identify where those feelings lived in my body, how the experience took root in my nervous system, wound through my gut, led me to pray to a God I don’t know well, and let tears fall at 2:45am when I lay alone, looking out the ICU window. You will know what it was like because you will experience it with me. That is how I differentiate between writing from within the cave and writing beyond it.

LOVE NOTE: As a gentle nudge to readers in their own caves right now, I think journaling is the best way to keep taking baby steps out of that dark space. Never feel like you have to share your writing to heal. Sharing can be helpful and even cathartic, but it can also keep you stuck longer, depending on the feedback you might receive. We are tender and armorless when we are in the cave, which leaves us more vulnerable to being hurt.

The healing process is intensely private in my experience. Although I’ve shared my experience here today, I did so because I feel supported enough to both share and continue the work of healing the trauma. I do not take that lightly, and if healing required no more words to flow from my fingers, I’d do it. I’d choose healing 100% of the time over anything else. I guess I’m just trying to say, take care of yourself first. Words can always wait.

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Your’s till butter flies. xoxo

Jo

“It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s okay,” I told myself. I was curled into the tightest, roly-poly bug position my body could manage, and I held my thumbs in my fists. And then I repeated the mantra again and again, usually until I fell asleep.

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This mantra was my stop-gap whenever emotions got too close to the surface, and I needed to stuff them back down. Those words felt like a hand rubbing circles on my back, letting me know I was safe. They slowed my heart rate, the tears and most importantly, kept the questions unasked and the guttural screams buried.

I first spoke these words when I was eleven years old, after being told my parents were going away for a while to “get help for their drinking problem.” I hadn’t known there was a problem until that moment. One night, they were there, tucking me in, and then they were gone, and I was alone, and my brother was somewhere else, and these words found their way from my gut, up through my throat, and, in the smallest whisper, out of my mouth. I usually didn’t make a sound when I repeated this mantra. My lips moved imperceptibly, and I could hear the words in my ears, but I didn’t actually speak them. Even that felt too exposing.

I would continue to use this soothing/suppressing/hiding tactic for decades. It was the one tool I kept in my highly inadequate toolbox. And it worked, in one way - it kept the facade intact. It helped me never break character in front of others, at least not in obvious ways. Sure, I’d take my rage out on the lacrosse field or basketball court, but that was warranted and even rewarded. Otherwise, I tightly managed my exterior reality. I was bubbly in social situations that called for exuberance. I was observant, keeping my focus on what others were feeling so I could mimic, divert attention from myself, and redirect with humor when necessary.

My exterior reality was perfect. I was perfect. I placated my parents, played the good student for my teachers, and competed fiercely for my coaches. I wore the right clothes, said the right things, and was friendly with everyone but close to very few. I was the high-achieving girl from a well-to-do family who lived in a big house on the lake, had a pantry full of the best snacks, acted carefree, loved to make prank phone calls, and have slumber parties.

Don’t get me wrong - this was the case for a decade of my life. I was that girl. The problem was that I tried to keep being that girl, even when the life I was leading behind closed doors no longer matched the exterior.

Once my parents came home from rehab, the mantra began, along with the lies, the worries, and the swallowing of all questions. No one talked about any of it - the drinking, the debt, the dysfunction. We were all silent, and in that silence I learned one thing - keep this secret. Act the part. Fit in. We kept moving houses but stayed within the same zip code. I was forced to hide in plain sight. I went from naturally playful to forced smiles and anxious eyes. And I learned to do it very well - but there was a cost.

When you feel that you can’t show your authentic self, it doesn’t just affect your mind. Your body tightens around the secrets. Your belly aches, your limbs ache, and you begin to curl into yourself, hoping to take up as little space as possible, hoping to disappear, to blend into the background, to make as few requests as possible, to have fewer needs, to keep it all unnoticeable. To be perfect.

Hiding behind perfection kept me from forming long-lasting relationships with friends or lovers. It sparked a ferocious battle between my mind and body. While turning inward for protection, I turned against myself as the enemy. I couldn’t meet my expectations of myself, the same ones I believed others held of me. I was competing against myself to be better, achieve more, and prove something to… the people who were judging me. They were a faceless jury that followed me everywhere, and they were (I was) relentless.

The biggest cost was losing the ability to trust love. I had many people who loved me with everything they had, even when they had little else. In my mind, they were not living up to my expectations of them - yes, I had expectations of others, not just myself. I was furious at my parents for not being perfect, for letting me down time and again, for breaking the facade I had so carefully tried to maintain not only for myself but for my family. They let their imperfections show, and I was angry at them for not holding their shit together.

I need to interject with a present-moment experience: My chest is tight with a heavy ache I know well, and my throat is constricting as I write this. “Don’t tell. Don’t say bad things about your parents. Don’t hurt them. You’re so ungrateful,” I hear these words hissing in my ears. I am still ashamed to admit how judgmental I was of my parents for a very long time. I blamed them and then myself. I hated us all.

I craved their love and protection. It was given freely, but would then fall short. It was never taken away, yet it felt that way. The more it ebbed and flowed, the more I craved the stablility I remembered when I was younger. My mom’s slow, circular back rubs, the way my dad would throw me in the air as a toddler, and I would squeal in delight, knowing he would catch me and I would be safe in his arms. The more I ached for it, the more I resented all the work I was doing to hide the fact that it wasn’t my reality at all.

The story meanders. There are peaks climbed and valleys wallowed in. The journey has been long - and perhaps it had to be - but it ends with forgiveness, grace, and a love so strong that it tore down the walls I built between my dual realities. I had to learn to let go of the act, let my stomach ease and let all the worries about how I was perceived, judged, or witnessed fall away. I had to accept that love will never be perfect, no matter how perfectly you try to force it. People may judge, but they may not - and who fucking cares. Hiding who you are or what you are is never worth it.

Come, let’s be beautifully flawed, imperfect, kind, and compassionate humans, sharing our one true reality with the world - the messy, often unsightly, hard, but also surprisingly magical and gorgeous moments that make up this life we have.

Yours till butter flies.

Jo

I’ve curated a few other posts that relate to this one in case you want to continue digging deeper into the way hiding costs us more than we admit:

After publishing this essay, I will be turning on paid subscriptions. I have been on Substack for two years, pouring my heart and soul into personal essays, musings and poems that have slowly helped me excavate and accept my hidden truths. Through this process of truth-telling, I found my voice. I am now ready to own that voice and help lift up other writers who are doing the same. Read more about my pledge here.

“Just finished and have been in a puddle of tears for 13 hours. Scary, beautiful, embarrassing, humiliating, hurtful, loving words. I love you.” These were the words my dad texted me after reading my memoir, which he apparently finished in 13 hours!

The flashbacks were immediate. The father-daughter dance he took me to when I was five; the campouts when he taught me about The Big Dipper and Cassiopeia’s Chair; the countless atta girls and the hundreds of sporting events where I could hear my name being cheered. I felt my mom’s backrubs and saw my parents holding my babies. The ugly parts faded away. I felt like the ugly one now.

An intense ache made my knees buckle, and I fell forward, catching myself on my thighs. The concoction of emotions I harbored about the day my dad would read my memoir lived in every cell of my body. His words confirmed how deeply I had wounded him and my mom by unveiling our secrets. I tried to cling to the few words that stood as a testament to how deeply he loves me, but my heart could barely register them as I imagined him sitting alone, reading a story about all the ways he and my mom didn’t or couldn’t protect their daughter.

I never intended to write a memoir. My memories were crushed down into my gut, like the contents of a trash compactor. I lived them once and had no desire to revisit them later in life. It was as if I had walked through an underground sewage tunnel for years, holding my breath and looking for a way out. Finally, I popped out into midlife, took a full breath of fresh air, and never wanted to go back down there. Forward was the only direction I wanted to move.

Plus, I didn’t think of myself as a writer. Throughout my twenty-five-year career, I wrote a lot of stuff for a lot of other people, but it was always under the umbrella of marketing, promotion, loyalty, or communications (which I didn’t identify as a writerly thing to do…because again, I wasn’t a writer).

It felt safe and easy to write for brands and other people. Their stories were interesting, or if they weren’t, I could just make shit up. That was my favorite part about marketing. I was the weaver of stories that sounded good and sold stuff. End of story. No one got hurt. No one felt vulnerable or exposed, especially me. The truth was that I was hiding.

It wasn’t until my husband insisted for the dozenth time that I start writing at least snippets from my past, if for no other reason than to get them out of my body. He was there for some of the hardest moments. He held me when I couldn’t contain my tears and disappointment; he never ran away, even when I tried to push him away in the moments I felt too unlovable. He stayed put and steadied me through it all. It was his constant, unwavering love that helped me understand that love can indeed be unconditional. He helped me take the first steps back to myself.

Reading my dad’s initial response to my memoir - raw and still mid-processing - sent a wave of nausea through me. At first, I felt like retreating into the little girl who wanted to please and appease, to make everything better. I wanted to take it all back and say sorry a million times. I wanted to tell him everything was okay, that I was okay, and that it wasn’t his fault. I could sense the protective words he used to defend my mom, since she could not do so herself, and hot tears stung my eyes. There is a physical pain that accompanies the belief that I’ve caused another being harm, and it radiated through me with the force of a nuclear blast. This is the cost, I thought.

I closed my eyes as the tears continued to slither down my cheeks, and let the words seep through my skin, into my veins, and circulate through my body: hurtful, embarrassing, humiliating. I breathed them in and out, counting to four with each cycle, and pictured my family around me. Then I heard his voice, Beautiful, loving words. I love you.

Slowly, the heat beneath my skin crackled and popped as it began to subside. Both can be true, and usually are. It can hurt, but it can heal. I had to trust in that. I let myself feel the love - the unshakable, unconditional love - we all worked so hard to rekindle, and as I had with Mikko many years before, I felt myself stepping back into my body. I knew my dad still loved me, not despite my truth-telling, but perhaps because of it, “times infinity + one,” as he would say. That’s about as unconditional as you can get in my book.

In a recent collaboration by and , these brave and beautiful humans mused on a topic that most (if not all) memoirists struggle with - the act of and response to truth-telling. There were many layers braided together in this piece, because Rebecca is the master of that, but this is the strand that made my breath catch in my throat.

The people in my memoir were alive when I started writing, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask them for consent or permission. I knew I didn’t need it, but part of me wanted it. I wanted to hear, “Of course you should write your story. It’s important,” but I doubted that would be their response. So I basically wrote it in secret for nearly six years, with this nagging feeling inside me. I’ve come to realize that was fear.

When I began to write my story in earnest for the first time, an endless stream of questions flooded my brain and nervous system. They sounded something like this: “Will this truth hurt him? Will she feel ashamed or embarrassed when the world knows this happened? Will they think less of me for what I did? Am I selfish for sharing our long-kept secrets? What will this cost me? Will I lose them?”

I had been hiding secrets for so long, it was grueling work to let my body release them. My mind was made up, but my back would spasm when I sat down in my chair to write; my stutter came back when I tried to talk about it; my joints ached, and I had chronic stomach aches - and that was just when I was writing it. No one had even seen the words populating my Google Doc!

Sharing the memoir was waaaaay harder, and as I got closer into my inner familial circle, I honestly didn’t think I could do it. Even now, my mouth goes dry at the thought of it. I love them. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I also know this has been the most important catharsis of my life. Sharing it comes with a cost, but it pales in comparison to the cost of silence. It takes far more emotional energy to keep pretending, hiding, secret-keeping, and lying than it does to just tell the truth.

So here I sit, waiting for my dad to process my lived experience, lick his wounds, process the shame, and hopefully - hopefully - feel more free too. Then I wait for my brother to do the same. At the end of this process, I hope this opens a dialogue we’ve never been able to have before. I hope it brings healing and release and a stronger bond between us. I also hope it unlocks more laughter and sharing. That would be the best gift of all.

Today, I picked this card from “The Universe has your back” deck. I think it’s a good sign. ✨

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To all the writers out there who are doing the hard work of telling your truth, keep going. Keep writing, keep healing, keep believing in the importance of what you are doing. Yes, the truth may singe the corners of some relationships or burn others down, but it also has the power to restore love and make you whole. The other side of writing and sharing your work is worth it. I promise.

If you are working on writing your truth, please let me know. I’d love to read it, support you and cheer you on. Writing is not a solo sport. It deepens when you do it with others who truly see you and understand the path you’re walking.

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Yours till butter flies,

Jo

In case you are interested in reading other pieces about my memoir, my family and my reason for beginning this journey, I invite you to read the following articles:

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We all know what vigilance is. Most of us were taught from an early age about “stranger danger” and to look both ways before crossing the street, right? As we get older, we are reminded not to walk alone at night, although this advice is often gendered and taught to women more than to men. The digital age also demands vigilance: watch for phishing emails or texts that claim to be from your bank and alert you to overdraft payments and never, never, never give someone your Social Security number. Basically, be on the lookout for bad people doing bad things.

Vigilance is defined as “the action or state of keeping careful watch for possible danger or difficulties.” Surveillance or alertness are often synonyms. These generally imply a watchfulness over our physical safety and security and primarily rely on visual cues. KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN, it seems to be saying.

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There’s another type of vigilance, however: one learned through relational interactions; one that relies on more than just visual cues; one felt in the body that calls on all the senses. It’s reading the slump of someone’s shoulders and knowing it wasn’t a good day. It’s noticing the tiny vein in someone’s left temple that you know will precipitate an unwanted mood shift. It’s hearing the slightest modulation in someone’s tone of voice that alerts you to a problem.

It’s a sixth sense that teaches you to keep your guard up, your eyes open, your ears tuned and your nose close to the ground. Vigilance of this ilk is a survival skill that mammals not so much learn as they do internalize when the environment is unstable, chaotic, or unpredictable. For better or worse, it can also get carried in the body for lifetimes, even when the original threat is long gone.

I’ll admit that I started off as a naive, blissfully ignorant child, trusting anyone from my parents to the mailman to the kind salesperson at the department store. I didn’t know any bad people in my life, and therefore, I had no need to pay much attention to anything in particular. As a result, a whole world happened under my nose without so much as making it tickle.

Then, one day, my rose colored glasses were ripped from my face and everything I thought I knew - everything that happened under my not-so-watchful eye - came blindingly into focus. I blinked and blinked, but I didn’t know what I was seeing. I heard new words like “alcoholism”, “drinking problem”, and “rehab”, and although I didn’t understand what they meant, I also didn’t know if it was okay to ask. All I knew was that I needed to start paying closer attention - or perhaps my body knew as my mind was reeling.

I’ve thought a lot about how vigilance manifests in the mind and body, and I think it’s different for everyone and every situation. In my case, my parents went from being golden statues on a pedestal I created for them, to people with a problem I didn’t understand. So, I had my targets. They were close-in, not unknown people lurking in the shadows. They tucked me in at night, gave me hugs and kisses, made my world spin.

For me, vigilance meant comparing “before” behaviors with “now” behaviors. It was remembering what they smelled like when they gave me kisses goodnight. It was listening to the tone of their voice and how they enunciated words. It was feeling the weight of quietness that followed their return home from rehab and learning to interpret it. It was spying and eavesdropping, searching and finding the hiding places for those little bottles of clear liquid. It was breathing through the knots that twisted in my tummy and keeping my game face on.

It was trusting that same gut to hear even the tinest of clues that something wasn’t right.

Even as I dialed the familiar ten digits, my mind was already thinking ahead. I could feel the nerves sizzling just under my skin and the muscles in my belly involuntarily tightening. My grip on the phone was stiff, and I pressed it to my ear a little too hard, like I always did. It was a call I made at least once a week, sometimes more when I sensed something was off. And recently, my spidey senses were spinning webs all throughout my body. I needed to be able to hear her voice clearly when she picked up - and I knew it would be her. Mom always picked up. Sometimes Dad would pick up the second home phone, but only when she told him to do so. Answering my calls was her domain.

One ring, then two. If it rang one more time and no one answered, the answering machine would pick up. A little part of me hoped I would get to leave a message tonight, but then I heard the click and her voice, “Nancy Ostrander speaking.” It’s how she taught me and my brother to answer the phone when we were young. We had to say our whole name or, “Ostrander residence, JoAnn speaking.”

In an instant, all the spit in my mouth seemed to disappear. My tongue felt heavy and thick as I tried to form the words, “Hi, Mom. I was just calling to check in.” I had become good at keeping my voice steady, forcing all of the quivers to stay deep down below the gate of my throat. But I could hear it; the tone was a little too high, and the words had a round quality to them. Not crisp, like they should. No one would likely detect it, but I had tuned my ears to the vibrations in her voice from a young age. I’d perfected the vigilance, and I knew she was drinking again.

Heat smacked me across the face as I let her babble on about this or that. I don’t know what. I was no longer listening. I was thinking about what excuse I would make to leave this conversation quickly. I cut her off. “I’m sorry, Mom. My roommate is here, and I have to get off the phone so she can study,” I said in a monotone voice. Peeling the phone from my ear, I could hear the first bits of “I love - “ as I hung up the phone on her, and her relapse.

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My world had been knocked off its axis when I was eleven, and I had been totally unprepared for it. I felt exposed and vulnerable, totally unprotected in that moment. I carried that feeling with me for decades - three of them, to be exact- and vigilance had been my suit of armor to feel safe. So, giving up that one defense I had felt like one of those old-school trust falls. There I was, standing at the top of the bleachers, my gaggle of classmates below me, arms outstretched. I crossed my arms and tumbled backward, waiting to crack my head open. I lost my stomach, but gained the understanding that trust can literally hold me in its arms.

Step by step along my path to forgiveness and acceptance, I had to fall again and again as I tried to unlearn or at least consciously stop my attempts at vigilance. I had to quiet the voices in my head that told me to doubt, ease my grip on knowing everything, and focus on being present and loving wholeheartedly, even if…I didn’t “know for sure”.

I sucked at it for a very long time. I can’t tell you there was a distinct moment when I let go of it completely. I think it happened bit by bit, so slowly it was almost imperceptible, until there came a nondescript day when I could look at my parents and see them as the beautifully imperfect, sometimes annoying, but always loving humans that they were.

Vigilance is heavy, I know. It’s a burden to carry with you, and it requires far more than it gives. It’s okay to put it down, cross your arms and fall back. I’ve got you. Your friends have you. Your loved ones love you. You just have to let yourself trust our love is strong enough to hold you. (And I promise, it is). xoxo

Yours till butter flies,

Jo

If this touched something deep within you, you might enjoy some of my other posts about what the body holds:

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

― Anton Chekhov

“Before I write something, I ask myself, how would Jo write this?” a colleague once told me. I probably demurred and laughed it off at the time, but it remains the biggest compliment I could ever receive. It was the first time I asked myself what might be different about the way I write compared to anyone else.

I don’t mean to imply that I’m unique in any grandiose way. There are countless writers and poets I admire and hope to learn from as I continue my writing journey. I underline words, phrases, and passages in every book I read because I am enamored with how other authors convey a thought, feeling, or action. That’s the beauty of writing, I think - everyone has their own way of expressing ideas.

As I pondered this question about how I write, I wandered into my closet to pull out some of my old papers and poems I had written for school assignments and for myself. The work spanned all genres, from short poems to short fiction, personal essays to thesis papers. I looked back through my Dropbox folders to find corporate manifestos, manuals, letters from the CEO I had written, a million presentation decks, pages of marketing copy, social media posts, and even a gorgeous wine label I created —>

Through my disparate writings, I found it - there was a hue to my voice, sometimes deep purple or blazing red, sometimes the palest robin’s-egg blue, but a consistent hue nonetheless. It showed itself in my descriptions of people and in how someone felt. It was a pulsing devotion to the interiority of the character or person I was writing about, or perhaps writing for. It’s as if I’ve had a box of Crayola crayons in my head (the big box with 64 crayons in the pack) and, whether consciously or not, I’ve been using them to scribble stories onto the paper.

Interestingly, I studied art history throughout college, always telling people, “I cannot paint a stick figure, but I love the stories behind the artwork.” I guess writing became my way of painting stories, too, using words as brushes and feelings as paint.

I rarely write, “she was happy” or “I felt sad.” Instead, I picture the face of the person I’m writing about in my mind’s eye, and I notice how her eyes crinkle at the corners when she is happy. With that image as my guide, I might write, “When she looked up and saw him standing in the doorway, the tightness she’d been carrying around her eyes simply let go.”

This example might imply that I consciously do this, and I wish that were the case, because it seems easier to replicate. That would be a lie, though. It’s just how I process feelings into words. I’ve carried a bajillion feelings around in my body for five decades, and perhaps that’s why I lean toward expressing emotions through the body’s natural responses to the world around me.

As I started to write my memoir, which begins when I’m about five years old, I, of course, couldn’t remember every detail. Memories came in little vignettes, not full-length scenes. What I could remember, however, was the feeling Little JoAnn had in those moments. I could feel the tingle in her spine and the racing in her heart when she peeked into her preschool classroom, but was too scared to walk in alone. I could remember the feel of the sand between my toes as I sat and listened to someone tell me my parents were in a rehab facility for a problem I didn’t know they had. I remember the feeling, like someone’s hand around my throat, that kept all the emotions from tumbling out. So, that is how I pieced it together, feeling by feeling.

I never want to tell the reader what to feel. That steals something from their experience and puts up a wall between them and the scene I am building. I feel the experience is most authentic when I share the sensations in my body. For me, that’s the purest way to allow the reader to become fully immersed in my experience.

As Mary Karr said in an interview about her book, The Art of Memoir, “I think the writer’s body should act as an avatar for the reader, that the reader gets zipped into the writer’s skin.”

When asked the follow-up question, “How do you wriggle back through that wormhole in time to be able to remember those moments, those senses, those smells, those tastes? To be able to get them onto the page, so we can be zipped into your body?”

She replied, “That’s how I remember. That’s just the nature. Memory is many things, right? It ricochets around like a pinball. It’s language, it’s image, it’s story, it’s scene, and it’s sense impressions. I think I have a lot of physical sense impressions. I probably would have been a massage therapist if I hadn’t been a writer. I’m just a body person. It’s just how I am.”

It’s just how I am. Yes. Please note that I am in no way comparing myself to the Queen of Memoir, Ms. Mary Karr! I am just saying that I, too, am a body person. I feel first and communicate second. I process by taking note of the sensations I am feeling, and then I write. If I were to name my writing style, it would be sensory and intuitive. [Sidenote: Rarely do words come out eloquently when I speak. It only works in writing.]

Once I identify the feeling, the second step for me is to visualize how emotions manifest in my body, like shame, relief, guilt, fear, or sadness. Shame pushes inward and seeps into my bones; intuition or a deep inner knowing crawls up my neck like a spider; sadness - now that’s a tricky one, because most expressions of it can sound overused or cliché. For me, I have to identify the exact location and specific feeling in my body. It tends to burrow in the pit of my stomach, making me feel uncomfortably full, as if I’ve eaten too much. It pulls at my eyelids like window shades that it’s trying to close. I just want to curl up into a tiny ball and sleep when sadness casts its spell on me.

I have found that this process of emotional specificity works especially well in memoir because it mirrors how we notice our own emotions, and that helps draw the reader into the story with me. It makes memoir a time-traveling machine, transporting readers to a space and time I am creating.

The cool thing is that when you bring a reader into the scene with you by sharing the sensory details of what you are smelling, tasting, feeling, or hearing, you allow them to feel more deeply, too. You allow them to connect with your experience as if it were their own. It’s the ultimate gift we can give those who honor us by reading our words. It’s also the only way I’ve found to truly connect with my younger self, who was surviving the memories, and to be there for her as the witnessing self.

If I have any advice to give those who want their writing to be more sensory-rich, it would be this:

To start, close your eyes and think about a moment from your past or a specific scene. Really visualize the details. What do you see? Jot it down or use a voice memo app to record yourself. Do it again, working your way through the senses. What do you smell, taste, feel, or hear? Again, jot it down or speak it out loud. Your visual memories hold more power than you may know at the time.

Then visualize yourself in that moment. How are you holding your body? Where are you? Are you standing, sitting, crouched, or moving? Are you tense or relaxed? Work your way down your body, checking in with each body part to assess its state of dis/ease.

Now zero in on the emotions. What is the first emotion you sense in your body? Fear? Grief? Surprise? Joy? Gratitude? You might experience several emotions at once, but I encourage you to break them down one by one and identify where in your body you feel each most acutely. What sensation do you feel in that part of your body? Is it hot, icy cold, tingling, piercing, numbing, or thudding? Does it make your insides clench or your tummy flutter? Does it feel like a rubber band is squeezing your temples? What? The more specific you can pinpoint the feeling itself, the better you will be able to zip the reader into your body, as Mary Karr says.

And with that, you are off to the races.

I’ll leave you with this thought - the pure expression of an emotion, like “she cried,” is flat. Emotion complicated by an instinct to control or hide it is what makes readers lean in and feel it with you, so don’t be afraid to dig deep and truly flesh out how your body experiences emotion. That’s where you start.

Yours till butter flies.

Jo

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Below are a few posts by people I admire and whose writing comes from somewhere deep within their bodies. If this post spoke to you, their writing will certainly tickle your fancy.

- Melina Charis is a poet & conscious writing coach who writes at the intersection of grief, womanhood, and our longing for wildness. She is currently working on her debut poetry collection.

- I grew up in a meth lab in the Mojave and writing saved my life. Now I help people write the hard stories they’ve been carrying. Here you’ll find somatic writing practices and rituals to help you listen to your body and tell the truth on the page.

- Helping you build a creative life rooted in the wisdom of the wild. Writing, practice, and ongoing creative support. Author of Forager.

- the one and only! Want to know HOW to write like this, she’s your gal

Oh gosh, there are so many more writers here I love, including: , , , , , , , , , . Who else should I know? I can’t get enough of you all!

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Recovery is such an interesting concept. I’ve always felt it should be spelled “re-re-re-covery”, since it happens over and over and over again. Don’t you think? In my experience, recovery is a perpetual loop. There’s a beginning and a middle - and many times a beginning again - but is there ever really an end?

I’ve hesitated to write about recovery for approximately my whole life, because I’m not quite sure I believe in it as a state of being. In all honesty, I’m quite sure I’ll never be fully recovered from the things that eroded my sense of wholeness. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s what makes me the person I am today. Jury’s out.

The trailer version is that I had an idyllic childhood for the first ten years of my life. That’s a lot. I would come to think, perhaps that’s more than I deserved. I was whole then, mostly because I was blissfully ignorant. I lived in a fancy house in a fancy neighborhood, with a last name I thought was fancy, too. I had a dad who wore a suit and tie to his important-sounding job and brought home pens and pads of paper for me to use with his fancy title at the top. I had a mom who rubbed little circles on my back to wake me up each morning while singing a song she made up just for me. She laid out my clothes and made my brother and me breakfast before school.

I felt safe and secure in the love surrounding me at all times. I lived happily in my snow globe that no one ever shook up. At ten years old, there was nothing I would have chosen to improve about myself or my life. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

When I was eleven, my snowglobe was upended. My parents were sent away to rehab for a problem I didn’t know they had. I wholeheartedly thought they were perfect until that moment. When I was told they were gone, it ruptured the handmade paper heart, covered in Elmer's glue and glitter that lived inside of me. I could feel a physical pain radiate from somewhere deep within me. It made me want to cry out, but I didn’t. I only let a few silent tears fall and brushed them away before anyone noticed. The abruptness of my parents’ absence left me feeling shaky, unsure what I had done to cause it.

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The first thing I quickly understood was that this break in our family was shameful. My parents were not perfect. They had a problem, and problems were not something to share. I knew this already. I learned this early on, so instinctively, I knew I needed to be very careful. I needed to hide this problem and my fears, keep it all secret and mimic what I perceived as “okay/acceptable/good”. So, I pretended nothing happened. My smile became my mask.

In the beginning, it wasn’t hard to maintain the façade. Turns out, it’s remarkably easy to cover up problems by just pretending you’re fine – and I did. If you met me as a tweenager, you’d say, “she looks okay/acceptable/good.” I assure you, you would. All the adults did. As for my friends, they were still blissfully ignorant like I was in the “before”, so they saw nothing either; none of the relapses, none of the worry, none of the tears.

The months passed, and I waited, but still no one talked about the dysfunction in our family. I listened, but the tense silence just made my ears ring. I watched, but I didn’t make a peep. My parents were good at mimicking “okay/good/acceptable”, and they quietly taught me how to act the part, too. I was a quick study. I was a good girl.

Shortly after their return from rehab, we moved out of our fancy four-story house on the water, which was once my dad’s childhood home, and into another house with no story. It was a bit smaller and near the freeway, but my parents hid the downgrade by painting the house the same color as the old one and building a Sports Court in the backyard. We were easily deceived. We liked that Sports Court.

A few years later, in desperation (remind me to tell you about the ceremony my parents did with the realtor to sell the house fast), we traded in the house with the Sports Court for a tiny, rented rambler with pea-green carpeting, wood-paneled walls and a musty basement smell - although there was no basement. My parents would have painted it the same color as the other houses had it not been rented.

Much of our artwork, a grand piano I loved to make forts under, and the furnishings my mom worked with an interior designer to fill my/dad’s childhood home didn’t move with us. I noticed. I always noticed the things that went missing, as well as the worried glances my parents shared, and the bottles of vodka my mom hid in the bottom of closets. I noticed, but didn’t say a word.

Still, my parents continued to pretend everything was okay/good/acceptable. Of course, it wasn’t, but I didn’t know how to begin the conversation or what questions to ask. I was too worried that I would embarrass them or worse, cause another relapse. So, I stayed quiet and remained vigilant.

Not surprisingly, given my parents’ desperation to maintain the status quo, the musty rambler was located in the same zip code as the nice house we just left and the even fancier house we left before that. We were hiding in plain sight. My parents were broke, and our lives were crumbling, but they refused to acknowledge it. This made the game even harder. I was pissed by this point, and yet, on some ingrained level, I understood I needed to play along. I needed to hide not only the relapses but the fact that we were broke, too. So, like a good girl, I kept pushing it down into the dark, twisty cavern of my belly and smiled on cue.

I continued attending a fancy high school and made sure I fit in. I was perky and kind and good at making people laugh. I threw myself into sports and became an A+ overachiever. I was trying to impress some faceless jury I always believed was judging me. Of course, this was all just a diversion tactic so people didn’t look too closely and notice my quivering sense of self. I couldn’t let anyone find out that my mom was in rehab (again) or that I was living a knock-off version of their lives. I might as well have run through the quad naked. Nope. Hard pass.

All the secrets lit a fire in my belly to push as hard and as far(away) as I could. When it came time to apply to colleges, I set my sights high, applying to schools I was told were probably out of reach. I made it my goal to prove “them” wrong, and did when I was accepted to a prestigious college on the East Coast. I accepted more out of spite than anything, even though the sirens were ringing in my head. I was saying yes to the expensive college across the country, as my brother was headed home because his tuition payments had gone unpaid. In that moment, the floor unceremoniously dropped out from beneath me. I knew I had no safety net.

I still went to that college. I had something to prove, and I was determined to make it work on my own. I tried very hard to look like I belonged there, channeling everything I remembered from when I was ten. I worked hard to secure grants, scholarships, and work-study jobs. I tried to be the perfect version of a college student-athlete. That way, no one would see through my act. No one would suspect my worried thoughts or notice the cracks. Most importantly, no one would see the alcoholism and financial shit show I left back home. I maintained the perfect image of my family.

As time passed, my muscles shook under the burden of it all. When I couldn’t be strong any longer, I decided it was better to disappear, one pound at a time. I became quite sick, ping-ponging anorexia and bulimia, and yet, I still maintained the façade – even if it was under oversized sweatshirts and baggy sweatpants. I was still an athlete, at a top college, getting good grades. My life looked good from your vantage point. I was hemorrhaging inside, but I was okay on the outside - as long as you didn’t look too closely at my pale skin, puffy face or hair that was falling out.

Eventually, I got caught by someone who loved me very much. They saw me. They knew the burden I was carrying. They tried to help. I was given two options: inpatient treatment or returning to college and getting counseling for my eating disorder. The former was far too visible. I would be exposed as a fraud. Everyone would know I had a problem. I panicked. I couldn’t let that happen, so I went back to college and hid my problem by going to counseling and playing the “I’m doing great” act.

Not surprisingly, recovery didn’t start that day. I wasn’t ready. There was still too much weight on my shoulders, and I was heavy with secrets and shame I could not shed, but it did something important; it put the first piece of tape on my ripped paper heart that still lived inside of me.

The path to recovery was a long, slow, meandering, dead-end, and pothole-filled journey. The re-re-re-covery would take a decade, but to this day, my eating disorder is the one thing from which I can claim to have recovered.

The other things I carried through life – the withered sense of self; the underlying hum of inherited shame; the desire to save my parents; the need to give, give, give of myself until I had nothing left to give myself; the impulse to people-please; the desperate ache to be perfect; the desire to be seen and remain hidden - have been harder to recover from. I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I’m not sure where recovery starts or ends when it comes to these less tangible things. I’ve practiced this act for so damn long, like four fucking decades, that some days, I’m honestly not sure if my okayness is still an act or if it’s authentic. It’s probably a little of both at times.

How do I know if I am whole? How do I know I’ve recovered from the shame I inherited early in my life?

I can still feel shame’s icy tentacles winding through my thoughts, behaviors, and actions if I’m not vigilant. I’m still a people pleaser. I’m an over-extender, unsure where to put up boundaries without fearing someone will be disappointed or hurt. The cold tingle creeps up my spine if I enter a room of people that my 10-year-old self senses are fancier/better/more than me. They must know I don’t belong here, my brain screams.

So, yes, I carry the shame I inherited long ago. I know this because whenever I try to walk away from these pieces of myself, I get antsy, and my skin feels electric. The more I resist, the more agitated and hyper-focused I become on my perceived deficiencies. I want to apologize, shrink, justify and exit any room with people who mirror the idyllic childhood I lost. I am still a child seeking security, acceptance, and safety…and even admitting that makes me feel a little ashamed.

There are days, weeks and even months I’m successful at showing up fully, and I can feel the warm, oozey sensation of pride trickle down my spine. It makes me stand a bit taller. I like this version of me. Every day, I continue to try. I try to be my authentic self; The one who is kind, who helps others in need, who lifts people up and who is working on being kinder, more helpful and more complimentary to herself. That self is working on taking up more space, claiming her story, sharing her story. This is what recovery is looking like for me.

Ironically, I used to think the only thing I had to recover from in life was my eating disorder. Turns out that was not at all what would bring me closer to being whole. It made me healthy, but it didn’t seal up all the holes in my emotional and mental world. I’m not sure we ever completely recover from those deficits, but we can get closer to it by filling them in bit by bit—by choosing to show up as our unique, imperfect, authentic, messed-up, beautiful selves and thanking other unique, imperfect, authentic, messed-up, beautiful selves for doing the same.

For me, I felt this shift deeply when I started writing my memoir, and it blossomed when I started showing up here and sharing my story with you. I know I don’t know each of you personally, but I believe in my heart that we are connected in a cosmic way. We are drawn to this space for healing, which makes me visualize you with your arms wide open, inviting me in for a hug I deeply crave. SO perhaps we do know one another on a more important level.

Slip, fall, run away, turn around, take a few tentative steps, skip, hold hands and join together. We close the holes in our sense of self through a community of clasped hands, all trying to be brave and heal out loud – Reclaiming and recovering, together. I’m honored to be here with you.

Yours till butter flies,

Jo

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I write about my life in essays and poems on my Substack and soon I’ll begin sharing snippets from my memoir. I hope you’ll join me on my journey of self-discovery. Below are a few posts you might enjoy that also speak to the feelings we are taught to keep to ourselves and the consequences of doing so.

Okay, if you don’t have the tune of that song rippling through your brain at this moment, you are not a Gen Xer, and I just dated myself. ;) The song is called “Let’s Talk About Sex” by Salt-N-Pepa, released in 1991. I was embarking on my first year in high school, and it was both embarrassingly taboo and super fascinating. Anywhoo, I digress. Let’s get back to trust, another thing I was learning about at the time.

To ground you in my relationship with trust, I’ll say it has always come way too easily for me. I am, perhaps by nature, a very trusting person, especially when I was younger. I fully trusted that every cent I dropped into the “Save the Whales” donation jar would go to a whale in need. I trusted that gagging down spinach would make me physically stronger, like Popeye. I believed that if you made a promise, you would keep it. And I trusted that if my parents said everything was okay, it was 100% okay.

Over the years, thought, my trust has been tested. I’ve been let down more times than I can count. Life has taught me lesson after lesson to stop being naive, to stop leading with trust, and to be more cynical and verify first. But, still, I can’t help myself. I guess I just want to believe in the act of trusting another person. Maybe I want to believe in the act of trusting myself.

Recently, I came across a paper I wrote as a sophomore in college. I hadn’t realized I kept any of my work from college, so I beamed when I found it. Then I read the title, “JoAnn Ostrander on Trust.” Above the title, the professor had written, “a good title for this ‘safety seal’.” I’m not sure what the project was for, but it intrigued me that I had an opinion on trust at this age.

During this time in my life, my trust was being broken often, mostly by my parents, but I, too, had started letting myself down in many ways. Trust was no longer a contract I could rely on. I didn’t even trust my friends. I worked very hard to keep all these moments of misguided trust a secret. I didn’t want friends knowing my life wasn’t as rosy as I pretended it was, so I either avoided friends on the really hard days or was overly bubbly when I engaged. I didn’t trust they could hold my secrets, or worse, that they would still want to be my friend if they knew the truth.

As I began to read the essay I wrote three decades ago, my stomach clenched. I fully disclosed my mom’s alcoholism in black and white - a topic I never would have dared bringing up with people in real life. Yet, it appears I must have been desperate to do so. Writing an academic paper on the topic was my “safe” way to let someone know I was hurting.

Why hadn’t I understood that at the time? Why hadn’t I kept writing through all of the feelings I kept bottled up inside? I was a trusting person, so why couldn’t I trust people to help me? Perhaps I felt safe writing about my mom’s battle with alcoholism as an academic exercise because I wasn’t actually admitting it in real life.

“The beans tumbled from their container, through my moist, tear-stained fingers and onto the yellow, flower-patterned, linoleum kitchen floor. There were hundreds of burgundy and cream-spotted pinto beans bouncing across the floor like little pebble-sized roaches skittering into their hiding spots as the lights flicked on. The blurry image of those roaches captivated me with their deceptive beauty and made me wonder why I had ever believed in them.”

Every day for the preceding five months, I had dropped a bean into the jar on our kitchen counter. Every day, I told myself that I trusted her a little more. Some days, I would even drop two or three beans into the jar if I was feeling a pinch of anxiousness. The routine was always the same. I’d pop the seal and open the jar, just a crack, drop the beans in and quickly shut the lid, hoping none of the trust I had captured over the months would have a chance to seep out.

I was proud of myself for coming up with such a creative solution to this trust issue I had with my mom. I believed that putting beans in a jar would somehow keep my mom from drinking again, and thereby, I would never be let down again. When it didn’t work, I felt naive and stupid all over again. How could beans create trust? I didn’t know what real trust was.

“The game had ended. She had broken the rules. After five months of sobriety and a jar three-quarters of the way full of beans, she drank. I can still hear her assuring me after the last time, ‘I promise you, honey. I will never drink again. I slipped, and I’m sorry’.”

It's funny, or rather sad, to admit this, but even after I dropped a bean or two into the jar each day, I’d still go over to the sink and bring every glass to my nose and smell it. If I wasn’t sure what it smelled like, I’d go so far as to take a sip of the mystery liquid to make sure it was water or juice and not vodka. I didn’t consider this a loophole of trust. It was verification.

As I counted up the weeks and then months, from January twelfth, when she last relapsed, I started dumping four, five or even six beans into the jar. I wanted it to be full. The elapsed time seemed to make me more anxious rather than less. The pattern had always repeated itself, and if I had been honest with myself, it wasn’t trust I was after. I desperately wanted to make the cycle stop. Maybe more beans could do that?

“I learned something important the day those beans were dumped. Trust cannot be measured. It is not a quantity. It cannot be seen, for it is as transparent and transient as the wind. More importantly, it cannot be rushed, for there is no finish line. It must be earned day by day, not tallied.”

I didn’t have the courage to admit to myself or my mom that I didn’t trust her. I never worked up the courage to tell her that, to be honest. I was afraid that if I told her that, she would give up believing in herself and start drinking again, or worse, give up on life. In my mind, my trust in her was holding up her sobriety. Somewhere deep within me, I actually believed I had that power. It makes me ache to acknowledge this misguided belief, because I was just a young girl sacrificing myself and my health to save a grown-up. She was the center of my universe, and she was broken. I needed her to be fixed, and I would have given up anything and everything to make that happen.

“As I sat in the kitchen that day, staring blankly at the hundreds of dried beans strewn across the floor, I felt something deep inside me. It went beyond the numbness, beyond the tears. It was warm, like peace. It was the beginning of acceptance.

My mom just got her thirty-day coin of sobriety on the tenth of this month, and as much as I love her and need her, I also know she is out of my control.”

I’d like to say it got better after that, and I learned how to handle her relapses without letting them crush me, but I cannot. Even when I was shaking with anger and fear and helplessness, I always wanted to forgive her immediately. I wanted to put my arms around her and accept her empty apologies. I wanted to tell her it’s okay, that I’m okay, and that I loved and trusted her despite her repeated failures to keep up her end of the bargain.

I remained that girl at the center of the bean-strewn formica floor for several more decades, until patience and perhaps my own sense of self-possession helped me let it all go, and fully accept her as she was. An imperfect human who was trying, who never gave up, and who loved me as no one else could.

You have to be willing to play the long game when it comes to trust and acceptance. They are like two lines traveling to infinity. If you give them enough time and space, they will ultimately intersect.

Yours till butter flies,

Jo

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Below is a poem that emerged as I contemplated this moment in my young life. Trust is such a hard concept to grasp onto, especially when you are young. This embodies the pull between wanting to trust and wanting to protect your heart. Wanting to love and feeling the rage of disappointment. Holding both things:

Trust Scattered. Acceptance Denied. 
bare soles - perhaps my bared soul -  
grounded like stumps
pressing into the yellow Formica floor. 
Dried beans coming to rest, 
like a birds nest cradling me,
after their dance across the floor.
Trust scattered like ashes.
Stillness kneels before me, begging
chaos rages inside me, denying
pushing in, pushing out,
breathing fire to push it all away
I give in to neither
acceptance, once more
rejecting my access.
The password had been changed,
again.

Ingredients:

• 1 overly tenderized, raw heart (or as many hearts as are involved)

• A handful of memories, torn by hand, never cut

• 1/4 cup of melted expectations

• A generous pour of silence, aged in oak for years

• 3 tbsp of shame, cold-pressed

• 1 guilt, blanched (carefully remove the skin)

• 2 tbsp salt to rub on the tenderized heart, plus more to taste

• 1 heaping tbsp of trust, finely chopped for garnish

• 4 oz of love, clarified

• Fresh anger, to taste (it wilts quickly, so add it last)

Makes 1 serving.

Prep time: A lifetime

Cook time: varies by heart

Okay, full disclosure, I’ve never tried steak tartare, but based on experience and conversations with hundreds of memoirists, I think it’s an apt metaphor for writing memoir. There’s an element of writing one’s lived experience that requires cracking open one’s chest, reaching inside one’s body, grabbing one's heart and mincing it into thousands of tiny pieces.

The ingredients change from story to story, which is what makes all of our stories beautifully unique, but the recipe, or the act of creating the memoir, generally stays the same. This is because, regardless of which parts of your life you share, whether hysterically funny or tragically sad, you are not just exposing the truth; you are exposing your truth.

With truth comes big feelings - your own, of course, but also those of others. Your family may feel hurt, your friends may feel slighted, your exes may feel embarrassed, and the whole world of anonymous humans who do not even know you may feel all the feels. In turn, these feelings go in one direction - toward your exposed, tender heart. Like sushi-grade knives, they will feel as if they are mincing your tender heart into steak tartare.

Everyone is entitled to their feelings, but I think it’s important to remember that feelings are a manifestation of judgment. When those feelings, and therefore the judgments behind them, are aimed at your life, none of us (especially creatives) are built with defenses strong enough to keep them all out or stop them from stabbing our hearts. It’s just how we’re built. We are absorbers, porous beings. It’s how we take in all the ingredients life has to offer - good and bad - and create delicacies of the mind.

As I worked on my memoir over the past few years, it was my own feelings and judgments that first tenderized my heart. I had to face the ingredients of my life - the shame and inadequacy, the heartbreak and silence - and let them all marinate. At first, I could feel the acidity and wanted to start over. I pulled back and changed the recipe, adding more sugar to make everyone a little nicer, a little less flawed, but it left my life tasting inauthentic and bland.

I knew that wasn’t my true story. I also knew my truth wasn’t going to be dessert. It wasn’t going to make people smile and laugh and dig their spoons in for one last, delicious bite to end a filling meal. My truth was going to be tender and raw. Some bites would make readers wince as they hit their palates. Other bites would make them cry as if I were cutting an onion right in front of them, with tears searing their eyes.

I knew my story would require me to be cracked open like an egg as I let my sticky yellow yolk run across the pages. It would be messy, perhaps even ugly, but I also knew the truth lived in that mess. I knew I would have to create the savory, sometimes unappealing, main course that would attract both loyal readers and harsh critics alike.

And that’s what I did. I created a true, honest, hand-minced mound of tenderized heart, served raw with an uncooked egg on top. It will be judged by some and savored by others, but after all I put into it, it will always be a delicacy to me.

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Having just kicked off my publishing journey as a member of the Fall 2027 cohort of writers with She Writes Press (love, love, love), I’ve been reflecting on my memoir-writing journey. My reflections stirred more emotions than I anticipated. The anger that once burned hot fizzled out, and a gentle acceptance took its place. The sorrow I felt for Little Jo was replaced with gratitude and a deep love for her inner light.

Now, I feel like a chef rather than a clumsy cook, looking back to the first time I put words on the page, trying to identify even the first ingredient of this thing I was making. My palate was so unrefined that I couldn’t tell if it was good or bad (trust me, it was disgustingly bad. I’d put it in the donkey balls category).

But I kept going, seeking teachers and mentors who could help me refine my ingredients and tweak my recipe to create the most authentic dish possible. I had to peel back layer after layer to reach the center of my heart, which I had wrapped in plastic for years to protect it. It awakened the compassion I had long forgotten I’d possessed. It exposed the wound to air so it could begin to heal. It opened paths to forgiveness and clarified a love I hadn’t been able to fully trust.

The process is hard and messy. I can promise you that, no matter what you are making. That said, writing memoir is also the only way to create the most nourishing sustenance you could ever need. Keep going, keep experimenting, add an extra dash of wonder and a cup of unresolved grief, and voila! Chef’s kiss to you.

And to conclude, here is the poem that started this whole post in the first place. Whether you are a vegetarian or a carnivore, I hope this inspires you to keep your heart open.

Heart Tartare
The weight of it all and all of its weight
pounds against my aching chest
open and bleeding, pleading
What is my story? What is the truth?
Raw at its core, asking once more
What is the truth?
Ground up, ground down
the tenderized flesh of my beating heart,
minced by hand with lessons of silence,
lessons of worth
less, then more 
lessons to learn.
taught to witness but not to see,
left to feel but unfeel it all,
left undone and raw, but
taught to be palatable 
to the refined tongue. 

Yours till butter flies.

Jo

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If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, especially one shaped by active addiction, you likely assumed a role that felt necessary to survive; to make things better, fix the situation, or block everything out. There wasn’t a menu of options that you could choose from, and no one came to you one day and assigned you a role. We are highly intuitive beings, and whether we suppress that instinct or let it rise to the surface, it often becomes the very thing that helps us survive, for better or worse.

At the center of the system is the addict, right? I’d argue that addiction is the epicenter of the dysfunction, but it does not exist in a vacuum, nor is it created in one. It is sustained by both circumstance and the roles other people adopt around it. For my family, my mom and dad were the addicts. For a long while, though, before they wore the official badge of “alcoholic”, they also played the role of co-enablers.

Before I dive in, let’s back up for a moment, because this doesn’t just happen. There’s always context. There’s always a backstory. My mom came from a family that struggled greatly. Her dad was away fighting in WWII for the first two years of her life. He was brilliant but struggled with depression and alcoholism, especially as work became harder to find.

My mom became the wild one—assuming the role of scapegoat in the family. She absorbed blame, diverted attention from the addict, and in the process learned addictive behaviors herself. Her younger sister was the hero. She was dutiful and always was the one to go collect her dad from the bar when asked. She was a good girl and a good student. She was also filled with anxiety, but never showed it.

My dad grew up with alcoholic parents too, but they were wealthy, and it was much easier to hide excessive drinking when it was dressed up as an endless stream of galas and parties they needed to attend as members of elite society. They had to maintain their image, right? I wouldn’t call my dad the scapegoat in his family. He did his fair share of wild things, but not in a destructive way. He was just a privileged youth doing stupid shit that no one around him had any incentive to stop. In terms of his home life, he was a quiet enabler. He knew there was something wrong, but never confronted his parents.

So now you have a scapegoat from a poor family meeting an enabler from a wealthy one, completely enamored with this beautiful, wild, sophisticated starlet. To him, my mom was the sun around which everything else revolved. He called her Stella, after the Ella Fitzgerald standard “Stella by Starlight.” In many ways, that song captured exactly how he saw her:

That's Stella by starlight and not a dream
She's all of these and more
She's everything that you'd adore

At first, they lived much like my dad’s parents had lived—lavishly. They even moved into his childhood home when I was about six years old. It was a fairytale lifestyle for a while, until a few bad financial decisions became many, and they lost their footing. As they tumbled downward in an endless spiral, they drank, and they kept their problems secret. Secrecy creates the perfect conditions for addiction to thrive—and thrive it did.

When I was eleven, things hit an inflection point, and my parents’ friends staged an intervention, which resulted in my parents going to rehab. After that, my dad stopped drinking cold turkey (although I would argue he never recovered in many senses), and my mom did not. She added drinking to her list of secrets, and my dad looked the other way.

As my mom’s relapses became more unpredictable and our financial life kept unraveling, we slipped into our roles. My brother became the scapegoat in certain respects—moody, withdrawn—while I became the hero, the perfect daughter. We were all trying, in our own ways, to deny, suppress, hide, or escape what was happening. We were trying to survive the best way we knew how.

My dad pretended the relapses weren’t happening. He felt helpless to stop her, inadequate because of our financial issues, and just wanted the life they once had.

My brother was mad and gave the whole thing the middle finger. He wanted out.

I cautiously pointed out the drinking, then retreated while the fighting erupted, only to run back to my mom because I felt ashamed and guilty for exposing her, and was worried she was hurting. I wanted stability.

In dysfunctional families, these roles are rarely chosen consciously. They emerge as survival strategies. One person becomes the hero and tries to hold everything together. Another becomes the scapegoat and absorbs blame. Someone else withdraws, disappears emotionally, or uses humor to deflect pain. These roles may look different from family to family, but they are all coping mechanisms, and I can understand the rationale behind each. Addiction has the power to spin worlds off their axes. It pulls those involved into this vortex of illogical thinking and codependent behaviors.

If there is a hierarchy in a family shaped by addiction, it looks something like this:

1. The addiction is the most important thing

2. Denial of the addiction

3. Covering up, hiding, or excusing the addiction outside the family

4. Suppressing emotions and feelings about the addiction.

If you are thinking, “Well, that seems like a hot mess,” you nailed it. When all your energy is directed toward the addict, you become disoriented from yourself, and without that connection, your ability not only to care for your needs but even to recognize them can disappear.

Codependency moves in quietly and devastates everyone involved. It is insidious, and often you have no idea it has taken over your inner life. I didn’t. What does this look like?

• We feel responsible for others’ happiness (and sobriety).

• We believe we can - and must - save the addict or fix them.

• We become hypervigilant, trying to anticipate their needs.

• We blame everyone but the addict for their problems.

• We are consumed by feelings of guilt, shame, fear, and anxiety, but often don’t know why.

• We are more susceptible to depression and acts of self-harm.

• We let others hurt us and then hurt us again.

• We worry…a lot.

I could go on, but this list is making me sad, and at this point, you either identify with it or don’t. I hope you don’t. I hope you just find it curious that this could happen to people without them even knowing it’s happening.

If you did grow up in a family shaped by addiction or other dysfunctional behavior, I have to say (maybe as much for myself as for anyone else), this is all normal. You are not broken just because you experienced codependency or coped with your circumstances in a way that didn’t honor your needs as a person. We just didn’t know how to do that, or that was even an option. You are strong, resilient and likely pretty damn self-aware at this point.

The role you played in your family was a survival strategy. It was never anything you could have controlled on your own. It was something you had to move through before you could begin to re-orient towards yourself.

No matter which role you played in your family, remember that it grew out of those big feelings: fear, guilt, shame, helplessness, anger, and even love—the kind you quietly tucked away to make room for someone who took up all the air in the room.

While you can’t go back and change who you were, you can tell your little self how proud you are of her for being brave and doing the best she could with the resources she had. You can hug her and tell her that you are becoming who you were meant to be because she never gave up. And you can tell her that she is so very loved.

Here’s the most important part: the cycle can stop with us. We do not have to repeat the past or assume the same family roles. We have the agency to change the trajectory of inherited family trauma. We just have to be honest and willing to treat ourselves with the love we so desperately needed all those years ago. And we can start right now. It is never too late to stop the cycle of family trauma.

If this found you, I hope it spoke to you and helped you feel a little lighter, more hopeful, and free to be exactly who you are.

Yours till butter flies.

Jo

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If you are looking for other posts about my story and all the emotions I deftly learned to bottle up, below are a few you might like:

I also highly recommend checking out other people who are sharing their stories on Substack, like who serialized her memoir here, as well as , and , just to name a few brilliantly soulful writers who make my heart swoon.

She used to be the quiet kid sitting alone at the lunch table in the corner of the cafeteria. I didn’t know who she was, where she came from or what her name was. I didn’t want to know. Something about her made me feel all prickly inside.

From time to time, I’d peek over at her, but never dared to ask her to join my table, where both benches were lined with my friends. She seemed vacuous and awkward, and she sat oddly curled into herself, like one of those roly-poly bugs you see on the sidewalk.

I was quite the opposite; joyful and giggly, shining outward like the brightest ray of sunshine, fully occupying every inch of my ten-year-old body. I played jump rope and capture the flag with my gaggle of friends at recess and ate Tang out of the jar with them while watching cartoons at my house after school. She did not seem like a friend I needed to make, so I kept my distance.

One day during summer break, though, something terrible happened: My parents were taken to rehab for an addiction I didn’t know they had. When a family friend told me this, it was as if someone had taken a hammer and shattered the perfect snow globe I had been living in. The hands of my life’s compass spun in mad circles as I tried to find North, but the spinning made me dizzy, and I got all turned around. Nothing made sense.

At that moment, all the joy and lightness that once filled my whole being settled like falling snow at my feet. I stood there, cold and feeling very, very alone. Not understanding what was happening, I pushed all of that aside, dusted the snow off my feet and pretended to be happy - happier even - than I was before.

Walking into the middle school cafeteria for the first time that Fall, there she was. Standing inside the doorway, looking straight at me, waiting for me. No one but me seemed to notice her, but I knew I could not ignore her this time. With a racing heart, I linked my arm in hers, and she fell into step with me. It felt like I was holding up her whole body weight, like a metal rope was wound around my arm. Immediately, I felt an ache consume me, but I said nothing.

She never left my side, always silent, unnoticed by others, but a steady presence wherever I went. In the moments we were alone, I tried to tell her I already had a group of friends and I wasn’t sure I had time to be her friend, but she insisted she was my best friend. She repeated it so often, in fact, that I came to believe her. I came to need her and her promise that she would always stay with me and never let go.

She never betrayed her promise from that day forward, and although my body ached in ways I had never known nor knew how to describe, I stayed with her too, allowing her to nestle deeply into the tapestry of my self. There were nights she weighed me down like one of those protective jackets I had to wear at the dentist while getting X-rays, making it hard to breathe. There were times when I tried to fool her into leaving because I didn’t think I needed her. There were times I let her cradle me in her arms, when really all I wanted was to feel my mom’s arms around me.

I never told anyone about our friendship. She was my secret to have and to hold. On the outside, I was the same happy, silly, sunshine-emitting human and loving friend, and for reasons I could not explain, that made me feel safe. I felt like I could contain her and still be normal. I could be both.

As the years tore at me, so did she. Her voice became louder in my head, and although I still refused to tell anyone about my secret friend, she exposed herself in other ways. I needed to work harder to be like everyone around me. Maybe, I thought, I needed to be better than the people around me. That would keep my secret.

I dabbled at first. I studied all day, every day and got As in all my classes. I worked out when I wasn’t studying and won awards for being not only a scholar but an athlete. I watched what I ate so I could slim down just a little, and I felt good. That seemed to keep her quiet, at least for a little while. After a while, all I wanted was to please her. She was my best friend after all, especially since she convinced me to push my other friends away. They were getting too close, she insisted. They will find out. So, it was just me and — wait, I never asked her name.

“What’s your name, best friend?” I finally asked.

Her lips spread into a malevolent smile I knew well. “I have many names, but you can call me Shame.”

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It would take me decades to break up with Shame. She was persistent and ruthless. She brought me to my knees and held my head under the water. She was never a friend, but she played the role convincingly for many, many years. She’s a bitch that way, and the only good thing to have come from our friendship is that I can spot her a mile away these days, and I know to turn and walk the other way.

Yours till butter flies,

Jo

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Below are a few other posts I’ve written about the emotions that grip me, or perhaps all of us, from time to time. I’m a big feeler, so that tends to be a key theme in my writing. I hope you find something that resonates with your heart today.

If you plan everything, run through contingencies, check every box on the list, pre-empt breakups by breaking up first, and keep your hands on the wheel, nothing bad will happen. Right? I thought so for much of my life until I started unraveling some of my choices and realized I wasn’t in control of anything.

I was coping.

My parents were alcoholics, but I’d wager it’s not unusual for children from any number of unstable households to use these coping tactics. When you don’t know when the next relapse/fight/police raid/ bad thing will happen, you do whatever you can to create predictability and stability, and maybe, just maybe, stop the next bad thing from happening.

You were coping.

Of course, that never worked, but perhaps next time, if you are more vigilant, you will notice patterns and behaviors in those around you that will give you new clues. You will be able to determine what is normal and what makes the hair on the back of your neck tingle. Then you’ll be safe, right?

The control we try to exert over our environment isn’t consciously chosen, and that’s why it’s so pervasive and persistent. It doesn’t simply leave our body or our psyche when we grow up or escape unstable circumstances. Like spilled ink, it seeps into the fabric of our whole existence. It becomes the de facto mode of operation, without us even consciously registering it. At least, it did for me.

At one point, I created a “Trust Jar” for my mom. I told her I’d drop in a dried bean each time I felt I could trust her a little more. I didn’t set strict rules or criteria. I just dropped a bean in every day she was sober. It was my way of trying to stop her from drinking again. Shockingly, it didn’t work.

The more control I lost at home, the more control I exerted over my body, my grades, and my exercise regimen. But seeping ink does not know boundaries, so I also tried to control the people in my life, pulling away from my parents when I was hurt by their addiction and pushing away friends or boyfriends when I felt any sense of destabilization. I broke up before I could be hurt by someone breaking up with me.

The hardest thing to admit now is that I did everything in my power to control my relationship with the man who is now my husband. The man who was nothing but the best, most reliable, loving person in my life. There was no need for control, but I didn’t trust that feeling..

When we first met, I made up reasons to invite him on dates. I thought that if he spent enough time with me, he would surely love me forever. After a year of long-distance dating, he wanted to break up because he was moving to Germany. I pressed him to ask me to make the international move with him. He did. Eleven months later, as the clock was ticking down for us to move back to the U.S., I asked him to marry me. I was terrified of the unknown future ahead of us. I wanted certainty.

Please don’t misunderstand. The need to be with him was rooted in a love I had never known before. There was something about him that I knew I couldn’t live without. I was acting on an impulse of love, yes, but also out of fear; fear of losing this person who made me feel safer than I had ever felt.

So there it is: Fear. It’s the driver of my need to control. And what fertile soil does fear grow in? Distrust. When you learn at an early age that you cannot trust the people you believed were the center of your universe, the people who kissed your boo-boos, rescued you from bad dreams, and promised you everything would be okay… you carry that with you forever.

It’s taken me years to loosen my grip on life and to better understand what I can and cannot control, and what I should not control. I often think of the Serenity Prayer, which was often repeated in our house: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

For me, this prayer is about letting go of the need to control. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully let go (my son just started driving, so that’s putting my need for control to the test!), but at least my body now recognizes when fear arrives. It gives me a moment to pause, catch myself, ask what I don’t trust about this situation, and try my best to work through it.

It might take a lifetime to unlearn the lessons I internalized at a young age, but there is one thing I fully accept - I am a work in progress, so I might as well keep trying.

Yours till butter flies.

Jo

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“Hey Helga!” my brother yelled to me from across the yard. I spun around, balled my hands in fists and glared at him. I hated it when he called me that, and he knew it. I was a strong kid, built like my mom, with large calves and biceps, and although I was only ten and too young to understand why this name-calling made me so mad, I knew it was meant to be an insult about my muscular body.

In blind rage, I took a run at him, my fists flying and eyes closed, trying to land as many punches as I could before mom or dad broke it up, or he ran away. At that time, I probably could have beaten him up, even though he was two and a half years older than me. Eventually, though, once he hit puberty, all I could do was spit insults at him, like calling him “dummy head” or “meanie”. I know, harsh, right?

Despite my hatred of his nickname for me, I did love sports. I was most at ease when I was in motion - whether that was doing back handsprings or kicking a ball from one end of the field to the other. Sports were also my connection to the world. My teammates were also my best friends. In elementary school, we played Boys and Girls Club basketball together during the winter, and when spring arrived, we’d transition as a pack into soccer. In high school, I went from soccer to basketball to lacrosse, never needing or wanting to take a breath between seasons.

It might sound silly, but sports were my calling card, so to speak. The identity of “athlete” melded into the very fabric of my identity until one could not exist without the other. I was her. She was me.

As life became harder and my worries bubbled to the surface most days, sports also became my safe haven. They were the one place I could let out all of my emotions. It was okay to get mad. That was just a sign you were competitive and tough. It was encouraged to be intense. That intimidated the other team. It was implied that you should be mean… okay, that wasn’t explicitly stated, nor was it probably encouraged, but I was kinda mean once I got on the field. (Sorry, not sorry). I could act tough on the field, and people would believe me. It was my armor, hiding my squishy, soft interior.

My favorite sport was lacrosse. I picked up a stick for the first time because my older brother played, and if I didn’t learn fast, he would have used me for target practice. Ironically, after years of tearing me down by teasing me about my Helga-like body, he made me strong. Little by little, it became My Thing. I won several awards, including being named an All-American my senior year in high school. I even chose my collegiate path based on schools with strong lacrosse programs. It’s why I selected Wellesley College, where I played for three years.

And then, I quit before my senior year of college.

I wasn’t kicked off the team. I didn’t choose to give it up to pursue some other interest. I did it to myself. My eating disorder had become so advanced that I was putting myself at risk to play. The doctor who assessed me the summer before I returned to school for my senior year gave me an ultimatum. I could check into their inpatient ED program, or I could go back to school under the supervision of a therapist. I chose to go back to school. And then he threw in the kicker - I would have to stop playing lacrosse. The shame weighed more than I did. I was sick with it.

The worst part, which I write about at length in my memoir, was that my coach hated me for this “decision”. She seethed with anger, telling me I let her down. I let the team down. I never wanted to do either of those things. I already knew I let myself down. Wasn’t that enough? She told the other players, who were my teammates and friends, that they were no longer allowed to talk to me. I was left without My Thing and without anyone to lean on.

Even when I was in the deepest, darkest pit of my eating disorder, I still held onto that part of me I believed was strong, determined, fierce, tough. I had My Thing. I was My Thing. I was an athlete, not the daughter of alcoholics or the struggling student or the secret keeper, or the poor girl pretending to be rich or the scared eleven-year-old who desperately wanted her mom’s consistent love. I was invincible.

The whole time, it never dawned on me that I was slowly ripping My Thing from my very own bony fingers, calorie by counted calorie.

It took me years, and a lot of setbacks - some self-inflicted and others externally so - to find my footing again and rebuild my sense of self, one piece at a time. Once I started doing that, my one thing became two, then three and then, more than I could count. Some of the things I count as most important about myself now are:

1. I’m a kind person

2. A loving wife

3. A devoted mom

4. A dog lover (and a cat lover, if they are dog-like :P)

5. A loyal friend (still maintain a text thread with my elementary school friends!)

6. A fucking good writer (if I do say so myself).

7. I’m pretty funny, and love those rare, unplanned moments when I laugh so hard I pee a little.

8. I’m an intuitive feeler, and now, I let myself feel all the emotions I kept inside for so long.

9. I’m the #1 cheerleader for others who are in my tribe

10. I am still an athlete, and I kinda like my biceps now

I found my stability in the understanding that I was not just One Thing, but this beautiful, messy, emotional, colorful fingerpainted canvas of so, so, so many things. That is my thing - all of it.

Maybe your thing is painting or dancing, debate or robotics. Maybe it’s being a mama, a loving wife, a lyrical poet. It’s wonderful to have a thing that lights you up. I’m guessing many of us feel like we’ve found our thing in writing. I know I have, and that’s wonderful. It’s necessary and powerful to have that thing.

But one thing cannot be the whole of who we are. From experience, I can say that when it is, and you lose it, you lose your identity with it, and that’s the ultimate fucking gut punch. A roundhouse, knock-out blow. You’re stripped down to nothingness and left on the floor to either get up or stay down. It’s a harder choice than you might think.

By losing what I believed was the only redeeming thing that made me worthy and being forced to rebuild my sense of self, brick by brick, I realized there is no “one thing”. Rather, we are so many things, and they change from season to season. And that’s okay. That’s beautiful. That’s essential, actually. That’s growth.

We will never fully know who we are, but we have to trust that what we are building will always be better than the sum of its parts.

Let your multiplicity shine, friends!

Yours till butter flies.

Jo

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I was deep in my morning chauffeur duties, dropping my son off at school and my dog at daycare, when I felt tunnel vision set in. The podcast Dear Gabby was on, and I was listening while sorting through the to-do list in my head.

· Post Substack article

· Run through audio from the latest interview with ghostwriting client

· Pick up ear meds for Lulu, the puppy

· Remind my daughter about her uniform fitting

The usual morning churn of bingo balls in my brain. Then I heard Gabby Bernstein ask the question. “How are you resisting love?” I looked at my car’s console, where the podcast episode was playing, as if she had directed the question specifically to me. Who, me?

“Do you control it, play small, pull back?” she asked.

Umm, check, check, and fucking check. Damn it. This really hit me hard. When I think about myself and my relationship to love, I immediately see myself as a lion-hearted, loyal, fiercely loving, lapdog of a human. You need love? I’ll give it to you. Pant, pant, pant. You don’t even need to scratch behind my ears. My love is your love.

The realization that struck like a hot poker into my lion-hearted, fiercely loving heart is that I don’t always believe your love is my love. Yes, I am very good at doling it out, and it makes me happy to do so, but when someone tries to reciprocate with loving kindness, I tend to hit the brakes. Screeeeeeech! Get out of the car.

Since I was a tweenager, I began developing an inner monologue that went like this: You can have my love, but I don’t need your love. It felt safer that way because I couldn’t get hurt. It’s not that I consciously sat down and plotted out this coping mechanism. It was a learned behavior.

When I was little, I had more love than I could ever need. It was safe and consistent, and I could trust it at every moment of the day. If I had a bad dream, my parents were there to turn on all the lights and check under my bed for monsters. If I fell off my bike, they were there to bandage me up. If someone hurt my feelings, they’d fix that emotional boo-boo, too. Their love was my bedrock.

Then, one day, that bedrock shifted beneath my feet when my parents went to a rehab facility for an addiction I didn’t know they had, and I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. For the next two decades, as relapses and financial troubles kept shaking the stability of my life, I braced time and again against losing the love and support I had come to depend on. It was given generously, only to disappear as my parents dealt with life’s punches. It would be regifted to me over and over again, wrapped in love-laced apologies, only to be taken away by hands reaching for a bottle of vodka rather than mine.

What I have come to understand is that when we lose trust in love, it creates a crack in us through which fear can seep in. Fear brings its allies, self-doubt and judgment. Fear makes us shy away from being seen for who we really are, or, God forbid, from accepting a compliment. Who me? I’m not a talented writer. I just dabble with words. Fear builds a wall around our hearts to protect us from exposing our vulnerable underbellies. Above all, fear leads to the belief that accepting love is risky, while paradoxically, giving love is safe. It is the ultimate way to control love.

I didn’t just wake up one morning and realize I am a love-resister. In fact, I never saw myself that way until I began working with someone who helped me peel back the layers of love, one by one. Love is like an onion. To get to the heart of it, you have to peel away the fear of getting hurt, the judgment, the shame, and the unworthiness. When you do, you will find something beautiful: vulnerability, then acceptance, then the truth - we are all worthy of receiving love, from the moment we existed as a thought.

I have not overcome my resistance to receiving love in its purest form. I pull back; I sometimes stay small; I occasionally doubt my worthiness to receive love. But no matter what, every day I commit to staying open to love, to saying “thank you” when someone compliments me, and to loving myself first. That’s where it all begins.

I will always have love to give you, and I will graciously and gratefully receive yours.

Yours till butter flies.

Jo

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“How does your body know it’s okay?” asked during a recent Inner Room workshop. I’d never been asked this question before. I’m not sure I had even thought about it before. I know when I feel the quiet weight of the Sunday Blues or the cat-like claws of grief kneading at my bones. When I’m angry, my whole body shouts it back at me, my face reddens, and electricity shocks me from the inside. There’s no way I can miss it.

I guess what I’m realizing is I know the feeling of not-okayness. I know it in my body and in the bodies of others. I read it on faces and sense it in body language. Not-okayness is like pheromones. I can smell it on other people’s breath, and I run to them, trying to lick it off them, take it away, tuck it in my own body so they won’t hurt. I know not-okayness, and therefore, I know how to hold it.

When I was a teenager, I was surrounded by non-okayness. The wood-paneled walls of our rental house, the puke-green carpet that smelled like cat urine and deodorizer, the permanent scowl on my brother’s face, the stoic expression on my dad’s and the downcast eyes of my mom after a relapse – these were all my signals of not-okayness. And I absorbed it all, metabolizing its sinewy flesh bite after bite. I was so full of not-okayness, I had no room for anything else. Eventually, when I looked in the mirror, it stared back at me through my shrinking frame and worried eyes.

When your body carries a feeling long enough, it begins to feel normal, safe even - for better or worse. You learn how to deal with it, shove it down or hide it away. It becomes part of you, the rhythm of your heartbeat, the cadence in your speech, the reason you always say yes - for better or worse.

When I wasn’t feeling the not-okayness coursing through me, I looked for it in others and ran to them, sucked the poison from their snake bites, gave them my okayness in exchange for knowing they hurt less. I didn’t like it when people hurt. It lit up all the not-okayness in my own body, and I could feel it radiate through me. Maybe I just knew what it felt like to hold not-okayness and didn’t want anyone else to have to do it. I don’t know, but I always ran towards the call of the ache - for better or worse.

So, when Jessy asked how my body knew when I was okay, my mind initially went blank. I pictured myself happy. I was laughing at a stupid Dad joke my daughter told. Yes, that felt okay. I saw myself spooning with my big body-pillow of a dog, Gus. Yes, that felt okay. I remembered ringing in the year 2000 in an abandoned castle at the top of a hill in an old German town, kissing Mikko. Yes, that felt very okay. But what did okayness feel like in my body? That was harder to name.

I closed my eyes, and this is what I felt as I reflected on my moments of okayness: a soft warmth tickles my skin from within, like I have a hearth somewhere deep in my belly. The liquid in my body feels smooth like olive oil. My body feels light, and my limbs are loose. My chest feels expansive, and my heart beats in a melodic cadence. I do not feel a tightness in my stomach, a cold, tingly sensation at the base of my neck, or a tight headband around my temples. I feel like I’m floating - for better, not worse.

I open my eyes and write, “It feels like I’m a feather drifting from side to side in the wind as it falls to rest softly on the ground. Grounded. I feel grounded.” Yes, that’s how my body tells me I am okay. I am gently grounded but also feel like I can fly away again on the wind’s next breath.

Some people might call this ease or centered. I can think of a dozen words for it: fully present, joyful, happy, content, but I don’t think naming it is the important part. The important part is identifying how your BODY tells you you’re okay. It’s different for everyone, so there’s no cheating off the test of the person sitting next to you to answer this question. You have to look inside yourself.

Do you know how okayness manifests inside of your body? Like really? What I finally realized is that until we can answer this question, we can’t fully embody it, summon it, run back to it when our gut starts twisting in knots, or our neck begins to feel the familiar cold prickly sensation. We must know what we are running toward, not just what we are running away from. Okayness is our destination. We just need to find the map within ourselves. What does okayness feel like to you?

Yours till butter flies.

Jo

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“Rub some dirt on it,” is something my dad would say when I skuffed a knee or bruised an elbow. He was, and still is, a “get back on the horse” kind of guy. It’s how he was raised and, therefore, how he raised us. We don’t whine about things. We don’t mope. In fact, another thing he loved to say to me as a kid, if I started to pout, was, “If you stick that lip out any further, JoAnn, a bird is going to come by and poop on it.” Imagining the horror of that, I'd suck my lip back in immediately.

The whole scenario is bizarre, but the meaning was never lost on me - Don’t complain. Don’t show your discomfort or disappointment or disgust or hurt or sadness or any other emotion that was messy. Suck it up and get on with it. It was drilled into me early in life, and worked its way into the synapses of my brain. Extracting it over the years has been like getting slime out of my daughter’s hair; slow, painful, frustrating and ultimately, you always have to snip away a little chunk.

I still hate to complain about anything. The minute I start to, I can feel something tighening around my head, like a too-tight headband around my temples. I think that’s why it’s taken me fifty years to talk honestly with my doctor - my DOCTOR - about a stomach issue that’s plagued me for pretty much as long as I can remember. But I digress, or maybe not.

Back to the horse I always had to get back on. The sentiment itself isn’t terrible. We do need to face the hard things that scare us (if they aren’t dangerous) and try to work our way through them when possible. That’s growth. That’s healing. That’s important work. Life isn’t Care Bear Land, much to my dismay, and we can’t just bounce on clouds and sing rhyming songs that will make any hard thing disappear. It takes work, grit, usually a few swear words, and repetition.

That’s the hard-earned lesson I learned by getting back on that horse. [Her name was Raisin, by the way. She was my favorite horse at summer camp. She was small and feisty, and she farted a lot].

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So yes, there is a positive lesson in there, but I still believe it’s a terrible overall sentiment to foist onto your kids. What happens when something bigger, scarier and more dangerous comes up in life, and the only coping mechanism they have is to suppress their feelings and not complain about it? What do they do then? Where do those feelings go? How do they move through the hard thing while preserving their wholeness?

It took (is taking) more years than I can count on my hands and feet for me to begin figuring out how to move through the bigger, scarier things in life without holding it all inside. Although ultimately cathartic, it’s also been mentally and physically painful to learn that it’s okay to be loud, to express discomfort, and OOF - here’s the hardest one - to talk to another real, live human when I’m hurting (and not a dog or a teddy bear, which I may or may not have done for decades. Great listeners, though, fwiw).

I’ve always craved that connection during times I felt low or scared, but I just didn’t know how to ask for it. Stated more accurately, I didn’t know what to ask for. Admitting to someone else that I was terrified my dad would finally leave my mom if she didn’t stop drinking, or that they wouldn’t have enough money to pay rent, felt like admitting so much more than just the facts. It felt like I was admitting I was weak and unworthy of their love.

I correlated resilience with rubbing dirt on my wounds; strength with holding everything inside; worthiness with getting back on that damn, extra-gassy horse. All of the emotion-sharing stuff was messy, and I categorically did not do messy - at least not around other people. Oh sure, I was a shit show when I was by myself, but I kept that behind closed doors. I’m strong enough to admit that now ;)

It was only after I became a mother and heard myself utter the words, “rub some dirt on it,” that it all came rushing back, nearly knocking me off my feet. My son had stumbled and fallen while we were playing in the park. He was considering whether to cry; you know that quiet fraction of a second when you can almost see the neurons firing in their brain? That’s when I said those five words before I could stop myself.

It was the last time I ever said those words to my kiddos. It was also a wake-up call about how easy it can be to pass along generational trauma, especially when it’s dressed up in a fun little saying. I’m doing my best not to do that. I am trying to be just who I am and hoping that’s enough.

I am resilient.

I have Sisu.

I am worthy of love.

I am also messy and complicated.

I am shy and introverted.

I need to be coaxed out of my shell sometimes.

I love fiercely and forever.

I am loyal. I am kind.

I am learning to ask for what I need.

I am learning to ask again and again.

I am emotional and a sympathetic crier.

I wear my heart on my sleeve.

I am funny (although it’s an acquired taste)

I am fiesty, but only when provoked. ;)

I am sad and happy, sometimes all at once.

I am not a horse rider.

I will not suck it up

And the only thing I rub dirt on is the leg of my pants after planting a flower.

Let’s not rub dirt on our feelings. Let’s feel all that life has to offer us.

Yours till butter flies.

Jo

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I’m not going to bury the lead on this one. I started writing my memoir because I was angry. Not like a little perturbed or disgruntled, but like a fire-in-my-belly pissed off. The feeling didn’t just flare up one day, unexpectedly. It had been building for decades, and although I was usually able to wrangle it back down into the recesses of my belly, it was getting progressively harder to do with each passing year.

Ironically, as I got farther from the one thing that changed everything for me as a child, my feelings didn’t dull. Instead my fuse got shorter. I’d snap at insignificant annoyances like my husband forgetting to pick up something at the store I’d asked him to get. I’d feel my face flushing with anger at work when my boss criticized a presentation I’d been working on or asked someone else to lead a meeting. Dumb stuff.

The culmination came when I full-out screamed at my boss for what felt like constant belittlement and micro-aggressions. We were in a small conference room, and I intended to calmly express my frustration at being passed over again for a promotion. She continued to rebuff my carefully curated points as I read them. Finally, she said, “Sometimes, JoAnn, we just need to break you down before we build you back up.”

I snapped. “You’re not listening to me! You’re not even seeing me!” I shouted at her as I stood up and pointed my finger in her face.

She sat there, frozen. I stormed out of the room and into the open layout area where the extended team sat. No one looked up from their computers. No one moved. I rushed past them all, tears burning my eyes and headed for the exit.

I panicked. What have I done? What have I done? What have I done? I kept thinking as I paced around the parking lot. I’m a sweet person. I’m kind and considerate. I raise my hand and follow instructions. I’m a team player and usually yield to other people’s requests. I don’t yell or explode, or whatever that was I just did. I didn’t recognize myself in that moment.

Slinking into my car and locking the door, I closed my eyes and tried to regain my balance and slow my breath. I had never done anything close to that in my nearly two decades in corporate America. I had never done anything close to that to anyone in my life. But then my stomach dropped as the realization hit me: except for one person - my mom. I could see my younger self yelling at my mom after she relapsed, telling her how selfish she was and how she didn’t care about me or my feelings. I screamed until my throat was raw.

Oh fuck. In that moment, I saw it for the first time. I had so many memories and feelings trapped inside me that were literally begging to be freed. They had tried to escape countless times, in seemingly random outbursts: fists slammed on locker doors, a string of swear words on the lacrosse field or basketball court, anger rather than hurt feelings when I felt left out of a friendship circle. I felt these rumblings, but always found a reasonable excuse to explain them away.

I had always known (or been told) I had big feelings, but I never trusted myself to express them freely in spoken or written words. Since I was a kid, I had a pile of notebooks, some even had locks, but I’d close them just as fast as I opened them. I wouldn’t even have the pen in my hand before a nauseous feeling stirred in my belly and a salty taste filled my mouth. So, the notebooks remained empty, and my feelings remained stowed away, most of the time.

Now, sitting in my car, I was sweating, not because it was hot but because I knew. For the first time, I knew I needed to face the things and people who were at the source of my anger. To do that, I had to start at the white-hot center of the fire: the day my parents went to rehab for an addiction I didn’t know they had.

I spent months, which turned into years, writing letters to the people I thought stole my childhood from me. I never sent a single one, but writing them felt like a tiny release. I ruminated on the ways I felt hurt by their actions and how unfair it felt that they got to keep living their lives while mine crumbled around me. The list grew longer. I hated the families who orchestrated the intervention. I detested the people whom I believed committed my parents to rehab. I resented their perceived superiority, and I cried, thinking how they never asked if I was okay. They weren’t seeing me. They weren’t even interested in listening to me.

It was the same way I felt about my mom and dad after each relapse that followed. No one was honoring all these wild feelings that were swirling around inside me. I felt invisible and unimportant. Unworthy of being fully seen.

So I continued to write and write and write, letting all my feelings spill onto page after page of Word documents. The letters turned into memories, and the memories into vignettes of my lived experiences. The writing was terrible, but it gave me, for the first time, words to process what I was feeling and make sense of some of it.

It took me several more years to actually confront my mom and dad and ask them what happened that day they first went to rehab. Their memories had faded, and the details blurred around the edges, but I finally understood. I still believe the intervention wasn’t handled well, but I could finally see that it was done from a place of concern and love. Their friends were trying to protect my brother and me. They were trying to help fix what was breaking before our very eyes. They just sucked at it a little.

Once I finally understood the true nature of everyone’s intentions, it was like I was given the key that unlocked everything inside of me. I deleted all of the hateful, accusatory words I spat onto paper in an attempt to hurt those I believed hurt me (okay, I put them in an “archive folder”), and I began again.

I started at the beginning. I honored the joy and the love and all that I thought had been taken from me. I didn’t sugar-coat anything, and I didn’t underplay my fears and anger at times. I didn’t forget the nights I curled into a ball and tried to soothe myself with my worn and beloved mantra, “it’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s okay”. I wrote into and through those moments to find my way back to love.

I saw the six-year-old and the eleven-year-old. The fourteen-year-old and the nineteen-year-old. I saw them all, and writing from a place of honesty and love, I took their brokenness and built them back up.

That’s how I started excavating and writing my memoir. Now, rather than anger, I feel sincere gratitude - and a tinge of sadness - for the people in my story who were trying to help. Their method was flawed but it was based in love. And I thank them for trying to make things better.

The rest of the story was on us: my mom, my dad, my brother and me. I own that now, and to be honest, it was only once I was ready to accept my part that I could finally make sense of all the things I could not understand growing up. Slowly, the lens through which I saw myself and those in my life who impacted my journey, shifted from anger to gratitude.

That’s where my story begins.

With love and gratitude.

Jo

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A few other posts of mine that might tickle your heart:

I Struggle with release, like the big “S” Struggle with it. Even the thought of it makes me constrict rather than expand, as if doing so were an act of abandonment; To me or by me, I am not sure…maybe both.

I imagine a little human holding onto their favorite blankie. It’s bedtime, and a bigger human is telling them, “It’s okay. You don’t need this anymore. You’re grown. You can let it go. It doesn’t serve a purpose anymore.” But the little human, even when they are not so little anymore, feels like they need the blankie, wants the blankie, just to feel it next to their cheek at night.

Not everyone understands this need. It seems irrational. Why wouldn’t you release the thing that no longer serves a useful, tangible purpose? It makes you feel weak to need it, so you don’t tell anyone that the thought of letting it go makes you ache inside. You rub your ache against your cheek at night in the dark, quiet solitude of your mind.

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I feel I need to say that I understand the concept of release, and I believe it can be an essential stepping stone on the winding, often circuitous path to healing old wounds. Some things need to be released in order to lighten the pack you’re carrying on that journey: heavy memoiries that no longer serve you; anger that slows you down; shame for things that you may or may not have had control over. Release can feel like that first full breath you let out and take in.

I picture Cheryl Strayed on her trek along the Pacific Coast Trail (PCT), with a pack way too big for her frame, packed with so many things she thinks she needs but doesn’t. Then, a fellow hiker, further along in his journey, repacks it for her one day, removing all the items that will not serve her. When she pulls on her pack, she is no longer crushed by its weight. It’s lighter. She’s lighter and can finally enjoy the path ahead for what it is - her journey to self-reclamation.

What she was really unpacking and leaving behind was the shame and guilt for what she had done to herself in the years after she lost her mom. Only by doing so could she ease grief into its purest form, turning Big “G” Grief (the messy, chaotic grief) into the little “g” grief (the warm ache that embodies love).

Allison Deraney explains the difference between the two forms of grief beautifully:

For me, there is big “G” Grief and little “g” grief. Both are welcome. Both insist on being acknowledged…And maybe that’s the truest shape of this new relationship: not release, not recovery, but a widening of my own capacity. A way of letting big “G” and little “g” take up their rightful space without letting them take over the whole room. A way of living where grief is not a crisis, but a companion. ~Allison Deraney

This Big/little concept resonates with me, for grief, for release, for curiosity, vulnerability, sadness and even joy. None of these things is black-and-white. It is not an either-or decision or exchange. You do not have it one day and lose it the next. Each one is a magnificently colorful spectrum.

When I think of release, I think of letting go, and I am not good at that. There’s actually a good and bad side to that. On the one hand, I’ve held onto relationships longer than I needed. On the other hand, I’ve held onto relationships that others would have let drift away. I’m stubborn, but I’m also loyal, forgiving and resilient. I’m a magnificently colorful spectrum. I think we all are.

The reason I’ve been thinking so much about this idea of release lately is that I thought I had released the grief I was holding onto after losing my mom. It’s been two years since she passed away. We had a beautiful ceremony off the coast of Kihei to release her ashes, which you can read about here. I’ve talked about it at length with my therapist, and while the Big “G” Grief has settled into the little “g” grief, a quiet ache remains. I still feel like the not-so-little human who wants to hold onto her musty, grief-stained blankie even though people would tell me it no longer serves a purpose.

Releasing that grief feels like letting go of her. Physically releasing her hand for the last time or holding the box of her ashes as it disappeared below the surface of the ocean were hard enough. The emotional release seems impossible. And yet, I know releasing that grief is also necessary to lighten my pack and help me live in joy. Reconciling the two is my journey of turning the Big “R” Release into a little “r” release.

As I’ve been walking this journey, I am starting to realize (in no small part due to the nourishing essays on grief and the somatic writing practices I’m learning from you all here on Substack), that release and letting go are not the same thing. For me, letting go feels like forgetting, like letting go of a kite string and letting it drift away until you can no longer see it or remember what it looked like. I am not wired to do that.

Little by little, I’ve learned to release the grief I feel, turning the Big “G” into a little “g”, where it sits nestled in my heart, while knowing I don’t need to let go of anything else. I can hold on tight to my most cherished memories, and pan through them in my mind or tell “Nana stories” over dinner with my family. I will not forget, but I will continue to try to release my grip on grief. I will try my best to let go of the belief that if I don’t grieve, she will not know I love her. I will allow the ache to be there, but also live in joy.

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On a particularly difficult day, I happened to be in a Substack Live session with and the topic was writing an obituary for something that’s been hanging around for a long time and no longer serves me. I think it was the word obituary, or maybe it was the date, so close to the anniversary of my mom’s passing. I’m not sure, but when I put my pen to paper to begin writing, this came out instead.

I hear her feathery voice caress my face
Letting me know I am safe. It is safe.
I feel my feet on the ground.
My shoulders drop. My hands relax.

Deep breath in. Through your nose.
Hold it. 1...2...3...4.
Pause.
Now release. 
Let the breath out. Through your mouth.

I open my mouth to exhale and,
My throat resists. Closes shut.
Coughing, guttural sobs 
Push their way out,
into the still air.
I try to gulp them back in, but
they push through the barricade
of my throat. The barricade
I constructed over so many years;
A gendarme of my wildest feelings.

My hand clutches my neck, but
the boisterous soldiers still
march out of my mouth, as 
a cacophony of dissonance.
My ribs shutter to the beat of their boots.

My lungs burn. I beg for
The release. The exhale. 
I beckon them.
The tears glide down my cheeks. 
Down my neck,
soaking the rim of my t-shirt.

Breathe. Release. I hear her say.

I am not ready.  
I am not ready.
I want to keep you with me
a little longer, maybe forever.
My heart shivers in the shadow
of your love, And I know. I know
You gave me permission but 
I cannot do it
I cannot release you
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
I can't do it. 
Not today.
Maybe tomorrow...
Or sometime soon.

I guess I’m still transitioning from Big “R” to little “r”.

Yours till butter flies, xo

Jo

Trigger warning: there is mention of eating disorders and self-harm. If those topics feel too tender to you, I recommend skipping this post

While listening to a Memoir Nation podcast the other day, I heard a term I wasn’t familiar with: self-obliteration. Brooke Warner was chatting with her co-host, Grant Faulkner, about the memoirist they were about to interview, Marya Hornbacher. In that conversation, Brooke referred to the genre (so to speak) of Marya’s behavior as “self-obliteration.” That word awakened something in me. I stopped and gave them my full attention.

To provide context for Marya’s story, from age four (yes, four, not fourteen) to eighteen, Marya cycled between bulimia and anorexia. By eighteen, she weighed 68 pounds, not much more than she did at eight, and was spiraling towards death. Her doctors and parents had given up on her, unsure how else to help, when she finally made the decision to save her own life. She shares her journey into and out of eating disorders in her memoir, Wasted, which was published the year I was at the peak of my own eating disorder.

At that time, in the late 90s, there was a zeitgeisty moment in memoir focused on such stories. Girl Interrupted was hitting the big screen, while countless memoirs about eating disorders and mental illness were hitting bookshelves and bestseller lists - all while I was living it.

As Brooke stated during the podcast, “People wanted to explore it. Young people who were suffering in the ways that these writers were, they’re thinking about self-obliteration through eating disorders, through alcoholism, through what they might do to themselves.”

The idea of self-obliteration fills me with an ache so great, I can feel the tar-like ooze of it pressing in on my heart. I hurt for my younger self and for all the girls who are or have struggled with this thought of self-erasure. I should be clear that I’m not talking about suicide when I use these terms. The way I experienced it, self-obliteration was a living disappearance; a desire to vanish, to be forgotten, to erase myself from the minds and memories of others.

I’ve thought about this a lot as I write my memoir. As I re-read it and edit the umpteeth draft, I realize I dance around the topic a lot, coming up to the edges of it and tiptoing away, too afraid or unsure how to address it. I know where it comes from and yet, that source is the one thing that haunts me the most: Shame.

It’s the faceless, shapeless, deceitful villain I’ve fought much of my life, and it fuels one of the most vicious cycles I’ve ever known.

Although the triggers may vary for others, for me, the cycle started with fear and uncertainty, which led to self-criticism as a way to gain control. The response was self-harm. The harm was an attempt to fix my flaws, control the uncontrollable, and be a more perfect version of myself to make everything okay. To right the world.

The harm seemed to work at first, temporarily masking any other pain I was feeling. Ultimatey though, it betrayed me, as it does all of us, becoming the gateway for shame to creep in. Once shame tangled itself around my mind, the voices got louder, and the cycle escalated.

I think about the peaks of my eating disorder and what kept me in the downward spiral towards obliteration. It was a lifetime of shame I kept hidden from the world, building inside of me like a time bomb. When I was struggling the most, especially in my final years of college, I didn’t want to be around people, I didn’t want to be noticed, I didn’t want to be known or even remembered. I wanted to vanish. That was my attempt at self-obliteration: erasing myself from the memories of others.

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I may not know how to stop this cycle for anyone else who did or does lean towards thoughts of self-obliteration, but I can offer you my words. Words that I hope will begin to untangle the tentacles of shame that have wrapped themselves so deeply around the you of you. I hope it is a salve if you need it.

Dearest one -

You are worthy of a thousand magical sunrises. You deserve every dapple of sunlight that dances just for you. You do not have to earn any of it. You are entitled to it all, just as you are.

You do not have to change one single thing about yourself, lovely human. And, for that matter, I encourage you to tell anyone who says otherwise to fuck right off. For now, shoosh that voice inside your head that isn’t always kind to you, and let your shoulders drop. Release yourself from the expectations - your own and the world’s.

Reach your arms wide, then pull them around yourself and embrace your beauty and flaws, for that is what makes you, you. You are tender-hearted, but you are strong, oh so much stronger than people know; so much stronger than perhaps you believe. You are a bad-ass. Did you know that? I bet you did, somewhere deep within. Let that voice be heard - your voice, your words, your story, your pain, your joy - let it all out into the world. Exhale the weight of shame. Inhale your wholeness. You will find it’s lighter than the shame, buoyant even. Let yourself float down that river, relaxing into yourself.

Dearest one, please hear these words and let them through the veil of disbelief. “Dare to believe the whisper in your ear that you might be special, that you might be meaningful, that one day you might change the world.” ~Atticus.

It is true. It has always been true. And whether you are at the beginning of your journey to reclaim your sense of self or fully immersed in it, I want you to know I am holding the light for you. Keep walking. The path is there, even if you don’t see it yet.

Yours till butter flies. xo

Jo

Quick Note: This is the first time I’ve read a post (or a poem) out loud to anyone. Be gentle and patient with me ;) xo

As a continuation of my ponderings on our ever-changing sense of self and the forces that break it down and build it up, I wrote a poem. I didn’t necessarily mean to write a poem, but as I thought about this metaphor, a picture of my “self” came into focus. It was tangible and structured. It had a roof and walls and was deep in a meadow with fireflies buzzing about and wildflowers covering the carpet of grass around my self - my home.

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This poem emerged as a reflection of an early experience that rattled my nascent sense of self — moving out of my childhood home, the same home my dad grew up in. It represented my whole world, my identity, my persona, my abundant self-confidence. It was my safe place, and it was solid and formidable. I could count on it and all the people in it. And then it was gone.

This is my visceral remebrance of that shift…

Once upon a time...
I lived inside my Self.
The place was cozy and
fit around my bones, 
as if built just for me.

My Self was radiant, as if
illuminated from within by
a thousand sparkling fireflies.

My Self was joy-full, as if
hosting an endless tea party
for all my animal friends.

My Self was safe, as if 
protected by all the kings horses
and all the kings men. 

My Self was trusting, as if 
the mat before the front door 
was embroidered with "all welcome".

Then, one day, a brooding storm 
came to the door of my Self.
I smiled, knowing no better,
having not seen a storm before, 
assuming it a friend not a foe.

Stepping aside, I invited it in, 
eager to know this storm better.

It blew in with a force and nature
unknown to my little Self. 
Disorienting and dark, I was
swallowed in a cloud of worry. 
A cloud that grew louder
into a swirl of doubt, 
into a cyclone of fear. 

All trapped inside the walls of Self.
extinguishing the joy,
shattering the windows, 
scaring away the fireflies,
crumbling my sense of Self.

Once upon a time...
I crawled out of my Self.
A place that once was cozy
and fit around my bones, 
as if built just for me.

My Self was too small, as if
fear consumed every corner,
leaving no room to move,
no room to breathe,
no room to be.

After I read the poem to my husband, I looked up and saw that his face had fallen and his eyes reflected the broken pieces of my Self. “That’s so sad,” he said quietly.

I smiled. “There is a moment of sadness in it, yes,” I explained. “I think every shift in our sense of self contains a little sadness, because, inherently, there’s a loss contained within that shift. But there is also hope, like a renewal or a gift in that change.”

His expression softened. He smiled back. He saw me again as the ever-changing self I am.

Here’s how I see it: When we go through seasons of change that feel too big for our current Self to contain, we have to adapt, expand, evolve. We have to rebuild a new structure to contain this wiser, stronger Self. This takes time, though, as we learn how to become the architects of our new structure, our new home for Self.

While we rebuild, there are days it feels like we truly are a self without a home. We are self-less. We must sleep under the stars, get drenched by monsoons, brave the thunder and lightning without shelter over our heads. These are the moments of doubt and worry, when we are unsure how to rebuild, what to rebuild, where to rebuild. We face choices that feel new and scary, and because we are all unique, no one else can give us the plans for our new home.

Eventually, we figure it out, and we rebuild a new shelter for Self. It’s not perfect. It never is, but then again, we will eventually learn that it’s not permanent either. We will have to rebuild again - and again and again as we face new experiences that change us.

I like this metaphor for change because, even though it contains a seed of sadness, it also holds so much hope. I’ve been knocked down by things I didn’t expect as well as by things of my own making. I tore my own house down nearly to the ground when I was really struggling to figure out who I was supposed to be; when I was fighting against the expectations of others and searching desperately for the hopes and dreams of the little person inside of me. I was outside, in the storm, until I found the path back to myself - the one that led to the meadow of wildflowers and fireflies and the cozy house with radiance sparkling through the windows.

Whether you are starting again from the ground up, remodeling, sprucing up a few rooms or just re-organizing a few throw pillows on the couch, I hope the new space you are creating for your Self fits around your bones like it was built just for you (because, it was).

Yours till butter flies.

Jo