Thoughts on New’s Eve 2024
On darkness, desire, and learning to let love in
I have always been a big FEELER. I love hard, I CRY easily, I can be touched by the beauty of this crazy world, I GIGGLE at baby geese, I feel held and soothed by the waters of Barton Springs in AUSTIN, TEXAS. The smell of the forest gets me high. The taste of food makes me moan in ECSTASY.
I’m not scared of the dark side. I can be devastated and want to set myself on fire in front of an ex-girlfriend’s house because the pain of her rejection is so great. I can rage at injustices large and small. I can spin in circles in confusion about how to manage time and space in mundane life tasks. And I can laugh with joy every time I leave a CONNECTED ENCOUNTER WITH ANOTHER HUMAN.
I can simultaneously be grateful to finally have the time to focus on what I want to say to the world, and also sad that I am alone on New Year’s Eve as I hear the revelers hooting and hollering outside. I live in a busy city, full of culture. I do actually prefer to be home on New Year’s Eve, though. I don’t want to be around drunk crowds or out on the roads, and I am not much for joining in the culturally sanctioned holidays.
Someday I might like to be with a small INTIMATE GROUP OF FRIENDS to celebrate significant milestones. But this year, I am home writing, drinking homemade coconut-maple-cinnamon hot cocoa on my red velvet sofa, gazing at a bouquet of FLOWERS gifted to me by a COACHING CLIENT. I am enjoying the cozy space I have slowly been creating to honor my need for a BEAUTIFUL AND PEACEFUL HOME. I am supremely content and grateful.
I can honor my needs. Nobody wants anything from me in this moment and I am monumentally free. No partner to make requests for my time. No internal conflict about doing something I won’t enjoy to please anyone else. My kid is an adult with their own life and not needing much from mom except love and kindness. My family are all healthy and independent and stable for now. I am going to enjoy this blissful freedom for as long as it lasts.
I am the phoenix. I was the scorpion, stinging myself repeatedly with my own cruelty and the cruelty of others. When I didn’t love myself, I could enlist other people to help me punish myself. I could find people to use as weapons against myself.
Now it seems that every new person I meet joins me in SELF-LOVE. They are my allies in building myself up. SELF-LOVE BECOMES AN UPWARD SPIRAL, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and gains momentum, increasing exponentially. A mix of metaphors that defy the laws of physics, because in the realm of EMBODIMENT, INTIMACY, and SOMATIC HEALING, all things are possible.
I face the darkness. I am not afraid of it. I can hold you while you cry in my arms. We can heal together. We can flow from pain to pleasure because PLEASURE IS WHERE THE HEALING HAPPENS. Laughter, orgasms, inhaling the scent of the forest floor, gazing into the eyes of another human being in RAW REALNESS. Tears of joy and sadness mix and morph, each into the other.
I used to say I was a tough case, that healing couldn't get in. That I didn’t do my homework in therapy, I didn't do the exercises in self help books. I was sure that I couldn't change.
Now the evidence is undeniable that I have changed and I am changing. I am growing up. I love my own company. I am impressed with myself. I have healed myself of CHRONIC PAIN. I survived a shocking and devastating BREAKUP that I did not choose but for which I am ultimately very grateful. I make more money than I ever imagined, with no education, in a culinary career I built for myself from zero, with my own body and brain. I am building another career that will start as a side hustle and become my full time down the road.
At 18, I dropped out of an Ivy League school 3 weeks into my first semester and instead went to the psych ward, having taken LSD and seen the beauty and order of god and the universe that devolved into delusions that the CIA and KGB were after me for thought crimes.
I ended up in a long and terrible ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP, and despite the horrors of those years, there was also love and beauty and family, and without that experience I would not have my child (now an adult) who is one of my greatest teachers and the greatest love of my life. I am sure that my skills for HELPING OTHERS HEAL were forged in the fires of that hell.
I am standing on the precipice, looking out in awe at the new heights I will soar to and the adventures that lay before me. I have learned the secret, that as soon as I would arrive at the age and stage that society tells us is the end of the road, the end of desirability, my life could begin. I am entering my CRONING, the WISE WOMAN TIME.
My aging face scares me, but I know the fear is not justified, because I see how profoundly beautiful the wrinkles on the wise elders’ faces appear to me.
I am so loved. I am learning to let it in. I am learning to believe it. To see it.
I am experiencing LOVE WITHOUT JUDGMENT. Love that is not entangled with contempt or emotional dishonesty.
I have so much love to give, I am learning to give it judiciously, with BOUNDARIES and SELF CARE. I am learning to give it to myself first.
I have so much to say. I am learning to seek and find those who want to listen and to hear. Next I will learn to breathe and slow down when I get excited about sharing my SPECIAL INTERESTS.
I have so much care and compassion to share. I am learning to HOLD SPACE and find out how people want to be cared for.
I can help people heal. I have learned to only help those who truly want help. To do otherwise hurts more than it helps, by crossing BOUNDARIES and taking away AUTONOMY.
I am a baby in my career as a SOMATIC SEX AND INTIMACY COACH IN AUSTIN TEXAS, but I will just keep learning and growing. It is so exciting to be learning new skills and carving new NEURAL PATHWAYS. I know that my love and warmth and caring and compassion will go a long way, and the skills to support the work keep growing, the more I do the work.
I am so incredibly grateful for fellow students and teachers who are being my guides and guinea pigs.
I value myself and finally know MY WORTH.
