Welcome to DIRTY PRETTY.
Something happened to me when my Dad suddenly passed away.
Something in the realm of splitting. Splitting my focus. A splitting of perspective that thrust me into an out-of-body experience that felt like I was floating above myself, watching, analyzing, & grading my own life.
In the floating, I started to hear different. See different. Feel different & MORE.
Suddenly, nothing felt permanent & everything felt more fluid, like a big gobbly-gook mess.
In the fluidity that I began to notice, I also noticed MY mess. Me, in my life, as a mess. A mess of epic proportions that instead of freaking me out into frigidity. It softened me into possibility & liberated me into action.
Action that from the outside very likely could have, & maybe did, come across as
“This girl is straight losing her shit.”
Even typing that makes me laugh out loud. Because, while it’s not whole. It IS partially true.
My Dad, the strongest steam engine of a person I’ve ever known, was ripped out of my Universe without warning. My stability was demolished. And I was looking around trying to find anything to hold onto to keep me, & my mess, together.
It was when I started to peer into how losing Dad as a stabilizing agent was tearing me apart, that I started to notice how much of my power was not only codependent on him. But, also on Others. And, how ready I actually had always been to doubt myself, & rush to give away the power to stabilize or destabilize me.
In losing the 1 person in the World, whom, if the World EVER stepped to me, I believed would fuck its shit up, destabilized me like Humpty Dumpty falling off that goddamn wall. But never landing. Perpetually, in a free fall.
I don’t know if everyone feels this way about their Dad. I don’t know if everyone has had the pleasure to have had a Dad like mine.
One who, in the middle of the night receives a frantic phone call from their directionally challenged 18-year-old daughter, whose car broke down in West Virginia, USA, where she wasn’t intending to be. Then, on instinct & deep connection alone, finds her & her BFF, like a needle in a haystack, at a random gas station, on an exit with NO SIGN, before this kid had a cellphone & before Waze existed.
That was the bigness & reliability of my Dad. He was there. Maybe not exactly when you wanted him to be. But, he’d eventually find his way to be there for you - no matter what.
It was in noticing how heavily my security depended on Dad, & the weight of the World he showed time & again he’d carry for me if needed, that I reconciled the gift of gnarly grief staring me in the face. That his painful passing was an unwanted but necessary & overdue passing of the torch to me. That it was time to take heed of his example & trust that I am capable to handle whatever needs to be handled FOR ME, BY ME, too.
It took me months. Lots of writing. Thousands of dollars. Leaning out my business. 2 therapists. 1 life coach. 1 doula. AMAZING support from Family, Framily, & Scott + my fur babes. A self-love pilgrimage. Yoga. Meditation. Mucho Marijuana. And lots of grief counseling, to see that everything I’ve ever needed, everything that has ever been validated in me from my Dad, or others, wasn’t solely because of them.
It was also because of ME.
Yes. Those who hold me, & have held me, have the blessed capacity to love me in ways that I trust & need. That’s the beauty of the necessity for community. It reflects standards of belonging. It also reflects capacity.
In noticing my standards & belonging, I also noticed that I AM the nucleus for the LOVE I receive.
I AM what allows me to trust co-creating fulfillment of what I need vs enjoying it alone.
I AM the driver of what I need & LOVE, respond to & don’t, because I need it & LOVE it.
Not because someone buried it in me.
Others, memories, and associations are not to be invalidated for the stability they reinforce. They are a stimulus to validating & intensifying organic response to standards & need for them.
I learned that I can give what I need to MYSELF AND I can choose to receive support from others. But I do not have to be codependent, acquiesce, settle, or doubt my abilities in order to hold space for both.
THIS was my ah-ha moment!
THIS broke me wide open.
THIS is what caused me to dig into my mess.
It is what allowed me to notice where I did & didn’t need support. Lean out my space with only who & what was vital. And, take a pause to check myself by going inward, on that self-love pilgrimage I previously mentioned, in an effort to get honest with me & get my messy shit together.
I’ll add here that I wish I could’ve sustained my life ‘business as usual’, but it wasn’t possible for me. Heavy shit needed to be investigated. Mountains of accountability needed to be claimed. And, in order to do it, in order to start holding myself capable as source for meeting my own standards, I needed what I needed to meet a side of me that I had never met before.
My tall, sturdy, visible & capable Self.
What has revealed itself over the last few years is that Presence was missing from my life. People-pleasing had been unconsciously wreaking havoc on my divergent nervous system for -probably- as long as I’ve been alive. And, due to all those things being covertly dormant, I had been unconsciously operating as an angry, codependent, hypocrite, in -like- a lot, A LOT, of places.
Reconciling with outsourcing my power, gave me insight into my lack of presence.
Reconciling with my lack of presence, gave me perspective into where people-pleasing had long put me in opposition with myself & what it means FOR ME to be whole in congruence.
Reconciling with people-pleasing, gave me a humbling look into the pretenses aka hypocrisies of my humanity.
Reconciling with it all continues to give the opportunity to leverage awareness of it (presence, people-pleasing & pretense) as a tool.
A tool to claim sovereignty & institute boundaries.
A tool to honor standards.
A tool to judiciously receive support & hold agency in community.
A tool to accept accountability with hubris, humor & humility.
A tool to notice the guaranteed contradictions of humanity, & soften to them with Self & with Others, so as to compassionately use them for our communal benefit.
A tool for noticing when we’re lost & out of touch with ourselves, to accept equal parts grace & accountability to consciously calibrate to what we intend.
And this, my friends, is the Dirty Pretty.
Be good to yourself for fucks sake.💋
With Blessings,
