I spent nearly 2 years in therapy dealing with abuse from my childhood, I went to Dallas to see an environmental health doctor and finally began to see improvements in my chronic health issues. But, of course, things were falling apart in other ways. It seemed to just be one stress after another. It felt like it was 30-some-odd years of “hard.”
That much “hard” + my very sensitive "artist personality" had created a sort of victim mentality. I was always waiting on someone to save me from whatever horrible situation I was in, to save me from myself. During the worst part I was depressed, anxious, panic-driven, sick, in pain, overwhelmed, suicidal - the list goes on.
It was time for a LIFE BREAK. My grandfather had left me some money when he’d died the year before. There were tons of things we could of done with the money, probably should have done. But this just felt so important, I needed to do something for me. I needed to separate myself from my life, to get some space, to process - to take a vacation, alone.
(Thank God for a husband who understood, who took a whole work-week off to watch the kids -a 3yo and a 1 yo - by himself so that I could go, who sucked it up and tried to understand why I didn‘t want him to go.
That man has no idea what he did, how that helped me to heal.
How he said to me, in so many ways, “You are worth it.”
He’s told me before, “I am the first person in your life who has really loved you.”
In most ways, he's right.)
I chose Sedona, Arizona. I needed to take myself back there. To give that gift to myself. My husband had given it to me, 6 years before - the gift of Arizona - but now I needed to be able to give to myself because, of course, it is not the place, it is the state of being.
“Arizona” lives because I do.
I needed to touch that, to smell it, to believe in my own healing.
On the plane, I made a list (I like lists) of all the things that had led me to that point. It went something like this:
- Childhood abuse
- Crappy first marriage (11 ½ years)
- Post Partum depression with first child
- Chronic, chronic, chronic illness
- Years of fruitless visits to doctors
- Years of anti-pain meds
- 10 years of antidepressants
- Divorce
- Remarriage (Even “good” stress is stress and, let‘s face it, it ain‘t all good -if it was, it wouldn‘t be real.)
- Unhappy step-kids, unhappy Oldest Child
- Mold poisoning
- 6 weeks in Dallas at the Environmental Health Center (I’d been so sick that I “lived” outside, in a play tent, in my parent’s backyard for a while.)
- Healing from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
- Continuing to live with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
- Therapy for abuse
- Confronting my abuser
- Losing my family of origin
- Custody battle, that I lost, over Oldest Child who was 10 at the time.
- Cross-country move while 8 months pregnant, then awful post partum anxiety ( I was the web moderator for a yahoo group - PTSD After Childbirth, http://www.angelfire.com/moon2/jkluchar1995/ - for over a year, it’s a good sight. Labor, delivery and post partum - they can actually trigger the abuse - are not always warm, fuzzy moments- no matter what Hallmark would like you to believe.)
- Cross-country move while 7 months pregnant, then post partum difficulty
- Middle Child’s “dash” to the hospital, at 17 months, via ambulance, because he quit breathing, turned blue and crashed- I’d never seen an asthma attack before, BAD MOMMY-1 night in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, 1 night on the regular pediatric floor- thank God for 911 and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
The list looked small compared to the chaos that it had created. I realized that almost everything was really rooted in the abuse and it had all fallen apart (or refused to grow) from there. Dealing with that was the key.
I also made a list of the things that I was willing to sacrifice, really sacrifice, for. What were the things that were the most important to me?
1) My family -
husband, kids
2) Horses-
(stop limiting yourself, do what you love)
I flew into Phoenix on Monday, drove an hour north to Sedona and then spent the rest of the day checking out the place, I went on a 7 hour horse back ride through the Prescott National Forest on Tuesday, I met my very close friend, Bea, there on Wednesday and we hiked around Sedona the rest of that day, all day Thursday and until time to drive back to Phoenix on Friday.
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| Prescott National Forest |
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| "Tailings" of an old gold mine-Prescott National Forest |
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| Shag Juniper tree |
When I got back to the ATL airport at home and found my car in airport parking, I put the key in the ignition and then I broke into tears - I just sat in my car and cried like a baby.
I’d done it.
The woman who’d been so sick that she could NOT live inside her house and then barely been able to leave her next house, who couldn't move a lot of days before that, who’d had panic attacks so badly that she couldn’t drive to the next town, who’d thought that grief would never leave her, who’d felt, for years, totally victimized by her life and the world in general, had planned and executed an away-from-home trip by herself.
She’d decided on a place to stay, bought plane tickets, gotten in her car and found the airport, flown, rented a BIG truck, gone on an all day horse back ride by herself with just the trail boss, stayed away from home, been alone, been with other people, navigated in unfamiliar territory and come home.
I’d done it. Alone. I couldn’t believe it. I was overwhelmed with my own power. My victimhood died that day.
My list of things that I've learned:
- No one, except you, can save you from anything and nothing gets better unless you make it get better.
- In order to heal, you have to get to the ROOT of the problem and deal with that. Everything else is just Band-Aids on symptoms until the root is removed.
- I am strong. Anybody and anything that I will face in my life from here on out, I’ve faced meaner. I won’t back down. I may sit and cry for a while but this chick gets back up.
I've changed. (And, yet, I am more me, now, than I have ever been before.)
My Arizona trip wasn’t what caused the changes, that trip was a symptom of the changes that were already happening, but it is a touchstone, a time that I can look back to and say, It (I) changed, then.
Once I got home, I found a horse trainer, who was doing what I’d been wanting to do for 10 years, and I hired her. I bought myself a horse and a truck (bigger than the one I'd rented in Sedona :) ) and a horse trailer. I’d spent years cleaning out stalls in exchange for riding lessons and riding/training other people’s horses because I wouldn’t make horses a priority. I was always trying to make it be a non-issue for the people around me, because it cost money, because it took up my time, because it seemed like a guilty pleasure. I let that go and made it a priority. This is part of who I am and I quit pretending that it wasn’t.
I got really okay with the fact that the people in my life need me, that I am an adult and that I am responsible for my choices. That life isn’t just happening to me, it is my life and I am creating it. Life is so much more fun, now.
While in Arizona, I bought myself a metal war shield (it’s really cool, the base of it is an old Pontiac Chieftain hub cap, circa 1950s) made by a Navajo warrior, David Draper, after he’d returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.
To me, it is our sign of battles waged and won, it is reminiscent of the scars that remain in a heart, scars that can not truly be known by anyone else, other than the bearer. It is a reminder that even after the physical battles are all won, you often go home with a broken body, a broken heart and a broken mind and then the harder job of healing has to occur.
Anyone can lie around wounded,
anyone can give up and die on the bed.
It takes a real warrior to heal
and get up, to have the guts to live again.
(Or, sometimes, to learn to live for the first time.)
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| The copper wiring is made to represent the locks of the warrior's horse’s tail -locks that the warrior would pull out and hang on his shield before battle. How cool is that? |
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