Society is the abusive boyfriend from whom I can’t escape

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abuse culture, anxiety, rape culture, society is an abusive boyfriend, timeout, triggers, Trump is rape culture

Photo by Flickr user Melissa Morano.com (Creative Commons license).

I have four posts in drafts that I can’t bring myself to publish.

Like many of you, this election has me wound up, unwound, locked up, flayed open, anxious anxious anxious. I didn’t really realize until yesterday how bad it’s been, which is itself a symptom of how bad it’s been because I’m kinda boss at the self-awareness in recent years. Out of necessity.

So it was startling to me to tally all the evidence that I’m struggling to hold myself together right now.

Write now. Worry later: A guest post by Shawna Ayoub Ainslie

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advice, anxiety, gaslighting, guest post, Shawna Ayoub Ainslie, trauma, words make us survivors, writing

“I fashioned word keys for every lock. I found and freed my heart.” (Photo by Flicker user Iain Cuthbertson, Creative Commons license.)

I could have dodged forever. I did for years. My story goes that I wrote my honesty in poems before I switched to lies. I found Fiction like drugs behind a gas station. I used it to get a righteous high. It was an avoidance tactic. I wanted to write my story, but I was afraid of who might read me. There are truths and then there are truths, and what I needed to write was ugly.

It was vicious. A knock-down, drag-out fight with myself that lasted years before I was able to scale the walls abuse built around me and dive into my story, full healing ahead. Why? Because even before I wrote my truth for anyone but myself, I worried about who might read it.

And when I worried about who might read it, I worried about who wouldn’t want me to write it.

Poems, feelings, risks, safe spaces: On newness

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amwriting, anxiety, domestic violence, domestic violence aftermath, domestic violence awareness, new poems, new publications, poetry, prose poetry, safe spaces, self-care, taking risks, writing about aftermath

New poems published! Shout it from the rooftop or hide? Photo by Flickr user Alexis Nyal (Creative Commons license).

 

June 15, 2015, was the year anniversary of my escape from domestic violence.

In May of that year, I decided to take on a self-imposed poem-a-day challenge in June, to distract myself from the mental replay of all the little anniversaries leading up to that big one on the 15th. I could twist it and say I was celebrating my escape by writing a poem a day in my anniversary month, but lying isn’t my bag. I was distracting myself. I was trying to transform anxiety into productivity. I was trying to feel like myself again.

I did manage to write one poem every single day in June 2015. Out of those 30 poems, I really liked 20 of them and decided to work on them, try to make a chapbook out of them. Despite some of my best efforts to write on topics other than DV, that’s what the poems are primarily about. The heart-pen has a heart-mind of its own.

I’ve spent the last year plus revising those 20 poems. I had help (TD, RC, and SC, I feel tremendous gratitude for the time you spent reading and commenting on my drafts). The result is a chapbook called Dear Hollow. The poems concern the immediate aftermath of escaping DV, centering on feelings of disconnection and lamenting a loss of ability to relate to others. It wasn’t the graphic violence of my experiences that I wanted to capture; it was the almost surreal feeling of loneliness, flashbacks, and hard looks in the mirror from a place where people believed I should have felt safe. That things should have been easier–I should have been happier–because hey, at least no one was screaming at me or knocking me around anymore. If my chapbook had a tagline, it would be, I thought things were supposed to get better? Or maybe it’s Dickinson: This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me…

On July 1, the editors of Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine gave me my first publication out of this chapbook–a poem called “The hunting cabin.”

On Aug. 5, Shawna Ayoub Ainslie published three more of them on The Honeyed Quill.

How to tell if your face is what happy looks like

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anxiety, definition of happiness, good days and bad days, happiness, knowing yourself, smile, trust your gut, writing

Happiness: a work-in-progress. Photo by Flickr user Aline Tavernier (Creative Commons license).

I still can’t eat solid food without ouch. Every second of my day is planned. I live with my parents. All my money belongs to someone else. Life was bad for a few years. Damn if I’m not somehow happy, though.

I had that thought yesterday while sharing a chocolate malt milkshake with my son. I thought, I’m happy. Then I thought, Where did that come from? Then, How do I know that?

Maybe it doesn’t matter how I know, but maybe it does. I started digging into it. Here’s what I came up with:

Dual awareness, or, I learned a new psychology term and will write about it

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anxiety, Babette Rothschild, dual awareness, panic attacks, psychology, psychotherapy, PTSD, The Body Remembers, trauma, treatment methods, writing about anxiety, writing about trauma

For survivors of trauma, I’m learning that the ability to practice dual awareness is vital to healing.

Dual awareness, according to trauma specialist Babette Rothschild, refers to the ability “to recognize that I’m feeling upset right now…that I might even be having a flashback, but what’s going on with me right now has to do with something from the past, and I’m aware of where I am in the here and now, which is separate from that memory of the past.”

In other words, it is an acceptance of the past and the present at the same time.

Astrology, bear mace, books: The post that has nothing and everything, but hey, I try

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anxiety, astrology, good at life or bad at life, safety plan, Taurus, trying to change my life, unsettled, writing essays

This is the post in which I make no sense.

Please know that I want to make sense. It seems beyond me right now to be able to do so.

Maybe this post is about wanting to be what I’m not, but hopefully, it’s about wanting to be what I’m not yet.

What I’m not (yet) is someone who can see how things are going to end up. Some of my friends love living without knowing what’s next. Not me. I like maps, lists, plans. I’m a Taurus—probably stop reading if you roll your eyes at astrology because I’m into it. Anyway, qualities of a Taurus: stubborn, earthy, loyal, reliable, persistent, resilient, practical, loving, sensual, ambitious, artistic, and independent.

Hi, have we met?

Revelation, or have I said too much? The art of the overshare

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all writing is oversharing, anxiety, oversharing, saying too much, saying what I want to say, the art of oversharing

Photo by Flickr user Shooting Chris (Creative Commons license).

Earlier this week, I wrote about the art of temper tantrums by both kids and adults. Now I want to write about the art of the overshare and battling the subsequent anxiety.

Because I am an expert in the former, and a warrior of the latter.

I’ve been actively and avidly oversharing since I was a small child. The adults around me speculated a number of possibilities for what they termed “flamboyance” and “melodrama”: I was bored in school (I was), I had a chemical imbalance (I did not, but damn if I didn’t get put on Ritalin and almost die from an allergic reaction to it, anyway), I was just plain bad (I wasn’t). At school, I acted up. At home, I stayed in my room. At my grandparents’ houses, I entertained and imagined and played.

I learned quickly that I was expected, as a child and as a female, to internalize rather than verbalize. And I didn’t like it, so I didn’t do it. Untrue—I definitely internalized some things. Like a feeling of worthlessness, a perpetual inability to please anyone, an unlovability I was becoming more and more sure of as I neared college.

Happy anniversary to me

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abuse, anniversary, anxiety, celebrate life, domestic violence, leaving, taking control, writing about abuse

Photo by Flicker user Donnle Nunley (Creative Commons license).

A year ago today, I took my life back.

One of the things that has haunted me in the past, as a pretty free, nomadic spirit, is that I’m always the one who leaves. Whether it’s a relationship, a friendship that has run its course or is beginning to be detrimental, a job I’m not happy in, or any bad situation, I don’t wait around to be left.

I’ve never regretted the leaving itself, only the fact that I always seem to be The Leaver. So that I’m not The Left. I’m not cold. I’m not a hardass. I’m not a flight risk everywhere I go. It’s just that I used to go only where I was wanted. Now I go only where I want. I am by nature a loyal and incredibly stubborn, persistent, positive-minded person, so my leaving never happens on a whim. I try so, so hard to make things work. Usually, I stay too long. Every time, in fact, I have stayed too long.

But when I’m done, I’m DONE.

I wish I could just say ______ and you’d believe me

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anxiety, believe me, domestic violence, failing, no end in sight, trauma, trying, trying means failing

I talk a really good game sometimes.

I blog about writing, mothering, and trying, and sometimes trying means failing. Who wants to blog about failing? Or even read about failing?

Nevermind. I know there are those out there who want to read about how others fail. I know there a few out there who want to read about how I personally fail. I can write for days about my own traumas, and against gendered violence, against racism, against apathy or lack of compassion or both passive and outright aggression, but there is no happy ending. There is no ending at all, really.

All this shit just keeps going.

One essay: Can’t show anyone, must show everyone

Tags

anxiety, autobiography, domestic violence, essays, gaslighting, should, to publish or not to publish, un-silencing, writing anxiety

https://instagram.com/p/1vph1hm_Jo/?taken-by=shapeshifter43

I’ve written the thing, the story, the truth, that I’ve been trying to write for a year now, and I want to both print it out poster-sized-and-laminated for all to see, and bury it on a flash drive in my backyard.

I sort of hate the word “should.”

“You should totally share your story, it will help people,” said one friend.

“Don’t you think you should wait a little while, get some distance/perspective/healing first?” asked another.

“You should think about your children, how will it affect them if you make this public knowledge?” A random said to another random on the Internet, about this very issue.

We should (grrr) really stop shoulding each other and just do what we need to do.