Autobiography part II

This is part two of the auto-bio assignment for my class. I have this fantasy that now that I've quit my job, I'll have all of this free time to write, to take a writing class, to get back into tattooing, to catch up on reading, but then I seem to have all of these other obligations popping up everywhere-not to mention; part of the reason I wanted to quit my job was so that I would have a little down time...oi, thank god I'm winning the lottery tomorrow!

Autobiography: Part II
“Office girls they pass me by, they don’t know my name, put me on the danger list, just to wild to tame”. To keep the song quote theme going, in ‘Danger List’ John Cougar Melloncamp sings of being the outcast, the renegade, the lonely, misunderstood rebel. This is a favorite song of mine, in part because it reminds me of the person I used to be, or the person I used to want to be. In my twenties I was angry and wounded, and I kept everyone at bay with my rage. These days, I want to connect with people, I want to let them in. This is the story of how I got tamed.
Later Adolescence
Way back in grade school I had developed a chip on my shoulder. My general demeanor was that of “please fuck with me so I have an excuse to punch you.” This lovely little personality quirk stayed with me until I got sober. When I drank in public it was usually with the desire that someone would ‘fuck with me’, so I could have some outlet for all of the anger and venom I was carrying. Even though I was in my Late Adolescence, I was still stuck in Stage One; Doing. I didn’t trust others, I wanted others to know what I needed without having to ask, I didn’t know what I needed, I didn’t (think) I needed anything, I was numb (except for when I was rageful), I didn’t trust others to come through for me, I didn’t want to be touched, and I was unwilling to disclose information about myself (and, sadly, I still struggle a lot with this last one). At this stage in my life I was the walking-wounded, I was a raw nerve, and I had no resources at my disposal to confidently enter late adolescence.
Toward my mid 20s, I began to see that my attitude was just a cover for all of the fear that I had. I was afraid of everyone and everything. My guts were constantly knotted up, and it wasn’t long before I was carrying a bottle of Maalox with me everywhere I went. There were a few people who saw through my façade, but there were those too who really were afraid of me, who “put me on the danger list”, but instead of that making me feel empowered as I hoped it would, it made me feel bad.
Graduating from high school was a big accomplishment for me because for so many years I had no intention of graduating, and because it meant enduring 12 years of what felt to me, like Hell. Unfortunately, I had never really developed that plan B of what I was going to do with my life after taking over the ranch became no longer an option. I was still stuck in a place of not really having any career in mind that appealed to me. After graduation, I hired on as a ranch-hand for the man who was leasing the ranch. It was hard work, but work I enjoyed, and I enjoyed the company of my co-worker John. We worked long, hard days, but ended the days my favorite way; with a shared bottle of Jim Beam Whiskey.
That fall, my uncle passed away and left a trust fund for my dad that included my uncle’s house in town, so I quit my job and spent more time in Dickinson with my dad and less time out at the ranch. Shortly after moving into town, I started Tae Kwon Do, which had been a dream since I was pre-school age. I excelled at Tae Kwon Do, and was pleased to find something that I felt I was good at, and that I enjoyed.
I had no intention of going to college, still believing that I wasn’t really smart enough for college. That winter I visited my old English teacher who convinced me to try one semester of college in the fall. Having a great deal of respect for Mrs. Anderson, and being a people pleaser, I agreed to try one semester (fully intending to drop out after that first promised semester). At that point in my life, I was completely lost and I knew it, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try. I had always been good at art, so I chose that as my major, and proceeded to take my classes. Much to my dismay, I found that I really loved going to school, so I let go of my plan to drop out (one positive repeated pattern J).
That winter, Dad got sick and by the time he let me take him to the emergency room, he was suffering from advanced cirrhosis. At the time, his doctor gave him a 50/50 chance of survival. When dad was at home I became his nursemaid, preparing special meals, waiting on him, taking care of the edema in his legs, etc. He had taken it seriously when the doctor told him that if he took another drink, that he would die, and stopped drinking as a result, and I lost my supplier as well, so we were two dry drunks trying to live with one another. I became very angry and impatient with my father, and with my family who wouldn’t bother to visit or give me some relief from being a full-time student, and a full-time care-taker. In the late summer my father wound up back in the hospital, for what was supposed to be a two week stay, but two weeks turned into two months. During that time, my oldest brother Gary duped me into taking care of his two daughters while he and his wife went to Disney Land. Before that the nurse’s aides had asked me to spend whatever time I wasn’t at school at the hospital because they were too short-handed to keep up with my father, who at this point didn’t know where he was and would wander the halls. And still no visits from my siblings.
Ten days after my 20th birthday, my dad died while I was at one of my evening classes. I was devastated because I had thought that I would be by his side when he died. Both of us being the “tough cowboys” that we were, couldn’t risk the vulnerability of saying “I love you” to one another, but being with him when he died would be my way of letting him know. I have few things in my life that I would change if I could, but being able to go back and tell my father that I loved him, and telling him I was sorry for being such an asshole when he was sick, would be at the top of the list.
His death was a great excuse to get really drunk, which is exactly what I did after his funeral. During the funeral Gary became very concerned when he saw me crying, giving me further proof that I wasn’t supposed to cry. Later, after the funeral he took me aside and cried in my arms, telling me “Bud (my dad) was the only real father I ever had”. I wanted to tell him, “Then where the fuck were you when he was lying in the hospital suffering? Oh yeah, you were in fucking Disney Land while I took care of your little fucking brats.” But I didn’t say it, because I was still a good little girl, and I still haven’t said it, although it still stays close to the surface in my mind. By then I had developed some sense of autonomy from my mother, although she continued her vampiric drain on my soul, but this was a forced autonomy from my father that I didn’t expect or want.
With my father gone, I no longer had a place to live, so I had to get a job. Terror in hand, I got a job working security while continuing on with my studies. At one of my security gigs, I met a drunk guy, who I went out with after my shift was over. ‘Went out’ translating to driving around drunk and making out. Dating consisted of him showing up drunk at my door all hours of the day and night to make out. One morning he showed up at my door at 6 am having gotten fired from his job. In high school I had developed rigid-religiosity, so at this point I was using my Christian values as an excuse to cover my fear of sex. We had had the “I’m not ready for sex” talk, which he said he “totally respected”, so I was taken by surprise when he got on top of me, held me down, and had sex with me. I had been a tough cookie between fighting with the boys in high school, and studying Tae Kwon Do, so I was quite disgusted with myself for “freezing” instead of “fighting”. At the time I didn’t really know there was such thing as “freezing”, because at the time all we talked about in Psych class was “flight or fight”. It took years of therapy for me to get that “letting him” was a product of all the trauma (particularly learning over and over again that if I said “no” I wouldn’t be listened to) and lack of support from my care-takers in my previous life stages up to that point, and that there was nothing to forgive myself for. And this was my belated introduction into the world of ‘romantic and sexual relationships’. I wasn’t impressed.
Toward the end of that school year, my advisor/art professor took me under her wing and invited me to move into her and her husband’s basement. Delighted to have someone to take care of me and give me some positive attention, I took her up on her offer. It didn’t take long before our relationship became a sexual one. On the positive side, the first time she kissed me I realized that I wasn’t frigid, I was just a lesbian. On the negative side, she was married, she was my professor (and the only full-professor in the art department), and she was borderline.
Throughout college, I struggled with what I was going to do when I graduated (art degrees weren’t exactly marketable degrees), with my alcohol use, and with my past traumas. Eventually I got into therapy, and was directed to AA. After a year of sobriety in AA, I relapsed with another member who became my new girlfriend, I broke up with my professor, and moved in with my new girlfriend…in that order. Up to that point my professor had threatened my grades any time I rocked the boat, and at that time in my life, my grades meant more to me than anything else. By the time I relapsed, I was so sick of threats and black-mail that I just didn’t give a damn about my grades or anything else.
It was now my senior year, and I needed to decide what I was going to do next. I figured grad school was the next logical choice since I was still suffering from a great deal of social anxiety/phobia, and I actually felt a certain level of comfort in school and I was really good at it. As graduation approached, I tried to get sober. Everyday I would wake up with the intention of not getting drunk, and everyday I would wind up drinking. At the time I was also on anti-depressants, all of which were making the depression worse and were affecting my memory (to this day, I still have memory problems as a result of taking the meds). During the last round of anti-depressants (that I wasn’t supposed to drink on), I drank, and I was convinced that I was going to die. For 24 hours terror kept me from sleeping and from drinking alcohol. That was thirteen years ago, and I haven’t touched alcohol (or drugs) since. During one of my father’s last lucid moments, he had said to me, “If I could have one wish…” And in the pause I filled in the blank in my head ‘I would have saved the ranch, I wouldn’t have let alcohol destroy my life and my family, I would have spent more time with you…” But no, “it would be that I could drink the way that I used to.” I have to remind myself of my father’s words often so I don’t forget just what alcohol could do to me, as well.
The end of my drinking also meant the end of my relationship. I also found out that the one graduate school I had applied to for art therapy had not accepted me. In truth it was a relief because I knew I had no business doing therapy on anyone yet. That summer, the will of my mom’s latest deceased husband was settled and I received enough money to live off for a while, so when fall came, I decided to go back to school. I took a couple classes both terms and worked as a photographer in the university relations department. During the school year I concentrated on my sobriety and I also became the homo poster-child. I spoke at psychology and nursing classes, I started a LGBT club on campus, and I published an underground Queer-zine. I had to deal with a lot of rejection once I came out in my small ND town, but finally, I had an identity and I felt pretty damn good about it. I still struggled with gender and gender identity, but identifying as a butch lesbian allowed me more comfort in my gender than I had had before.
Early Adulthood
After having embraced my identity as a sober lesbian, I was feeling a little bit more able to face the world. That summer I got certified as a motorcycle safety instructor. And discovered that I loved teaching, but wasn’t quite ready to admit it. In the fall I took a job on the other side of the state, which was a bit of feat for me at the time as I was still feeling pretty fragile. Around this time I started thinking about going to massage school, but didn’t yet have the means to do so. After working the winter at the factory, I moved back to Dickinson and got another factory job there. I talked to my old therapists about my dream to go to massage school, and they were able to get me involved in a job-training program. Through their efforts and support, I was able to come to Albuquerque to attend massage school.
I moved to Albuquerque with no job, no place to stay, not knowing anyone, and only about $200 to my name, but I trusted that everything would work out, and it did. Through AA I met people who helped me get settled into the community. I was quite thrilled to come to a place that had a Gay Community, and I finally experienced ‘group identity’.
After graduation I set up a practice, and quickly had a very busy practice. I was very good at what I did, and six months after graduation started teaching at the school as well. I finally at this point admitted to myself that I loved teaching, and was starting to admit to the fact that I liked people. And happily, I was finally doing work that I enjoyed.
A couple years later I entered into a long term relationship. Roberta was someone who had grown up in a rural setting as well, so I thought that we would be able to relate better than the women I had been with before. Unfortunately we both brought our own set of baggage to the relationship, baggage she refused to work on, and I was still trying to be a care-taker. In addition to her baggage, she also came with a ten year old daughter. I had never wanted to have kids, but I loved Roberta, so I was willing to be a co-parent to her daughter. Sadly, Roberta, like her mother, had no clue how to be a mother, so I became the daughter’s primary parent. There when I knew that I needed to leave the relationship, but I knew if I left the relationship, my new daughter would be getting abandoned once again, and I just couldn’t do it. So I stayed and tried to make things tolerable with Roberta, but it just wasn’t working. I tried coaching Roberta as to what her daughter needed from her (mysterious things like saying “I love you” and “You are wanted”), but the response I got was “you’re not her mother; you don’t know what she needs.” But the truth is, I was her mother, and I was the only mother that she had ever had. During this time, many of my friends stopped being my friends because they didn’t like that I now came with a child. This was the first time I started to see that some of the people I thought were my friends, only desired a one-way relationship, one in which I did all of the giving. After Roberta moved her thirteen year old brother into our one-bedroom apartment, I finally decided I couldn’t do it anymore, and with much guilt about leaving my daughter behind, I left the relationship.
Around the time that relationship ended, I hurt my wrists as a result of over-work and not enough self-care. As devastating as it was to lose that career, it taught me a valuable lesson about self-care, one that I probably wouldn’t have been able to learn otherwise, and one that I absolutely had to learn before I was ready to enter the counseling field.
When I had to give up massage, I was once again lost as far as career goes. I next went into retail management because it fell into my lap. Right before I started my new career, I had to have surgery for excessive uterine bleeding. I happen to have a very strong phobia of doctors, especially when it comes to being naked around doctors, so I had a great deal of anxiety about the whole thing. The months before my ‘procedure’ I really reached out to my ‘friends’ because there were days when I thought that suicide was a much better option than going through with the procedure. Once again, I was finding that the friends who wouldn’t hesitate to call me when they needed something, were sorely absent when I was in need. At this point I really started to re-evaluate what it meant to be a friend and I wasn’t feeling a whole lot of mutuality with my peers.
While I was still recovering from my procedure, I started a relationship with one of my friends. She was someone who had just gotten out of a very similar emotionally abusive relationship to mine, which we had bonded over. I had suspected that Leah had a crush on me, but my interest in her was as a friend, so I ignored the signs. During my recovery, I just didn’t have the energy to rebuff her advances, so we entered into a four year relationship. In the beginning it was actually a relief because neither of us went out of our way to start fights, and neither of us were pathological liars. After about six months, I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to be in this relationship, but Leah seemed to be completely in love, so I just assumed that her feelings were right and my feelings were wrong, and that was theme of our relationship. Looking back at the affirmations for Stage two, I needed to work on “I know what I know”.
After working at the retail job for a year and a half I got very burned out, frequently working 14 days straight because we were short handed, and I quit. I eventually found a job as a clerk at a clinic. At first I thought about settling, after all I was for the first time in my life getting benefits. It wasn’t long before, once again, we were short handed, but because I was keeping up with the work on my own, the management wasn’t hiring more people. After about two years I got burned out, and was thinking about what I was going to do for a career. I started thinking more seriously about acupuncture and counseling, but graduate school was a huge commitment, financially and time wise, so with the constant echo of my mother’s voice in the back of my head “we don’t have enough money…” I wasn’t going to rush into a decision.
Middle Adulthood
As I entered this stage I was stagnating in both my personal and my career life, and I knew it. I was miserable in my dead-end relationship and I knew I needed to go back to school, but I was terrified to do anything. Looking back at the handout, the early part of this stage I was caught in the Stage Two: Doing. I was reluctant to initiate, over quiet, avoided doing things unless I could do them perfectly, I didn’t know (or trust) what I knew, I thought it was ok not to be safe, supported, and protected. Looking back with the help of my therapist, I have been able to see that the nature of my relationship with Leah reinforced many of my ancient fears and inadequacies, making it difficult to do things differently (my paper is already too long, so I’ll spare you the details).
I quit my job at the clinic, and started another retail management job, this one at a vitamin store, which was at least in a field that held some interest for me. I finally decided that I would start school, and I decided after months of going back and forth, that I would study acupuncture. Leah was already in acupuncture school, and I expected her to be happy for me. Instead, Leah completely lost it because acupuncture school was her space, her thing, and how dare I impinge on the one thing that was hers. Slapped in the figurative face, I eventually decided to go into the counseling field instead.
I started at University of Phoenix in their marriage and family program, still not convinced I was doing the ‘right’ thing. Also during that time, I knew I had to get out of my relationship with Leah. Leah still seemed to think that there was nothing wrong with our relationship, and was oblivious to my dissatisfaction with the relationship. I was unwilling to ‘drop the bomb’, so I asked her to do couples counseling with me, in order to hopefully get us on the same page, whatever that page might be. Over the course of several months, Leah was able to get to the here-and-now of our relationship, and we mutually decided to end the relationship.
Around the same time Leah and I were breaking up I surrendered to the fact that UOP wasn’t the place for me and I started working on transferring to Webster. I started classes at Webster a couple weeks before my birthday, and Leah moved out the day before my 36th birthday. On my birthday, I made myself a cup of coffee, went into the back yard and sat under my favorite tree, and enjoyed the start of my new life. At that moment I really got that life wasn’t about making other people happy, but rather about my own happiness. I made a commitment on the spot to do the things that make me happy, and to never suffer for the sake of anyone else again. I came out of my cocoon that morning; my confidence was better, my self image was better, and my self esteem was better. That fall I also started taking 5-HTP which has helped immensely with the mood and sleep problems that I couldn’t control with lifestyle and attitude changes, giving me a greater sense of empowerment and control over my life.
Over the course of this last year, things have only gotten better. I have a clearer sense of who I am and what I want, and I’m not afraid to get it. I am not constantly living in fear and anxiety. I finally know what ‘normal’ people feel like, and I am loving life. I have moved toward generativity, and will continue to do so. I now have a better sense of who my friends are, and I don’t waste my time with people who aren’t willing to give as well as receive caring. I have recently started a relationship that actually feels like a partnership, and I finally feel like I'm ready for a good relationship…and a good life. Before, I didn’t believe I could have a good life, that that only happened to other people. Now, I know I can have it all, and I want it all!