Never was a cornflake girl- so who will save my soul?!
I'm so angry and I didn't even know it - OR - A raw and real-time journey of shadow exploration
I would like to give a special thanks and shout out to
whose authenticity inspired me recently to embrace my wordiness wholeheartedly and NOT try to be more succinct. More than once I found that little voice in the back of my head telling me that I was being too much here… saying too much… but this time I told it to go to hell lol. Thanks, Sara! It felt good to explore through my words without worrying how many I was using. Not that I wasn’t wordy before, just this time, I allowed it and it felt so good!
Who will save my soul… cuz I can’t save my own…
Yeah. I know. Jewel sang it differently. But this is the song my shadow sings.
I recently got hit smack-dab in the middle of my proverbial forehead with a painfully uncomfortable truth…
The way I show up in the world and in relationship to almost all others is deeply colored by a desperate childish need to be saved.
Ouch.
Will you be the one who saves me and gives me what I need??
Maybe you?
How about you??
OMG, it HAS GOT to be you!
NO?? WTF????
Then who?!?!
😭
I am still in the middle of unraveling this, and maybe I should not be writing about it from inside the storm… but I am finding it hard to see, and writing helps me make sense of and put my feelings into place.
Putting things into concrete words that others will read forces me to engage an understanding that is not necessary when I am only flittering about inside my own mind by myself. I know what I vaguely mean… and it’s easy to ignore things in that vagueness of the inner space.
So please forgive me if this one ends up being choppy…
We are venturing into uncharted waters, and I will navigate as smoothly as I can…
After the initial “smack,” something inside of me shifted.
My voice feels quieter.
I mean… I guess it’s been quieting down quite a bit since last summer, when I realized some very important things about how I communicate (having to do with my undefined throat, if you are familiar with Human Design). This is not really the time nor the space to get into any of that story, and I will definitely tell it sometime, but, for now, suffice it to say I came to a place where I realized that my personal power resides in allowing myself to be silent, more often than not. - Except for here, ha! All my voice comes out here lolol🤭
But overall, I’ve noticed an ever-greater increase in what feels like a natural state of keeping silent.
Yesterday was a challenging day.
I had started listening to a fascinating audiobook the night before and all I wanted to do with my day was to cuddle up with my cats on my comfy lounging chair… and immerse myself in listening to the book with all of the fascinating thoughts that were brewing in response to it.
However, it was a Tuesday and that means I cannot stay home and chill on the couch. I have to go spend
all of my available daily energy and life force most of my day
at work.
The thought of moving through what is now my normal weekday routine did not inspire one iota of joy or enthusiasm… and getting myself through it, day in and day out, has become harder and harder. Like dragging myself through quicksand… sinking deeper and deeper each day.
There is a part of me - one which has never been good at this sort of torture that people love to tout as “resilience” - this part of me is getting harder and harder to silence and keep at bay.
In the past, (and on more than one occasion!) it has taken over and sent my ass running away faster than King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail could yell “RUN AWAAAAYYYY!!!!” And oh god isn’t that part of me screaming that very thing inside of my right now. In King Arthur’s voice and with coconuts for horse sound effects!
…
And yet.
…
There is another part of me that is holding me in stillness and keeping me from running away screaming.
If you are into Human Design (HD), I have some thoughts about how this all relates to my design- check out this footnote for those👉1
New day now; new thoughts.
Another song…
Never was a cornflake girl Thought it was a good solution Hanging with the raisin girls
Now it’s Tori2 playing in my head instead of Jewel
A realization from last night feels like it changes everything.
I was watching a tarot reading by a YouTube reader I deeply resonate with (Yes, I am woo-woo like that lol) and at one point the topic of belonging came up. She said something about how the people the reading was for were being called to overcome feeling like they do not belong here. I think she was mostly speaking to how some people talk about not belonging on Earth and being starseeds and all that sort of thing…
Although I don’t relate to the starseed thing, this phrase she said stopped me dead in my tracks:
“Stop telling yourself that you don’t belong here; you do!”
I had a moment of deep recognition.
Oh shit. That’s it, isn’t it?! That’s my missing piece 😳
You see… I don’t think I quite got to writing about this part in what I was saying up above there… but I had been feeling like I was missing something in the whole I-need-to-be-saved thing. There was an underlying part I couldn’t get to… the “why do I need to be saved and from what?!” part.
I had tried to feel deeper to get in touch with it, but anything I looked at seemed to be an effect of something deeper… something still out of my conscious awareness’ reach.
It’s been a few days since those last thoughts, and I keep wondering if I’m just going to delete this whole writing.
It feels like a strange meandering path through my recent ups and downs, (more HD thoughts)3 and a part of me wonders if this isn’t way too far into TMI territory.
For now, ima (yes, bad/crazy grammar there on purpose thankyouverymuch) keep on going here and see where this takes us.
ANYWAY.
I sat with the belonging thing and let it simmer.
At first, I thought it would be a sad, woe-is-me, I feel so bad and lonely because I don’t belong here 😭 sort of thing…
But the interesting thing is that although the whole thing was something of an AHA!-moment, and I could sense that there was something very important to be found there, I noticed that I was not tapping into any emotions. None at all.
I was puzzled.
Such realizations normally bring a visceral opening in my body which allows me to get in touch with the emotions that underly the thoughts.
But that was not happening here.
So, like I said above, I let it sit and simmer, to see what else would rise to the surface.
I can’t recall anymore (even though it’s only been a matter of three days at most lol) what made my perspective shift and allowed me to see deeper… but at some point, it hit me…
OH! It’s not that I have been sad that I don’t belong… no, no. I have been ANGRY that I have been forced to stay where I don’t belong!!
OH!!! 😮🤯
Yep, that really makes all the difference!
Not 😭 but 🤬
Never was a cornflake girl- so why the fuck are we trying to make me be one?! 😡🤬😤
I don’t belong here.
I don’t belong here!
I DON’T BELONG HERE!!!
These words started echoing in my mind.
For this month’s Kaleidoscope Project writing challenge, I wrote a beautiful masterpiece about how my experiences in my childhood shaped the way I have kept myself in a box and denied myself permission to be me. The ghost voices in my head. It was a very powerful piece (if I do say so myself), and it sort of broke open… broke free… something inside of me that I am slowly starting to feel take shape.
By putting real, readable, understandable words to the ghost voices, my awareness was brought to something my mind had chosen to bury and ignore all these years…
I was brought at a young age to a strange place where everything and everyone was different from what I had previously known… a place where who I had been learning to be was not well received… a place where the “acceptable way of being” was unknown to me… but maybe most importantly, it was a place where I felt actively rejected in deeply painful ways.
I’d had no choice in the matter. There was nothing eight-year-old me could do but dream of the day I might get to experience a stroke of luck where I would be saved from this miserable, horrible, awful place where I did not belong.
I was born in the US. When I was 3-ish, we moved to Brazil. When I was 8, we moved back to the US. My little kid brain looked at the past and did the math for the future. Ok. We lived 3.5ish years in the US, then 4ish in Brazil. Now we are back in the US… surely that must mean in 4-5 years, we will move BACK to Brazil! It made total little-kid-sense for the pattern to continue.
Alas, I was saddened and dismayed to discover the pattern did not realize itself and we did not move back to Brazil. Of course, 5 years in, I was 13 and understood the fantasy in that “little kid logic”… but nonetheless… it was one of those “hoping against hope” things that our emotions cling to out of desperation… and there was definitely a certain sorrow at the dissipation of that hope as time showed me it would not actually work out that way.
I am not completely sure if this is where the anger comes into existence or if it was there, underlying everything all along… though I have this sense that the anger arose with my teen years and the dawning realization that I was stuck in the place that seemed to be constantly and actively rejecting me.
I was stuck where I did not belong.
And there was nothing I could do about it.
I don’t belong here! Who will come save me from this hell?? I am powerless to save myself.
Well. There it is, I suppose.
As a child… as a teen… I was bound by my parents’ choices. It was not up to me to make changes to where I lived. In a very real sense, at that time, I truly was choiceless… powerless.
I had nothing to do but to find ways to cope.
The anger would have been the hardest part of it. As a very hot, active, and outward moving energy, when anger has nowhere to go, it is incredibly painful and almost impossible to hold if it is not allowed some form of expression. But it was not an acceptable emotion for me to display or express… so I deadened it in order to survive. Hardened it. Froze it deep inside. Severed myself from that angry part and hoped that I could destroy it by denying its existence.
In this way, I did cope with my very real childhood “powerlessness.” However, as a somewhat unavoidable side effect, I also rendered adult me quite “handicapped” in a sense… with a deeply unconscious, vague, and pervasive underlying feeling of being powerless and needing to be saved…
Translated into words, it feels something like…
I don’t belong here but there is nothing I can do to change that. I need someone to care about me enough to see how much I suffer in silence (because good girls don’t complain, it’s bothersome and annoying! Oh yeah, and nobody cares.) and then I need them to swoop in and save me from this torment. Oh how I do suffer, look at how hard it is to be so out of place. Somebody, please take care of me and my needs!!
And that part of me… that one that I hardened and froze and severed and hid away, hoping I would destroy it… that part that is still stuck somewhere in between 8 and 13 years of age (emotionally)… and she still rages somewhere in the frozen darkness.
That rage… that anger also colors that “need” and desire to be saved, since they are deeply intertwined in their origins.
It can get really yucky when left unconscious. Trust me. I can think of many times that I behaved in ways that make me cringe and feel deeply embarrassed about… behaviors that are a direct results of this particular conglomeration of unconscious muck.
But this is the work to be done…
Seeing the truth of what is there, beneath the surface of consciousness.
Allowing it to come up.
Allowing it to be known.
Allowing it to be felt.
Allowing it to exist.
That is how it begins to transform and untangle.
You can’t let go of what you can’t let yourself feel.
So I open myself to allow it in.
I think this is where this little written foray ends for now.
Hopefully, it hasn’t been too jarring or crazy… or given you whiplash to follow lol.
I keep writing and re-writing this very last bit. The words keep not expressing what I truly want to convey… oh words, why do you elude me sometimes! Lol, ok, I think that helped…
This has been more of a journal entry type of post than anything else. A sharing of my deep process of getting in touch with buried feelings. A part of my mind feels compelled to make clear that this is not a mental thing… this is not mind-led but feeling-led. As such, it can be quite messy and not look/sound/seem all that nice and neat. Also, my mind, in this process, works in service of my emotions… translating and giving them expression as they are, without trying to change, modify, or influence them. That is of no use… the feelings and emotions will only change and evolve through the active process of feeling and expressing them…
People love to point out that emotions are “e-motion”… energy in motion. And it may be a little overused and even a little cliche at this point, but there is a deep truth to that. In order to release old, frozen emotions, they must be thawed through the light of consciousness and slowly allowed to regain their energetic movement. Just like frozen water, moving from solid to liquid to gas. Yes, it’s a metaphor. Yet, in some ways, there is some strange physical truth to the metaphor. But I’m not gonna go into that here either. This one’s gotten long enough!
🌀
Anyway.
I think my mind is trying to take over and overexplain things now, so this is where I definitely take my leave.
And say…
Bye for now
Other writings you might enjoy
I’m thinking that the part that is screaming for me to run away is coming from my highly defined spleen, with its instinctual fear that wants to preserve my survival and feels like my perceived “lack of freedom” is endangering me.
The part that is keeping me still is my sacral, my actual authority. It’s not so much that my sacral says that I “should stay”… it’s more that it does not move me to leave. It’s been an interesting and strange thing to observe within myself.
Tori Amos. She was my favorite singer/songwriter all throughout my teens. Her music and lyrics deeply impacted me and will often come to mind to give expression to my deep emotions.
Cornflake Girl is one of many favorites, especially this one particular live version!
For my Human Design peeps- I have a completely open Solar Plexus, but I still go through and experience the emotional waves… it’s just that they do not come from within me. They pass through me from outside influences… and are different all the time.
When I am able to be a detached observer, it is interesting to witness… although I often find myself tumbling through it at first, and god it’s like an *effed* up rollercoaster before I find my bearings! You’re kind of witnessing the *effed* up rollercoaster portion a bit here, in this writing 🫨😅😮💨
I started reading but now I have a zoom meeting so i clearly did not get how long you meant when you said long. Itbactually is .....loooooong.
Lovin it thus far. I will be back for more.
Thank you for sharing such an intimate view of vulnerability.