Author: gwynn

Rising within is a rumble. A growl. A roar.

It is ours and not ours. It is within us and yet beyond our being. It is greater than our own experience and of our experience.

It is from the knowing. The being seen. The connecting to those parts of that have been buried and hidden and ignored.

Do you feel this rumble? This growl? This roar?

Within us is an anger, a frustration, a furor, bubbling and boiling. It did not start with us, with our experience and yet it has been fed by our life, what we have done and not done and what has been done to us.

It is fed by our friends and sisters, as we witness their lives, as we see their pains and joys.

It is fed by our mothers, and their mothers, and their mothers. And their neighbors and friends and sisters.

It is fed by women we’ve never met but read about or read their own words or saw photographs or news footage of.

It is fed by women we’ve never seen or heard.

This rumble. This growl. This roar.

This righteous anger. At all that has been done to and “for” us. At all that has kept us back and down and small quiet.

This gnawing grief. At all we have lost and never had and wanted so desperately.

This marrow deep strength and power. Our resilience. Our knowing. Our surviving and thriving.

I feel it rising within me and and I sense it rising within you and you and you.

Let’s let it out.

xoxo

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Life is funny sometimes.

We see people who we think are more successful than we are. Who have more clients, more friends, more followers. Whose words flow more fluidly, whose bodies move more gracefully, whose voices sound more harmonious.

We see these people and we want what they have, what ever It is. We want to be them. So we play with mimicking them, we try to do things just like them.

And then after a while we can’t really remember what our own voice sounds like. Or why we do this thing we do. Or what it means to be and be satisfied with our Self and our own way of being in the world.

Here’s the thing. The thing I’m learning over and over, again and again. The thing that I feel is finally sticking this time.

We can’t be anybody else.

We can only be who we are.

And maybe our words aren’t as fluid and maybe our bodies aren’t as graceful. Maybe we don’ t have as many friends or clients. Maybe our life isn’t as glamorous as theirs is.

This is all okay. Because that person who seems to have it all, they don’t. And there are people who look at you and think you have it all, and you don’t.

Everything always looks better from the outside, when we aren’t living it.

I don’t always have flowy words for you. And sometimes I do. And regardless my words are always true to who and where I am in that moment.

My roar is loud and to some grating. Except when my roar is soft and some can’t even hear it.

But it’s my roar. Mine. And it shouldn’t sound like some one else. It should only every sound like me, and who I am in that moment.

You don’t have to be like anyone else to be a success. You get to define what success is.

For me, today, success is having eight clients who always sign up for my circles. It is having seven women accepting my invitation to give their voice to my next circle. It is receiving love notes and comments of gratitude for my offerings, free and paid. Success this moment is knowing that my work is making a difference in a small number of lives.

Today success is having the privilege to homeschool my children and spend most of our days together. It is having food on our table and a roof over our head. It is having the most amazing best friends in the world who I can connect with at any time – even after not talking for months. It is having a partner who is faithful and supportive and loving, to me and our children.

Success isn’t about having a fancy car or designer clothes or even a spotless house.

Success, to me, is about connection.

Connecting to my family. Connecting to my friends. Making new friends. Re-connecting to old ones.

It is about connecting to me. My voice. My roar.

It is about being comfortable in my own skin. And knowing I don’t have to be like someone else. In fact I shouldn’t be. I should only be like me.

And you should only be like you.

(And this is the only should I will ever give you. I promise.)

Because there is no one else like you in the world.

And the world needs you, not a copy of some other person.

You.

Your voice.

Your beauty.

Your roar.

Let yourself be you. Let the messy and the clumsy and tone-deaf be okay. Let the jarring and jolting and grating be okay.

Because my guess is there are going to be lots of people who don’t see you as messy or clumsy or jarring or grating. They see you as amazing.

And they want to be like you.

And that’s okay. They’ll figure it out.

You just keep being you.

I’ll just keep being me.

And we’ll keep stumbling along as we figure all this out. As we let out our howls and wails and roars. As we dance and skip and run. As we hold each other close and give each other space.

As we do this thing we do. To connect. To be community. To be individuals and sisters.

Let’s just remember, to be us. Who we are. Because that’s what we need. That’s what the world needs.

Let’s not have any more fucks to give. And let’s give all the fucks to the important things:: our loves, our communities, our Roar.

Because that is where the fucks need to be given. Not to the petty or judgmental. Not the those who relish in shaming or condemning. Our fucks need to be given in love to the things that deserve them.

Let’s make a pact, explore an experiment, play with an idea, you and I :: I’ll stop giving all the fucks away to the people and things that don’t deserve them. And you do that same. And let’s see what happens. Let’s see where our roars end up, where our power is directed and where our strengths are most helpful, when we only give our fucks to the things that matter, when we only give our fucks in the name of love, or righteous anger, or to allow our Self to be (seen, heard, known… to others and to us).

Sound good? Okay. Let’s do this thing. xoxo

…

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I have been thinking a lot about the women who came before me, specifically my maternal grandmother, my mother and the women who came before them. As I wonder and wander about their lives I also think about myself and my relationship with my daughter. The more I mother the more I both understand and don’t understand these women who came before me, who shaped me, who created me. The more I look back the more I understand my Self and have stronger convictions to want to do something different, to create a different life for my daughter and our family.

I remember the last few times I saw my grandmother before she died. She was so sad. She seemed so small, this woman who once seemed so tall and great and strong. I sensed there were words she wanted to say and couldn’t for her own reasons. And I felt the deepest sense of love radiate from her to me, my sister and our mother. When she looked at my mother in those last few months of her life there was such sadness there, and I felt the sadness for the first time wasn’t directed at my mother, but at her self. Thinking back and remembering her face now I wonder if she was grieving all she didn’t do with her own daughter, all the time she wasted, all the kind and loving words she didn’t say. Watching her look at her grown child I felt the grief, though I didn’t understand it yet. It would only be years after her death that my own daughter was born and the complexity of mother-daughter relationships would become so heart-breakingly clear to me.

I remember the last eight months of my mother’s life. Her trip to Seattle at Christmas time to meet with an oncologist. I remember how she held my daughter, only eight months old, and how there was such hope in her eyes as she gazed down at her. I remember catching glimpses of how she looked at me and my baby girl and the longing that lived within her as she watched us in our little bubble.  I can only now guess that she too was grieving all that hadn’t been for her and me, all the time that was lost and wasted.

I remember seeing her the weekend of my daughter’s first birthday. I remember her saying to my girl “I may not be here for all your birthdays, and I wouldn’t miss your first for anything in the world.” How prophetic those words would be.

I remember seeing her four months later and my girl playing her cat’s toys as if they were the best in the world. I remember seeing the physical pain within her, how she was trying to hold herself together. How she held my daughter for the last time. How I hugged her, not tight enough, not long enough, for the last time.

I remember seeing her dead body on the hospital bed in the ICU. She died 45 minutes before we arrived from our trip across the state. I remember feeling all the years of abandonment come crashing forth. I remember being somewhat numb and moving into get things done mode and making decisions about where to send her body. I remember my sister wanting me to sit in the room with that dead body and me just wanting it gone, to not touch it or look at it for another second.

I remember the ends of their lives so clearly. I was there, not as they took their final breaths, but as they both came to terms with what never was and what never would be. It is only years later that I understand this more fully now, consciously aware of what they lost or never had and how it has impacted my own ways of being with my girl.

I don’t want to be at the end of my days, looking longingly at my daughter as she holds her own child. I want to be remembering our own bubble, how she and I were the only living beings in our universe.  I want to feel proud of the relationship she and I created and not shame for all that I could have or should have done.

I want different.

It is important to remember why I want different. To learn from the past. To not only remember my own pain growing up with these women, the wounds they gave me in this life and to know how it feels to be a young girl at the mercy of the adults. But to also remember as a mother now, and know deep in my bones their own longing and grief for what never was, what never could have been.

And so this spring, I travel down that path into the past, seeking them and the women before them who I never knew. Healing wounds and unearthing strengths. Learning more about who I am, connecting more deeply to my Self and becoming more fully the woman I long to be while accepting and loving the woman I am now.

Join me. xoxo

 

**Today's blog post inspired by a writing prompt from She of the Wild xoxo **

Frayed, rough, hidden.

The edges of who I am live deep within. All along and inside and outside these edges live other women, their lived experience, their pains and pleasures, their knowing, their secrets.

I have been deep in the wondering and wandering who these other women were, who they are, how they live in me. I have been hearing their words and voices in my own: the sharpness, the sadness, the wanting. I have been feeling the wails and roars and yearning and pleading. All of them rumbling and stomping and dancing within me as I try to make sense of who I am and what I want and how I am to be in this world.

Am I their happy ending? Am I the end to this long line of disconnecting from our daughters? Does the self-hatred and doubt end with me?

Probably not.

Maybe.

Most definitely yes.

All of the above.

The coldness. The frigid. The crispness.

The stoicism. The always in control. The tamed.

How to shake it off? To shake it out? To loosen those super glued edges and allow them to fray and unravel?

Looking in and out and around. Spiraling, always spiraling, never a straight line or direct path.

All these words swirling. They are nonsense and all sense. How do we put concrete words to ethereal sensations?

*She says:

If you own this story, you get to write the ending.

Yes. Own the stories. All of them. The ones that are theirs and the ones that are mine.  The ones that are true and ones that aren’t. The ones that are facts and the ones that are fantasies. When I own they become mine and then… then they can be shared. Then the generations of isolation can come to an end. The the centuries of secrets and the unspeakable will be spoken. Then…

At the edges. Where words aren’t enough and are too much. There is no definition and it is so clearly defined, no finite and also no infinite. Where there is struggle to stay held together and to let it all go and the battle rages on.

Expanding out to the edges. Learning the stories that live within, hearing them, allowing them to be witnessed. Sharing them. Moving them out, giving them breath and birth and life and death. Letting the secrets be told and the shame be shifted. Allowing love, light, peace. Allowing wildness, fun, unencumbered dancing and flailing and howling.

Always coming back to the howls. Back to the wails. Back to the grief.

Back to it and not staying there. Allowing it, embracing it and then changing dance partners. Trying out silly and loose ends and untamed being.

Pruning the dead ends, the numb limbs.  Creating space for regrowth, rebirth, (un)becoming.

Opening my throat, reminding you to open yours, and letting those howls, those wails, those roars out. At last. Again. For the first time. Always.

And so we begin again. We dip our toes into our wildness and feel what is beyond. (join us). We dive into our untamed being and experience our embodied knowing. (join us). The circles forming, expanding, growing. The roars and howls and wails rising up and demanding to be heard.

*She = Brene Brown

This post inspired by In Her Skin :: the sexuality session.