Nov. Sprints: The Shit Sandwich Cookbook

A Memoir To-Be

Introduction

I’ve been told enough times over the past several years that I’m a good storyteller that I guess it’s time I give the idea some proper attention. Personally, I think my acumen in this particular category has been drastically oversold. That said, my therapist also tells me I tend to have a “warped filter” when it comes to my self-perception, so I’m willing to suspend my disbelief, at least temporarily, for the sake of doing something I claim to enjoy. The “something” in this context is writing, in case that wasn’t clear. I’m working on being more clear. I’m also working on being less verbose. You can imagine the amount of stress I am under while trying to accomplish both of these things simultaneously.

As you can probably tell, it’s not going well.

Why does any of this matter? Well, it all started around 37 years ago, when I was born. I have consistently regarded this event as wildly underwhelming and overhyped, and I’d have to say my father agrees with me. Or at least he probably would if we were on speaking terms, but that’s a story for later. That’s my issue with stories, you see…I have so many of them that I never know where to start. This memoir has been building in me since I was 7 years old, as I was sitting outside waiting for my dad to come pick me up for visitation. I realized for the first time that a pattern had emerged. I predicted he wouldn't be coming, and I wrote a song about it. (I promise this book isn’t about my dad, it’s about me. Do not fear, gentle readers-I know that’s who you all came to hear about.)

ANYWAY, stories. I have a lot of them. And I’m easily distracted. It’s one thing when a singular event reminds me of one particular story and I can dive into it whole-heartedly, meandering and bumbling, leading my eager supplicants along as I take them from one twist to another turn, weaving the story in whichever fashion my heart desires. It’s another endeavor entirely when I have to weave these stories together into a larger narrative. Also when you’re telling a story in person, you have the luxury of being able to read everyone’s facial cues. You know, the cues that tell you “ok they’re officially getting tired of my shit, I’d better wrap this one up”. I don’t have that luxury here. Hell, you all might have already thrown this book across the room, or put it down on your coffee table never to be picked up again, and I’d never know. And I really hate not knowing how I’m being perceived. That means I have to just…tell the story the way I want to tell it, regardless of how it’s being received… and honestly that sounds like the worst idea I’ve ever heard…

But this idea of putting all of my stories onto paper has been haunting me for long enough that apparently it’s non-negotiable. The Muse has begun making demands as of late, usually around 2am when I have things to do in the morning. It’s less than ideal. So, here we are. Putting words to paper and hoping they come out in some semblance of a narrative. But the problem persists: where to start?

I could start at birth and work my way straight forward, but I’ve never been good at doing things in the right order (or in any manner that could be described as “straight”). I’ve also never been good at meeting expectations, though I’ve learned to see this as a sort of super power in recent years. See, I’ve learned that people typically delight in the unexpected, even when they like to pretend that they don’t. People claim to value art and beauty and sincerity, etc etc, but what do they really value? Novelty. People value novelty above all else. For example, a genius invents a new technology that will change our lives for the better, and they become an overnight sensation. But, say another genius halfway across the world invents the exact same thing the next day. He’s been busy in the lab, you see, and hasn’t been checking his phone (his mother is very worried), and he has no idea someone else already invented this particular gadget. He excitedly rushes to tell the world about his discovery….aaand no one gives a shit. Because someone already beat him to the punch. So it’s not the genius of invention that we really value, it’s being first, being novel, being new. If you’re not first, you might as well not even exist. Get out of here, loser.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the market is a bit saturated when it comes to memoirs. And these are memoirs of people you’ve heard of. And let’s be honest, you haven’t heard of me, unless you’re my mom and I sent you a copy of this and demanded you read it (hi, mom!). So I can’t just tell my story. I have to tell it well, and I have to be engaging, witty, funny, and somehow novel. So, I’m going to do something I haven’t personally seen done before. I’m not going to start in the beginning. I’m also not going to start at the end. Nope. We’re going to break the mold and start smack-dab in the middle.
— 11/1 21:30 (420)

I think I was 28 years old when I finally realized it was time to decide: either die already, or start living. I didn’t realize that’s the choice I was up against until I realized I had to make it now. I was lying on the floor of the shower, drunk on whiskey colas and out of my mind on Ambien at 2am, as was my custom. I was in so much pain that I had numbed my way straight through oblivion and circled right back around to unbearable infinite pain. Funny how that works, yeah? What started as the ultimate goal (numbness), was now something so unbearable that I felt the overwhelming need to escape from it too, but there was nowhere else to run because I had already used up all the other options. I had hit my rock bottom, and there was nowhere to go from here. You could go up? I thought. And then I promptly laughed, hysterically. I was quite the comedian back then, before therapy. I barely had the energy to lay there. In fact, that’s what brought it to my attention that I was at rock bottom. I was doing nothing but laying on the floor of the shower, and there I was thinking to myself “this is too hard. I can’t keep doing this, I’m too tired.” And I thought to myself, “Wait, I’m sorry… you’re too tired to lay on the floor of your shower? That’s gotta be the easiest job on the menu, friend. You literally just have to lay here and exist. If you can’t manage that…I don’t know what to tell you.”

And I thought, maybe if I could just feel a different kind of pain…maybe that would be the answer. Maybe that would snap me out of whatever the hell this was, give me some momentum to do literally anything else with my life.

That’s when I reached for the razor.

To this day I still don’t remember how I even managed it, but somehow in my dissociated state I disassembled the cheap pink plastic razor head and removed a single thin blade, and I began placing very shallow cuts into my arm. Looking back, it was honestly kind of pathetic. I had never done anything like that before, and I can’t help but feel like anyone who has ever been a serious cutter would laugh at my pitiful and short-lived venture into this territory. But that mindset is probably more telling than I’d like for it to be.

If I'm being honest, I don't get the hype. It hurt, but not enough to bring on any kind of noticeable euphoria. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as romantic as all the emo songs from high school made it out to be. And it definitely didn't bring me any relief. What did it bring me? Shame and self-disgust, both of which I already had in spades and needed no additional surplus. As I lay there with the quickly cooling water streaming over me as it attempted to wash away my pitiful attempt at joining the Depression Big Leagues, it hit me. I have to do something different.

"Do you want to die," I asked myself.
"I mean, I don't want to be alive anymore. Not like this, anyway."
"Ok so you want to be dead. But do you want to die?"
"I didn't realize there was a difference..."
"If there wasn't, you wouldn't have been playing 7 Minutes In Heaven with that razor. You would have gone all the way. Are you prepared to do that?"

I thought to myself for a while, thinking over the various options for checking out permanently.
"It's not that I don't want to die," I thought. "I just don't want to die like that."
"Why not?"
"Because, it would fucking hurt."
"Ok, so you're saying there's a level of pain you've yet to reach? The fear of that pain is enough to dissuade you from ending the pain you're already in?"
"I mean, yeah...I guess..."
"So you must not be in enough pain to really want to die."
"Ok, sure... but I also can't keep living with this pain. I'm not far off from a level of pain that would make the razor feel like child's play."
"So what I'm hearing is you can't keep living like this, but you do want to live."
"...Yeah, I guess I'd say that's accurate."
"So, live differently then."
"Because that's so easy."
"Never said it was going to be easy."
"Where do I even start?"
"Well, you can probably start by getting out of this shower, drinking some water, and going to bed."
"Then, maybe tomorrow, we look at trying to find a therapist?"
"That sounds like a great place to start."

I guess you could say I started in the middle back then, too.

The Stupid Witchy Shop and The Exhausted Therapist

Another reason I've put off writing this book for so long is because my memory is absolute garbage, especially when it comes to time. I've always envied those people who could just rattle off what year it was or how old they were when anything even remotely significant was happening. I can't relate. My entire past is just one big wibbly wobbly ball of swirling colors and vague shapes and shadows and weird smells. To remember where or when I was during any particular memory, I have to plant landmarks and lay breadcrumbs as I walk backwards from where I am now. And even that usually only ends in a best-guess scenario.

But since I've already agreed to write this stupid thing for the sake of getting it out of my head, I'll just ask you to forgive me if it later comes to light that my entire timeline is bullshit and half of this barely happened the way I remember it. All of that to say, I think it was a couple of months after The Shower Incident when my best friend Tylr forced me into her car along with two other people I had never met before, and told me we were going to the witchy shop.

Now, for a bit of context you should know that before that day, Tylr and I were your typical 20-something Mean Girls, in our own way. We constantly made fun of "crystal girls" and "dumb skanks" who thought magic was real. When I got in the car and she told me where we were going, I looked right at her in my hungover depressive state and said "Tylr, I don't think I can follow you down this path..."

She laughed and said "Hey, you can always stay in the car." It was the middle of August. I was not staying in the car.

I hung back and let everyone enter first. I might have been finishing a cigarette, I can't remember. I still smoked back then. The point is, I didn't want anyone thinking I was excited to be there, so I had to make sure to look super cool and nonplussed outside for a while before going in. There was a little bell that jingled above the door when I entered, and a giant pump-top container of lavender scented hand sanitizer on the counter. This struck me as odd, and I remember thinking "I guess spells don't work on germs?" (I already told you, I was hilarious before therapy).

But I'll be honest, there was something about this shop. I had never really felt anything like it at the time, but looking back, I often describe it as feeling like my soul was struck with a tuning fork. I now feel that sensation quite often for a variety of reasons, but we'll get to that later. I felt my entire nervous system sit up and pay attention. Something was happening in here. At first, I thought it was just the smell of the incense and burned sage, which reminded me of some of the few good memories I have from childhood. It reminded me of a home that was never truly real. That place only existed liminally, in the small quiet moments between the tides of chaos and pain and uncertainty. But when that place existed, the place that smelled like those things, there was a kind of peace I learned to cherish very early on. It was the only kind of peace I had ever really known: the temporary kind. So I dove into that peace, and I followed the olfactory trail to familiar comforts. I let it carry me past all the polished rocks and tiny brass meditation gongs, around the smudge kits and dreamcatchers, the rose water and abalone shells. And it brought me to an island of familiarity: the bookshelves. One thing you should know about me: I can always find a book I want. It could be an abandoned cardboard box full of rain-drenched cast-offs. I will find a book I want. This day and this shop were no exception.

I moseyed on up to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered the entire back corner of the shop, and I tried to keep my face neutral as I browsed titles such as "Spells for The Modern Hearth Witch" and "Backwoods Magic: Witchcraft of the Appalachian Mountains". I had zero expectations that I would find anything worth buying on these shelves, but at this point I was in it for the entertainment value alone. Then I got to the section on Buddhism and mindfulness. This caught my attention, because my new therapist had recently attempted to introduce me to the concept of mindfulness meditation as a way to help me with my complex PTSD.

My first therapist (we'll call him James) was a really interesting character. And bless his heart, he tried so many things to help me in that year we spent scraping the dust and rust off of all the trauma that had been buried deep deep under the surface of my awareness for 10+ years. I'll never forget the way his face whitened when, for our first session, I brought in 3 full notebook pages (front and back) full of "all the shit that's wrong with me" that I clearly expected him to fix for me. And I'll also never forget the way I sob-laughed when he immediately responded with "so I think I'll likely need to see you twice a week... Will that be an issue for you?" I'm honestly surprised it took him a year to finally admit that he was in over his head. But we likely lasted that long because I was one determined trash baby (my current therapist says I shouldn't call myself that anymore, but at this point it's a term of endearment and I can't fix everything all at once). Whatever he gave me to try, at the very least, I was determined to try it just to prove that it wouldn't work for me. I did all the workbook sheets and diary cards and self-assessments. I've always been a teacher's pet at heart, and this was no exception. I would get an A+ in therapy, or I would die trying. That was, at least, until he suggested meditation. I immediately turned into a 4-year-old who wanted to go to the party but was just told they had to put their shoes on first. What is this, prison?

I was resistant. He said he couldn't force me, but he highly recommended I looked into it. I did not look into it. Meditation was for monks who lived in monasteries and taught wily rough-and-tumble teenagers how to catch flies with chopsticks and do karate.

Despite my many childhood dreams of being raised by Mr. Miyagi, this was very much not my reality. I was a realist. I was a staunch atheist after a childhood filled with religious trauma and scoffed at those who claimed to be "spiritual but not religious". I had no concept for what that could even mean. I saw meditation as something new-age hippies pretended to be doing so they could pretend like they were better than you. All of this added up to "you're more likely to catch me smoking meth than meditating." Needless to say, it was quite the record-scratch moment when, after about the sixth session of me complaining to my therapist about problems that were almost guaranteed to be helped by meditation, and me refusing to even look into it when he finally snapped. He pulled out his phone and laid it on the coffee table between us. He pulled up Spotify and said "I'm going to play a song. It's literally 2 minutes long. You're going to sit here and breathe until the song goes off. You're going to notice your breathing. You're going to count your breaths from 1-10, and then you're going to start over and repeat that until the song is over. You've been doing hard shit your entire life. You can count your breaths for 2 minutes. If you hate it, I'll never bring it up again. But if you feel better, you're going to start doing this once a day, and I don't want to hear another complaint about it."

So anyway, I've been a practicing meditator for the past 9 years.

Another thing you should know about me is: I'm going to fall down a wormhole. I have never been casually interested in a single thing in my entire life. It's blinding obsession or bust for me. And I also have an unstoppable urge to understand why and how at all costs. I have never been able to accept phrases such as "that's just how it is" or "I don't know how it works, it just does." Get that weak-minded nonsense out of my face. I learned pretty early on in my life that I am not the kind of person to partake in "casual" interests, and I accept that about myself. So when I sat there for two minutes listening to some stupid wood flute music backed by a babbling brook and did nothing but count my stupid breaths, and I felt better? I needed to understand exactly what had just happened. And that's the day I became a neuroscience enthusiast. It was two years later that I went on to become a certified mindfulness meditation instructor, and I'm currently back in college at the age of 37, majoring in psychology and neurobiology. I'm telling you…I don't do casual.

I was at the very beginning of that particular obsession, so I immediately perked up when I saw some books in the stupid witchy shop about mindfulness meditation and magic, of all things. I was in the process of learning about this very scientific concept, and it broke my brain completely for a moment to see it mentioned alongside something as esoteric as magic. I had to know more, even if I ended up merely laughing at how stupid the whole thing was. I think I bought 3 books that day. I don't remember all of the titles, because I've since bought and read so many similar books that I can't recall what the first 3 were. But I do know those books changed my life. I still remember Tylr's smug face as I walked up to the register behind her and she turned around to see what Captain Skeptical had found worthy of interest.
She didn't say anything.
"Shut up," I replied.

Reading those books did something I never thought possible. They changed my mind about something I had zero interest in changing my mind about. Realizing that was even possible changed my life on its own. Like Descartes, I suddenly felt the need to upend my entire basket of apples to analyze each and every one before filing them away in the "Things I Accept As Truth" cabinet. These books forced me to reconcile with the reality that my inner narrative was responsible for the bulk of my suffering. Not my trauma, not the years and years of pain and abuse, but my beliefs about myself as a result of that abuse. And boy did that piss me off. Because it meant that I had had the power all along to change my circumstances. It meant that I could have just decided years ago to stop being so miserable that I wanted to die. Like, I nearly ended my own life, and I could have just...decided not to be in that mindset? I was incredulous. I threw many a book across the room during that particular chapter of growth. And before you throw this book across the room, let me be very clear about one thing: it sounds like it's supposed to be easy, as if anyone can do it. That is so far from the truth in so many ways.

The thing is, it really is quite simple, as concepts go. It's the implementation that feels like walking on Legos. Sitting for 2 minutes a day and counting your breaths? Easy as pie. Although that metaphor seems like a poor choice on my part, as I have never successfully baked a pie in my life. My mother still refuses to stop telling the story of the year I insisted on bringing a chocolate pie for thanksgiving and I mistakenly used baking soda instead of baking powder because I didn't realize there was a difference. It was salty, and not in a fun way. Where was I? Oh, right. Meditation. Easy on paper, salty chocolate pie in practice. "It's just observing your thoughts?" I thought. "Can't be that hard." My first mistake was assuming that my thoughts wanted to be observed. Wrong. Thoughts want to be had, not observed. And you're also supposed to realize at some point that you aren't your thoughts, you are the one observing them. Thoughts are also not a fan of this activity. See, your thoughts have found the current arrangement to be quite to their liking, up to this point. That is, the arrangement where you have the thoughts, and they pretend they're the ones having you. They float in, dominate your awareness, and drag you down-river until they get bored and decide to toss you back to the shore once you're sufficiently bedraggled and gurgling.

See, your thoughts really enjoy this arrangement, because they are convinced that they are keeping you safe. Because your thoughts aren't you. Your thoughts are the story your nervous system tells your brain. It's a story based on past experiences where things didn't go the way you expected them to, and this caused a whole lot of problems. In most circumstances, the biggest problem was a big ol' fat and hairy feeling of discomfort, which is just entirely unacceptable. So obviously, we need to do everything within our power to avoid that particular circumstance again. This means we need to tell ourselves the story of that discomfort over and over again, just to make sure we never ever forget what it felt like or what the circumstances looked like that led up to that feeling.

Our brains really are wonderful pieces of machinery...on a good day. On a bad day, they are basically just cantankerous hunks of electric ground beef. Wet, stupid, and likely to kill you if you leave them unattended for more than 30 seconds. On a good day, your brain is a pattern-recognition machine that would rival anything else found in nature, and would even dominate the realm of man-made technology. On a bad day...that piece of fuzz on the bathroom floor is definitely a man-eating tarantula and the only way you're going to survive this is by jumping onto the toilet like a coked-up housewife from the Mad Men era, subsequently slipping and breaking both the toilet seat and your skull. 10/10, brain. Thank you for your service. And this is why our thoughts need to be critically observed, at least occasionally. Which, again, doesn't sound that hard. I love pointing out all the ways my brain is being a moron.

Then I learned that meditation isn't just about observing thoughts, it's about observing them without judgment. "Well, shit," my idiot brain thought. How was I already failing at something when I just learned of its existence? Seems pretty on-par, if I was being honest. Needless to say, I was no meditation prodigy.

The problem with trying to observe your thoughts without judgment is the fact that you really have no idea how many judgments you make from one moment to the next. And "judgments" don't just mean bad judgments either. Good judgments are judgments too, I was so enthused to learn. And that's not to say that judgments by nature are inherently bad. It's just that the muscle you're exercising when you meditate is the muscle of allowing your thoughts to simply exist on their own, with no participation on your part. When you don't interact with your thoughts, they become much less sticky. And sticky thoughts are pretty much the cause of all of your suffering. Now, before you get all worked up over that idea, let me clarify that I didn't say sticky thoughts are the cause of all of your problems. See, problems are an inevitability. Hell, even pain is inescapable as long as we're alive on this planet. But suffering...that's optional. No one and no thing can make you suffer. Only you can make you suffer. And only you can decide to stop suffering. Granted, this is current me who knows all this. The version of me you're getting to know in these pages didn't have the first clue about any of this. It sounded like a bunch of woo-woo mumbo-jumbo to them. Oh, and by the way, I use they/them pronouns. This book isn't about that, though, and I'm not going to beat anyone over the head with it. I just felt the need to offer that disclaimer in case you see it from time to time and get confused.

So, if you find yourself feeling skeptical or a bit lost with any of the concepts, just know you're not alone. I was right there where you are now, and I learned so much by bumbling my way through the last decade or so. One of the first things I learned was the fact that you cannot eat an entire elephant in one bite. You cant' even do it in 10. In fact, don't even think about the elephant. All you should ever be focusing on is this bite. The bite in front of you, or the one in your mouth. And it's the same no matter what we're talking about. Whether it's healing from 28 years of trauma and terrible coping mechanisms, or switching careers, or even taking the dogs for a walk, the formula is the same. You can never be further along than you currently are in this moment. You are where you are. And where you are is the only place that you have any power whatsoever to impact the future. In fact, there's no such thing as the future. There is this moment, and the choices you make in this moment create the next, instantaneously. So we have to practice ignoring the staircase, and zooming so far in that we're not even looking at a single step. We're observing our muscles begin to tighten in our core and legs. We're inhaling as we begin to lift one foot and reach for the railing. We're shifting our weight slightly forward and gripping the railing tighter as we plant our front foot and push off. Do you see where I'm going with this? This is what a mind observed looks like. And it would be exhausting trying to think like that all the time, just like it would be exhausting to walk around lifting weights all the time or sprinting non-stop forever. Meditation is like going to the gym for your mind.

But this kind of practice honestly begins before you ever even try to meditate, which is why I'm bringing it up now. To set yourself up for success, you first have to stop telling yourself you're "bad at meditation". And that was quite the challenge for me, because I truly believed I was bad at everything. The only way you can be bad at meditation is by not doing it at all. Otherwise, that's just the mind doing what the mind do. The mind is meant to think, and it's been allowed to run around unchecked for pretty much your entire life up to this point. It would be a lot weirder if you sat down to meditate for the first time and it was easy. The good news is, you are not your mind. You are the observer of your mind.

I can't currently recall which guru said this, but a common quote in the mindfulness industry is "The thinking mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master." And the more often you meditate, the more often you'll start to see just how true that really is. But again, before we even get to the meditation part, I'll suggest to you a game I first learned about in therapy: The Traffic Game. And before you get too excited, no, the game is not about running into traffic. The Traffic Game can really be played anywhere, with anything, but where I live you tend to spend about two-thirds of your life sitting in traffic, and we're all about working with what we have here. So you're in traffic, or at the grocery store, or waiting for the elevator at the office. You look around at whatever you see the most of, be it cars or people or bags of frozen peas, and you notice them. You notice them and you make observations about them, but not judgments. For example: I'm in traffic and I'm looking at the cars that are passing me. An observation would be, "that is a red, mid-size sedan. It has a cracked window and several stickers across the back window." A judgment would be, "Oh wow, look at that shitty car. What kind of idiot plasters the back of their window with stickers? Those will never come off. I sure hope they never want to sell it. I'll be they don't have insurance either, otherwise they would have gotten that crack fixed." Etc., etc., etc.. See the difference? Notice the difference in tone and quality between the two? How did you feel, even just reading those two different examples? Notice how it feels to be neutral. Neutral is the name of the game, and if you stick with me, you'll soon understand exactly why.

Now, remember what I said about judgments not just meaning negative judgments. For example: You're driving in traffic and an expensive sports car zips past you. An observation would be "That is a very expensive black sports car. It probably cost $X or more. It has dark tinted windows and is going around 90mph." A judgment would be "Holy shit, look at that fancy sports car! I'll bet it feels so good to drive that thing. I'll bet whoever's driving that thing has everything they've ever wanted, and everything I've ever wanted. Must be nice. I'll never be able to afford a car that nice." See the difference? And do you see how a positive judgment can be just as problematic as a negative one?

What's the point of all this? you might be asking. I know I sure was when James was ever-so-patiently explaining all of this to me week after week. As it turns out, it's really hard to heal or grow as a person if you're constantly shaming and judging yourself for being where you are. If you're judging yourself for being where you are, it likely means you aren't looking clearly at where you are. I'll explain.

Say you really struggle with time management. No matter how hard you try, there's always something that prevents you from being on time, or from being aware of time in general. Every time you roll up late to the function, or to work or class, your system is flooded with adrenaline, cortisol, and what I like to call the "God D*mnits". You sit there with sweaty armpits and a racing heart, and you think to yourself, "God d*mnit! Why am I like this? Why am I such a piece of shit? Why can't I manage to be on time even if my life depends on it? Next time, we're going to shape the heck up, get our shit together, and be ON TIME for once!" Sound familiar? It seems like a great plan, right? Except...here's the hitch. How are you going to be on time next time? Which shit, exactly, do you plan on getting together, and how? When do you plan to start this endeavor? What struggles and challenges caused you to be late this time? The last 5 times? What specific changes do you plan on making to accommodate or improve upon those challenges? Odds are, you won't think about any of those things until the next time you're already running late, at which point you'll likely continue to only think about how big of a piece of shit you are. See, one of the hardest lessons that I'm still continuing to learn to this day is the fact that no amount of thinking "I'm just going to be better" has ever empowered anyone to actually be better. And yet we expect that mindset to work, and we implement it accordingly, 100% of the time when we make a mistake or fail to meet expectations. Why is that? I'll tell you why: because shame and judgment prevents us from looking at ourselves and our struggles clearly. Because when something makes you feel ashamed, the last thing you want to do is look at it for any amount of time. No, you want to sweep that shit under the rug and keep on strolling, fully convinced that it will fail to pop up again through sheer force of will and spiteful determination. But I want you to sit and think for a moment, and see if you can conjure up a single memory of a time that has ever worked. James asked me to do the same, and I'll tell you right now: I couldn't.

Now, again I feel the need to clarify: avoiding shame does not mean avoiding guilt (I'll talk more on this soon). Nor does it mean walking around with all your flaws proudly displayed on your lapel with a haughty "this is just how I am and I accept that" to justify any harm you may cause and avoid accountability. That's not what I mean when I say you need to let go of shame.

So what does letting go of shame mean? What does it look like? Let me tell you a story that might help you understand.

Trash Baby

When I was 23, I was probably the worst version of myself who had ever existed and will ever exist. And don't worry, I say this with love for that version of me. They were doing the best they could with the tools, skills, and resources they had available to them at the time (which weren't very many, and the ones I did have weren't very good). But that's the thing about loving yourself: you have to be able to look the worst parts of yourself in the face without flinching and say "Yep. That's a part of me." Until you can do that, you can't truly love yourself. You're only loving the parts of you that you deem acceptable and worthy of love. And those other parts? We don't talk about them. We don't look at them. And we certainly don't take accountability for them when they show up in our actions after one of the wounds they carry has been poked or reopened. So we shove those parts of us down deep, and we call them the skeletons in our closet. We treat them like rotting corpses when they inevitably float to the surface, begging for acknowledgement, awareness, healing... But they were never corpses, they were simply wounded children begging to be loved. So that's what I've been learning to do over the last 8 years or so. But boy is it difficult to love and have grace for a version of yourself who you just want to shake violently while screaming in their face "YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER!" Especially when it feels like they still make up a significant portion of who you are now. So I'm still in the process of learning to have grace for 23-year-old me, aka "Trash Baby" (if you're my therapist and you're reading this, finish the book before you yell at me okay, I'm getting there).

I have many regrets from my early-to-mid twenties, but among the worst is the fact that I was a serial cheater. There's a very complex and complicated web of reasons for that, and we may get to them at some point in these pages, but for now, suffice it to say I didn't know how to love anyone better than I loved myself. Most of us don't, by the way. Some even posit that it's generally impossible to love anyone better than you love yourself, but I have mixed feelings about that. But in my particular case, I was taught very early on in my childhood that I was generally unworthy of love, and that if someone did love me, I owed them big time. And when it came to having my needs met, I was in no way allowed to meet my own needs, because that would mean I "really thought I was something, huh?" and I would be taking leverage out of the hands of my abusers. I was definitely never explicitly taught how to meet my own needs, and if I even began thinking about how to meet them, I was almost guaranteed to end up worse off than when I started.

I was also taught that if I loved someone, that meant I would let them treat me however they wanted, do whatever they want to me, and never ever never put my needs above theirs. And because I was constantly reminded of why I wasn't deserving of love, why on earth would I have ever thought to love myself? And if I can't love myself, and I don't know how to meet my own needs, that means the only source of love, validation, safety, nourishment, joy, and everything else we need to live as human beings, was whoever I could convince to want me.

Needless to say, that makes for some pretty shitty relationship dynamics in adulthood.

— 11/11 1800 Official ( 670)

And because I truly believed that I was a walking pile of hot garbage who didn't actually deserve love, all I knew how to do was to manipulate people into wanting me by pretending to be whoever I thought they wanted me to be. And good lord was I good at it. I still am, to be completely honest with you, but don't worry...I only use my powers for good these days. Back then, it was pure survival. But eventually, you get tired of pretending to be someone you're not, and you expect your partner to love you for who you are. You slowly start to let the mask slip here and there, and your partner slowly realizes you're not the person they fell in love with. So they stop treating you like someone they love, and you begin to feel resentment. But because you don't have an ounce of self-awareness yet, you see them as the problem. They're the one who's changed. And you've tolerated SO many things that you don't like about them, how dare they not return the favor! That's what love is, after all, right? It's overlooking and ignoring everything you don't like about your partner and they do the same for you? It's ignoring all the ways they hurt you or trigger you or make you feel small, and then they ignore all the ways you lie to them and yourself, all the ways you feel incapable of change or compromise, all the times that you constantly act as if life is happening to you rather than because of your own choices.

— 11/11 1830 mini (268)

Obviously, there aren't many people who are willing to engage in this kind of transactional self-betrayal pact for very long, at least not while maintaining good spirits and an affectionate air towards their partner. Inevitably, the clock would run out on the honeymoon phase of all my relationships. The even bigger issue, however, was the fact that I was also conditioned to never ever make anyone feel bad under any circumstances, especially if the circumstance in question was my own unhappiness. If I did, I was very quickly reminded just how small I was, and my nervous system was taught that this very well could be a life-or-death situation. Which meant it often took me years to finally work up the courage to break up with someone when I finally decided I was unhappy and that the relationship was no longer working for me. This isn't even taking into consideration the relationships I was in where my partner was actively emotionally abusive and controlling. In those instances, I wasn't just working against my own trauma programming...I was also working against very intentional manipulation and restrictive abuse. Throughout my twenties, I often felt like a wild bird in a too-small cage.

Now, I want to be very clear when I say that none of the explanations I give here are meant to be taken as excuses or justifications, and I blame absolutely no one but myself for my choices. I also don't expect you to feel pity for me as I describe the very justifiable consequences of my own actions. It's all just context that I feel you need to have in order to fully understand the situation and my internal landscape throughout the rest of this book.

I read a study once where they put a rat in a cage with a button that, when pressed, would activate the pleasure center of the rat's brain. The rat very quickly became addicted to the button, so much so that it avoided food, water, mating and socialization. The rat eventually pleasured itself to death. After years of unfulfilling relationships, from which I felt I had no real escape route. This is how it felt the first time that little voice that whispers all of my worst ideas spoke up and said "You could always just cheat?". The cage door opened, and a tiny little button was placed inside, the cage door closing behind it. So I pressed the button. And then the pleasure would wear off, and the shame would settle over me like a wet blanket. I was disgusted with myself. And I would spend a while being on my "best behavior", trying desperately to reconnect with my partner and get whatever fulfillment I could from that relationship. My partner would continue to act as if I barely existed, or as if any needs I expressed were "not what we agreed to when we started this thing", and I would feel the resentment and anger building with no clear escape route. And in slid the button again. It was one of the worst addiction cycles I've ever experienced, and I've danced the addiction waltz more times than I care to count.

— 11/11 1900 mini (445)

One such cycle was way more destructive than the others. Up to this point, I had been caught in a lie here and there, but I had always managed to deflect or cast doubt or gaslight my way out of it. And please, please know how NOT proud I am of this. I still think about some of the things I did in the past and wish a giant steamroller would crash through my house and put me out of my misery. Just because I talk about these things openly and unflinchingly doesn't mean I don't writhe with disgust for those choices. The difference is, I no longer writhe with disgust for myself. Because 1. I'm not the same person I was when I made those choices, and 2. even if I were, I have learned the difference between shame and guilt. In this particular instance, however, I was still running Shame_and_Disgust_V1.0 and had no idea I was even running a program, let alone that it was missing a critical update.

So there I was, 23 years old with a two year old at home, and I was not only cheating on my partner, but I was doing it with a friend's husband. I know, I can feel your disgust and I don't blame you. But just stick with me if you want to see what it looks like to learn from something unforgivable. You never know when you might need that skill in your back pocket.

We'll call my friend Amy, and her husband Peter. Now, Amy and Peter had what was probably the most toxic marriage I had ever seen to-date. Again, this is no excuse for my behavior, but it feels appropriate to mention. Another best friend and her husband had recently discovered swinging and polyamory, and I was full to the brim with envy as I listened to her tell me about all of her exploits and how good it had been for her relationship. I had casually mentioned it to my partner, and he made it very extremely abundantly clear that we would not be exploring any such options in our relationship. For some reason, this made me feel even more justified in my decision to cheat? My (very warped) thought process was "I know you're unhappy too you little shit. I'm literally giving you an out, so you don't have to be the bad guy and break up with me, or cheat on me. You could have had the best of both worlds, but no..." In my mind at the time, he deserved it. For additional context, I had caught him with some very condemning messages in the past that made me 99.99% certain that he had cheated on me as well. He also refused to go to couple's counseling with me despite months of me telling him how unhappy I was and begging him to work on the relationship with me, so that definitely added to the feelings of justification, but again, I know this is still no excuse.

So here I am at Amy and Peter's house, and they start hitting on me. They're giving me that "we saw you from across the bar and we liked your vibe" kind of energy, and I was falling for it hook, line, and sinker.