Before I left for work, I received a text from a friend of mine’s ex-girlfriend. I’ve been in not-so-constant contact with her since they broke up. She had added me on to Facebook because I bequeath my friends with free Tarot readings periodically and she kept me around for that purpose. I had never met her and never intended to. So, color me shocked when she started texting me after they broke up. I had already reached out to my friend to talk with him about things because I knew he was having a bad time of things prior to that. (We meet up periodically when I have “the feel” that he needs to talk, which usually means he winds up in my dreams on a nightly basis until I give into the urge to call him.) She reached out to me for a Tarot reading, but also because she knew that we were “birthday buddies.” Since we were born twelve hours, or less, apart, we tend to just kind of “know” things about one another that is absolutely true. Anyway, we talked until I found out she was (A) a Scorpio (and he a Leo!) and (B) she was the crazy girlfriend type.
She sent me a new text this morning about how, after two months of being broken up, she was “so sure” she was “over it.” And that she had dreamed about him the night before and now, was a “pathetic mess.” While I won’t comment on how pathetic she may or may not have been after dreaming about someone she thought she was going to marry, my advice to her was that even though she may consciously believe she had dealt with the issues of the break up, she really hadn’t. And her subconscious mind was going to continue to poke at her at random moments until she did so. I recommended some “basic shadow work” techniques to her: relive the relationship so that you can pinpoint your faults and his, as well as try to relive it as an outsider so that you can look at all events subjectively. And she was like, “I did that, but it still hurts.” I emphatically explained that she had obviously not done that since her brain was still picking at the wound, but she wouldn’t listen to what I had to say. (Ain’t that the way?) I gave up.
This got me mulling in my [few and far between] off moments at work. It came down to the fact that I was the kind of person who “knew the things” and so people would come to me for advice. But, just because I give them the advice that they actually should pay attention to that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are actually going to listen. It also made me realize that just because I say, “do this,” that doesn’t mean people really understand what in the world I was talking about. I can say a thing and I can say it in another way, but that still doesn’t mean that people who aren’t “woo inclined” will understand how one does this. This led me to think about how, maybe, the bits and pieces that I’ve learned from Dusken aren’t quite enough for the people I know who are not woo-inclined. Point in fact, the person I was speaking with this morning has admitted to excessive amounts of atheism. She’s highly skeptical of readings I do for the dead on her behalf, but fully believes every Tarot reading I’ve ever done. (How’s that for double standard?) Another example is a friend of mine’s daughter who needs to do some deep healing after a severe trauma. I’m almost positive my explanations of what I needed her to do were lost on the sixteen-year-old, who also has a deep skepticism and deep atheism. (Do I collect these people or something?)
How in the world do you get someone who doesn’t understand what you need to do to, well, do it?
I began pondering how else I may explain this to outsiders. It’s one thing when you can speak, pagan to pagan or polytheist to polytheist. There are certain connections that you can formulate with people of like-minded or similar spiritual paths. After using a few key words, the two of you can sit, head to head, and start working out what to do. In same vein, there are other bloggers of polytheistic or pagan persuasions who have blogged about these things before for those particular communities. If you don’t have the time or the energy to discuss it with someone new, then you pop over some links and tell them to “go for it!” However, while everyone knows my religious background isn’t exactly a secret, I’m not comfortable sharing links with people who aren’t of the same religious persuasion as me. The links of shadow work, and how to shadow work, entries tend to belong to bloggers who are, well, rather “woo” in their practice. And there’s nothing wrong with that! I fully endorse having (or not having) woo in your life. But, I’m slightly uncomfortable tossing those types of links to people who are, de facto, atheists.
So where is the middle ground here?
I started perusing through a lot of my related entries on my ex-husband. And minus the items that were woo related, I felt that it was a good jumping off point. But hadn’t I mentioned that to the girl this morning? Hadn’t I explained to her that you had to relive the whole experience? Hadn’t I said that you had to at least try to be as neutral as possible while going through it? Personally, while it takes a lot (especially in a years’ long relationship) out of you to be able to do this, it’s incredibly important to try to be impartial while going through the experiences in question. It’s not just a matter of trying to pinpoint where the other person screwed the pooch, but also where you screwed up, as well. And as far as we are concerned about ourselves, we are perfect and can do no wrong. This isn’t the case at all because, well, we’re human. So, it doesn’t matter what we say or do, but in some form or another, we may have caused some serious stress in our partner’s life, which later manifested as the endings of all endings.
The real question here isn’t a matter of whether or not you are capable of doing this, but whether or not you have the gumption to look yourself in the face and admit all your fuck-ups.
There are a lot of people who simply cannot admit that they were complicit in the downfall of a relationship. I know that, for the longest time, I couldn’t see myself as anything more than someone who had been wronged. As the years past, I began to harbor the belief that I was a victim. As evidenced by some outsiders’ comments regarding, a lot of it was victimization (at least towards the end of our relationship). But, I can look back and say, “I screwed up really bad here, here, and here,” and also tell you what I learned from having fucked that shit up. That is absolutely something that’s really damn important. But, as I said, I didn’t first start off that way. As I said, I started off seeing only the fact that I was wronged all across the board. So, how do you get to the point where you can start working on this shit and not have it eat you up inside? I don’t always think waiting around years to start the process (as I did) is a good idea, especially if you need to do the healing now (as in the case of my friend’s daughter).
While discussing this, with myself, I thought about the suggestions I had offered to my friend’s daughter. I was throwing out random suggestions on how best “to heal” and how best to start her round of shadow work. She has a lot more open doors to practice this stuff with. And I think a lot of the ideas I threw out there are pretty damn sound.
1. Write Really Bad Poetry
I thought back over the years, as a teenager, when I would always carry a notebook around with me so that I could write down whatever overly emotive poetry came to mind. Years later, I still have every single one of those notebooks and I can tell you that, while they kind of have a beat or something to them, they are pretty bad. I’m not just talking in that, “Gah, I can’t believe I wrote that,” kind of way, either. They are also bad because they discuss every messed up and screwed up thought that popped into my head at some point or another. There are poems about (TW) suicide, eating disorders, rape, and everything in between. (/TW) The items you choose to write about aren’t just to convey to people without saying, “I suffer from these things,” but it’s also a way to get the pain from those items out and into the open. Even though you may be the only person who actually reads the items and maybe you are the only person who gives a fig, but that notebook/blog/tablet app may just be the quintessential shadow work you need to get to the next step(s). I think that the reason I was able to deal with high school and all the crazy shit that went down for me back then was because of the ability to write those types of poems. Another reason, I think, why it helped so much was because it didn’t matter if I kept the prose or if I followed iambic pentameter (or whatever the fuck it was). It was just a bunch of words strung together in vaguely poetic fashion. In same vein, take that and use it to your advantage. And who cares what the fuck it sounds like so long as it makes you feel better?
2. Write Short Stories
I wrote a lot of novella length items regarding my ex-husband because I finally had the gumption to write the shadow work entries related. I also had a lot of time on my hands to write other types of short stories. While the shorts, themselves, didn’t necessarily mirror the relationship exactly, it focused on key points in the relationship that I had always wanted to make changes to. So, with the red pen of an editor, I went back through my life and red-penned the fuck out of things I had always wanted to change. There is a certain amount of power in being able to change items you want to change. And it doesn’t even have to be characters based on real people, either. If you do the fanfiction thing, then write your life experiences into a fanfic starring your favorite actor, anime character, etc. It’s not as though you need to do a monkeys writing Shakespeare thing here. You are taking an aspect of your life that has hurt you beyond repair and fixing it, just a smidge, at a time. Grammar, spelling, punctuation: nothing matters beyond what you think needs to matter because this isn’t about what others think (if you letter others read it) but about what makes you feel better.
3. Scream A Lot to Loud Music.
The reason I’m saying “to loud music” is because maybe you don’t have the ability to just scream your head off. It’s possible that you don’t have a car to run to and start screaming to. It’s also possible that you may still live with your parents and they might be very concerned over finding their child screaming for apparently no reason (especially if you haven’t told them what your trauma is). Or, maybe you just don’t feel comfortable screaming for no reason whatsoever. Whatever the reason, I recommend doing this to really loud, bass-infested music. And in so doing, you may not realize how much it makes you feel better, but it does. One of the problems, I think, that causes the traumas to fester is an inability to let out all of the pent-up emotions. Writing, to me, helps in that regard. But sometimes, those things aren’t the be-all, end-all for the needs of the trauma. So, as a teenager, I would put on some Tool (favorite band) and I would scream until I was hoarse or I would scream the lyrics. I highly recommend if that if you do decide to scream to music, you choose something that is appropriate for the mood that you are needing to create. Screaming is great on its own, but if you’re going to listen to music while doing so, then something that epitomizes either the trauma that’s caused the harm or your emotions concerning it are an excellent addition.
4. Cry A Lot [to Loud Music].
The music part on this one is pretty fucking optional. If you want to be depressed as all get out, then sure, cry to some Celine Dion over a break up (or whatever). But, really, the crying part is probably the most important aspect to this. A lot of people (like me) do this really unhealthy thing where you bottle up your emotions. It’s really not recommended by anybody and as someone who has done this for long enough, I can attest that it causes more problems in the long run. What I can say is that crying is something that we need to do. I’m not really sure on the science of it all, but we have the ability to make tears for a reason. And we have those tears during high emotional moments for a reason. So, by not letting those high emotional moments cause an ending-in-gagging crying jag, then you’re doing yourself a severe disservice. So, seriously, I think it’s something you really need to do when it comes to working on shadow work.
5. Therapy.
I’m not a fan of therapists. I’ve had quite a few in my life and I have found one that I actually trusted enough to tell everything to. I had one that told me that I feel too much – exactly what you should say to an emotional twelve-year-old – and another who made me feel like my date rape was my fault – and she was a rape counselor! So, I’m not overly thrilled with the whole idea behind going to see someone you pay to listen to you for an hour a week or however many times you actually go. However, I also know that it has helped me to have impromptu therapy sessions. I’m not just talking about the person you pay, but since you pay them and they have to listen to you, it’s kind of a bonus, but I’m also talking about the ones you have with your friends. Or, if you don’t feel like you can mention your real emotions to your friends, then that means therapy in any and all means that you think will pay off. If that means eating an entire gallon of ice cream, then you do it. If that means taking a lot hot baths, then do so. If that means losing yourself, almost literally, in a book or twelve, then do so. If that means talking to your pets, then do so. If that means talking to strangers on the Internet, then do so. If that means talking to trees, the ocean, a river, a bird, your car, to yourself, then do so. Whatever the word “therapy” means to you, then follow through with it. Just talk. Just blather. Just go on and on and on to yourself or whatever or whomever and don’t stop for anything. Let every little thing come pouring out in a complete rush and don’t stop until you’ve shot out every aspect of the pain imaginable.
While these items aren’t the entire list of things I did as a teenager to get through some pretty hellacious times in my life, they are the items that I think are the best and fastest recommendations. While not all of these items will prepare the person for the next step of reliving the past, it will definitely help in getting the pain out of you. It will also help to get the whole thing moving. By allowing the pain of the trauma to stagnate, you’re pretty much condemning yourself to that much more work for that much longer. By being able to at least partially address the trauma in minor ways, you’re preparing yourself for the next steps.
As tomorrow begins the start of the intercalary days prior to my Kemetic New Year, I knew I had to get this entry written tonight or leave the story without an ending. As someone who always thought of themselves as an author, leaving something so open-ended was tantamount to failure.
There are a lot of things I haven’t mentioned in this year-long work with my ex-husband and all that I have put myself through in an attempt to prevent our traveling this road again. While my writing down every ounce of what happened between us in this current life was important, it was only a small part to the overall work that I had to go through. Much of the work that I put myself through had to do with astral shenanigans as well as reliving our past lives together. A lot of the work was such intense healing work that there are no words to describe what I had to put myself through in order to destroy the tether that bound our two souls. I’m going to finally describe what I did on the astral, minus the past life stuff, so that others who read this will know what NOT to do if they ever end up like me.
After Hekate made it abundantly clear that my ex-husband and I have been bound together, soul to soul, for numerous lives, I began to feel like I had a black, oozing cancer manifesting itself in my soul. This cancer would begin to eat away at every ounce of who I am and destroyed a lot of the connections I had been building over the years. It tended to come out in a physical way with self-destructive impulses, as well as depression, anxiety, and anger. These emotions, while I do experience them on my own, seemed to be multiplied and exacerbated no matter what sort of motions I went through in order to stem the tide. It was almost as if this cancer was trying to destroy me because I was attempting to remove it.
Much of the ooze – there really is no descriptor besides that for what his soul facet within mine was like – had become so integrated into my core soul components that a simple surgery like we would get at the astral doctor was out. I had to do a form of chemotherapy to remove it. With each dose of this form of astral chemo – usually in the form of watching a past life over and over again, trying to see it from clinical eyes instead of emotional eyes – would shrink the cancer a little bit at a time. And with each time I came back from that adventure, I would find myself more disconnected, more disillusioned, more depressed, and questioning my sanity all the more. While the last bit may not have anything to do with the connection I have with my ex-husband, it is something that I began to take note of right along with everything else as I fought back against the cancer eating away at my soul.
Around the time that Hekate began to make motions about leaving, I grew tired of waiting on the chemotherapy. A lot of the tired of waiting was my own fault. I put a lot of this off for longer and longer periods of time. This was, also, I’ve come to diagnose, a side effect of that soul cancer. With each entry I wrote here and each trip into the astral, I ended up coming back from it with less and less desire to work on the problem. I began to truly despair that I would get this done in a timely manner. And with Hekate leaving me in the good hands of Sekhmet to continue the healing process, I really knew that I had a choice here. I could continue down the tried and true path, taking my doses of chemotherapy each night or I could do something drastic.
Here’s a little known fact about me: I am the most impatient sonofabitch you ever did meet.
So, without any anesthetic or any warning, I reached into my soul and yanked the cancer out. I flung the dirty, the vile, the horrific thing away from me. And I fell to the ground.
Don’t worry, this is not recommended and I got my ass handed to me. Hekate decided that I was an idiot and that’s, actually, why she left when she did. Sekhmet cooed over me and yelled at me. I got a lot of yelling as I lay curled on my side for days in the astral. I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t do anything. For large parts of it, I wasn’t even aware of what was going on in the astral because I hadn’t just ripped out the cancerous ooze that was my ex-husband’s binding to my soul, but I had also managed to rip out a large portion of my soul with it. And of course, since nothing was ever easy either because of myself or because this is my life, those soul pieces were now missing. With three-quarters of a soul, I began to slowly come back to myself. Most of the next few days were entirely devoted to Sekhmet yelling at me, Aset cooing over me and clicking her tongue, and Mut doing her motherly affectation.
I was pretty much in a daze.
I spent the next few months slowly going around and trying to find the piece of my soul that I had ripped out along with the cancer. Aset would send me places and I would begin to find what I needed in order to start piecing the puzzle of my soul back together. I don’t know how or why, but very much like the crystal from InuYasha, my soul pieces ended up all over the fucking place. I managed to gather up many of those pieces and brought them back to Sekhmet to have her bind them up and shove them back into place. The problem here is that not all the pieces were found – the cancer was still attached to some of the soul bits and I couldn’t figure out how to clean it off so I figured it was better to do without – and so that fit wasn’t complete. Sekhmet did… something… and the soul bits have managed to reform with one another. The fit isn’t total; it’s definitely not complete.
I don’t recommend doing this for a lot of reasons – the yelling, the pain, the daze, the stupidity – but above all, the problem is that when you are trying to re-grow soul bits to fit with one another, you end up kind of insane for a while. It’s very much like a broken mosaic that has to be refit together. Sekhmet used bits of herself to fortify what she was doing and got some other bits from some helpful other spirits we know. There were days where I didn’t know who or what I was and what I was supposed to be doing on the astral. Other days, I couldn’t remember how to get back to the astral at all. And in still other days, half of me was in the astral while the other half was living here, doing things and being alive.
Another reason why this was can be so difficult is because you end up with various personalities more at the surface than with other personalities. This is how you get to meet how many soul facets you have within you, but it’s not really a good idea if you have to, you know, like live a life or anything. I found two major personalities in my soul who are polar fucking opposites and there were days where I wanted to rip my head off of my shoulders because I was rapidly cycling from personality to personality. This was pretty much when I was given absolute fucking obvious testimony that I am (A) Sekhmet’s daughter and (B) not as crazy as I always just assumed.
While all of this insanity was going on with my woo life, I ended up doing some very cathartic in-this-life magix to assist in my moving on.
Sometimes, literally cutting cords is the most cathartic thing a person can do.
I went out and bought one of those shitty little rope toys you can purchase for your dog. I was hoping for a pure white one, but ended up with this kind of multicolored ribbon type for $1. I pinned my name to one end and my ex-husband’s to the other. I placed it as an offering upon Sekhmet’s shrine and over three days, I literally cut the cords.
It was during this time that I began to seriously consider what the step for these halves were. I knew that I needed to do something nurturing towards my half, but I wasn’t quite sure what I needed to do with the ex-husband’s half. It was then that I wrote my entry regarding the etiquette of saying goodbye. After a lot of back and forth with myself, I decided that as much as I still want to make him feel badly for what he did to me, it wasn’t worth it. Sometimes, the fact that we can say, “I really dislike what you have done to me and I would very much like you to acknowledge that you screwed me over, I am an adult and I can walk away.” As an adult, I decided I would be kinder to he than he has ever been to me.
This is what my half looked like when I was finished.
With both of our halves in hand, I began to sing to myself as I braided charms into the ends. I placed little amulets for dreams, hope, success, spoons, and other type things on my end. I fed my half with all of the things I was hoping to find in my life without my ex-husband and his soul being bound to mine. Instead of searing the ends as I knew that would hurt terribly, I ended up tying off the ends so that they would “atrophy” and drop off, making it impossible for my half to adequately forge with his again. I added four jingle bells to it so that he would know I was coming if we meet again in the astral or if we meet in another life.
I did the same for his half because, again, I am the adult here.
I buried my half in a pleasant place beside a birch tree. The place that I chose was really no contest. I knew that I wanted to finish my half of the rite in a place where I was comfortable and where I could watch over that portion of myself over the years. Not only did I finish the rite in a place where I am happy and at peace – and honestly, whenever I go there, I feel like I am ‘home’ – but I also had TH assist me with the burial part. This was a symbolic way of showing that not only did TH help me completely in getting away from my ex-husband in this life, but that he has continued, over the years, to help me in contending with the horror and trauma from that time of my life. So, with hands held, we buried my portion of my soul in a pleasant, happy place.
There are moments where I look back to those heady days of beginning this Kemetic path of mine and I have to wonder why no one took me aside and said, hey. Hey. This shit is hard. I don’t think that would have actually deterred me from the path that I am on now, but I would like to think that if someone had given me a little bit more forewarning than I had, which was to say precisely none, then I may have at least paid closer attention to the book learning and to what those people who could be deemed as “older and wiser” were saying. I knew, technically, that going into this would be difficult. After all, I’m historically informed and recreating a religious tradition that hasn’t been actively practiced from a layman’s perspective in thousands of years. However, the reality is that I spend more time crying and blubbering about how I don’t know what the hell I’m doing versus actively attaining the homeostasis I think I see brewing in practices that have been around longer than mine. Even though I am quite aware that appearances aren’t everything, I seriously have some rather nastier moments where I’m pretty sure everyone is doing this so much easier than I am and having so much more success. And in those dark moments, I wonder if they got that warning I never got. You know, the one: this shit is hard.
With each new ask that I get and each new convert I see entering the scene, I tend to have this intense desire to take them aside and say, “Back the train up, Johnny. There’s something you really need to know about all of this.” And then, with a furtive glance over my shoulder, I want to shake them like a rag doll and scream, this shit is hard – run the other way because this shit is so damn hard. There’s no manual to turn to. As many books as I own and as much reading as I’ve done, there’s no big, huge book that I can turn to for the answers. When I’m having an internal debate about spoon management or about boat paddling, I can’t turn to a Kemetic version of the Bible and read a passage, learn a thing, and move on with my life. I have to continue those internal debates. I have to make a mistake, pass the test with flying colors, or scrape by barely. There’s no priesthood that can say a prayer for me – I have to do that on my own. There’s no right way or wrong way, really, because I’m practically make it up as I go along. There is nothing in any book that will be able to adequately tell me the things I need to know: what the people thought of the gods, how they believed in things, what they thought of the priesthood, how they felt living in ma’at and how they functioned in their daily life. And even if we did have those things handed to us, even if the ancient Egyptians actually wrote down what the lay people said and thought and believed, it wouldn’t matter. We get to recreate an ancient religion not just removed by time and geography, but also based on morality and history.
I often wonder if people think I joke when I talk about those times that I wind up curled around an altar, crying my little heart out. Frankly, I never am. If I’m going to joke about something, I’ll joke about dicks. I’ll make half-serious remarks about not being a dick. But, when it comes to how often I spend whining at my gods or how often I’ve curled into a ball on the floor, banging my head against the tiles, and just blubbering about how I don’t know what I’m doing? I never joke about those things. I’m incredibly serious. There is nothing more difficult than trying to recreate a religious tradition that is as far removed from us than the other side of the universe is from our galaxy (and that other side keeps expanding, so never the twain shall meet). Those images I’ve posted over and over again with the tag, “this is me” about kicking and screaming? I never joke about those, either. Those go hand-in-hand with the hours, the days, the weeks, and the months where I’ve wound up crying on the floor because everything is just so fucking hard. I’m not just kicking and screaming because I am being forced into something that I don’t think I’m ready to work on – see: shadow work – but I’m also kicking and screaming because this shit is hard.
The worst part about it all is that it doesn’t matter how well read you are or how active you are in your practice. It really doesn’t matter if you are more of the armchair persuasion or if you are more of the active persuasion. It will always be difficult to sit up and say, “I’m doing well,” with pride in your voice. I’m not saying that you won’t have moments like that. You will. I do. There are days where I’m like, “fuck yeah, man; I know what I’m doing.” And then something will come out of left field and I’ll end up on the floor again, crying about how I don’t know what I’m doing and how much I suck at this. As often as you go hunting for the religious equivalent of homeostasis with your practice, there will always be some other task, some other item that is lurking in the corners like some religious-related robber or something, ready to steal all of your good deeds, hard work, spoon management, and boat paddling away from you. And when that happens, the ghost of the voice in the back of your mind will be whispering, this shit is hard.
We can always turn to one another, to each other Kemetic in those moments, and talk it out. I’ve been on the receiving end of some of my community players’ blow ups about these kinds of things. They’ve been on the receiving end of my version of a blow up because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and I must be screwing everything up in some way or another. That’s the point, I think, in community anyway. It’s a place where you can go and not feel like you’re being judged. And it helps in the Kemetic community – hell, in any of the polytheistic communities – because there are other people who have gone through or are going through the same damn thing that you are. But sometimes, you are so embarrassed by whatever setback you’ve hit that you can’t really bring yourself to mention it. So, you curl around your altars or around your icons or around your pain or around your misery and you cry about it. You cry about how you suck and you’re anxious and how very, very difficult this whole religion shtick is. In those moments, the only thing that we can really do is just let it run its course. Just like there are times where relying on other people to discuss what you perceive as your failures or your hardships, sometimes there are times where you just can’t bring yourself to talk about it with other people. In those moments, of which I have frequently because I’m a lot more socially awkward and anxious than I let on, is when I end up crying, this shit is hard.
For those of you who have these moments more frequently than me, let me just say that you can and will get over it. For those people who have them rarely, let me just say that I am incredibly jealous. And for everyone in between, everyone who is thinking about Kemeticism and what it will be like… let me put it to you this way: there will be moments where it is freeing and exhilarating and thrilling. And then there are moments where it is like you are being tortured by some unknown, all-consuming thing that you can’t fight against but you have to keep going because turning back is not an option. With moments like that, I can assure you that crying about how difficult this path you’ve chosen is quite all right. It won’t solve anything. It may not even make you feel better. But, it’s an option and it’s the best option in many cases.
And it’s quite all right to tell yourself, this shit is hard.
And it’s equally as all right to warn others, this shit is hard.
There is something about goodbyes, no matter how necessary that they may be, that are incredibly painful. I have had a whole host of goodbyes in my life, not many of them at my own behest, and none of them went over very well with my psyche or with my emotional health. There is something about removing someone who you have known for years from your life that is incredibly difficult. Even though you know that what you are doing could very well save your life and the lives of your friends and family, you still think that a goodbye – a final goodbye – is too much to bear. So, you don’t bother doing it and you live on in fear, hatred, anger, and pain until the final end comes or you finally have a single moment, a single second, to run screaming into the night.
Even knowing what life was like towards the end of my marriage, I am still finding it difficult to say goodbye.
I thought I should write a letter, at first, to explain that I forgave him for everything he had put me through. Knowing full well what he had done to me, to my personal growth, to the growth of my soul on the astral, and everything in between, I knew that I had to at least let him know that in some way. While I’ve said that bit here and there on the astral to that soul that once bound with mine, I no longer need to say it. And honestly, that’s not how I wanted to say farewell to a man who had been in my life for years and who had been in previous lives over and over and over again. While I am usually very good at writing and letters and the perfect wording of the point that I want to convey, I found myself still a little angry and still, perhaps, a little unable to forgive the binding of our souls.
I knew a letter wasn’t a good idea.
The thing that I have repeatedly come up against, knowing all that he has done to my in this life, has been the fact that it’s the binding of our souls for so many years that causes me the most heartache. While I cannot remember the exact life or the exact place when our souls united in a very unhealthy way, I do remember the emotions of that person and that aspect of my soul. I can remember the hope. I can remember the joy. And I can even remember the love that my soul—no. I can even remember the love that each of our souls had for one another. And I can remember holding hands while we were bound together with words that I have long forgotten. And I can remember that moment and the surety that if things didn’t work out in this life then they would clearly work out in the next.
I remember the innocence of that moment and not understanding the gravity of the situation.
And I can remember the hope, the joy, the excitement, and the love that we both turned to one another. And in that moment of those beautiful, wonderful emotions, we were bound together. And things didn’t work out in that life, so with hope and joy, we moved on to the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. There really are too many to count now. I have had to relive them all over and over again. And I can remember each moment when my soul searched humanity, scanning each person in front of me for that soul aspect that it needed for completion, for that one person they needed above all others. In some lives, we never met. In other lives, we started over again. And as time went by and each life did not end as we had hoped, as we had wanted, we went back to it again.
And over time, we both became disillusioned.
And over time, I began to want to get away and never return because each life was successively worse than the one that preceded it. It should tell anyone who has read that statement how much hell we both put ourselves through and we both put each other through over the years. We’ve killed one another. We’ve raped one another. We’ve beaten one another. We have done every untoward and awful thing to each other – both the physical shell of our souls and to our souls themselves – over the years and no resolution has ever come.
I understand now, I think, why certain other astral related things happened in this life. And I also understand now why certain people were brought to my life. And now, I understand what I must do. I must sever the tie completely. For all intents and purposes, that tie is actually severed. I feel peaceful and dreamy, sometimes, when I go to the place where that soul facet once rested. It’s a facet that I ripped out of myself and kept hidden in a safe place for the day when I could destroy the knots that bound our two souls together. That day has come and gone; the separation has completed. And now, it is finally time to say goodbye.
And I find myself horribly unable to do so.
I’ve gone back through many things in the last few weeks, preparing myself for this moment. While the letter writing thing failed, I looked in other avenues for a proper goodbye.
My issue here is that you can’t just kick someone to the curb after so many lifetimes together – there must be proper etiquette here, hm? However, I can assure anyone else who may have this issue in future that there is not. And I have to create that etiquette all my own. And with the words of Sekhmet in my ears – you’re too nice for your own damn good – I go searching for that etiquette. A simple goodbye, an easy farewell seems like such an anticlimactic end to so many years together, so many hurts together, and so many deaths at one another’s hands. Even with the very real right to just run the fuck away, even now, I find myself unable to do something so simple and so brave.
There must be a proper way to say goodbye.
I keep coming back to the day when our hands were bound together in a rite that neither one of us really understood. He understood it, his astral self anyway, far quicker than my simple little soul facet could. That soul piece is very kind and very nice and has always looked for that knight in shining armor. That very soul facet has always looked for the good in everyone. And it has been her downfall many a time, but not so much more than this particular time. With very real regret and sadness she is willing to say goodbye to a soul that shared her life with her so many times, but she still hopes that there is goodness in that soul and that love will find him one day.
Maybe not in this life and definitely not with her, but maybe in the next and with someone better suited.
I keep coming back to that day when our hands were bound together in a rite that neither of us could really understand. And I keep coming back to that because that was the ultimate moment of betrayal to me, the soul piece that did not willingly bind myself to a man who would kill me over and over again. This soul facet – me – looks back on that moment with pity and horror, knowing what will eventually happen and knowing that there was never anyone around who could have or would have stopped it. The person who I am today is partly because of that kind, sweet, simple girl soul facet who has always wanted a knight in shining arm, riding in on a unicorn with a defeated evil wizard’s head on his shield. But a smaller part of the person who I am today did not agree to that binding. And that smaller part is in control now, demanding that we say goodbye.
But she keeps reminding me that there must be some etiquette, something more than just a simple “va te faire foutre, trouduc” as I am wont to do, and this is why. That moment with hands bound. That moment with tears in their eyes. That moment of heart flutters. That moment of love swelling. That moment in the green grass of unknown time, surrounded by nothing but the flutter of wind, the smell of flowers, and hope on the horizon. She keeps bringing me back there and reminding me that we can’t just kick him to the curb. We can’t just toss him out without a single regret. We can’t just say “fuck the fuck off and die already” to someone who once loved us very much.
To run away from the heaviness that other soul keeps forcing on me, I have gone back through old stories and poems I wrote when I was living with that man. I’ve re-read old blog entries. I’ve gone through our relationship over and over again. I’ve found some very telling pointers in the last few hours that convey that I was fully aware, in a subconscious way, of what was going to happen. With chilling words, I’ve written about this very moment of bittersweet finality over and over again in various made up universes. And with each minute that I have read and re-read what once I wrote about us, I find myself very angry indeed because the soul facet who is stronger now – me – has had enough of this binding, of this connection and wants it all to fucking stop.
And now, I am supposed to say goodbye.
A part of me that is still a little angry and a little bitter wants to curse him still. He had known earlier than my soul facet what the hell had been done to our souls. He had known far sooner than this sweet, little facet and had done nothing to remove the binding. His soul learned faster than mine what was needed or could be done and what had been done between the two of us. Sometimes, I wonder if he knew even back then but that sweet, innocent soul facet assures me that is not the case. I’m more cynical than she is, though, and I have to wonder. Considering all the things he has done to me, astrally speaking, since the day he walked out of our home and said we could get a divorce, I have to think that he knows a hell of a lot more than I do about all of this shit. And that he’s known for far longer. But that sweet part of my soul that is loud, sometimes, and still colors my life in the realm of love and soul mates, swears that my cynical views are not all true and not always the way it is.
I would take her word for it, but I am cynical for good reason.
I have to say goodbye to a man who I have both loved and hated. I will be honest, I have never truly had to say goodbye-goodbye to anyone before. I have never been able to look at a situation and know that I will never, ever see them again in this life or the next or the next or even on the astral. I’m imbedding specific telltale signs in our souls – both his and mine – so that we won’t meet up again without knowing that the other one is bad news and walking the fuck away. I’ve also learned a thing or two, both in this life and in the astral, and I know what needs to be done now to make sure that things never happen like this to my sweet soul facet and to my cynical soul facet ever again.
This is all a novel experience for me, but I will be honest, I hope I never have to do this again.
In the meantime, we have to come up with proper etiquette on how to formally say goodbye before Wep-Ronpet this year. That is the time line we have both established with Sekhmet nodding grandly in the background at our choice. Why would we want to start another twelve month cycle with that ex of ours even slightly in it? We have other projects to work on, other shadow work to get done with, and it will probably take just as long and probably be just as difficult as this one person, this single soul, has turned out to be. We have work to do and that work mostly has to do with what “proper etiquette” of such a permanent goodbye is likely to be.
Sekhmet recommends a final goodbye with fire.
The sweet part of me thinks that we should wish him well and bury him so that “the soul will flourish and grow; the soul will find love again; the soul will learn to maintain its spoons; and it will do so without me.”
The cynical part of me is fond of the fire idea.
But the sweet one wins the day.
She wants to see him grow apart from her even as she grows apart from him and we’ll see it done.
We still need to figure out what a proper goodbye is, though.
Recently, I started receiving the othala rune on my daily pull. I have an app on my phone that I use for a daily Tarot and a daily rune. I find it interesting how the two separate types of divination can correlate with one another. Of course, I could also just be putting too much thought into this every morning. But, lately, no matter what Tarot card I receive (and they are all different), I just keep pulling the othala rune. Normally, I can zoom in on the meaning behind it easily with a quick run down of my internal components. Almost always, it tends to remind me that I need to pay closer attention to hearth and home. While I am trying, desperately, to get better at that whole thing, I still fail. So, it usually comes up periodically to remind me that I have a hearth, I have a home, I have a family, and I should probably pay more attention to them.
Thing is, this time around, I’m not feeling that.
Since I am a diviner via Tarot and oracle decks, I will admit to knowing next to nothing about runes. I added the app to my Tablet, on a whim, because I was interested in branching out my divination techniques. In all this time, I haven’t really learned much from them. However, if I get stumped on what the rune is trying to signify, I go to a host of websites to get others’ interpretations of the rune in question. I will do Google search after Google search, troll the appropriate tag on Tumblr, and integrate what I read with what I’m seeing on my app. In every instance regarding the othala rune, I’ve found a key term that keeps popping up and resonating within my subconscious/soul/something-or-other: the wealth of the ancestors, ancestral connections. In other words, it seems to be signifying something to do with my akhu, but what specific is it trying to tell me?
What’s bothering me even more is that I’m noticing a serious coincidence regarding the pulling of this rune. Whenever it shows up, I almost always have dreamt about Sweet Pea, which means that it has been coming up a lot for me recently. After my 70 days of mourning with the loss of my Sweet Pea, I began to dream heavily about her. Sometimes, I knew that I was actually going to the astral to see her, as well. But on a regular basis, I keep going either to dreams to see her and spend time with her, or I end up going to the astral and traveling with her as my stalwart companion. This is, partially, why I’m pretty sure the rune pull has to do with akhu, as Sweet Pea is a part of my akhu. However, I honestly can’t figure out what one has to do with the other. What does Sweet Pea being a part of my akhu and the dreams/shenans I have of her have to do with this rune? What particular ancestral wealth am I supposed to look to?
Without pulling my Sweet Pea into this, I’ve attempted to look for what type of wealth I could expect from my [genetic] ancestors. I’ve combed back through my memory to attempt to figure out what aspects of them that I have within myself. And I have to admit that I have a lot of aspects from my maternal akhu that have made up who I am today. I have Leo’s legs; I have a passion for history; I am named for a branch of the family; I misquote French sayings; I have the same nose that’s gone back generations. I have a lot of bits and pieces of myself that are aspects taken from the genetic inheritance of my akhu. But honestly, as much as I can see all the items I say, do, and have that bring honor to my akhu, I don’t think this is quite what the rune or my shenanigans with Sweet Pea are about.
So what is it?
What key piece to this damned puzzle am I missing?
And where the hell is my manual when I fucking need it?
Note: All lyrics for Face Down by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus can be found here.
The month of December went out quietly, thankfully. We had no further incidents together. I managed to pass my classes, as did the Sister, and we both made the Dean’s List. This was an achievement to me, at least, and I know it was for the Sister. I don’t recall if the ex-husband fully commented on my being on the Dean’s List, but I know he was pretty proud of the Sister. There she was, a girl who hadn’t gone back to school since high school, achieving the Dean’s List at her local community college. I think he felt that it wasn’t really a good achievement of mine, honestly, and that hurts. I was pretty proud of myself and after I told him and didn’t receive the reaction I wanted, I shut the fuck up about it. In fact, this is the first time I’ve mentioned it since then, so obviously, his lack of reaction did not do me any good.
The Sister and I were effectively housebound for January. We didn’t have any jobs. I had stopped going to my call center job the night of TH’s party. I had to work the next morning, but I just didn’t bother showing up. I told everyone I formally quit, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was too much with school and all of the stress from my ex-husband and our relationship. The Sister was able to procure me a job as super secretary at the Mentor Center in our school, though, because that was where she worked. I was effectively the right-hand man of the woman who ran the center. I would also be assisting with mentoring students and assisting the program in putting on events, but my official title was secretary. I enjoyed the job, overall.
TH spent a lot of time at our house, on the phone with us, or chatting online with us. He knew how we felt about being stuck in a house. And while I may or may not have told him exactly how my relationship with my ex was going – though he wasn’t dumb enough to not see how I was degenerating – he knew things weren’t going well. It was that month that, one night, a friend of mine asked if I could drive her to work at Big Y. And on a whim, after dropping her off three towns over, I called TH to meet me in a public place because I wasn’t ready to go home yet. And we sat in a Wal-Greens parking lot and just talked. I told him how things were pretty bad. I told him how I felt. And he just listened, with my car running and music on low, to everything I had to say. He was good like that.
This became a ritual for us. After the house was quiet, I would sneak off to Wal-Greens and just sit with TH, talking. I was gone for hours sometimes. Other times, since he would meet me at a halfway point with a Walgreen, I was gone for less time. It was a form of cheating, I think, on my ex-husband because I felt exceptionally guilty afterward. It was the emotional kind of cheating, but it was also giving me a base. I was able to recover, a bit, from the feeling of hopelessness and depression that was overwhelming me. And even though I had a therapist in whom I could trust with everything going on, I still held back. I was worried she would judge me for emotionally cheating on my husband, I think, but above all, I couldn’t help but wonder if she would tell him what I said. He found her through his insurance program at work.
As though the ex-husband was aware that I had long since grown unwilling to do anything with our marriage, he began to start harping on the two of us buying a house. His belief about that being what “married couples do,” was not the actual reason. I think this was his attempt at solidifying his hold on me further. If we owned our own home, then the Sister would no longer live with us and his hold on me would be complete. While I hate to ascribe the notion that he wanted to “do as adults do” and “grow up completely,” considering his behaviors prior to his suggesting this, I can’t help (now, as I did then) believe that he was doing this as a final attempt to fully push me completely under his sway. No longer would I be able to sneak out as capably to spend time with people who reminded me that I was a human being, too, and no longer would I have the assistance of the Sister to defuse the mounting tension and stress in my life.
I was terrified of the thought and dragged my heels accordingly.
My emotional state became very, very tenuous as the month of January went by. I began to worry that the reason things were so horrible with my marriage was because of things I had done as a youth. I was not a pious, virginal, sweet teenager. I did many things that I am, to this day, rather ashamed of. I said many, many things that came back to bite me in the ass in some form or another. As I tried to figure out why things were happening the way that they were, I began to believe in a Westernized [and incorrect] version of karma. I began to think of things as “you did this, so this is why this is happening.” It was not a very good frame of mind – never mind the fact that it didn’t even remotely convey what karma actually is. This should show that my frame of mind was more in line with blaming me, the victim, for what was going on in the house between my ex-husband and myself.
In a misguided effort to explain away my karma, I turned heavily towards divination.
I’m not saying that my turning towards divination was the wrong idea. It gave me solace in a mentally healthy way. However, the questions I was asking my Egyptian Pyramid Oracle were not the questions I should have been asking. I was worrying too much about the past and how it was intruding on my present and future. I should have paid more attention to the little things – the reading I gave to TH denoting that if and when he broke up with his girlfriend, he would sleep with her again; the reading I gave to the Sister in which I showed her that the world she was crafting would end; the readings that showed that the card I had once initiated as being that of my ex-husband (Djehuty) had changed dramatically (Sutekh).
Depression works in mysterious ways on everyone. To stave off her own round, the Sister spent nights with her ex Demon Boy. To stave off mine, as best I could, I played with my divination cards and spent an extraordinary amount of time with TH. To stave of his, the ex-husband stopped paying our bills, minus the car and the insurance, and bought useless things. We were all having a hard time of things.
Hey, girl, you know you drive me crazy
one look puts the rhythm in my hand.
Still I’ll never understand why you hang around
I see what’s going down.
TW: Alcohol/Alcoholism
Since TH, the Sister, and I were all having excessive amounts of issues to deal with and no one to coherently do so, we all turned to alcoholism. I have had massive amounts of drinking related issues previously, of which is slightly documented in these entries. But every night, I turned to a drink or six to make it so that I could get through another day. I know this isn’t healthy and I also know that I was incorrect in doing so. There are days, now, where the thought of drinking puts me off entirely. I drink still, but not nearly as often. I’ll have a drink here and there, responsibly, but back then? It didn’t matter. While the three of us were sitting in the kitchen or watching a movie in the living room, we all had drinks. The Sister’s were huge, half-and-half drinks; TH’s were usually about the same. I don’t remember if I poured massive amounts of alcohol into my mixers.
It doesn’t matter.
We all had demons that we couldn’t face for whatever reason and we chose childish behavior to deal with those demons.
There are days where I wonder if my ex-husband was even aware of how much drinking any of us did. He had to have been aware that I had begun drinking again. I didn’t exactly keep it hidden. But, I honestly can’t remember a time in which he said he was worried about it. Maybe he thought that by pushing us to buy our own house, it would go away? I honestly don’t know. If I had begun drinking again in Texas, without anyone around to diffuse the situation, he would have said something and it would have become another epic argument. However, while we were waiting for school to get started, he didn’t say anything to me. He made snide remarks about being immature but he never explicitly said what those remarks were about, so while I could chalk it up to some weird way of acknowledging my problem was back again, it probably had more to do with the general situation as opposed to this particular one.
One night, while the three of us were sitting at the kitchen table, my ex-husband was upstairs, but the Sister’s boyfriend was over. He had bought himself a fifth of whiskey because that’s what “men drink.” I made a joke about how I wasn’t allowed to have any whiskey – my high school friends had banned me from it. It’s a long story and it will probably be discussed in future shadow work entries, but I tend to be more of a tactless ass after drinking whiskey than usual. So, as a kind of dare, the Lumberjack gave me some whiskey. And that was really his big mistake.
That was the night I made a Lumberjack cry.
As I said, we were all sitting around the kitchen table. I had my Pyramid Oracle out, but I don’t think any of us were paying attention to the cards I was pulling. TH, the Sister, and I had been drinking vodka and diet Coke for a while by then. I would shuffle and pull out a card. Almost on a dare, the Lumberjack shared his whiskey with me. Considering the fact that I had a black out previously because of mixing types of alcohol together, it shows, to me, how very far gone I was at that point. I didn’t care if I had to be rushed to the hospital. I didn’t care if I didn’t remember huge chunks of my life. I didn’t care at all. And that, really, is what makes it so much worse when I drink whiskey. If I’m at that low of an ebb in my life where I will consciously drink some, then whatever bits of me still care will just magically dry up. And I stop caring.
It takes a while for whatever inner preservation or inner voice that prevents me from saying things to stop working. It takes a while for whiskey to do as it should. It doesn’t really matter if I’m excusing my behavior because of what I was drinking or if, as I strongly suspect, whiskey just lowers my fucks to the magic number 0. Either way, I’m not nice. And the Lumberjack was completely forewarned. As my mom always said, “Forewarned is forearmed.” However, not in his case because I don’t think he took my warnings seriously.
During all of this time, the Sister had been letting little things that irritated her about him drop between us. She’d mention a little thing here – “he breathes through his nose so loudly; why?” – and we’d laugh about it later. Then, she’d drop another hint – “our sex life is so boring” – and it was with this fuel. Under no uncertain terms did I explain to him that showering daily was good, that wearing plaid flannel shirts had gone out in the 80s, that missionary was not the only position in bed, that video gaming was a passion, not a lifestyle, and that breathing was a privilege and he should do it more quietly. I was… cruel. I was nasty. With all of the pent-up emotions regarding my ex-husband that I didn’t dare let out deep inside of me, I used that fuel to make a man cry for all the true items no one had ever said.
I think, at one point, my ex-husband finally came downstairs to protect the Lumberjack. The two of them were very buddy-buddy at that time. I shut down then. I went back to my cards and lost interest in making a man cry. Instead, I went back to trying to divine shit like why this was happening to me and where it was all coming from. I know now, of course, that everything that happened then was unavoidable. As with the loss of my job in August of 2011, it was fated. And that’s all the cards ever told me.
This was fated. /TW
Cover up with makeup in the mirror
tell yourself, it’s never gonna happen again
You cry alone and then he swears he loves you.
One of the things that I’ve tried to figure out the most was why I did half the shit I did during those hellish three months in 2007. I’ve sat around and pondered them to myself, often, and thought, Why did I do this? I’ve looked back often, and not just because of these entries, trying to ascertain what was going through my head at the time that I made X unchangeable decision and went with it. I’ve come to a few conclusions here. I don’t think I ever consciously made a decision to do a damn thing back then. I just went off gut instinct and survival. That’s all I was really trying to do – survive a really shitty fucking life – in the best way I knew how. Drinking offered solace because when the ex-husband wanted to fight, I was too fucked up to care anymore. It didn’t hurt so badly if I was numb, right? The next steps that I made to preserve a modicum of myself are less savory and possibly, I will be judged harshly for them. But there are things a person will do to stop the pain, to stop the horror that you don’t realize you would willingly do until you’re doing them.
It’s not an excuse; it’s just the truth.
Periodically, during that month where the Sister and I were housebound, I was able to take our car to do things. They were extremely rare moments, honestly. I wasn’t really allowed to touch the car that was in both of our names unless I had permission, which was why my midnight Wal-Greens outings with TH tended to not be announced in any form. We ignored the reality – the missing gas, the missing time, the fact that I was not home – on all ends. I’m sure the Sister deflected questions on my behalf, but she didn’t know a damn thing about what was going on between TH and I. She didn’t know that I was retaining a bit of my emotional self with my midnight chats with TH because I didn’t tell her where I was going or who I was with. The Sister can’t lie for shit. And knowing this, I sacrificed a bit of our friendship to save myself. I don’t blame her and I don’t hate her for it. She didn’t exactly tell me she was cheating on her boyfriend with ex Demon Boy (never mind because I would have reacted badly). We both harbored secrets from the other that neither one of us have harbored again or since.
We tell each other everything now.
I went up to New Hampshire and I took TH with me. It was nice. We were away from both of our terrible situations. We were away from everything. We spent the day singing songs and talking about things and enjoying a peace-filled day. We ended our day together with tentative kisses. I was the provocateur. I knew TH would never make the first move and I knew that I wanted to know what that was all about. I had come to terms with the idea of only ever kissing my ex-husband for the rest of my life, but I couldn’t let another second go without kissing him. I think we were listening to Metallica and we were in a Wal-Greens parking lot. (It’s a joke now.) And then I dropped him off at home and drove around for a while before going home.
I came home to the Sister screaming, “OH MY GOD,” in the computer alcove. I went running upstairs, dropping off my packages and my good humor in the kitchen. I ran upstairs – it was night – and demanded to know what the hell was going on. “He broke up with [name redacted] and now she’s threatening to commit suicide!” She was screaming. We had both advised he break up with his girlfriend for months and he had always politely listened to our advice without following it. My good mood was definitely gone. I felt guilty. I hadn’t taken into consideration what sort of effect our kissing would have on anyone. I had thought I could go home with a boost – someone else cared about me and not in a possessive, scary way – but I hadn’t realized what sort of thing I was causing in his life. I felt guilty. I fell to the floor, shocked. The Sister gave me a play-by-play of his conversation with [name redacted]. I was in shock all night and into the next morning.
Guilt swirled around me like a cloak. I was wearing it for cheating, emotionally and now physically, on my ex-husband. And I was wearing it because I broke up a couple that should have broken up a long time ago. Really, in either of those instances, I don’t think guilt should have played into anything.
School started up again, which gave the Sister and I a welcome reprieve from being housebound. We both enjoyed our schooling, truth be told. I guess we’re exceedingly odd people who are interested in what we wanted to major in. However, non-school problems kept cropping up. One night, while I was getting ready to go into our night class (History of Witchcraft) that TH, the Sister, and I were all taking together, I saw TW my rapist /TW walking by. And I froze. Internally, I froze but physically, I was off like a fucking shot. I went outside and ran around the building and I just about wanted to run all the way back to Texas and say fuck everything. There was a message here, of course, and the message people told me it was, well, that wasn’t right. The real message was “foreshadowing.”
I was going insane. I couldn’t think or feel properly at all unless I was near TH. The Sister helped to offset what my emotional responses to what they should have been. I had every right to freak out about the situation above, but I should have paid more attention.
The first time I slept with TH, I was happy. It was nice. It was different. It was like I could feel something and like, I wasn’t really an unwanted dishrag anymore. I felt… I didn’t feel whole. That’s not quite right. It was like things were smoothing out all of my rough edges. The pain that had been accompanying me for months was gone. I was all right for a while at least. It wasn’t like other moments where you first have sex with a significant other where you’re nervous about fucking up and then, after, you’re all embarrassed. It was just… it was nice. And I felt better for a while.
TW: Rape
That very same night, the ex-husband did to me what he said he would never do to me. He had made joking comments of which I disapproved of. “Wifely duties,” was what he called it, but he had never traveled far enough outside of who he was as a person to do something like that to me. He knew how screwed up, still, I was because of the experiences I suffered in high school. And he knew that I was not a whole human being because of those experiences. He knew that Octobers were the worst. He knew that I still grew depressed about it. However, due to other experiences with rape victims, he seemed under this mistaken impression that my sexual anorexia was due to not having orgasms. What a laugh. It had nothing to do with the orgasm. It really didn’t have anything to do with flash backs, really. It was just… not something I cared to do.
So, he wheedled me. And he bothered me. I don’t know if he knew, somewhere deep inside, what had happened earlier that day. But, I told him no. I said I wasn’t in the mood. And he said that was always the case. I want to say that he held me down and I fought him valiantly. I want to tell people that I was able to scratch his face and hiss in anger at him as I fought him away from me, inevitably failing. But, I saw his face. I saw his face and the look on his face brooked no arguments. I never told him it was all right. I never agreed. I never said anything. I just lay there with tears in my eyes while emotions of what happened to me in high school swirled around me. “Wifely duties,” was exactly how he was seeing it in that moment. It wasn’t an act of forcing someone to do something they weren’t willing to do, to him. It was him just doing as a man in a married relationship is supposed to do in order to procreate and feel better about the world.
Afterward, I waited until he fell asleep, frozen on inside and on the outside. In a weird freak of emotion, I felt like I had cheated on TH somehow. What a laugh. But, that should explain how fucked up my world was then. My relationship, according to my insides, was actually with TH and I had to stomach a horrific situation in the mean time. When I knew he was asleep, I slipped downstairs and the Sister was on the computer. I had half a mind to tell her what the ex-husband had just done. I had half a mind to tell the world, but the words caught in my throat and I locked myself in the bathroom. I wouldn’t go to school the next day.
I took a shower very carefully. I know how it can be, after you’ve been raped, and the feeling of dirt being overwhelming. I remember those days where I would scrub myself with a stiff-bristled brush after I was raped in high school and I was careful not to follow that example. I locked the experience in a vault in my mind and wasn’t very surprised when I saw all the blood seeping from between my legs. It wasn’t that he had been rough, aside from the initial entering with no lubrication. He had torn me a bit because my body had resisted even while my mind shut down. Carefully, carefully, I took a warm shower – not super hot because that may have exacerbated my feelings – and I dressed in warm, bulky clothes to hide myself.
I slept on the couch that night.
I bled for a week. /TW
A pebble in the water makes a ripple effect
every action in this world will bear a consequence
If you wade around forever, you will surely drown
I see what’s going down.
I stopped sleeping, after a while. In a twist of fate that I cannot even convey, I began to have the worst possible dreams about my ex-husband. It was like my waking life wasn’t nightmare enough, so my mind had to make my sleeping life just as awful. In fact, the nightmares were worse. Without fail, the ex-husband would find out about my cheating or about some minor infarction or not know anything at all and he would kill me. He was always choking me to death. I think my mind chose this because he had a weird fascination with erotic asphyxiation that had been brought about because of a previous relationship (the “one who got away”). Even as I write this, I can still remember those dreams and the feeling of being unable to breathe when I woke up, clawing at my neck to get his hands off of me. What made it worse was the night he dreamed the exact same thing.
He woke up, crying and clutching at me. And I woke from another spate of choking nightmares to that. I flinched as he was trying to cuddle me to him, crying into my hair. I remember looking at the ceiling, not sure if I should say anything to him because I was sure that this was it. Instead, I asked him why he was crying and he told me back the dream I had just been having, verbatim. “And I killed you,” I remember him sobbing at me and that’s when I knew that this wasn’t some fucked up emotional response. This was real. There was a part of him that wanted to kill me and choke me to death.
On my old blog, I wrote about this. A very old friend who is extremely Christian said, “Symptomatic of occult involvement I’m afraid. I’ve seen it happen to a workmate.” At first, most rational people who scoff at such a statement, but I didn’t. I was long since far from rational at that point. But, while the Sister and I were very busy trying to figure out why my ex-husband had changed so dramatically since we moved in together in September, demons had come up. We had watched one work on her ex Demon Boy before. And while I wondered if it was possible if the demon in Demon Boy had brought reinforcements to infect my ex-husband, I don’t think so. I honestly don’t. I think the ex-husband invited something in at some point, knowing or otherwise, and this was what we had to deal with: the aftermath. This explained, clearly, why the Pyramid Oracle deck had gone from his card being the card of wisdom and guidance and positive male influence to chaos and the bringing of death.
It was around that time that the ex-husband changed completely for the worse. I guess I was the catalyst.
I was out, on one of our midnight chat sessions, with TH. I was in his car and he was telling me to run away. Both the Sister and TH, by this time, had only ever told me to get out, get out, run away, go back to Texas. But, I was honestly frightened of what he would do when he found out that I was gone. I knew he would attack the Sister. She had told him, previously, that she had back up in the form of her dad, her grandfather, her uncles, and her brother, but I was so frightened of my ex-husband that I didn’t think they’d be able to hold out against him. And I was worried what he would do to TH. I didn’t know his family or what they were like. I didn’t know anything about them except that they were people who lived in the same house with him. They had guns, I guess, but I didn’t think it was enough to stop him from doing something crazy to TH.
And he was a firefighter – part of the boy’s club. It was yet another problem that runs rampant in small towns with police, fire, and EMS. They get together and they can do no wrong. They all bleed the blood of men and women who are first responders. What I would have said, had I gone to the police, would have sounded crazy. And I think the ex-husband may have done that on purpose.
“Take money and stash it,” they said. My mom told me to get a duffel bag to bring my “essentials” with. I was told to get a throwaway cell phone so I wouldn’t have to rely on the ex-husband’s largesse to communicate with people he didn’t want me to. But, he would have found all those things if I had tried to hide it. Even if I had hidden it in the basement where I would never go, he would have found it. If he had the smallest inkling of what was going on, he would have found all the things I was hiding and it would have been worse for me, I think. If he really was possessed by a demon, it didn’t matter how good at lying and hiding I was – it would have found all my plans.
It was then that the ex-husband began to say, “I would let you divorce me, but then I’d have to kill you.” All in one breath. If he wasn’t saying that, then he was telling me what he would do to my friends, my dogs, my family if I went missing. I knew better than to run away.
So, anyway, that night I was with TH and he was telling me what I should do. Or what I could do. And that’s when the ex-husband called. I shook and started to cry. I flung my phone. It would stop ringing only to ring again. You know how in horror movies the phone will ring constantly? And if it goes to voicemail, the caller will hang up and try again? He did that to my phone something like 17 times before I turned it off. And I cried and cried to TH about how I didn’t want to go home. He tried to persuade me to go to his house, to hide the night there, and then we would go back in the morning with reinforcements and get my things and get me out. And I was even more scared of that. I was terrified of bringing more people to get hurt into the situation.
Invariably, I went home because my dogs were there and I was honestly scared he would kill them.
I should have been more frightened of what he would do to me.
The entire time I was gone, the Sister was attempting to force rationality down his throat. It wasn’t working. The thing about being rational is that you have to want to be rational and while she was being calm, explaining reality to him, he wasn’t having any of it. When I came home, he immediately pounced on me. In no moment was I left alone with him, however. The Sister knew better than that. She was worried about what he would do to me – we both were – but she was in more of her head to know how awful things could be. He screamed and yelled and bellowed. I cried and ran away, literally. I ran up to our room, unable to face the insanity that was on his face or maybe just the fear that he was pushing in my heart. I locked myself in our bedroom, which was too much. He got out a screw driver and began pulling the door of its hinges.
I remember listening through the door, crying quietly in a heap on the stairs. And I remember the Sister trying to get the screw driver away from him, telling him that he was being crazy and ridiculous. At one point, he threatened to stab her, just like he had in the kitchen. And I remember her saying something like, “Oh, we’re going to go through this again? Do I have to remind you of who will kill you if you touch me?” And maybe that was the glass of cold water he needed. He stopped trying to take the door off the hinges, at least. I think, too, the Sister told him things that night that put him on high alert. I don’t know what she said when I wasn’t there and we never talked about it, really, until years later.
I was at my wit’s end but the fear of leaving made me stay.
I see the way you go and say you’re right again,
say you’re right again
Heed my lecture.
The night TH went out to the club with his ex-girlfriend (and can you guess what happened then?), the ex-husband and I got into a fight. We were coolly ignoring one another. I decided to go out and take a chance. I was going to buy a duffel bag and I was going to get a cheap cell phone. I was going to squirrel money away. I had to get out. I went to tell him good-bye and I did something that irritated me. He pushed my face away with his fist. I can’t quite tell if he meant to do it that way, or if I just pissed him off enough to not quite know what he was doing. He used too much force to get me away and pushed my jaw (which isn’t at its best after seven years of braces) out of alignment. I went upstairs, trying to get a hold of TH on AIM but he was gone. I blogged about it and then went to Wal-Mart. I didn’t get anything I had intended.
TW: Cutting, Razors
I bought razor blades instead.
I had been a cutter all throughout high school. I have the scars on my left forearm and my biceps to prove it. Most of my other scars have disappeared and faded with time, but those ones will probably always be around. There are days when I look down at the scars and I am disgusted with myself for what I did. There are days where I look at them and I am relieved that I didn’t intend suicide, but just a release. I vary. In this case, I was looking for a release. My emotional well-being had long since frayed and drinking heavily every night wasn’t enough anymore. I had quit cutting, cold turkey, in 2002, but it was easy to go right back to it. The same patterns can be… relieving when you’re in a situation that there’s no guidebook to.
The Sister was also a cutter, although she had never actually quit. If she was faced with a situation that is beyond her scope to handle, she will cut. Mostly she hasn’t lately but she has had her moments. Back then, that night when I bought the razor blades, I assured myself that I would not let the Sister know. It would be my dirty little secret, like everything else.
The next day was both bad and good because I had my coping mechanism all ready to go. It was bad because I had to listen to TH’s ex-girlfriend tell me about how they were back together, which they were not. I also had vivid flashbacks of all of those stupid divination readings I had given him in which I explained that it was pretty normal for people to sleep with their exes after the break up. I decided it wasn’t going to hurt – though it did, oddly enough – and cut myself a lot. I told the Sister about it later when I cajoled her into accompanying me to the liquor store for a fifth of vodka to add to my soda. She jumped on the cutting bandwagon. It didn’t dawn on me until much later that she had her demons hanging around that she wasn’t able to exorcise. And I didn’t know what they were.
TH found out pretty quickly what I was up to and he took my razor blade away. I don’t know what he thought he was going to achieve with that. It didn’t matter. He was wallowing in his own well of hate and self-pity. I’ve thought a lot in the years since that time about what it was that could have drawn him into my and the Sister’s web of horror and depression. I don’t really know if it was the relationship he had just ended or things he’s never told me. He did a lot more fucked up shit than me – who was abusing prescription meds, drinking heavily, and cutting – back then. He said once that he “wanted to try some new things.” And yeah, he was 18 and ready to explore the world. But, some of the things he’s done remind me of someone with a death wish. I usually end up blaming my fucked up life and situation for his depression. It makes sense. He falls for a girl with the shittiest luck and the shittiest home. It’s bound to drag anyone down. /TW
Face down in the dirt, she said,
“This doesn’t hurt”, she said,
“I finally had enough.”
One day she will tell you that she has had enough
It’s coming round again.
One night, TH came over to drop off a book. The ex-husband, the Sister, and I were all watching TV. At this point, my ex-husband became obsessed with people calling before they would come over. It was yet another thing he wanted to have control over. Mostly, no one ever came over except for TH and mostly, I asked his permission. But TH surprised me by coming over to return one of my ex-husband’s books. Later, he would tell me that he was planning on TW: Suicide committing suicide that night and wanted to say good-bye to me. /TW He came over and he hung out for a bit, upsetting his plans. The Sister went upstairs and I walked TH to the door. The ex-husband went about turning off lights and getting the house ready to be locked up for the night.
I said good-bye to TH outside, joking about how my ex-husband was probably watching us. Of course, my ex-husband actually was watching us. He had suspected since October or November that I had been having an affair with TH. It was kind of amusing because it was only true at that time and not before. Anyway, we joked for a bit and I watched TH pull out into the swirling snow.
When I came back inside, my ex-husband was standing in the living room, surrounded by the darkness. I remember freezing in the kitchen doorway, staring. As Scully, in the episode Irresistible of The X Files, saw Donald PFaster much like this demon after he kidnaps her, so too did I see my ex-husband in similar guise. I blinked. He was still demonesque but his shape resumed that of the man I had married. It was then, really, that I knew I was not married to that man who wooed me with fixing his truck and a leather bomber jacket. The man standing in my living room was comfortable with the darkness deep within himself and that scared me more than anything.
I hadn’t married a paragon of virtue or of lightness, but I hadn’t married a demon either.
On the 3rd of March, I made the decision to run away and I was going to take TH with me. I told him that on the 1st of April, I was going to move away. I was going to run way, more accurately, and I wanted him to come with me as well. He decided he would. It was better than having him stay up north and die slowly without me around. When put that way, really? How can you say no to helping a woman run away from her mentally and emotionally controlling soon-to-be ex-husband? Aside from deciding that I was running away, I put no real thought into it. I didn’t even think about filing for divorce until after I was in the vicinity of my mother and the constables who loved me best. (I worked with them all at my condo job in Texas so while they knew my ex-husband, they preferred me to him unlike every other civil servant down there.)
The ex-husband was still friends with Demon Boy, who I had refused to allow near me. I had broken off our friendship after his doing something out-of-hand after the Sister, my ex-husband, and I moved in. He wasn’t allowed in the house and for the most part, everyone accepted that. I think he came over once after I told him to take a long walk off of a short pier. It just wasn’t worth it, at that point, to maintain a friendship with someone who was, probably, literally a demon in human disguise. And quite frankly, our friendship had been just about over for years. It had just been the time to get rid of him easily. I’m actually surprised the ex-husband never tried to force me into remaining friends with him. Maybe if the Sister wasn’t around, and her sensibilities regarding him, he would have.
Now, I’m not quite sure what Demon Boy said to the ex-husband to cause him to be suspicious. I don’t know and frankly, I don’t care. But something caused my ex-husband to get incredibly worried and install a key-logger program onto the computer. It caught snippets of my conversation with TH, but we were careful. TH reminded me that key-logger programs were something my ex-husband would know about so we rarely discussed our actual relationship online. But, anyway, the ex-husband came to me and demanded to know something – I forget what. And what bothered me the most was he was asking me all of this while I was in the bath, the cuts on my body as obvious as the sun rising in the east, and I turned the tables. A moment of self-preservation kicked in and I went on the offensive.
I showed him my cuts. I told him I was depressed. I didn’t tell him how he made me feel. I was careful to dance around the truth of how he had been treating me. I was careful to dance around every little hint of how I felt, what he had done, and everything in between. And I’m grateful I never said anything to him about it because things wouldn’t have gone “as smoothly” as they could have. The ex-husband offered to go into counseling with me and I refused. I told him it was over and he… he actually believed me. Instead of attacking me, instead of doing all the things he said he was going to do in previous moments, he said he would let me go.
That night, TH came over without fear of what my ex-husband would say. And the Sister rejoiced silently beside us. The Sister, TH, and I watched movies and laughed off the emotional roller coaster we had all been riding on for months. The ex-husband left the house to “spend time with friends,” but when he came home at five in the morning, he hopped directly in the shower. The Sister and I cast knowing looks at one another. It wasn’t hard to figure out he had been to see one of his lovers. I don’t think he went to see the wife he has now – but they were engaged within months of my leaving and before our separation was finalized – but we’re pretty sure he spent those few hours with the “one who got away.” We laughed at how “circumspect” he was trying to be and failing.
Getting a divorce is difficult in normal circumstances, but it’s harder when your ex-husband tries to flirt with you to keep you around or attempts to sleep with you one final time. It’s even harder when your ex-husband screws you over on how much money you can pull from the joint account you share. It’s even worse when he has a lawyer on standby and you don’t, thereby screwing over your debts report when filing for divorce. I think, honestly, if I had stuck around, I could have gotten a lot from our divorce, but I was too intent on getting back to Texas where I could recover and be safe. Divorce sucks for everyone involved, but it doesn’t help when the actual victim keeps her trap shut and the non-victim portrays himself to be one. “She’s taking the car. She’s taking my dogs. She’s still living in our house together and won’t leave.” Wah. I told TH we had until April 1st to prepare things to leave and that’s when I was leaving… no matter how much he whined at me to leave early.
Even though I got the shit end of the stick, the Sister got it worse. She had a deal with my ex-husband that if we broke up, then she would still have a home with my ex-husband. But he renegged. And that was around the time I told the Sister where the money she gave him went – not to bills she owed on, which was why our electric and gas was behind. To help her out, I ordered some oil without paying, putting it under my ex-husband’s name. Turn about was fair play.
I had to leave a lot of things behind. And the things I left behind, my ex-husband trashed. There are things that I miss. A cross-stitch my grandmother did for me when I was a child of the Last Unicorn. The Sister tried to salvage some of my things from the cleaning spree he and “the one who got away” did after I left, but a lot of things got thrown out or destroyed. There are days where those things hurt me, wound me, beyond all measure. That cross-stitch was a part of my childhood that I lost because of my ex-husband, first because I forgot to try to shove it in my Neon, and second because he destroyed it and threw it away like it was nothing special.
After moving to Texas, our separation paperwork was finalized about his birthday. He called to tell me and said that his birthday was “simply awful.” He was trying to play the victim, but I was 2,000 miles away then. I had my mother and TH. I had people who cared about me. And while a lot of the firefighters ignored me and didn’t so much as breathe in my direction, the EMS people knew my ex-husband for what he really was – a lying, charismatic jerk – and were friendly. The cops were nice to me, too, and I didn’t have to worry about telling them anything, at least. I could live in peace. So, while he whined about how his birthday was terrible because our separation was finalized a day or two before, I told him to go to hell because my birthday would always be awful since he had married me on it.
Our conversations were less civil after that.
The last time I spoke with him while in Texas, I told him I was pregnant and it wasn’t his. I wanted him to know from me so that it would be completely clear he really was infertile. I also didn’t want the rumor mill to go hog-wild up there without me there to deflect it. The child, my son, is definitely TH’s child. TW: RapeThere is no question unless women’s bodies can carry rape children around for nearly twelve months. /TW
My relationship with my ex-husband was hell on earth for a while.
Mystical Bewilderment 
