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  • don’t fight the wind (on radical acceptance & aesops fable ‘the oak and the reed’)

    let’s talk about radical acceptance. this is therapy talk, so forewarned if that’s not your particular type of topic of conversation. however! i’m going to look at this kind of therapy as something akin to one of my favourite fables from aesop – “the tree and the reed”, which is more commonly known as “the oak the reed”. i found this really interesting 1980s colouring book with these amazing aesop’s fables illustrations inside of it, and it’s had me thinking about this wisdom, ancient in nature that remains worthwhile today.

    radical acceptance is a cognitive behaviour practice which involves “fully acknowledging and embracing the present moment, including its difficulties and discomforts, without trying to change or control it“

    sounds a bit hokey, right? if you’re anything like me, you might find this shit kinda downright insulting. this was introduced to me during a particularly shitty portion of my personal work journey. everything was awful – i was traumatized, horrified, betrayed, sick, and on the verge of complete mental collapse. i was deeply offended when a therapist brought this up to me, and i immediately became defensive, very defensive even. “oh just accept how shitty it all is?” i remember saying.

    but that’s not what radical acceptance is.

    radical acceptance is a verb, it’s an action, and it’s a practice that is done constantly, all day long, and constantly changing. for me, the more i would fight and stress and worry and claw my skin and mind and heart raw over things, the more pain i found myself in, both emotionally and physically.

    but when i began to accept situations for what they were, as they were, the ones i can’t control or fix or do anything about – aka my strained relationship with a close friend. before i began doing my personal work, i would fight frequently with this friend. screaming matches over our differences would punctuate cute selfies and girls’ nights.

    once i began doing this work and accepted that i can’t fix things for my friend – that only she can do that work for herself, and that fighting her on it, is pointless and causing me only heartache.

    so, you know what happened? our friendship, as long as it had been, dissolved. we grew apart.

    i hold no malice to her about it, either. i loved her and still love her now. i understand that we grew into two different people on two different paths. i accepted that her values and goals and priorities were not in alignment with mine. i didn’t hang around our friendship anymore like some jaded cop trying to get a fucking retirement pension.

    and i’m not here to say that it didn’t suck – it sucked. i lost a long friendship, one that i thought would last forever. and even while it sucked, and even while i grieved that loss, i accepted those situations as they were. i still accept them as they are.

    our friendship ended. it was really great when it was really great.

    so before we get too far here, let’s look at the aesop’s fable:

    it’s similar to what radical acceptance asks of us.

    don’t fight the wind, move with it.

    kinda profound, right?

    accepting that things that are beyond our control just are, and will be and we must deal with them as they are. we can make boundaries, we can make plans, we can try our best to move with them, and we may need to adjust it all as we go.

    i’m reminded here of some lyrics from an artist called schur, found in his song “cactus” which is about doing personal work by using psychedelic plant medicine to gain perspective.

    i should
    meditate in traffic
    i could
    vegetate in my hatchback
    hit the
    dmv for practice practice
    waiting in line under hospital lights

    i find this pertinent to another experience of mine. i live with a couple chronic illnesses that flare into episodes requiring occasional trips to the hospital. i used to rage and lose my shit and get so twisted up about it all – the betrayal of my own physical body, something i couldn’t control. i would sit fuming in those shitty hospital chairs in the trauma informed rooms that smell vaguely of piss and cleaning supplies.

    and now, i know that i have to get checked out, it’s for my health, i can’t choose it or control it, it’s the luck of the old genetic lottery, so imma have to pack up my book and my bag and water bottle and go sit under those hospital lights and wait my turn. the task is no longer something i’m forced to do kicking and screaming against my will, it’s something i get to do. i live in my body and respect and value my body and i need to take care of it thusly and so i do. i just do.

    and now? i feel a lot less fucking stressed. like yeah sure, when i’m barfing up my asshole, things aren’t great, but that’s just how it be sometimes. i can’t change that. i try to sit in the hospital and just know that i’m doing what needs to be done. a hospital trip isn’t a rage filled stress induced crash out for me anymore. it’s just another thing i have to do that day.

    radical acceptance, for me, has also been simply accepting that all that self reliant, self righteous shit i’d been mainlining for years, was actually harmful. it isn’t a badge of honour or point of pride to walk around slung through with slings and arrows to appear tough or cool or hard.

    me before radical acceptance tbh

    i accepted that this label of “ice queen”, and the actions that go with it, aren’t helpful. i try to not give my past self who used all this edgelord shit as mega copium too much shit.

    obviously i’m not some asshole in yoga pants sitting on a $200 meditation pillow they got from indigo thinking i’m levitating above everyone with a crystal jammed up my asshole, sorry, sacral chakra. this is something that’s really helped me. maybe it will help you too, maybe it won’t. maybe it’ll seem as hokey to you as it did to me, and seem totally bullshit, and that’s cool, man.

    hey, we don’t all walk that same road and we all reach our peace through a variety of different modalities.

    i just really try, god, i really do, to not fight the wind anymore.

  • seeking, always

    i say to a lot of people – i’m constantly seeking. seeking, always. i’m always looking for more ways to understand not only the world, but also to understand ultimately myself.

    for years, i felt like everything was really out of control for me – i didn’t understand my own emotions or my own place within the world, how i related to other people, or how i understood my life, the things that had happened to me, and how to even make sense of it all.

    when people ask what i mean about this, i always say, “i’ve lived an interesting and slightly bizarre life” and i mean that. my experiences have been vast and varied. when i was only newly nineteen, my closest friend at the time was murdered – stabbed to death in the culmination of a love triangle gone wrong. i was not yet twenty when i was giving statements about the horrific and gruesome murder of my friend. i sat in a court room as a boy i knew was convicted of killing this other boy i knew. i never got any help for it, you know? there was no counsellors, trauma therapists, EMDR or internal family systems therapy talk, no blogs or youtube channels to check in with about it. the cops just sent all of us who had witnessed our friend die over and over on shitty CRT security footage over and over in that court room, just out into the world to figure it the fuck out on our own. just head on out and raw dog life. and i couldn’t vocalize how i felt, because i didn’t understand how i felt. i didn’t have the words inside me to say, “this traumatized me, this was horrific, this changed how i feel about the police and the justice system and fairness and life and god and this will impact me for the rest of my life and i don’t know it yet and i don’t know how exactly, but in that moment, i got extremely fucked up”.

    so, what did i do? i acted fucked up.

    i drank to the point of blacking out, i became aggressive and started fights with other girls at the bar, i started fights with boys and men much larger than me. i swore and yelled and got high for the first time and grew my hair into dreadlocks and stopped shaving my armpits and pushed people away and drank shitty champagne out of big bottles and wore angel wings and glitter to parties and made myself into a menace. i did all this because i couldn’t or at least, didn’t know how to stop and say, “i feel so lost, please help me”.

    i look back at that version of myself, in the fairy wings and flower crown drinking 151 proof rum straight in a van with strangers, and i just see a child wearing the horrors of the world alongside crystal necklaces and festival wristbands.

    i told myself at the time that i was honouring the memory of my friend, by doing the things we had planned to do together, but looking back now, i doubt severely he would have wanted us all traumatized and fucked up, drinking our guts raw and our minds into oblivion. i still wonder about some of the people in that group of us. i see a few from time to time, you know? we don’t talk about it. we don’t talk about the blood on the checkerboard floor or the fact that there was no plaque to honour our fallen friend. just silence and nothingness. i wonder what happened to all that evidence – the bloody clothes, the huge knife, the footage, the 911 calls.

    i did EMDR in 2021 for many sessions over my friend’s murder. i still feel kinda raw about it, but not as raw as before. next year, will be twenty years since he died alone on that gas station floor.

    i think about him sometimes. like right now as i type this. would we still be friends? would he have kids and a cute wife? would he live his dream of playing in a band? would he dance pow wow?

    so much went wrong on that day. i lost my friend and too, i lost my innocence, and myself, for a while.

    i know now that this all inadvertently led me to who i am now, but it is sometimes difficult for me to look back on those years of the grief, the loss, the sense of loss and being lost. i look back and feel grief for what happened to him, for what happened to all of us.

    i hope we all continue to seek and find ourselves. it’s really never too late.

    i’m walk the path to myself in the same filthy cotton dress from sweatlodge, my blundstones on my feet, blood on my hands and in my mouth, and i’m carrying a braid of sweetgrass..

    but i’m still the girl that sold coffee at the gas station, still the girl that sat in the court room with dyed black hair and bangs, still the girl with the dreadlocks and the champagne and the angel wings. i keep all those girls safe. the princess i’m looking for must be in another castle, and so i keep looking, keep seeking.

  • the eagerness of me

    the thrift finds haven’t been great this week, nothing too wild on my end, but that’s ok.

    i found a cool vintage music stand for some of the gaming gear for scott over at drunk in a spacehulk – kinda one of those super vintage ass “bartholomew meet me at my fainting couch” kinda pieces.

    i’ve been thinking a lot, gestating ideas and music.

    i threw together the above design and maybe i’ll make some stickers just for fun. i scanned this falling apart art catalogue from a fancy auction in paris and a vintage 1980s fairy tale book and cropped out the flower design. i think it looks cool. it’s kind of giving medieval times meets vaporwave “have you seen my lost mary?” kind of thing but i like that.

    i’m eager to see what hospital vespers becomes for me and this work of mine, and i want so many things all at once and i need to remind myself – patience patience.

    things happen as they do.

    anyways bye

  • grief as siege warfare

    i used to believe that grief was like a river, full of rapids and ever changing waters, deep to the banks in some areas and calmer in others. the river runs the stones smooth and the bones into nothing.

    now i’ve changed how i feel. i feel like grief is kind of like siege warfare.

    for me, anyways, in times of grief, i retreat inside, because it’s what i know how to do.

    i cloak myself away, hide in my darkened bedroom both literally and figuratively with this weird hope that i could wait it out. i convince myself that i have enough good faith and good memories to wait it all out in the safety of my closed doors and drawn curtains.

    but, obviously, that isn’t how things work. grief is a siege of the homesick heart and i’ve bled my reserves dry over and over with all of the death.

    you can find me in the castle yard with the fool and the dead horses.

    and i have only myself to blame for it. my own foolish avarice and even more foolish pride unable to concede any kind of meaningful defeat so i wear my grief like spikes in an iron maiden worn inside out and use my pain as a weapon and i’ve made it clear to everyone but myself when my grief is pretending to be anger.

    did i lose you with the medieval horseshit? maybe i lost myself a little bit and felt like i had a better point to make about how the november cold makes me nervous with dry skin and i find myself thinking about death and using too much bubble gum lip balm.

    why did all the big deaths in my life have to happen in such close proximity to winter, the season of death and cold. why did i drive by the christmas lights on the way home from the hospital where my father died? what about the blow up santa claus on the way home from her funeral with christmas carols on the radio next to that stupid the weekend song “i can’t feel my face”. she died taking cocaine, so i guess that was applicable.

    wren died in the old punk house we lived in, slipping away without letting us know.

    and i miss her.

    you know, they called her “the iron maiden”? and yet to me, she never was.

    i was the one unwavering, made of stone cold iron and hate.

    and she was tie dye and marjoram, incense and weed smoke.

    she was this happy laughing yogi and i was the master of arms with a sharpened blade in place of a tongue.

    november is almost halfway over. i can’t tell if i am ready for december yet.

    and january, is somehow even worse. my birthday.

    another reminder that i made it through another siege.

  • lest we forget

    the fighting of world war one ended on november 11, 1918 at 1100, a day that became known as armistice day and in the british commonwealth – remembrance day.

    as a canadian, this day has been something traditionally recognized in my home as my grandfather served all five years in world war 2 – overseas.

    he came back with a war bride and PTSD. he joined the legion and drank the horrors of war away.

    he didn’t like to talk much about it, so he didn’t, unless he was drunk.

    my mother and father would drop him off at the legion and he’d be wasted when they’d pick him up after shopping at costco or wal-mart. then he would talk about the war, and the guns, and the boys he’d killed when he had just been a boy.

    later, after he died, we found stacks of old love letters and polaroid photos from women he had met overseas. with long black hair and olive skin and high cheekbones, looking stereotypically first nations, he must have been so exotic to those european women. he called himself jack, overseas.

    he said he felt like he was someone else when he was overseas, and maybe it was easier to truly become someone else.

    i wish i had had more time with my grandfathers.

    i think of them often, but especially today.

    i remember you.