When Grief Wakes Up

On loss, parentifcation, depression, and predation.

Blessed Solstice to you, loves.

It’s been a while…

Not just since I have published for you here, but since I have written anything other than a few lines in my journal or shared some rather unpopular opinions on social media. I have been writing a bit more there which feels like cheating on you all here, but I am working through collective ideas about certain ideologies that I feel better trying out on the hordes with whom I have no real relationship.

This space feels more intimate. And I like that about it.

I will put my head on the chopping block for social media when it comes to exploring ideas. I will no longer lie my heart on that block.

Here I will. And as I write to you this Winter Solstice morning my heart feels exquisitely tender. The last couple of nights I have been writhing in deep disappointment. I have let loose more chicken scratch in my journal than I have in a while and that feels a little good, but not a lot because the feelings attached are awful.

It’s hard after a hiatus—writing. Gathering thoughts, transmuting feelings, but also getting my fingers to remember how to type. Feeling the sudden need to stuff pizza in my face or refill my wine glass. It’s uncomfortable. Sitting, churning…

Getting the body to sync up feels like the most dominant challenge, but not only synapses to fingers and fingers to keys; this disconnect feels like my life right now.

I—who have for years relied upon my body to be my guide—have been feeling disembodied for quite some time. Part of it is the stress of having two small bodies’ routines that my own body must revolve around.

Another part is grief.

GRIEF…. bleh

It was a few weeks ago that I awoke having felt like I was in my dad’s presence in a dream.

It is 6 nearly months since my dad passed. I am as aware of the significance of that anniversary as I am of the season’s cyclical turning. Snow has returned after an unseasonably warm and weirdly windy hiatus. The power flickered off for several hours the other day with winter’s re-arrival. It feels fitting.

Not that he said or did anything, but just that he was there. It was that same obscure awareness that tickled me upon waking up. I attributed the awareness to grief being there, or more accurately, here—in my body not because I felt it, but because it told me it was there.

Grief told me it was in my body, but being in the rather disembodied state I have been in for several months, I did not feel grief, I only knew that it was there. Lurking.

Feeling grief that does not strike like lighting or ruble like an earthquake requires time, reflection, and space to emote or “process” a word I find I like less and less. My own emotional reality seasons me like a well used gate. There is no “processing”. There is rust, dust, and well oiled, well used hinges that keep things out, in, and away. And that is how I like it. I like my feelings more contained these days. Part of that is out of necessity. One cannot be a caterwauling mess with kids around. It’s dysfunctional and bad for their peace of mind and development. I learned that nearly two years ago when Mina died. The girls were here then, too, and aside from a migraine and bath tub session of bawling, I kept my grief contained.

Grief was not suppresssssed then or now. And I added the extra ssss’s there deliberately so you will hiss when you hear it in your head as if supressssssion has a slippery quality to it or as if it is to be villainized in its pronunciation and psychological affiliation. We all know what a “problem” supresssssion can be for the body, for the brain, for our relationships. But in our categorical desire to do away with anything that creates emotional walls in our psyche we also often forget that those are sophisticated defense strategies and survival mechanisms.

We don’t supresssss things just for the fuck of it, We do it for damn good reasons. And what might those reasons be?

We may not have the capacity to “process” at the moment. We may not have the support we need. We may be in active danger. Our brain and body will quite rightly prioritize just making it through over emotional or psychological integrity. Do we need to come back and integrate later? Maybe. But maybe we also need to find a way to move in love with self and others. Romantically, platonically, parentally, fiducially, with pets, with pals, with plants, with paints, wool, words, or with a bloody therapist.

Maybe…

Maybe we also can find peace by simply staring at the moon, watching a sunset, counting starts, putting our hands in the dirt or spending some quality time wrapped up with our favorite comforter and pillows.

Or, maybe for a time we sink into a bit of depresssssion. This is where I am now. Depressed. It is the first time in months I have had time to luxuriate in actual depression where the needs of someone else were not superseding my own. And I’m not talking about self-abandoning to other adults who can damn well handle their own business. I am talking about kids—genuine dependents to whom I am committed to their comfort and care.

Grief is not linear anyway. What is fine today may hurt again tomorrow, but in a different place or a different way.

When it comes to grieving my dad… I have been grieving Dick, Richard, Dad for more than 20 years. I began grieving my father when I entered counseling. From the moment my hypnotherapist had me do an “exercise” where I drew a circle around myself, noticed where he appeared in it—right on top of me!—and then had me move him to a position that felt better. At the time that was a out and a bit behind me. Now it is waaaaay off in the distance. Has been since before his death and remains so months afterwards.

You see, I do not want to talk to Dick, Dad, Richard. I have worked to detangle deep narcissistic hooks and layers of enmeshment for a very long time and engagement at this phase feels precarious at best, and still dangerous on my more tender days.

Allegedly, things were said by him to other people before he passed about me, but he did not say them to me and I do not care to hear through the grapevine so to speak, what he thinks of me. For too long I carried the weight, burden, and grief of his lack of love, approval, and support.

And there are things… deeper things and uglier things realities which I long felt and suspected, but did not have the information to back up.

My father was a predator—and I hunt predators.

Here it is, the real grief—coming to terms with having been sired by someone who may have been a legitimate psychopath. The pain is so deep, so layered, so complex.

The Gawd force in all of Her benevolent wisdom seeded me from a being who did exactly the thing that I am here to call out, name, rebuke, reject, and protect the innocent from.

I still reel from the mindfuck of it to be honest. And yet it makes total sense. Early in my career I began working with wounded women. Women who specifically had been predated upon by men in their family: fathers, grandfathers, uncles, cousins, and brothers. You wouldn’t believe how common it is. From an early age, I myself was the prey of the family predator—not my father, but the one who got to him. From an early age I had the awareness of being psychically stalked. But more importantly, I knew how to protect myself. I would run around corners because IT was after me. I would press the soles of my feet together, so IT could not enter me there. I would sleep with my palms pressed together over my belly, so IT could not get in through there.

As far as sexual abuse goes, mine was mild. Fumbling beer induced molestations in a quiet dingy place away from the hypervigilant presence of my great-grandmother, my own predator’s wife. They always know, you know…. the wives. They may pretend that they do not or they may supresssss the knowledge because they are too afraid themselves to confront the Predator in whatever flesh suit IT has slipped into. IT moves through family lines and corrupted lineages—always. Incest never comes out of nowhere. It is always someone who does something to someone who goes onto either marry someone who does the same things or does the things themselves because their own mind, heart, and soul have been corrupted.

It is this corruption that I am grieving and even having walked countless women through this very pain and confusion in my own practice over the years, it is severely fucking with me.

Mamma, in Her abundant women, seeded me with the very poison which She intends me to follow, to track, to hunt. She showed me how to wound the beast with weapons of Her design and knowingly and unknowingly I have been in Her service my whole blessed life.

You see, once you get a whiff of IT you will not forget. And once you see through ITs many masks IT loses the ability to fool you. I see IT and as much as IT hunted me as child when I was vulnerable and undeveloped, I am hunting IT now. Anyone who has followed my work for any period of time has probably seen my writing about predation, Wetiko, psychospiritual infestation, evil as we may call it in a non biblical way. Because when I say “evil” I mean antilife. I mean a consciousness that hates and feeds upon innocence. I mean the real corruption of soul and flesh: predation dressed up as sexual assault, violence, and mutilation.

Again, tears come as I write these words: this is my inheritance not just as human— though that is all of our “cross to bear”—but my legitimate family lineage. Spiritual parasitism, sexual abuse, violence, addiction… suppresssssssion.

I am the one to unearth it, so excuse the fuck out of me if I am not grieving in some predictable and polite manner. If, instead, my back has gone out repeatedly as I reorganize my most fundamental internal structure. Oh, fucking well if I have gained a little weight in my breasts, belly, and hips because aside from the toddler body I am constantly dragging around I have some serious fucking weight I am carrying.

This—the weight—would be the thing my body whispered to me about in dreams a few weeks ago. The weight of being a wound waker and a chain breaker because by Gawd, this stops with me.

Already lightning has struck the thing that not only infested my father—twisting his behavior into something heinous and sometimes unspeakable—but that also that for years held his inner child captive. This is the battle that in my grief I choose to take on because here is the thing about being a chain breaker: we often wind up freeing the ones who abused us, not because they deserve it, and sure as shit not through forgiveness—but with pick axes and bonfires, with spells, mud, sweat, ink, and tears because we and our whole bloody lineage deserves to be free!

On these dark nights leading towards the return of the light that rises today, Winter Solstice, some of us hunt. Some of us clear. Some of us sink into immune reactions to viral bugs and collective bugs, taking that battle within our very cells. And some of us dance with those shadows, slip into the Dark, not lighting fires, but staring into it.

That is where I have been for the last few days. Staring into the Dark.

I wish I had the energy, the presence, the stability to offer you ritual on how to do it, especially to my paid subscribers of whom I feel especially neglectful right now—but I don’t. So, instead, I am going to pause your paid subscriptions. I feel incongruous with you sending me money for something I am not delivering.

I will try to get back to writing. I will try to be more consistent here.

In the meantime, I am wishing you so much love, courage, and care from the shadows in which I feel currently steeped, but also held.

Love, Justice