Convalescence

 

The universe will present opportunities for you to pause and take stock and care of your needs, and if necessary, do so in a very dramatic way.

I haven’t always been so mindful of my own needs. I was bogged down by a lot of external factors. I often felt cranky, defensive, exhausted, angry, and irritable. Then I found myself in active treatment for breast cancer, and suddenly granted this grand permission from the Universe to slow the fuck down, to get real with myself, and get completely immersed in self-care. Healing myself suddenly became my day job, and all else was secondary. My long term goals became about ways that I wanted to feel in my body, about specific experiences and sensations I would like to experience. My immediate needs were only about feeling as comfortable as I could within extreme physical and psychological discomfort. I quickly adapted to the rhythm of getting sick, chemo was like clockwork, the rhythm of the medicine working its way through my system on its 3 week cycle. I had the bad days and the good days and I could plan my calendar around them. Even if it was only in the ritual of picking up an ice cream sundae on my way home from my blood work appointments, there was comfort in the rhythm. There was comfort in the constellation of being sick, even in the bad days, when I would get really medicated and watch Project Runway. And even in the worse than bad days when I would announce that I couldn’t do it anymore, that I wanted to quit, I was promptly reminded by my wife why I should stay the course, and that was comfortable in its predictability. I went back in for each infusion feeling a renewed sense of resolution toward what was being put into my body, a mental preparedness for it to do its job and a willingness to cooperate, tune in deeply so that I could have my needs met. I learned how to observe my thoughts. I learned how to sit with my memories. I learned how to find peace and comfort in the midst of pain and uncertainty. I learned how to get really comfortable being really uncomfortable.

From Wictionary.org

Noun

convalescence (countable and uncountable, plural convalescences)

1. A gradual healing after illness or injury.
2. The period of time spent healing

Several months after treatment had ended, I was still going to a lot of medical appointments but I was more or less on my way to “life after cancer,”awkwardly ping- ponging around in my life, looking to find the elusive “new normal” that is often spoken about. Everything was different, and there was a sense of some expectation to bounce back from it, same as I ever was. My experience not quite integrated, I did my best to figure it out,utilizing the tools and medicines around hard core self-compassion. I often felt whiplashed from the changes that were happening and deep grief for the old self that was rapidly dying away. I had learned to set boundaries. I had learned to cut the fat very quickly. I had learned how to be a master of my own self-care, but it took time and diligence and patience and self-forgiveness for me to be able to integrate those lessons into my life post treatment. One day I ran into my next door neighbor outside in the driveway. She asked me how I was doing, if I was still “convalescing?” The word rolled around in my mind like a marble in a bowl. I had never given much thought to the word or even to the act of convalescence. That question stuck with me because she was specifically relating it to my recovery from recent chemotherapy and surgery. But there was something about the privilege of my convalescense that I was missing, that I was craving, as I tried traversing the old habits that were dying hard around the hustle of trying to return to a lifestyle that I knew before. I had made the incorrect assumption that once treatment was finished, I would just not need to get deep, soulful, intentional rest anymore.

Now that I have more control over what I put into, and how I utilize my physical body, I notice that I have a more mindful awareness of what my body needs. The upside to the “new normal” is realizing the necessity of convalescence on microcosmic levels. I have spent time studying my body’s rhythms in relation to the moon cycles, my sleep habits, my work habits, my desires. This has not come without repetitive illnesses and injuries showing up to remind me how to do it. I am five years out from my treatments and I am only just now integrating the boundaries and lessons around this. My body still taps out on me occasionally, giving me permission to put my needs at the forefront. The work that I have done around convalescence provides a framework to shift things around, omit and add things, behaviors and medicine to my life as needed. Checking in regularly provides the balance that I need to accept my body as it is in any moment. It provides the benefit of allowing my body and mind to rest long enough to take regular stock of my needs and goals. This should be an ongoing process,not just one that we do when shit hits the fan and we are knocked down in a dramatic way.

Next time you find yourself ill, injured, taken out of the game by some unforeseen or external circumstance, consider a bigger picture. Consider your situation a force of nature, asking you to heal something. Consider it an opportunity to take stock and rebalance. Why not use this opportunity to not only get the rest that your body requires, but to take a deeper look at what might need to be adjusted? Don’t beat yourself up about your habits or behaviors. This is not the time to scold yourself. This time calls for gentle assessment, compassion and self-love and a deep nurturing of the soul. Thank your body for demanding the rest that it needs.

 

 

A Letter to a Loved One

Still in the cold of Winter, entered into Pisces season, we are feeling into our shadows. We are dreaming in the dark. We are receiving messages from our unconscious. We are feeling old stories in our bones. We might be feeling the need to pull off scabs and agitate old hurts. We need to feel. We need to process. We are being invited to integrate our painful or tricky emotions into our new experiences and we can do so in a healthy way.

Everyone has tricky relationships in their lives. Sometimes relationships that are good for a while can get crappy for a time. Whether it be with a family member, a coworker, a friend, it is sometimes difficult to communicate our needs because we are stuck in a cycle of guilt or shame or confusion and frustration or even anger. A tool that I often use when sorting out my feelings and creating proper boundaries with people is to write letters. But these are letters I will never send. These are letters I will keep in my journal, or ritually write and then burn by candle light. I find that the act of writing the letter that I will never send is so cathartic because I am allowed to be honest and vulnerable. I don’t need to sugar coat what I have to say. I don’t need to worry about making the other person feel comfortable. I don’t need to qualify what I am about to say before I say it. I can get straight to the point. I can state my feelings, my disappointments, and my needs. And then I can state how moving forward I will protect myself with a boundary. Letter writing to a specific person, rather than just writing in my journal about how I feel about that person, allows me to pinpoint the issues that I have within myself that I know I need to heal. It reminds me that I hold the keys to healing within myself, and that I have another lesson to learn about seeking validation from others. If I love the person and want to keep them in my life, I can easily move into future interaction with them with my silent boundaries set. No harm, no foul. If I need to cut this person from my life, I can do so with clarity of purpose. This is such a powerful and effective tool for me that I wanted to share. All of my letters are private, just for me to see (or burn), so this is a template of one that I recently wrote. I invite you to try plugging in your own story into this template and observe what you find. Share with me if you feel called! I am interested in the work that you are doing!

Dear Loved One,

I love you dearly. I respect you. I am proud of what you have been able to accomplish. I thank you for all that you have taught me and continue to teach me.

I am disappointed in you because _______. I wanted you to do XYZ because I asked you to, or I expected you to, or I wanted you to intuitively know to do it. I see you doing XYZ for others and sometimes I wish that you would think to do the same for me.

I am hurting because you_______. I have relied on your praise for my own self worth. I understand that it is not from you but from within me that I need to find that. I realize that my expectations need to be adjusted. But I wanted to tell you how I feel.

I am doing this in my life. I would like you to know about it. I am telling you now, in detail, what I am up to, how I am feeling and why I choose to be on the path that I choose. I am proud of who I am, what I have done and am excited about my plans for the future. I love you and I want to share that with you.

I am stating my boundary to you now. I take the energy back for myself, what I have given to you. I need my own resources to be strong. I choose to engage in relationships that nourish me as much as I nourish them.

I wish you the best. I love you dearly. I respect and admire you greatly. I thank you for the lessons that you have taught me and continue to teach me.

Sincerely,

Me

In November of last year I had the pleasure of being interviewed for The Self Care Club podcast. The podcast is meant to help inspire people to take their self care practice to the next level, and to explore guest’s self care practices to provide that inspiration. I was delighted to have been invited, as I have been a fan of the host, Natalie Ross, for about two years, as she is also the host of a podcast that I love called Dream, Freedom, Beauty. At first I was nervous and I didn’t know if I would really be able to share anything of importance, but I used her guided questions as journaling prompts before the interview and allowed myself to dive in a little deeper to why I consider self care to be so paramount to my well being. I preach self care and offer tips about carving out time and rituals for self care to my hair clients, so this seemed like a way to take my message to a platform that could be heard by more people.

As soon as I finished the Skype interview with Natalie, I thought to myself, Damn, I kept myself small. Even though I had spent a good hour preparing for the interview, reading over my notes, and even did a meditation to center myself and ask my Divine guides to allow me to speak my truth clearly, I thought that I did not dive in as deep as I would have liked to. I was still feeling so self conscious and asking myself that question…”Well, who the hell are you to talk about this stuff with any authority?” So, in the months that I had to wait for my interview to air, I had to double down on my self care, in order to keep myself from freaking the fuck out with nervousness about what I would sound like. I told very few people that I had an interview coming out. I chose not to listen to the interviews that aired before mine so that I would not fall into the trappings of self comparison. Some of my mechanisms for getting through this time were to consciously work with my doubts and fears, looked them in the face, channel them through my body and journal about them. I chose to actively keep seeking healing. I chose to do more exercises to get clear on my purpose for sharing my story at all. I chose to meditate more. I chose to read more books about healing modalities that I am interested in. I told myself that regardless of how crazy I might sound on a podcast interview, I have found so much satisfaction in my healing process. I have found so much peace and comfort along my journey of self compassion, self study, self care, and that is ultimately what matters the most. I reminded myself that my story is mine to tell, and that I have authority over my experience because it is my own experience. I reminded myself that I am not selling anything, I am only sharing my story as I heal because through healing myself I know that others can find inspiration for healing. I reminded myself that when I was first diagnosed with cancer, my motto quickly became “Live to Inspire and be inspired. Live to thrive.” That motto came to me as a download, and I wrote it on my chalkboard wall and did not erase it until treatment was done.

When the episode came out, I woke up early and snuggled back into bed with my animals and listened. The tension slowly loosened it’s grip on my body as I continued to hear my own voice. I was half expecting to be so embarrassed by how I had presented myself but I wasn’t. A dear friend of mine was listening to it at the same time as I was, and we were texting each other, crying. My wife texted me when she got to work and said “I’m at work, but I’m sitting in the car listening to your interview.” In the days following I listened several more times, and the emotions of the experiences that I talk about in the interview well up inside of me each time. Hearing myself speak about these issues allow for me to practice that self love, that gratitude, and appreciation for my perseverance. Hearing myself speak about these issues and the practices have been another exercise in clarity. Hearing my own voice, and listening to the feedback that I have gotten from people who listened in reflects back to me why I am sharing my story. It has solidified my purpose. This experience has been healing for me above all else.

In the blog and in the book that I am working on, I plan to dive deeper into my self care practices to help illustrate how simply studying myself within my own experience has enriched my life, relationships, and self worthiness.

You can check out my interview with Natalie here! Shondi’s SCC Interview

Intuition is my Big Friend

I was hurting. I was downtrodden. I had lost both my implants to a series of infections and was recovering from 3 surgeries in less than 3 months after chemotherapy was done. I was still slick bald, even though I should have had a bit of hair already. My chest was what I called a mangled mess. I was having to face the reality of losing my breasts in a whole new way, as I was seeing a stage of reconstruction I wasn’t really supposed to have seen. Our friends threw a party for us, a fundraiser for the extra medical bills we had acquired and for time that I needed to take off work, to lick my wounds and try and make some sense of all that had happened. My friend and drag artist, Paul, performed at the house party. He pulled me aside to tell me that he had never heard me use a word like “mangled” before, speaking of my beautiful self. In so many words, he explained to me that the essence of me couldn’t be broken, and the essence of me could not be mangled, could not be so easily snuffed out. The essence of me did not rely on outside factors like breasts or hair or anything of the sort. What the essence of me is is beauty personified and a spiritual expression. I was onto him enough to know that he wasn’t speaking of a generic idea of letting my light shine or whatever, he was speaking of an outward expression of something more magnificent than a light. He was speaking of self presentation. He was speaking of painting and decorating myself to be seen in any way possible, and it being a true authentic expression of me, but just as I was onto his concept, I didn’t believe it applied. He doesn’t understand me, I thought, a biological woman doesn’t want to wear falsies to present as having breasts, or wigs to present as having hair. I bucked the idea that we were the same in this regard, because I was attached to a concept of being a “natural” beauty, of having lost something that made me fit into the categorization of a natural born woman. I appreciated his concern and his advice and his love and his words of encouragement, but I was only hearing the “you are beautiful on the inside” type of shit that people always say. Years later it would suddenly spark something within me. The seed he planted grew and fruited into consciousness. I wasn’t meant to understand his words in the linear timeline of my hearing them. I was meant to integrate that knowledge later on, when I had done the heavy lifting, when I had finished wallowing in my self pity and in my pain and when I had gritted my teeth and eaten the proverbial shit. Not until then was I finally able to kick up my heels and swipe on my lipstick and tape hair on my head and say “OHHHHH, I totally 100% get what you are throwin’ down, and now I know it’s true because I am living embodiment of it”.

The first time I was cognizant of the concept of non linear healing was when I started integrating lessons from conversations I had with my friend Sabrina when she was alive. I had been a 21 year old kid, angry about the war we were starting in Iraq. Angry about the Presidential election, about homophobia, about racism. I was angry about the world and the general malaise toward the oppressed in general.  And she spoke to me on the phone, between my fits of rage, about how change starts with me. A bunch of  nonsense (I thought at the time) about actively and passively disregarding the larger picture and starting with the healing of my own vibration. Something about the universe not really accepting sides, but reacting to the vibration of the energy that we put out. Total bullshit, I thought. I thought how can you sit there and say that, as someone who is for social change? As someone who is for social justice? As someone who is oppressed? As someone who loves the oppressed? I fought against the notion, and actively disregarded her message. It was planted though,because it was true. And then I found myself, 9 years later, about a year after her death, integrating the truth of this piece of advice into my psychic awareness. I was seeing that making a bunch of noise wasn’t really effective if it wasn’t coming from a place of stillness inside, of knowing who you really are on the inside, or of at least having a curiosity of your inner landscape, of listening in, reflecting in, pointing the finger back in. I was seeing that my example of peace was shifting others perceptions toward me. I was seeing that I was able to stir change in people’s hearts by loving myself, by loving them, and by leading with love in my communication. By no means was I a master at this concept, but I started to preach it, and it felt as though my teacher was right there with me in the teaching and integrating of it. Her love of crystals and her studies of the witchy kinds of things that I am into now feed into what I am learning today. They were concepts that were kind of on the fringe of my consciousness for a very long while, always being kind of aware of them and respecting of them and curious of them, but not really immersed in them at all. Little by little and then big by big they started taking center stage of my consciousness. With each further dive into these modalities for healing she is here with me, soaking up the deliciousness of what there is to be found. There truly is an element of a friendship, of communion that can extend beyond this physical plane. One of us is living on this plane, and the other is not. It is unconscious connection that we are making.

I do something similar with Virginia Woolf. I light a candle for her. I serve an offering of tea. I roll her a smoke. I pace and I smoke and I talk to her, as I imagine she might have done with her own guides, as she was working out the problems of her craft. I read aloud passages from her diary. She answers my questions. She gives me ideas. She gives me inspiration. She encourages me to try putting words to an unconscious experience. She talks to me, she guides me to sink into my third eye and sit with her. It is not her persay, personified, that sits there, but there is a sense that a shared consciousness is being tapped into. That by studying her so intently and by embodying her spirit and simply gesturing in ritual an invitation to sit, I am invoking her wisdom, because her wisdom could not have died along with her. Her wisdom was not in her body, her wisdom came from somewhere else. The ether. The underworld. The spirit world. The collective consciousness. She used language to describe it. She used language to tell stories. She used language to heal herself through those stories. And through those stories she heals me. And I offer to pick up where she left off, to harness some of the concepts and explain them in my own words, within the context that I live in. And when I say I love her and that she loves me, it is not a physical love that would exist between two people who know one another. It is not the love of girlfriends or of niece/aunt like I had with Sabrina. It is what we name Love that keeps things moving. The thing that helps things grow. The thing that inspires creation. It is in that concept of love that my tutorship with her resides. I learn from her because I ask the questions, and she has written the answers down, and on a deeper level than ink and paper there is a mysterious thread of consciousness that can not be broken, can not be mangled, can not be snuffed out. This place of knowing is where and how I hear her.

I did something similar with my Bible when I was a child. Confused and hurt by my parents’ divorce, I sought healing. I had questions about commitment, failure in relationships, familial love, romantic love, betrayal. I would sit in the floor of my bedroom and I would talk to “GOD” and I would flip though the Bible, as a divinatory source, and I would ask a question and hope to read the answer. I would randomly read the page and I would apply it to my problem. I see this as the same thing that I do with my VW diaries, or with my Tarot cards. I am asking a question to the spiritual ether, and I am drawing on my own unconscious mind, using a tool to reflect back what the truth is. I hold the truth inside me, be it God. Be it Source. Higher or Divine Consciousness. That thread of consciousness, call it what you may.

I sometimes put more common names to this consciousness, such as My Inner Child, speaking in the context of a linear past. My IC is who I tap into now, to heal those parts of myself that gave up trying to use the tools, that abandoned her own healing because she started to distrust the information that she was receiving. She began to distrust the truth of the thread of higher consciousness that informed her. She began to distrust god and religion because other people were using their interpretations of the same tools, to tell her that she was wrong and dirty and bad. She went the way of wrong and dirty and bad and took pride in it, not knowing what else to do. And let’s be real…we all have wrong and dirty and bad within us. It is part of the higher consciousness too. It doesn’t need to be labelled for its own sake. We feel the need to label it, as humans, we want to categorize everything. So when this lovely little Shondi started flailing out in the world and many experiences went unintegrated, many hurts went unhealed, because she had fallen out of trust with her higher mind. She had fallen out of trust and fallen out of communion with that voice, that spirit, inside that was always there to be her compass. I started experimenting with tapping into My Inner Child, even speaking to her, from her station on the floor of her bedroom, through her bible, and giving her another signal that what she is divining is true. That what is being reflected back at her, out of her purest and deepest desires to know herself better, is true. And I am able to arrive at this present moment, stronger and more resolved, more loved, more secure and more confident, because I went back to hold her for a moment, to whisper in her ear. And I know that my future self will do the same for me, and so on and so forth.

In essence, I think learning to trust my intuition is cultivated from an awareness around energetically tuning in. I am more acutely aware of those times when I have a gut feeling or reaction to something, and have a mysterious sense that this will be useful to me, that this moment is helping to define an aspect of my truth, if not immediately but in the linear future, when I will integrate it more fully. Examples of when this has happened to me is picking up my first Yoga Journal, years before I started practicing yoga, and saving it, even moving with it from apartment to apartment. An acute awareness of the possibility of someday being bald as I curled my long hair, that voice inside of me clearly asking me to love and revel in this moment, almost exactly one year before I was diagnosed with cancer. The moment I lit Kayla’s cigarette, the first night we met, the woman I would marry three years later. In these little glimpses of recognition, synchronicities, and in deja vu moments when I know I have been here before, in this exact scenario in this place that I have only just first arrived on this timeline, I am learning to trust as intuition.

Vanity as Ritual

I used to struggle with my vanity. My love and appreciation for dressing and painting my body and my face in ways that are considered beautiful or sexy or strange got all tied up in confusion about what I thought was supposed to be important to me. I secretly feared that I relied too heavily on how I looked so that other aspects of myself might get lost. My intellect. My feminism. My spirituality. My lesbian identity.  I felt so much shame around this simple thing that fed my soul that it became something that I pretended to ignore. I spent more than a decade wrestling with this shame, the meat of it festering as I got into the beauty industry. I spent years wallowing in self doubt and insecurity and self loathing. I felt more shame around it than I could even admit. I was ashamed to admit that I was ashamed, and this simple thing that once fed my soul became a kind of sickness in my soul. By now, It’s taken me years to unravel that shame, and I suppose I owe my struggle with hair loss to aiding it’s unravelling.

Having a job where the expectation is to look put together or stylish or pretty or cool was sucking so much of my life force, once I worked through cancer and realized my hair was gone forever. To do my job effectively, and to gain confidence and trust from my clients, it is necessary to exude confidence in my appearance. For a time, in order for me to do this, it took a lot of ‘faking it til I made it”. Pep talks, affirmations, finding the stuff inside that made me feel bold and confident and sure of my space in the world were crucial. But all that took energy, and I found myself exhausting limited resources by writhing under the weight of the painful things that had happened to me. It was painful to face my appearance. It was painful to face my reality. I could no longer pretend that I naturally or effortlessly looked any certain way because it took work and effort and thought to look any way at all. Then, boom! Reckoning with that truth was an important piece of the puzzle. That reckoning is what brought me face to face with my underlying shame, easily ushering to the surface all of the shame around caring about the way I looked. It highlighted the shame I carried in struggling to find my authenticity in presenting as a pretty peacock one day, a fierce androgynous warrior the next, and some days wanting to throw on a hoodie and some sweatpants and fade into the background. There was shame in hiding that I might not know who I really am inside, so I have to pick something, my personal shield, and embody it. It forced me to reckon with the realization that I am a dualistic human person who enjoys varying ways of looking and being. It forced me to realize that what makes me authentic is not fitting squarely into any boxes, or checking any physical attributes off of any lists.  How I looked on the outside was suddenly a blank canvas, and I decided to play with it.

I can summarize stages or steps of my journey to self acceptance and whole embodiment, and will always be in some stage of it as well, as I am ever evolving. Some of those steps were doing my boudoir shoot (for me!), using Rogaine to grow a little hair and wearing a bleached buzz cut, even getting a weave for a while… But here I just want to skip ahead to the part where I started to tie ritual for rituals sake into my self love practice. Mindfulness in my self presentation has become an integral part of my daily practice, and takes up as much space as it needs to. To put it bluntly, I have given myself permission to love what I love, prescribing the medicine of accepting and revelling in my own beauty. In the most important discovery in my healing spiral, I caught on to a way of relating how I present as expressions of various aspects of my Spirit.

I take delight in many things; cooking,eating,bathing, reading, writing, running, dancing, loving my partner and my animals and my friends. But one thing that gives me deep joy and satisfaction is spending time laying out my look on the altar. I create altars all over my house for different purposes, and my dressing area is a shrine to my devotion to self creation. When I was a kid and then a teenager I would lay out my outfits before school every night. I put thought into how I would style my hair the next day and I would lay out the styling tools as well. Somewhere along my shame spiral I had abandoned that practice. Once again, I now ritualize the act of getting ready for my workday, this time doing it with the intention behind it, with awareness fueling it. I set out one of my heads with the wig of choice. I lay out jewelry. I may select a certain lipstick or a shadow palette. I hang my clothes on a dressing mannequin beside my vanity. I consider the experiences that I want to have in my body, how I want to feel in my clothes, the vibe I want to put forth, the essence that I want to embody. The way I present in the world is no longer something I can ignore or pretend to ignore. I no longer spend a lot of time behind the scenes primping and pruning myself and then pretending as if I didn’t put any effort in. I must recognize that I am many things and all things; I shine out what I want the world to see, and what my Spirit wishes to express. These acts of ritual signal that I am worthy of this attention to detail. They are a celebration of my freedom of expression. They honor the permission I have given myself to PLAY. They are a recognition that what I create for others to look at is something of a reflection of my own Spirit, shrouded in layers of the colorful collective consciousness, and all that draws or ever drew my attention. In honoring my appearance as a work of creation, I release the bonds of programming that tell me that how I am interested in looking or what I am interested in looking at has any bearing at all on my intelligence, my ability to “succeed”, or my role in society on any certain status level. I denounce any negative associations I have attached myself to about why I should decorate my body or how I should relate to it. I have integrated this playful way of being in and enjoying my flesh as necessary and crucial to my well being. My self presentation becomes the essence of Spirit Embodied.

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