Being sexually assaulted, abused and/or raped is life-altering for victims. We feel ripped away from our former selves and forced to wander a strange and unfamiliar path trying to hunt for pieces of who we once were and getting to know the strangers we have become. All while trying to heal and feel safe again. All while our traumatized brains and bodies continually become dysregulated by events and interactions in a world that moves forward at its usual fast pace. Many of us lose friends and other relationships either because some people suddenly don’t feel safe to us — physically
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The color of my futureis a past broke open andLaid to rest within the expanseof what’s Possible. I smile amidst bright tearsof my own making and The Molasses riptide changesto gentle Champagne.My body rests and floats,held up by imagination, bubbles.My own strength. Yours. Dread spins into nothingness.I am the Curiosity that remains. I am MagicI am WholeI am SafeI am Here That noon hour of painand fear dissolves ina mixture of blues, pinks,purples and golden glitter.Exposed to light —the static & chaos recede Abracadabra! I Say:With my file folder of words.Because I am Powerful. I am NowI am the calm
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This photo was about four weeks AFTER in 2018. My husband helped pace me to a third-place, age-group finish. I was running on pure anger and adrenaline and determination and yelled, “Fuck Him!!!!!” inside my head when I crossed the finish line a second after this photo was taken. Or maybe I yelled it out loud. I don’t remember. But it was very satisfying and I’m so appreciative of John for helping me achieve that. I felt incredibly empowered, and I still have that race result on my fridge five years later. It was the first super-positive experience I had
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I’ve been working on cleaning out my Google Drive because Google has been warning me my storage is almost full, and I don’t want to pay for more storage because that’s ridiculous (in my mind). I’ve already been going through my old e-mails for months (I’ve been at 92% for a while), but hadn’t been aware of the space I was taking up in Drive. I had stuff in there from 10 years ago and files I have no idea why they were there in the first place. Recipes and photos. Old copyediting assignments. But also files I shared with
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[Content Trigger Warning] Last week I had a panic attack while riding in the car with my husband. That’s never happened to me before. The seatbelt was bothering me first, and then I felt a rising tension in my chest, had trouble breathing and eventually felt this intense feeling of being trapped. We only had 25 minutes to go on the car trip, and I thought: Well, I can handle it for 25 more minutes. And then I realized and told myself, “NO, I don’t need to “just handle it,” and asked him to pull over so I could get
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Two years ago this week, we closed on our mountain house and became the new owners. It honestly felt so surreal as we signed the final papers from the typical very tall stack, and left the meeting. Was it ours? Was it really ours? It was really ours! We lived here now. In Grand County, a county we had spent so much time visiting for 20 years. We could now call it home. John and I felt like kids let loose in a candy story of possibility. There was something new and good in our lives. We needed this good
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Ironically, we only went to look at “our” mountain house as an afterthought — as a back-up viewing with the real-estate agent. Our primary target that early-November day was a cute little log cabin in our favorite neighborhood, down on the flats near the lake. There’s nothing more “Colorado” to me than a log cabin among pine trees. And the square, high-peaked little structure with its classic ribbed exterior was picturesque-perfect and inviting when we arrived, hosting a blanket of snow on the roof and entrance railings, and a backdrop of flocked pine trees up and down the street and
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“You gotta keep moving. Once you stop moving, you die.” My dad told me this many times in the decade before he died, although I’m not sure if this message was meant for me, to remind himself of this mantra or to tell me something about himself. Probably all three. Dad always “moved” and tried to get us kids to move, even if he didn’t always do it in the most encouraging way (meaning he yelled a lot). He didn’t always know how to teach us, but he tried to instill his passions largely through exposure and small snippets of
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