The Reflection

It is said that in love, we see a reflection of ourselves.  Maybe that is why love is such a scary thing to enter into.  If we are honest in love, then we have to be honest with ourselves.  I go back and forth between wanting to be alone forever and wanting to find that special someone who completes me.  I do not think that I have come far enough in my self discovery to know who I want to see staring back at me in the reflection.  There have been many men in my life.  Each one has been a very accurate reflection of my current sense of self.  None have been a reflection of the person I ultimately want to be.
There was Jimmy who reflected my desire to have a home and a sense belonging.  I started dating him before I had discovered why I never felt grounded. Trying to steal his sense of belonging and make it my own only made me resent him.  His home would never be mine and his family would never be mine.  They took me in and treated me like one of their own, but I still did not feel as though it was my place.  He did not know who he was without his family and outside of his home, and I did not know who I was without mine.  It was too soon for me to start developing a new sense of family, because I had not yet processed and let go of my previous one.
 After Jimmy, there were various men that reflected every aspect of myself that I had woven into my identity.  One after the other, showed me sides of myself that I wanted to let go of.  Sides that belonged to who my family told me I was but not who I wanted to be.  There was the world traveler who lacked any stability, there was the doctor who thought his career would fill the other empty cracks in his life, there was the party animal who thought the solution to problems was to forget them, there was the adrenaline junky who self medicated by scaring the shit out of himself and there were many mountain men who found their sense of self by climbing the tallest mountain, kayaking the class 5 creek and skiing the wind blown couloir.  None of them reflected the sides of myself that I wanted to grow.
When I made this painting, I was dating a boy who had experienced a childhood very similar to my own.  It was while I was neck deep in the pain my family  had caused me and accepting that I was allowed to feel it.  With him, I felt comfortable being upset and not smiling.  I thought that because he had been through similar traumas, he could relate to what I was feeling and help me to express it.  I did feel my pain.  I did wallow in self pity.  I did self medicate.  I did allow myself to use my pain as an excuse to be angry at the world and close myself off.  There came a point when I wanted to move on and become someone different.  He never did.  This was a huge turning point for me; realizing that I could feel the pain and wallow in it but then let it go and no longer allow it to control who I am.  Letting go of him and the reflection of myself that he represented, really helped me to move on to the next stage of my recovery.  It also taught me how enlightening relationships are, whether they are positive or not, they can help you to discover the person you are at the current moment and tell you if that is the person you really want to be.    

The Conflict

We all fight with conflicting sides of ourselves.  Everyday we make choices as to who we want to be.  Sometimes the good wins and sometimes the bad overcomes us.  We hope that the good is strong enough to persevere, and each time that it does, it gets a bit stronger.  There is nothing stopping us from one day stepping off the edge and choosing to be a side of ourselves that we have not yet acknowledged.  We can only hope that we continually have the strength to choose the more positive option.
 
After my mom moved to Africa, I was left in the deceivingly calm wake left by my family's chaos.  I was torn between feeling relieved that I was finally able to live my life free of their drama and feeling completely broken by the fact that I was truly alone.  This began my stage of redeveloping how I saw myself and how I related to myself and the world around me.  For so long, I was living just to survive the ups and downs created by my family.  My life was riding their roller coaster and I was simply reacting to each curve they threw at me.  At last, I was on my own left to figure out what path my own life would take.  Derailing from the ride they had me on filled me with a sense of freedom but also dread.  Who am I without them?  What lifestyle will I choose to live without them?  Can I even survive without them?

I go back and forth between the person they made me and the one that I am slowly developing into.  In no way do I regret all of the traveling I have done.  It taught me so much about the world and my place in it.  I have however, realized that my instability left me feeling disconnected and hollow.  There were no ties connecting me to any one place or any one community.  I had not stopped moving since I was 16 years old, and as I sat in Buena Vista trying to find myself, I realized that I didn't have a well defined self.  Erin could be a school teacher in Luxeuil Les Bains France, sitting in cafes for hours, taking dance classes and going to art clubs.  She could also be a mountaineer in Chile, camping above tree line in blizzards, climbing rock faces and trekking through the Andes.  I had so many identities that I had lost any sense of self.  Through my travels, I had proved that I could be anybody, that I could fit in anywhere and that I could survive anything.  Figuring out what I really wanted to be doing was a much more challenging task.

Whether I was running from my past, proving my ability to survive or trying to gain my family's approval, I had never been living for myself.  I was tired.  I was broken down.  I was lost, and I was very lonely.  As I slowly relaxed into my life in Buena Vista, I started to uncover the person I was before I jumped on the crazy ride around the world.  I was a small town girl who craved community and connection.  More than anything, I wanted to belong somewhere and be cared about.  Sometimes the flighty traveler in me still takes over and tries to convince me that I will never belong anywhere and that I will never grow roots anywhere.  She tries to pull me away from my grounded state and throw me back onto the roller coaster.  It is not easy to convince myself that I am capable of having a home.

The person that I am becoming wants more than anything to have a home.  I want to be a stable support to others and find a stable support system for myself.  There is nothing easy about trusting my ability to do this.  I know how to survive in foreign countries and how to live alone, but I don't know how to be a part of a stable community.  I am afraid of getting too close to people and losing them again or worse hurting them.  I don't believe myself when I say I want to be there for others.  Nothing in my past has proven that I make a stable or reliable friend.  One day I am there and the next I am on the other side of the world recreating my life somewhere else.  All that I can do is start every day by focusing on the person I want to be and believing that I am capable of being her.

To the Future

Moving forward is based on the assumption that you let go of the past.  Understanding what this means has been one of the most challenging tasks for me.  Does this mean that eventually I will be able to forget what happened to me?  Does it mean that in order to leave my past behind, I have to slowly dissolve the person that I was?  Through this process, I have realized that you can never forget where you have been.  Those memories will fade and slowly lose the weight that they once held, but they will never completely vanish.  They shouldn't vanish.  Good or bad they were the stepping stones that you took into the present.  Realizing this, I had to accept that I could never drop these heavy events in my life; I simply had to learn how to lighten my load and rob them of their power.

It is hard for me to believe that I can be someone different than my family.  How can i come from a past like that and become someone worthy of a loving and stable environment?  Nobody should ever have to go through what I did so, as a precaution, I told myself that I would never get married or have a family.  What if I became my father or mother and hurt my own family like they did me?  I would rather live alone forever than put my own family through that.  I am sure that everybody who has been hurt by their family thinks the same thing before they start their own life.  They tell themselves that they will never do what their parents did; they will never be that cruel.  Then, before they know what happened or how they got to where they are, they find themselves repeating the same destructive patterns that they had sworn they would never repeat.  Moving forward, to me, means accepting that what happened in your past does not have to control who you are in the present.  It means looking towards the future with the hope and belief that you will be in control of your actions.  Your past will no longer carry enough weight to alter the direction of your future.

My good friend Angela drove with me to Woodland Park on the day that I was saying goodbye to my mom.  I couldn't speak in the car.  I had no words that could fix or distract me from the situation I was in.  A deep sadness pressed down on my heart as I faced the possibility of never seeing my mom again.  She was simply moving to Uganda, but in my reality, I was making the decision to not only let go of her physical presence in my life but also her emotional presence.  This was going to be my goodbye to having a mother.  The mother that she had once represented had left years ago, but this was the first time I was going to look her in the face and admit to myself that I no longer had a mother to turn to for support.

When you see a family member, no matter how your relationship has been with them, you feel a tug on your heart that tells you that they are your tribe.  They are supposed to be your safe haven, your rock and your comfort.  Whether this is what they really represented for you or not, your heart tells you that this is what you should be receiving from them.  My mom was sitting at a little table with a manila folder laying in front of her.  I could see the tension run from her watery eyes down through her taught shoulders and rigid back.  Her discomfort was a reflection of my own.  We hadn't seen each other since our heated separation after Thanksgiving.  She was leaving for Uganda with the man that had broken our family apart.  She was leaving me and her life in the states to follow a man who had never loved her to Africa.  I was losing my mom.  There was nothing comforting about this meeting, and although my heart told me that seeing this woman should stimulate love and relief, all I felt was pain and anger.

We sat across from each other inches apart but with oceans of distance between us.  She handed me a folder that explained the organization she was going to work for.  As she spoke about her excitement to be helping the children of Africa and doing good in the world while finding her purpose in life, my throat closed in tighter and tighter while I wondered why her life here and her family here could never provide her with that fulfillment.  I felt no happiness for her; I didn't believe one word she was saying.  She wasn't running towards her life's dream; she was running away from the life she had let seep through her fingers here in the states; she was running away from the family she had failed to support.  There was nothing I could say to her to explain that I felt as though a jagged knife was slowly ripping my soul from my dying body; how all I wanted was a family that loved me enough to stick around and make a real effort to change.

 I tried to stay very stoic not wanting to show her the damage she was causing me.  There was part of me that didn't want to give her the satisfaction of watching me cry over her departure.  As the tears welled up in my eyes, I saw the relief and light begin to shine in hers.
"Does this make you sad?"  She asked looking at me with eyes that searched for proof of my love and my hurt by her leaving.  "What's making you sad?"  She asked prying out a confession that I needed her and couldn't live without her.  A confession that would have satisfied her every need but that never would have changed her decision to leave.
"Nothing, I can't explain it or talk about it right now."  I choked out the words trying not to suffocate on my slowly restricting throat.
"Will you come and visit?"
"No mom.  I don't think that I will."
She handed me the manila folder that contained the title and service records to my dad's old car that he had given to me after he missed my college graduation, because he had moved to the Congo.  We hugged without touching and I walked away from my mother holding a title to a car that represented everything I had received from my family but could never replace the connections we were never able to make.