I Choose My Fucking Peace

Boundaries, Self-Trust, Soul Retrieval, and the Moment You Stop Waiting for Someone Else to Change

There is a version of healing that looks beautiful from the outside. 

You regulate.

You breathe.

You pause before responding.

You become mindful of your words.

You learn your triggers.

You learn theirs.

You stop reacting to every activation like it is an emergency.

You communicate.

You set boundaries.

You try to cause the least amount of harm.

You become compassionate enough to understand that people do not change simply because you finally found the perfect combination of words to explain how their behavior is hurting you.

You learn about trauma.

Attachment.

Addiction.

Mental health.

The nervous system.

Family systems.

The wounded child.

The wounded masculine.

The Drama Triangle.

You learn to recognize your own role in the dance.

You learn when you are rescuing.

When you are persecuting.

When you are making yourself the victim.

You learn to step out.

You learn to stay with yourself.

And sometimes you do all of that...

and the relationship still fucking hurts.

That is the part we don't talk about enough.

Because there comes a point when all the regulation in the world cannot compensate for what requires two people.

I know how to regulate.

I know how to wait.

Boy, do I fucking know how to wait.

I have been called too kind.

Too patient.

Too understanding.

The person who gives too many chances.

And maybe sometimes I have.

But I also know what change actually requires.

I know how long it took me to become the woman I am today. I know how many times I fell backward. I know how many times I had to catch myself repeating something I swore I understood. I know that insight does not automatically become integration.

So I gave grace.

And more grace.

And more fucking grace.

I tried to remember that another human being's healing does not happen on my timeline.

But all the patience and kindness I gave could not undo all the neglect I had been served.

And eventually something inside me would rise.

The calm before the storm would end.

The bull would wake up.

And suddenly I could scream.

I could breathe.

I could finally speak my fucking truth.

I Didn't Want to Be Done. I Wanted Something to Change.

There is something I need to admit about all the times I said: 

I'm done.

Sometimes I wasn't saying:

I don't love you anymore.

I wasn't even saying:

I want this relationship to end.

Sometimes what lived underneath those words was much more vulnerable:

Please give me a reason not to be done.

Please show me something different.

Please take responsibility without making me drag it out of you.

Please come toward me when I am hurting instead of running away.

Please stop making me explain the same wound for the hundredth time.

Please take something you learned in therapy, treatment, a conversation, a book, anywhere—and fucking use it when it matters.

Please show me that US exists somewhere inside your decision-making.

Please don't make me be the mother again.

Or the caregiver.

Or the teacher.

Or the therapist.

Or the coach.

Or the fixer.

Please just let me be your partner.

I wasn't asking for perfection.

I was asking for participation.

There is a difference.

And I think that is one of the hardest truths I have learned about boundaries:

A boundary can work perfectly and still break your fucking heart.

Because a boundary does not exist to make another person change.

It defines what I will do when something continues.

And sometimes I secretly wanted my boundaries to accomplish something they could never accomplish.

I wanted them to make the relationship healthy enough that I wouldn't have to leave it.

I wanted the boundary to wake someone up.

I wanted it to say:

Please understand how serious this is before there is nothing left to save.

But the other person still has agency.

That means I can communicate beautifully.

Regulate.

Explain.

Wait.

Love.

Set the boundary.

Hold the boundary.

And still not get the outcome I desperately wanted.

That is grief.

The Last Straw Is Rarely About the Straw

Sometimes it is something ridiculously small. 

A simple task.

A promise.

Something that should take twenty minutes.

I'll do it tomorrow.

Tomorrow becomes next week.

Next week becomes another explanation.

And suddenly I am disproportionately angry about something stupid.

Except I'm not.

Because I'm no longer looking at the task.

I'm looking at the promise.

I'm looking at every other promise sitting underneath it.

I'm asking:

Does your word mean anything when nobody is standing over you making you keep it?

That's the thing about the proverbial final straw.

It isn't carrying its own weight.

It lands on top of everything that came before it.

The conversation that never happened.

The apology that never became repair.

The plan that never materialized.

The commitment that required another reminder.

The beautiful moment that gave me hope.

The next disappointment that made me question why I let myself hope again.

One piece of hay lands on a camel already carrying fucking years.

And everyone wants to talk about the hay.

STICK TO THE FUCKING FACTS

This is one of the most important things I teach. 

It is also one of the most important things I practice.

When the nervous system becomes activated, the mind can create an entire courtroom.

Evidence that doesn't exist.

Motives we cannot know.

Stories.

Predictions.

Catastrophes.

So I return to the same thing over and over:

What are the facts?

STICK TO THE FUCKING FACTS.

What was actually said?

What actually happened?

What do I know?

What am I assuming?

What evidence exists?

It has kept me sane more times than I can count.

But loving someone who has repeatedly damaged trust creates a brutal dilemma:

How the fuck do you stick to the facts when you suspect the person holding some of those facts isn't giving them to you?

There were times I wanted to look.

To search.

To investigate.

To find the thing that would finally settle the argument happening inside my own mind.

There were times I was essentially told:

You can look if you don't believe me.

But I didn't want to look.

That was never the fucking point.

I did not want to become a detective in my own relationship.

I did not want to secretly search someone's phone.

I did not want surveillance to become intimacy.

I did not want to spend my life trying to catch someone doing something so that I could finally trust my own perception.

What I wanted was voluntary transparency.

If you know your word has been damaged, don't make me perform an investigation to restore it.

Show me.

Not forever.

Not because another adult should surrender every ounce of privacy.

But because when trust has been repeatedly broken, “You can look if you want” still places the labor of establishing reality onto the person whose trust was injured.

I didn't want to police someone into becoming trustworthy.

I wanted behavior to eventually make policing unnecessary.

How Did I Not Fucking Know?

This may be the question that has hurt me more than almost any other.

Not:

Why wasn't I good enough?

I know I am enough.

Not:

Why wasn't I worthy of love?

I know I am worthy of love.

The question that reaches somewhere much deeper is:

How did I not fucking know?

I consider myself deeply intuitive.

I notice things.

Patterns.

Shifts.

Energy.

Behavior.

Incongruence.

I have also spent more than twenty years professionally working in the intersection of severe trauma, mental health, addiction and co-occurring disorders.

Human behavior is not foreign territory to me.

And still:

How did I not know?

Again.

How did I not see it?

Again.

How could I be so perceptive in so many places and become so uncertain here?

But when I really sit with that question, another truth appears.

Many times...

I did know.

I knew something.

I felt the incongruence.

I noticed the behavior.

I saw something that didn't fit.

What I didn't necessarily possess was the missing fact.

And that matters.

Because intuition is not omniscience.

No matter how perceptive I believe myself to be, I cannot hold myself responsible for accurately identifying information another human being may be withholding from me.

Sometimes all I actually know is:

Something is fucking off.

That is information.

It is not automatically proof.

And perhaps self-trust isn't believing that every feeling I have is fact.

Maybe self-trust sounds more like:

Something isn't adding up yet. I don't know what it is. I don't have to invent the answer. But I also don't have to abandon what I am noticing simply because I cannot prove it yet.

That has been a very different lesson.

When Not Knowing Becomes a Fact

Uncertainty used to make me fucking crazy. 

I would ruminate.

Analyze.

Replay conversations.

Look for the missing piece.

What am I not seeing?

What doesn't make sense?

What fact would make all the other facts line up?

And eventually I realized something.

Sometimes the inability to establish reality inside a relationship becomes relational information itself.

I may not know whether someone is lying in a particular moment.

I may not know why something happened.

I may not know the motive.

I may never get the confession that makes every piece click neatly into place.

But I can know:

I am repeatedly in a relationship where I cannot determine whether the person I love is telling me the truth.

That is a fact too.

I don't need to solve every mystery before I am allowed to determine what kind of environment I am willing to inhabit.

The goal is not becoming a better detective.

The goal is becoming less willing to live somewhere that requires one.

The Shadow of Compassion

Understanding people has been part of my life's work. 

Trauma.

Mental health.

Addiction.

Co-occurring disorders.

Attachment wounds.

Survival responses.

Shame.

Relapse.

The nervous system.

I understand that change is not linear.

I understand that someone can sincerely want a different life and still repeatedly choose behaviors that move them farther away from it.

I understand how difficult it can be to interrupt patterns that once kept us alive.

I understand because I have done my own fucking work.

Not once.

Repeatedly.

For years.

So I tried to practice something that matters deeply to me:

the least amount of harm.

I tried to choose words carefully.

I tried to recognize when someone was fragile.

I tried to wait until there was enough regulation for a conversation.

I tried to separate behavior from identity.

I tried not to shame.

I tried not to weaponize what I knew about someone's wounds.

And then I had to confront a very uncomfortable question:

At what point does my commitment to causing the least amount of harm to another person require me to tolerate an extraordinary amount of harm to myself?

Because there is always another layer I can understand.

Another wound.

Another explanation.

Another trigger.

Another childhood experience.

Another reason.

Another relapse.

Another nervous-system response.

Another opportunity for compassion.

And all of those things may be real.

None of them automatically create relational capacity.

Understanding someone's wounds does not obligate me to keep volunteering as the place where those wounds land.

I have said it before.

Apparently I needed to live another layer of it:

Understanding is not permission.

Boy Did I Fucking Wait

I waited because I knew change takes time. 

I waited because I knew what my own healing required.

I waited because I could see effort.

Sometimes.

I waited because I could see potential.

I waited because I loved.

I waited because there were beautiful moments too.

I waited because human beings are complicated and I refuse to reduce someone to the worst thing they have ever done.

Those qualities are not things I want to remove from myself.

My compassion is not the enemy.

My patience is not the enemy.

My ability to understand complexity is not the enemy.

But patience has a shadow too.

At some point I had to ask:

When does patience stop serving healing and begin postponing reality?

Maybe.

If.

Someday.

Eventually.

Those are such small words.

They can also become enormous fucking houses we live inside.

Maybe he'll understand.

Maybe this time is different.

If this changes...

If that happens...

When he's ready...

And suddenly I am relating to a hypothetical future human being instead of the person standing in front of me today.

I have written this before:

Potential is not reality.

Now I have to live it.

I cannot build my present life around another person's possible future.

And Then the Bull Comes

I am a Taurus.

For those who find meaning in astrology, you already know the symbolism.

The bull can be extraordinarily patient.

And patient.

And patient.

Until the fucking line gets crossed.

Then good luck.

There is a point when I no longer want to regulate my delivery.

I want to be heard.

I want to be seen.

I want every single thing I carefully held back in the interest of causing the least amount of harm to finally have somewhere to fucking go.

So I scream.

I cry.

I tell the truth.

Sometimes I tell it badly.

Sometimes historically I have chased.

Accused.

Insulted.

Said things from the most wounded parts of myself.

Sometimes the bull didn't simply protect me.

She caused harm too.

And I have had to own that.

Being hurt does not give me permission to hurt another human being.

Someone else's dysregulation doesn't excuse mine.

Someone else's behavior does not absolve me of responsibility for my own.

Healing did not require me to kill the bull.

It required me to stop giving her the fucking car keys.

The Wise One Takes the Wheel

I don't shame her anymore. 

I don't tell the wounded parts of me:

You should know better.

I don't weaponize my profession against myself.

I don't say:

You've done all this work and you're still fucking triggered?

Of course I am.

I am human.

Instead, something wiser inside me steps forward.

She finds the bull.

She finds the little girl underneath her.

And she says:

You are allowed to feel this.

You can scream.

You can cry.

You can rage somewhere safe.

You can say that something hurt.

You can acknowledge what happened.

You can stop pretending you're okay.

But you do not get to destroy yourself or another person because you are hurting.

These are adult problems.

You don't have to solve them, Sweet Child.

Go play.

Go sing.

Go dance.

I'll take it from here.

The wounded girl doesn't disappear.

I simply stopped asking her to drive.

Oh Dear Sweet Child.....Tell Me....What Is Not Yours?

And this is where something in me becomes less clinical.

More transpersonal.

More sacred.

Something I experience as a kind of soul retrieval.

Not a scientific claim.

A spiritual language for something I deeply understand inside myself.

The Wise One asks:

“Oh Dear Sweet Child.....tell me....what is not yours?”

His choices are not mine.

His recovery is not mine.

His shame is not mine.

His self-hatred is not mine.

His anger is not mine.

His wounds are not mine.

His relationship with his past is not mine.

His communication is not mine.

His boundaries are not mine.

His purpose is not mine.

His decisions are not mine.

His consistency is not mine.

His effort is not mine.

His accountability is not mine.

His consequences are not mine.

His relationship with himself is not mine.

His ability to receive love is not mine.

His willingness to change is not mine.

I can love someone without carrying all of that for them.

So I send it back.

Not with hatred.

Not with punishment.

Not because I have transcended into some enlightened being who no longer gives a fuck.

Because it was never mine to carry.

And What Is Mine?

My love.

My patience.

My compassion.

My wisdom.

My knowledge.

My courage.

My encouragement.

My capacity to support.

My ability to regulate.

My ability to have deep and profound conversations.

My voice.

My body.

My sexuality.

My heart.

My soul.

My strength.

My sense of self.

My independence.

My joy.

My peace.

My fucking life.

Some of those things may have felt lost.

Some may have felt stolen.

And if I am going to remain accountable to everything I teach and believe, I have to acknowledge that some may have been abandoned by me.

That's where my agency lives.

I cannot retrieve myself while insisting someone else possesses every piece of me.

I don't need another person to hand Cathy back to Cathy.

I take her back.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Maybe soul retrieval isn't one beautiful ceremony where the lights flicker and suddenly every fragmented piece flies home.

Maybe sometimes I retrieve myself on a fucking Tuesday.

Oh. There's my voice.

There's my Saturday.

There's my body.

There's my ambition.

There's my sexuality.

There's my right to be sad.

There's my right to have needs.

There's my right to say no.

There's my right not to know.

There's my right to stop waiting.

Come home.

I Resign From the Unpaid Internships of Life

At some point you have to laugh.

Because holy shit have I held some positions I don't remember applying for.

Mother.

Caregiver.

Teacher.

Therapist.

Coach.

Fixer.

Cheerleader.

Accountability partner.

Relationship coordinator.

Recovery assistant.

Detective.

Crisis-management department.

Emotional-regulation support staff.

Probably fucking HR.

And somewhere underneath all those unpaid positions was the only role I actually wanted:

Partner.

Here's the uncomfortable part.

It would be easy to say somebody made me occupy all those roles.

Sometimes those roles may have been expected of me.

Sometimes another person may have benefited tremendously from my willingness to perform them.

But I also kept accepting the fucking jobs.

That's mine.

Agency means I can resign.

I do not need another person's permission.

I do not have to wait until they understand why I'm exhausted.

I don't have to make them agree that the job description was unfair.

I simply stop showing up for positions that never belonged to me.

Cathy has officially taken a seat.

She has resigned from the unpaid internships of life.

Reconnection Is Not Repair

This one took me awhile.

Rupture.

Separation.

Grief.

Silence.

Time.

Missing each other.

I love you.

I miss you.

I want us.

Reconnection.

Hope.

Closeness.

Physical intimacy.

And somehow we were together again.

But eventually I had to confront the possibility that time had been doing work that repair never did.

The emotional intensity faded.

We missed each other.

We reconnected.

But the structure underneath us had not necessarily changed enough to hold something different.

Reconnection had replaced repair.

Those are not the same thing.

I don't want another glimpse of change.

I need a pattern.

And trust?

Trust will no longer be advanced on credit.

Court Me

If I ever rebuild something after trust has been profoundly damaged, I know something now that I didn't understand as clearly before.

Change first. Access later.

Court me.

Not because I need expensive dinners.

Not because flowers erase betrayal.

Not because I want someone groveling at my feet proving my worth.

Court me because I want to see who you are when access to me is no longer guaranteed.

Show me consistency.

Over months.

Show me initiative.

Show me regulation.

Show me accountability.

Show me that you can tolerate a difficult conversation without abandoning it.

Show me that your word increasingly matches your behavior.

Show me that you can independently pursue the work you say matters.

If professional couples counseling is necessary, participate in making it happen instead of agreeing that it is a wonderful idea and waiting for me to fucking organize it.

Show me you can contribute to an US without requiring me to manufacture it.

And physical intimacy?

That doesn't get to become the shortcut back into a relationship whose emotional foundation has not been repaired.

My body is not the lobby you pass through on the way back into my life.

Trust requires evidence.

Not one extraordinary weekend.

Not one beautiful conversation.

Not one night of tears.

Not one grand gesture.

Time.

Behavior.

Congruence.

Pattern.

Cathy Has Officially Taken a Seat

And here's the beautiful part. 

I don't have to orchestrate any of it.

If another adult wants to demonstrate change, I don't have to create the demonstration.

I don't need to write the repair plan.

Find the therapist.

Schedule the appointment.

Explain the homework.

Create the accountability system.

Remind anyone what they promised.

Then remind them that I reminded them.

Then become resentful because I'm somehow project-managing the exact process that is supposed to demonstrate that I no longer have to project-manage their fucking life.

No.

Cathy has taken a seat.

If another human being wants to show me who they are becoming:

Show me.

I'll be over here living.

I Choose My Fucking Peace

Peace used to get confused with quiet.

They aren't the same.

Keeping my mouth shut because I don't want another person to become upset isn't peace.

Avoiding a difficult conversation isn't peace.

Making myself smaller isn't peace.

Pretending I don't need something isn't peace.

Keeping everybody else regulated while I quietly accumulate resentment isn't peace.

Peace and silence are not synonyms.

Peace can contain a boundary.

Peace can contain grief.

Peace can contain anger.

Peace can contain:

No.

Peace can contain a fucking scream when that scream is released somewhere it cannot harm another person.

Peace can contain disappointment.

Peace can contain uncertainty.

Peace doesn't require me to stop loving someone.

It requires me to stop abandoning myself in the process.

And today:

I choose my fucking peace.

I Was Already Living

There is one thing I refuse to do with this story.

I will not tell you that I finally chose myself after everything fell apart.

Because that isn't true.

I have been doing that this entire fucking time.

Despite the hits.

Despite the setbacks.

I pause.

I take some well-deserved self-love and self-care time.

I cry.

I scream.

I shout.

I use my tools.

I recover.

I repair MY FUCKING SELF.

And then I write.

I create.

I read.

I watch the show I want to watch.

Hell, I watch the fucking season finale we were supposed to watch together.

Because I'm done waiting to live my life.

I stopped that awhile ago.

A commitment we made once doesn't mean I have to keep sacrificing myself indefinitely to honor circumstances that no longer exist.

I go to the gym when I want.

I take the salt bath.

I light the incense.

I use my lights.

I care for this body.

I sing.

I listen to music I love.

I dance.

I make room for what I want, when I want it.

I have been slowly building my life while all of this has been happening.

And I'm finally becoming more comfortable with something the older version of me struggled to understand:

Slow and steady is okay.

Rest as you may.

But don't forget to have some fucking fun and laugh in the process.

Peace Is Not the Absence of Him

Maybe that's another thing I've learned.

My peace isn't an empty room.

It isn't a blocked number.

It isn't the absence of another human being.

It isn't finally eliminating every person capable of triggering me.

My peace is the presence of me.

It's hearing my own music again.

Feeling my own body.

Recognizing my own desires.

Choosing my own schedule.

Creating something because I fucking want to create it.

Laughing when I'm grieving.

Dancing when I'm tired.

Resting without calling myself lazy.

Building without requiring an emergency to fuel me.

Living without waiting for somebody else to catch up.

My life doesn't begin when someone changes.

It doesn't begin when somebody apologizes.

It doesn't begin when the relationship is finally resolved.

It doesn't begin when grief ends.

It is happening now.

Today, I Know

So let me return to the thing that has kept me anchored so many times.

The facts.

Not tomorrow.

Not IF.

Not MAYBE.

Not what somebody promised.

Not what I desperately hope.

Not what I desperately fear.

Today.

Today I know I am living life to my fullest—whatever that means on each particular day and in each moment I remain breathing on this planet, in this skin, in this body named Cathy.

I know how committed I am to my work.

I know how committed I am to my own becoming.

I know that when I fall, I return.

I know that when something hurts, I am capable of feeling it without making pain my permanent identity.

I know I can repair myself.

I know I can create while grieving.

I know I can rest without giving up.

I know I can love without making another human being responsible for proving that my love has value.

I know I am capable of unconditional love.

And I know I am worthy of receiving love that does not require me to disappear in order to keep it.

I do not know exactly what happens next.

I cannot fact-check the future.

But perhaps I don't need to.

Because after everything...

I trust the woman who will meet it.

This Too Shall Pass

I have carried those words with me for years.

This too shall pass.

Not because pain isn't real.

Not because everything happens for some perfectly packaged reason.

Not because grief should be hurried along so we can get back to being inspirational.

Because nothing stays exactly as it is forever.

Pain moves.

Grief moves.

Anger moves.

Bodies change.

Relationships change.

Homes change.

Careers change.

Children grow.

People arrive.

People leave.

And joy passes too.

That's why I don't want to spend the rest of my life preparing to live.

There are people on this planet I haven't met yet.

People who may touch places inside me I don't even know exist.

And perhaps I will touch something in them too.

There are conversations I haven't had.

Places I haven't stood.

Foods I haven't tasted.

Songs I haven't danced to.

Mistakes I haven't made.

Things I haven't created.

Versions of myself I haven't fucking met yet.

I don't know.

And for perhaps the first time, not knowing doesn't have to mean something is wrong.

I spent so much time asking:

How did I not know?

Maybe now I can allow another question:

What if I don't need to know yet?

I can stick to the facts without demanding that life reveal the entire fucking story.

I can live what is here.

I can grieve what is gone.

I can remain open to what comes next without building my life around a MAYBE.

Unconditional love always finds its way.

I know I carry it.

I know I am worthy of receiving it.

And wherever this next phase takes me, I intend to actually fucking be there for it.

So take the trip.

Eat the food.

Make the mistake.

Laugh.

Sing.

Dance.

Rest.

Create.

Love.

Find your fucking people.

Keep finding yourself.

Explore this magical planet while you still have feet to stand on it, lungs to breathe its air, eyes to witness it and a body capable of reminding you:

You are still here.

Not healed.

Not finished.

Not enlightened.

Still becoming.

Still breathing.

Still living.

I don't know what happens next.

I know I trust the woman who will meet it.

This too shall pass.

And while I'm here—

I choose my fucking peace.

And I choose to live.

— Soma Alchemy