Thoughtfully and Faultfully, Gabe

Hey Alexa, play This Is Me Trying by Taylor Swift and dim the lights. I’m setting a mood.

Grab your wine, guys, because this is some sociopathic admissions with a pinch of growth. And who doesn’t love a good gift? Well maybe, it’s not a great gift.

I pack away my feelings in gift boxes wrapped in bows. They look beautiful from the outside. They look well put together; strung out in careful words with some whimsical poetic touch. If you unraveled the bow, and slid the lids off, you would find nothing but a seriously chaotic mess. Untidy at best. A mouse trapped in an endless maze with no net return for the jobs she does.

Eighty percent of the time, I love the mess. Mess builds character, right? God knows I AM a character, at least. Lol. But I hate (and I say this with every cell of my body) I HATE the boxes.

Each box fits into their respective slots on the grid. They never cross. They never touch. There is no intermingling; no entangling with the parts of Me.

My mom used to say that there were separate parts of my life that never crossed. I became a different person for each situation I had to be. Which, quite frankly, for a nine year old is exhausting. To become an adult as a child, and to know how to handle your emotions when you’re supposed to be learning is exhausting. But sometimes, life just happens that way, and you cope.

I’m not going on about it in a way to discredit the few adults I had as a child, but most of the ones I trust came in my late teens anyway. To discredit my parents who tried. To discredit the good times I had as a baby. Its just nine year old me tied bows on boxes as a unhealthy coping mechanism that I’ve never stopped using. I acknowledge. I pack. I tie the bow. I put it in its designated place. I control who I am, to control the out come of situations.

When I was nine, I had my first round of therapy. This was very court threatened as I like to call it. My therapist was mostly wonderful but she asked me to describe myself, I don’t think she was ever prepared for the spill I gave her. I told her, verbatim with a touch of censorship for the feelings of others, “if this were the wild, if we were wolves, I’d be the alpha. I’m in control.” Which lead to a series of other discussions with my birth givers that I was 100% not present for. However the boxes are controlled. The need to be in control is… heavily weighted. I can’t think of a time where I demanded to not be in control, to be on the same level, to not have authority issues in general. To respect the understanding of mutual understanding itself. It’s hard. To be so vulnerable to hand off control and respect to the person its handed to. (Spoiler: this is me trying.)

I have never let those boxes touch. I can lie about each separate box with a straight face and I’ve done it for years. My own husband casually informed me that he knows I could lie about massive things and never falter on the front lines, never give it away. Because again, the boxes don’t touch. It’s easy to lie when parts of your lives have never met. It’s easy to adapt to a truth when truth is circumstantial to the person you become in specific situations.

Its easy to set aside boxes after they are wrapped, and lie to yourself about the person you are. It’s easy to lie about the things that have impacted you. It’s easy to lie about what you do and do not feel. It’s easy to lie when you don’t mean to. It’s easy to lie. Period. It’s only after the truth is admitted to the own voice inside your head, produced by the never ending waves of electricity, that it becomes hard.

There are things I will never admit. There things I will never say first. And when I do say them first, I tend to make it a bomb; a foundation and justification for leaving the box behind. It’s an edge on a mountain that I love, where jumping down, doesn’t seem nearly as bad as what could happen when someone comes along and realizes they can push me off. There are views I will never share. There are bridges I will never cross because too many times I have been led to believe I was meeting someone in the middle to only find bombs left by other people waiting to explode. Too many times I’ve been in the middle of the bridges when those explosions went off, and I was left burned and suffocating somewhere in the bottom of a river. Too many times where I said I felt safe crossing, only to have my lungs filled with water. And honestly, I am the only person allowed to steal my oxygen now because of it.

I refuse to allow people to box me. I refuse to allow them to pull back the boxes off their grids and throw them into fires. But there are moments that do make me feel out of control, its normally the big moments; the big emotions. I normally set them in their boxes more gently; visit them more often. Untie their bows and tie them again; become familiar enough in order to desensitize the situation. Say it over and over again in my head to make me believe it, until it stops being a big emotion; until it stops feeling real. Sometimes, I’ll even say it aloud just to make the constant pounding of the truth go away. To prove to myself that it doesn’t matter.

I may not be able to unfeel things but I can certainly control what I feel at the end of the day. I can participate in the denial, acceptance, or neutrality. I can turn the emotions all the way down to get through them.

However, I am learning that sometimes there are people in this world who won’t mislead the safety of the bridge. There are surprising moments in this life that leads individuals into being better than they were. There are people who can talk you off the ledge with just a few words and the energy they emit without ever knowing ledges loom. There’s people to share the views with, without starting a full out war. There’s peace. There are people who are the safety in your world. There are safe spots in life you can trust wholeheartedly, unconditionally, indescribably.

When you don’t put the blame of the population down onto specific people, you may just be surprised once and awhile. While you may be terrified of the switch of the consistency, the change is normally what you need the most in order to pursue the growth. It’s a type of relief, solace, and crushing feeling all at once; its oxygen on a hard day. It’s the only thing keeping you together when the plates clide. It’s a cast signed with love around a heart with too many fracture lines. It’s everything important, and beautiful and needed.

It’s difficult to find the places where you can unpack your boxes, untie your bows, and peacefully sit in the mess. Its difficult to find the place where words don’t lose all their meaning the more you say them to yourself. It’s hard to find the people who can meet you in the middle without the threats. It’s hard sometimes not to automatically leave the unknown for the comfort of your independence.

And trust me when I say while getting to those places, the baby steps are the hardest. The most painful. The ones where you bear all the weight, while not moving far; and they are the most important (the most beautiful, the most needed.) Untying the boxes are more important than how pretty the bow is. Finding out what’s inside the box, is more beneficial than forgetting the box. Allowing a person to hold the weight of their own actions, as opposed to others, is more important than the lack of acknowledgement to yourself. The acknowledgement towards yourself is more important than back burning yourself.

So I’m baby stepping my way to trusting myself, and trusting the Surprises, to see what it’s like to be unboxed.

Loving you forever.

Faultfully,
Gabe 🥰

Good 2021 my loves,

I’m just gonna jump off board here and get into it, because I have a lot of questions and a lot to say.

I understand the whole saying; I get the concept. Masters of our own fate. Captains of our own souls (or ships, whatever.)

I hear it. I know it.

But I wish I could I see the future. I wish I could see if I’m mastering this well enough because lately I sure don’t feel like I am. I wish I could see exactly which direction the ship is headed. I wish I could see how bad it’s going to hurt when I get where I’m going.

I know we’re supposed to embrace the seas, and love the sights. You know the whole, stop to smell the roses thing. But the truth is, I don’t really like the smell of roses. I just want to see if the roses bask in the sunlight or if they get trapped in a vase. I want to know if they get cut up and put in a window, or if they get to be settled into the ground with permanent sights of mountain tops.

Does the ship make to the other side? You know the perfect pirate picture: blue skies, white sandy beaches, green trees; the vibrancy of life and health (well okay, pirates aren’t notorious for having a lot of health but you get the picture, right?) Or does the ship get pulled under? Does it get cut off by my tsunami of grief and regret? Does it make it the shore just to be pulled under and crushed by something it passed a long time ago?

How does one end a life knowing they are in the exact spot they were always meant to be? Better question: how does one live a life knowing they are in the place they were designed to be? How does one master their fate while they live in it?

I know we’re not supposed to know; we have to live on faith and trust (and probably some pixie dust) that we’re doing this right. I know there’s humans out there who say they have no doubt in what they do because they are living peacefully within themselves. I just dont buy it from the amount of people who say they live without that disconnect.

I think they bury the questions to have a life they can fathom. But what would they do with that pseudo confidence if they knew there would be in no pain along the way, between the journey and the destination? What would they do if they thought the ship would never sink? What would they do if beauty never became destructive?

There’s so many questions in regards of life, and love, and fate. As beautiful a notion as being the captain is, I think its equally unfortunate for both those who work hard and hardly work. There is no one in the entire world who is going to get you to where you need to be. Its just you on that boat, really. It’s up to you to get to where you need to be. It’s up to you to die peacefully and whole. It doesn’t matter if you are religious, if you believe in the stars, an entity, or science; at the end of the day. It. Is. All. You. There’s a weight in that responsibility for yourself that most people don’t often remember they are lifting.

Nobody will tell if you the projected pain is worth the earth moving situations you are in right now, but yourself. And sometimes that’s cruel. Most of the time, the easiest things that we can say and do, are the hardest to survive. Sometimes the pleasantries of truth, are the very things weighed down with unmasked pain.

The only thing to do is to surround yourself with the people you can rely on; the people you love and trust. Even when it’s hard to love and to trust. Even when sometimes mastering feels more brutal than the oppression of coasting.

Sometimes the best way to answer all my questions, is to accept the pain and the emotions willingly. There will always be the constant gamble as to which is better; diving blindly or proceeding the caution, based on how much “living” you can take.

The questions are hard. Living is hard. Finding the place where you’re meant to be is hard. Because what if you’re 47, and realize you ignored your calling? What if you’re 32 and realized you didn’t pick the soul who matched yours effortlessly? What if you’re 88, and dying without ever really having embraced the pain to take the gamble for the life you really needed?

When I was in highschool we were constantly reminded by the band director that “good is the enemy of great.” And for some reason it sinks more into me every passing year. Can you sacrifice what is good about your life in the attempt to find what would be better? Or does there come a point where you can be comfortable in what you sought out to begin with?

I mean obviously I don’t know. I only know that a beautiful life doesn’t mean there’s no pain. A beautiful life isn’t always built on reckless truths. And reckless truths aren’t always absent from a beautiful life. There are fine lines everywhere, and we are really just acrobatics of life tight rope walking until we fall into the places where we need to be. A constsnt plan walk waiting for the exact moment we can fall and sink into our own waters.

It’s nothing short of wonderful and awe inspiring. It’s nothing short of painful and heart crushing. But we’re here and we’re in it. We’re all living on the same rope waiting for our little piece of ocean to swallow us up. There are days we are flies in glass boxes and days we are the great whites of the seas.

The Captains. The masters. Who lost their maps in the wild the moment we stepped out into the world. You will find your way, and it will be worth it one day. “The emotional outbreaks,” the pain, and the beauty. Somewhere out there, one day, the answers will come and we’ll know where each path was worth it. Even if it rips us apart before we become whole.

Faultfully in the heart of the tsunami,

Gabe

Bonjour mes amores, (girl look at you practicing your french.)

I think most humans are not nearly as domesticated as they’d love to believe. They’re not strictly the labels they’ve placed on themselves. They’re not French, American, Spanish, Indian, or Christian, Muslims, or really the list goes. They’re animals and it should be respected.

I feel like most parts of me are untamed; beasts somehow surviving past the inexplicable amount of damage that has been continously hurled toward them. Most of the time, I love that wildness. I love the wilderness that weaves its way through me; the places were I stand mystified by who I am.

But sometimes, I mean rarely, its too much. A little more than I can bear to shoulder on my own. Most of the time, I think my emotions enjoy wondering The Wilderness of Gabe; they’re content in their space, and not to sound too crazy its miles of protected land in my heart. They’re good. Its taken me years to allow myself the space to feel, and to allow emotions to come and go freely. Its dedication to determine what is worthy of most of your time, and find them little homes. Yellowstone would pale to the states of human growth, despite our insignificance in the totals of this realm.

I think though that most people believe once the establishment of these protective lands are built, that there suddenly becomes a depletion of moments where even that is not enough. Thats not true. Wild beasts, are still through and through, wild beasts. Even those who are untamed can have the misfortune of being trapped inside their chests.

I’m pretty sure thats what love is, what ambition is, and where the soul resides. Right behind the chest cavity, a persistent pounding against the inside of what you are made of; a pounding that would put the Tell-Tale Heart to shame.

My Love, my ambition, and my soul pace back and forth right behind where my ribs meet my sternum. Relentlessly throwing the weight of their body against my own. A beating that my own heart can’t take. Its like they’re waiting for permission to engulf, destroy, and heal every transgression that has ever had the unwarranted courage to cross their prey. It’s beautiful, naturally, but where there is beauty in the wild there is also brutality.

A love like that is never reciprocated. An ambition like that is never fulfilled. A soul like mine is not satisfied. There’s a consistent hunger; a consistent desire to pour out every ounce of my life in the “now” to feel whole for the “next.” Its a bad habit, in all honesty. But I am so much, that sometimes it feels like that there is not enough protective land in my body, to withstand the earthquake of who I am.

And where do these beasts go, when they’re released from their cage, but have no place to rest their desire? What happens when the earth shakes and it crumbles their homes? Do they die, or do they find holes to lick their wounds? Do the fault lines that build mountains I love, and the valleys I respect, simultaneously demolish and diminish the animals of my wild? Or does the earth cracking allow for their growth? The diversion, and evolution and habit expansion that rebuilds them into something even more wild? Something even more desirable and beautiful than they were. Something that men want to hunt but have no desire to keep.

Either way, there’s copious amounts of who I am. Sometimes it feels like my little body just simply cannot contain the contents of the things that make me. I think most people feel that way at some point in there life, even when they’re happy.

My best suggestion is to roam until you find the place where your beasts dont feel like they are attacking you from the inside. More often than not you will find the place that sits well within your soul. However, when the “not” comes, embrace those feelings of uncertainty because wild beasts are wild nonetheless. Allow the beauty and the brutality to consume what they need, because expansion never occurred without shattering. Dont neglect the grounds where you grow what makes you. Don’t neglect the beasts that aquire the things, that makes your heart beat voluntarily over the science. The things that make your heart aspire to beat over survival.

Faultfully, and t’aimer toujours,

Gabe

Hey, you.

Whoever you are. Whoever has deemed this link important enough to click on. I abandoned my blog, so dont judge its lack of love; I went on an unsolicited soul search the last half of twenty-three. Or maybe it was the last half of twenty twenty, because im sure twenty-three in the grand scheme isn’t a mile marker for wisdom. Maybe it was this wild year, and speaking of the year- happy 11 months blog.

I’m not sure why when I look back at twenty three, I just remember a lot of tears because there was a lot more than sadness that possessed my last 365 days. There was a lot of growth; a lot of epiphanies. A lot of happiness. There was a remembrance of a person I was, and a lot of hard looking at the person I’ve become.

I’m sure seventeen year old Gabe would stand proud to know she has the same heart that she had seven years ago. Im even more postive twenty one year old Gabe would stand there disgusted to know that the growth she thought she endured was just a neglected mind set. I’ve come to accept that maybe I dont block out all the romantic fairy tale type notions of life because I don’t believe in them; rather I just can’t accept them. (And I mean, all of them, not just romantic romance.) I’m a firm believer in hard work, so its hard for me to accept that there is a beauty in friendships, relationships, and life that festers naturally. I deemed luck unworthy, because I decided I was unworthy of those things that seventeen year old Gabe wanted. And thats just a bold truth; one of those hard ones that make it difficult to breathe. The truth of knowing you let yourself down somewhere along the way and you don’t have anyone to blame but yourself.

The truth is, I blamed a lot of people for how hard my heart got. The more truthful thing is, is that its very possible to be your own Daisy to your Gatsby. You can be the villain in your story. Im not saying I’m the bad guy; I’m just saying I understand why she never called. Having your hands tied to a dead end is never beautiful; there is no romantic notion to justify that sometimes what you need and what you want are never going to be the same. I think Daisy’s story is a lot more complicated than I originally believed; I still hate her though. I hate that I have sympathy for someone I used to hate. Fictional or not, I guess. Thats just a cold comfort, because some things will never change. Maybe sometimes the things that we really desire, will be unthinkable. Life is too complicated and love can be dark.

I did everything I have dreamed of for the last ten years, and naturally those dreams have rearranged themselves again. Grew bigger. Grew bolder. Im not sure I’ll get everything I’ve dreamed of. I say I appreciate hard work, but the truth is, I’ve always come by education and succeeding naturally. I’ve never considered not being successful in my life because I’ve never felt like there was room for not doing better. It was and always has been a survival instinct for myself and the babies I knew I wanted: do better. Theres no such thing as perfection, and no such thing as 100%, because ultimately you can do better than what you’re doing right now.

So I did it. I got my degree. And damn did that take 70 years or what? Honestly, from the pre vet, to the pre med, to the IO, to the business, to the soc, to the psych. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’ve done it all simply because I could? The endometriosis made me settle into a decision, yet the fact I could have done whatever I wanted is comforting. Thats a warm comfort because I’ve always been trying to prove to myself I’m smart. I’ve never felt smart a day in my life until recently when I started looking back on me. I’m actually like… a whole ass package. But you’ll never hear me say I believe that. Im the most insecure, cocky person I know. Twenty one year old Gabe, would be proud. She would take comfort in knowing I’ve allowed myself to grow into believing more.

I have realized after state hopping a couple of times since seventeen, that I still run away when I hurt myself. I leave. Its what I’m good at. I cut off ties. Let silence become seemingly comfortable when the weight of it feels like its snapping my neck. I allow the people who know I want nothing but the best for them, to become memories. Something to feel momentarily; not forever. Nothing changed there. I suppose that makes me weak, preferring to run away from my pain than accepting it. I have a feeling that 24 and 25 will do wonders in that department. I just hope the wonders dont suffocate me in the meantime. Seventeen year old Gabe would be disappointed; the darker side of life persists. However, I hope I can stare my own in pain in the face soon; just wrap that up and allow its lessons to evolve the person I am. Continously growing means perpetual growing pains.

I didnt learn much, I guess, this year. I just relearned what it felt like to be alive; not a frantic undergrad student who barely thought of anything more than school and stress. I learned to breathe a little; a learned to say no, and I’m trying to find how to balance that. I learned to say what I needed to say, but sometimes I still hurt people that I truly and deeply care about. I allowed myself to let the stress go, then quickly reaccumlated it when things got hard by my own hands. But there’s no changing that. I’ll just find new outlets to come by, new ways to let it go. Whatever it is.

Ultimately I’m happy, with the life I chose. Ultimately, I’m sad for remembering certain aspects of my life I wish I had left alone. Ultimately, I know relearning was the best thing I could have done for my heart this year. I remembered how to say no. I remembered the self love that I gave myself everyday before 21. I remembered that no conditions means you have to have a lot of heart. I remembered I have a lot of heart. An endless capacity for forgiveness, grace, and love. Sometimes I just forget myself in that mix.

I’m remembering the individual I wanted my daughter to see. I made some promises to myself. I made some plans that need to coincide with fate. I decided to choose to believe that there were reasons beyond my own selfishness. I chose to believe in the life I have, not the one I want. Because to be honest it took me a week to figure out where I was going with this blog post. Its a reflection, and a process.

Last year was a year where the faults made valleys. This year was a year where the faults made mountains, and I have always been in love with mountain top views. To see beyond where you stand, and to remember you are so insignificant yet so loved. Theres a beauty somewhere in that. Admiring the heights of mountains and respecting the vastness of the oceans and the stand still of the mysteries of the universe.

The pain we cause ourselves are not always detrimental. They can be beautiful; even if it causes a few earthquakes to make the mountains. Even if volcanoes erupt. Theres a process to who we become and why become them through our faults. We need them; daisy or gatsby. Degree or no degree. A straight line or a million curves. Baby or no baby. Romance or heartbreak. Loves that are Whirlwinds or loves that are like walking into freezing water. Its the faults and how we handle them that determine the views we seek. And I think, I’m still seeking my views.

Faultfully, but loving you always,
Gabe ❤