Anami Grace | Made Up Life

I always used to get the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when my mother would cry, and I would know in my head that there wasn’t anything I could really do about it. But in my body shame, fear, and signals of danger would appear all over me.

Being a highly sensitive human, who lost my more attuned parent before I was 5 created a completely non-verbal fear of abandonment that I’m not even sure I have words for in adulthood. Even with that story settled in my body – it’s more of an all consuming raging sob that runs through my body like electricity every time I think about it.

But I could always feel the trouble before I could see it streaming down my mother’s face in the form of ever-manipulating tears. And tears meant danger. Especially since my younger sibling was born unwell and with complexed medical needs.

So, as an adult one of the most powerful gifts I gave to myself was liberating myself from being in trouble by slowly backing away from capitalism/the patriarchy/white supremacy.

The week before I quit my job I was called into a meeting with my ex-best friend, and my boss. It was a set up. My boss asked my ex-best friend what she’d been working on and she listed 5 projects that she’d been given. While I had already handed my work over to another department a month previously.

I was in trouble, for doing what I was told. In front of my ex-best friend. Who still had a job. And was 6 again. Powerless. Watching my sibling get the attention I needed as a totally traumatized human who’d lost my relationship with my dad just a year previously.

And all I could think was: why am I doing this to myself? Why am I continuing to beg for this money? Why am I allowing humiliation ritual continue?

That weekend I took myself on a mini roadtrip and was determined to make a way to get myself out of trouble. Permanently.

Because it turns out that when you love yourself. When you’ve spent a year indulging your every need, devoted to the proper care and feeding of your human body. It changes your relationship with being shamed.

As in. You no longer allow outside forces to dictate how you live.

So. I went deep into my soul and past the shadow realm on a rescue mission to liberate the piece of me that abandoned herself because of my mother’s crocodile tears.

And as the miles passed, I yelled. I screamed. I cried. I pouted. I told the universe it was vastly unfair to have asked this of me as a child. To have made me feel responsible for another human being’s feelings.

What was left was the fire in me and a boundary that I’m not ever going to allow my human body to be in trouble via way of someone lording their power over me ever again.

And that following Monday I messaged my HR business partner. And told her that it was my last day with the company.

I would say the rest is history. But I had just reclaimed myself from the trouble I’d been in and now I had to do the important part of liberating my emotional body from the trauma of being autistic in a world that minimizes and chronically misunderstands your needs.

In order to do that, I had to accommodate. Every. Single. Need. I had in my human body. No matter how small or slight. I had to validate that it was a need. AND give it to myself with equal and opposite love from what the world had shown me as love.

And that’s the hard part right? Being an autistic human with rejection dysmorphia, PDA type, with early childhood trauma creates a really challenging relationship with needs. Right?

Those needs came at a high emotional cost because I’d become so used to them being chronically unmet in my childhood and early adulthood that it felt. Wrong. To identify and meet the needs.

We’ve already established that I’m ridiculous about food and fashion. But this went deeper than that.

I remember once crying at Target about a trash can that I needed and my mom told me no for.

So meeting my needs meant that I had to unlock my own fear around spending money, and indulge (to an appropriate degree) my need for whatever my inner child could possibly want at the store. It was all minimal stuff: Like, if I wanted a coke with lime. I was going to get myself a coke and a lime at the store. I within reason I wasn’t going to say no to what my human body needed because I’d put everyone else’s needs before my own for a stupidly long time.

My quest to liberate myself out of trouble became a quest to indulge whatever, food I wanted to eat, whatever place I wanted to go, whatever thing I wanted to buy.

Much to my general shock, the more I took care of and met each need as they came up for me, actually lead to my overall joy and happiness. Because for the first time in my life I didn’t have to hold my stomach in like that. Waiting for the vibes to sour in my space.

Mostly because nobody was left in my life to sour the vibes. LOL!

And. Y’all. My needs were so simple to meet. I had to get a good night’s sleep. I had to feed myself good food. I had to have access to music, to dance and sing. I had to speak to myself kindly. I had to move my body, I had to be in nature, I had to see something beautiful every day. AND. Most importantly. I had to create the beauty I wanted to see in the world.

But. I had to get myself out of trouble before I was going to be able to hold safety within my human body to even consider shifting anything within my world.

This post was for my highly sensitive people, extra bonus points if you are neurospicy with high pattern recognition too. You gotta get your human body out of trouble.

I don’t know what that looks for feels like for you, but I know that for me that meant leaving my corporate 9-5 job, and then healing myself through indulging my ridiculousness around food, fashion, friendship, and liberating my time to use for my own whimsy. And if you can’t do that. What gets you closer?

Anyway. Love and Light to you all. Take care! Bye!