Anami Grace | Made Up Life

Do we leave this bathroom alive, Anami Grace? Anami Grace. It’s time for you to choose yourself and leave this mess for your evolution.

I choose myself. I asked for the gun. I put it in my safe. A gift from my grandpa that had just kept me alive when it mattered. Thanks Grandpa. I’ll love you forever.

It had been a profoundly unexpected spiritual experience, it felt like a pink shimmery bubble of rage/grief/complexity had risen up within me and I’d chosen myself for the first time in my life, and all of the screams of the women who’d lost their lives to violence rose up within me and with calm certainty I’d asked for the gun that had just been resting at his temple.

The bubble told me I needed to lock up his gun and do whatever I could to leave and never look back.

But the violence continued into the restless night, followed by a bleary eyed morning in which the children went to school after being up most of the night.

From the outside I suppose it might not have looked like violence. But on the inside I knew that I was about to be launched head first into the hardest months of my life. He’d been trying for MONTHS to come between my therapist and I. But I finally went in person after being remote for 2 years because of the pandemic. I got a hug from her, and at first she didn’t seem to understand how extraordinarily dangerous my situation had become, but I had already decided. Months prior, on my birthday. That I was going to find a way out.

It was extraordinarily difficult because this was my first time feeling like I was part of a family, but I played the part of the devoted mom and girlfriend (?) he’d asked me to marry him, but then gaslit me into believing it was a “promise ring”…Whatever the fuck that meant.

I had finished with therapy, and I was on the phone with the totally useless domestic violence hotline when he came home.

I told him I was leaving with my kids and dog. He pathetically begged me to stay, but didn’t show any signs of changing. He just blamed his job loss, his kid, and played it off like bringing a gun out and cocking it in front of people after having a 4 hour fight with his eldest was a totally normal thing to do on a Sunday night.

I spent three nights with my best friend, and then we couch surfed until I was able to find an apartment I could afford.

All of this gives me a stomach ache and high blood pressure to remember. But this was the beginning of the rise of the matriarchy within me.

And, he made exactly one mistake. Underestimating how much Balloon Girl, my inner child, wanted to survive.

Because who I met in the bathroom was his inner child. So afraid of losing control of everything, resorting to violence to blow it all up before it could burn down.

I felt the power of all of the women who had come before me. All of their cries. I felt their dead weight as I dragged my ass up off of that floor and moved through the impossibility of untangling this mess that was somewhere between the most fun I’d ever had and certain death.

And that’s the unfair thing about the moment before your life changes forever. It feels just like any other moment.

In that moment I was done with a million steps in front of me to create a life I loved. But today I’m done because a work that I’ve been silently moving through my human body is complete.

I asked the spirits of all of the women and children who have lost their lives to domestic violence to join me in play. I asked them to dance with me through my life, and I learned how to live where they could not.

The privilege of this life, and the nuance of their lives lost to the violence of the patriarchy is not lost on me.

I learned how to love them, to hold their shadows, and to move the loss of their lives through me.

And today. As I stood by the river, once again moved to tears that I get to be alive again today. I once again felt their presence in my life. As we danced together in the rain…It dawned on me that we as a nation are faced with our own bathroom moment.

We have to decide that we no longer agree to the terms and conditions of this paradigm. We have to get up, ask for the gun, and move ourselves through the steps of allowing the matriarchy to rise within us.

It’s the only way to honor all of the lives that have been lost to capitalism. And their forever silenced voices cry out from every cell in our bodies to be held.

There is deep power that has been silenced through the promise of opportunity, and it is time for us all to go on our quests to liberate our inner children so that real love, kindness, joy, hope and balance can be birthed through our bodies.

It’s time to leave the bathroom and stop imagining that any of this is normal or okay. Y’all ready? I know the way out.

It’s through the pleasure and pain of loving yourself out of abject violence, and straight into a world you love. Via way of a shadow work healing journey.

Anyway. Love and light to you all. Take care. BYE!