Disconnect reconnect

I'm falling in a vortex of my past self. For the last year and a half I've been climbing out of the previous six years, and if I'm honest, those six were the culmination of the fifty-two before them. Now I know that. Before now, I had no idea of that loose thread. I pulled that loose thread and have since asked myself every morning in the last six months, "What is happening?"

I have several small projects going in my studio. All art. No pottery. I think I'm concluding, after examination, that I am not an artistic potter but an artist that can make pottery. Taking care of MOTHER was the incendiary device that exploded/imploded my pottery mojo. Excitement at being able to make things and distribute them gave way to feeling obligated to do the same thing over and over, all the joy evaporating. I thought, perhaps, once MOTHER died, that joy and energy and motivation would return. But it hasn't.

I walk in my studio and feel like a stranger to all my efforts. I worked on glaze chemistry which was so good for me and I want to work on that more but I'm in an existential funk. Why?

My shrink told me to think about two things one session. She said, "I want you to think about a couple of things. Anger, and Purpose. And Purpose does not mean Productivity. And I want you to struggle with this." And she gave me the analogy of how a butterfly struggles to get out of its cocoon but the fight strengthens its wings. Naturally, I burst into tears at this metaphor. I still tear up thinking about it.

So many things have been swirling in my head for the last oh so many years but just as many things have been squashed and repressed and beaten back in to the shadows. What is my purpose? What have I been saying no to? I've been saying no to PLAY. I don't even know what PLAY is anymore because I became so goal and result oriented that fun could only be had with an end result in mind. Fun could/can only happen if the context of "how will it help me get something done?"

I've been saying no to AUTHENTICITY. Many times in my career as an adult human I have had the label "grounded' leveled at me. It is in my nature. It is in EVERYBODY'S nature. But children will sacrifice AUTHENTICITY over ATTACHMENT and the upside-down I was as a child came back when I had to take care of MOTHER. I didn't become ungrounded but I did squash, and repress, withdraw and destroy my authenticity just to get through my task of helping MOTHER die. I had to. She never changed and my old ancient small inner child came back to protect me.

My shrink once put to me, "What would happen if you confronted her?" I used to go over the scenarios in my kitchen, me and my cats, and it always escalated into a screaming match with no understanding, no resolution but a whole lot of frustration and guilt because she was never going to change. I knew it. In reality, MOTHER was always trying to bait me into a fight without any provocation from me. She loved the fight. She, even after heart surgery and a growing breast tumor and her half pack of cigarettes a day and her two beers a night at 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, found energy in attacking, manipulating and being the victim all at once. She threw a coffee cup at me when she was 91, screaming at me to "Grow up, Cindi, just grow up!" because I refused to engage in her baiting insults and excused myself to go make my pottery. ("You're always making pots!" she'd regularly say with her smile yet I knew it was a criticism and not an observation or encouragement.)

We humans have an internally hard-wired need to be authentic. It's in our DNA. We also have a profound, hard-wired need to maintain attachment to our primary caregivers, often our mother and father. When we choose attachment over authenticity—which we must as children—we create chaos internally, distress, not just mentally in our thinking brain, but also in our emotional brain. If we don't resolve that inner trauma, it will manifest in ourselves somehow over time. I think.

Anger, my constant companion. The suitcase for my pain, my sadness, my disappointment, my insecurities, my sense of abandonment and my fear and realization that my own mother detested me because somehow, I was conditioned to learn at an age before I even knew how to know, that somehow, I was fundamentally defective. Good but just not quite good enough otherwise my own mother would have loved me unconditionally. Thankfully, my dad did so I had some counterbalance for my inner psyche but the wound of MOTHER projecting her life trauma onto me, always asking in incremental ways to teach her, to solve her inner problems, to feel her feelings because she was terrified of them is a slow-motion accident I'm still in the midst of recovering from, if I'm honest. Parentification is a crushing weight of responsibility.

I've been saying no to TELLING MY STORY. I mean really telling my story, not my self-censorship so as not to hurt other people's feelings or make them mad. Not leaving out details. Not a lack of frank assessment of what happened to me and how I felt or what my point of view is on the matter. Just being authentic. "I should write a book. Post more in this blog (screaming into the void). Make more art." The most obvious obstacle, the person I didn't wish to provoke or make angry is of course MOTHER and from her, trickled down the knee-jerk reaction to self-censor all sorts of truths about my life's journey so as not to make others feel bad but by others I really meant MOTHER. Part of that story, the story that makes others uncomfortable, and oh I know there are so many others out there who share aspects of my story, is that not subscribing to the MOTHER cult, not being 100% devoted to MOTHER with swimming smiles and softly chirping birds and sparkling streams and floating hearts is a sacrilege. And that makes some people angry. I don't know why. I'm not describing their mother/child relationship, I'm only talking about my own. I mean, my relationship with MOTHER wasn't even the relationship she had with her other four children. Maybe there was some overlap, and maybe not. However, MOTHER did create FAMILY ROLES and that's an artifact I'm all too happy to discard. I'm so, so tired that other’s discomfort at my situation has been taping my mouth shut. I have one shot at this trip through the universe, I will speak. And then I will die and my story will be over.

I've been saying no to my IDEAS and my CREATIVITY. Currently, that's where I am, at the road block unsure of how to move it off my path and proceed forward. I do manage to inch forward but I keep bumping into invisible boulders that don't move until I feel out all the contours and process all the feelings, allowing myself another perspective, another facet to ponder, another dot to connect.

That's enough for today.