the power of secrets
Someone I admire very much often reverberates that you’re only as sick as your secrets, and that your mess is your message.
That is one of the biggest things I’ve been grappling with most this last year, reconciling things that have happened in my life because of needing to uphold secrecy, or keep the silent peace for others, not wanting to cause a scene, even if I’m carrying chaos. Being the person I am, I’ve been able to escape the pain easily. I’ve been able to hide behind made-up reasonable explanations in my mind so as to not face the deep reality of my truths head on. I can escape anything and dream. It’s one of the perks of being an imaginative Pisces. I romanticize the story. I paint a pretty rainbow on it because I see the best in people and don’t want to feel the darkness of what they do.
The problem with this is that the truth cannot be hidden from or painted over, you have to acknowledge it first. If you don’t, it attacks you in the middle of the night. It comes at you from all angles and eats you until you trust that inner compass of what your soul has experienced authentically moving through this physical world. We carry these amplified points in our energy with us, no matter what kind of stories we try to tell ourselves about this weird life we’re living. It longs to be unraveled.
I suppose I am here to expose my own lies. If I do that, no one has the power to hold them over me. Therein lies true freedom, where I can rise and maybe use my experience to help others without throwing myself or others back in drama. I feel like that is true mastery. I do not bring this up to attack anyone, only to speak my truth for myself. I already know karma works. The energy you give is the energy you receive. Justice doesn’t have to come from my actions. Whatever another does with their energy, they get the same energy back, regardless of what I do. All I can do is manage me.
If I don’t acknowledge this for what it is and integrate it, I carry it with me and invite more of it in, and that’s the very last thing I want.
Three months ago I randomly found a woman’s blog. (Not so random, in my opinion. I was probably meant to.) She was a woman I’d met some time ago. I was surprised to find that she validated what I had been chaotically feeling for some time about someone in sharing her own experience there. I sobbed for hours as painful memories hit my body. If she hadn’t spoken her truth, I would still be questioning what really happened all those years ago, because she happened to be talking about the same person. She expressed there the same experience as what happened to me regarding this person I was too terrified to confront, A person I had been making excuses for and lying to myself about, because of how well-connected he was in the community. I was young, in a vulnerable situation at the time, and he took advantage of me. I should have run far away when he kept saying to me that I would be the perfect girlfriend and kept asking me if I was bi yet. I made very clear to him that I was a lesbian and only into girls. But he would drink heavily at night and did whatever he wanted, because his life was in flames. To be honest, my life was in flames. too. Humans are messy.
This woman’s own exposing of her secrets involving him are what led me to finally heal mine. It had popped up a couple times in life where I was looking at my experience for what it was, but I had shoved it back down and labeled it “He didn’t mean to, he was just drunk, he’s a friend, and I’m dramatic,” so I didn’t have to think about it anymore. I was scared of it. I was forced to be in my body when it happened, and it was one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced. You have to understand that as someone with so much Pisces energy, who lives in space and out of body, having an abrupt physical experience like that without warning was shocking to my entire system. As a result, I didn’t let anybody intimately close to me physically for years. It took my Saturn return to wake me up to healthy boundaries and how to implement them to feel safe physically around others.
What has really struck me through all of this processing is I can’t believe I didn’t realize all these years that it didn’t matter if he was a nice, helpful guy during the day. It didn’t matter that he was involved in good causes in his community. It didn’t matter that many people I loved thought he was a good guy, and still do, making me feel like I couldn’t bring it up. I experienced him secretly behind closed doors just like this woman did, and it was terrifying. I am so grateful to her for waking me up, for having the bravery to write about it so I stopped questioning my sanity.
I take accountability for not setting healthy boundaries with a dangerous person, and for not knowing more about life experience at that time to make better decisions. I don’t need to carry the heaviness of the experience anymore, so I’m exposing it. I can clearly explain in detail all of the times I pulled away from him in distress, but he forced his way in and got what he wanted. I did say stop. I voiced my concerns. I didn’t know what boundaries were and was laughed at, because he was in a different mental state, and wasn’t making sound decisions. He knew what to say to shove it to the side and make sure I wouldn’t say anything. I didn’t, because I was already at my lowest low. I couldn’t add it to my trauma punch card, especially with the trauma I was going through when it happened.
A lot of my friends and family have experienced something like this, and I don’t know how many dead women I’ve talked to who think I’m being overdramatic about it, based on what they had to experience in their lifetime, and they’re fucking right. Especially the dead ones who don’t get to live and tell their tales. Maybe I’ll start to tell their tales for them.
Starting with the one about my great grandmother. The most powerful woman I’ve ever fucking known, yelling in my ear, fueling this sass and rebellion in me. She was an Aquarius. She was independent, and fierce, and unique. She left her amish family in the midwest to start a new life for herself and she raised four strong women, one of them being my grandmother, who gave birth to another strong woman, my mother, who gave birth to another strong woman, ME. My great grandmother had the strength to run away from the uncle who raped her and knocked her up with twins. She gives me the strength to end this fucking cycle of men making us feel small, silenced, and traumatized. She gives me the strength to use my voice, communication, and boundaries.
Women deserve so much better. Those of any gender, alive or dead, queer or straight, who have had boundaries unapologetically crossed, who have been mistreated by another and didn’t know what to do about it out of fear, they all deserve a hell of a lot better. I hope we as a planet start moving into a place of receiving the good, and being treated with respect, honoring ourselves with strong boundaries. I hope we can all choose to put ourselves in safer, more loving situations where we can stop coping with alcohol and drugs, and stop placing ourselves in dangerous situations to be misused by another just because we’re sad. It just adds trauma and layers to this already complicated human puzzle.
I’m just done with the secrets. They hold no power over me anymore. I trust my intuition to know if a person is safe to be around or not. I trust myself to process intense emotions and my energy. I know what I’ve done wrong, I’m accountable, and know where I could do better. I don’t need the attention or validation or nurturing from others. I know how to take care of myself. I didn’t back then when I allowed this person to hurt me, and that’s okay. I release it now.
I’m no longer sick because of my secrets. I’m well due to my awareness. I’m riveting in my rise.
