Triggers
Hi, my name is Catherine and I am a recovering codependent.
Codependency is an acquired mental health disorder, based on social conditioning and upbringing.
At its core, codependency means that I don’t didn’t love myself. I was not taught to love myself. Instead I was taught that to give all of myself to others made me a good person, and keeping myself to myself made me a bad person.
I was taught that self-love is shameful; by people who themselves had been shamed into not loving themselves by their own social conditioning and upbringing.
I’ve had enough. By not loving myself I have treated myself and others badly.
No more.
I now practice self-love.
Triggers
Masha’Allah, God brings me such lovely blessings and miracles and synchronicities.
Saturday 10AM
When my high school boyfriend turned into my street in his mother’s car, I was sitting on the massive boulder at the bottom of my family’s rental property in Hout Bay. With my mom overseas for work and my sister away at university, I was left alone with my father; a raging alcoholic who was prone to terrorising me when drunk. I’d stayed home that long weekend in the hopes that I could study for my upcoming exams, but the previous night; a Friday night, had been so rough that I’d called my boyfriend early that morning and asked if I could spend the rest of the weekend with him. I needed some TLC and relaxation after all the chaos and terror of the previous night.
And so it was that he’d driven over the mountain to fetch me in the late morning. He didn’t seem to mind fetching me at short notice - maybe because I was his sugar-mommy. Fetching me meant that I would pay for his petrol, his cigarettes and his booze that weekend. He’d even get laid a couple of times, which he seemed to deem to be worth the effort of fetching me.
I’ve been believing that love and safety are things I have to trade for.
I’ve traded for them willingly.
Because I want to experience feeling safe and loved.
I’ve changed.
Now, I am only willing to trade reflected values.
As we drove up the beautiful Constantianek Pass over the mountain between our two homes, we got caught in a centipede of slow-moving cars, the head of which was a truck of some kind that feelered its way around each bend with snuffling engine revs and exhaust-fume sighs.
The windows were open because we were smoking. The air was warm and the skies were blue. As we crawled up the winding hill the trippy music from the cassette player stretched out languidly as birds sang and hopped cheekily between the sunlit leaves of the overhanging trees. These gifts teased out my gratitude and love and joy from within me and I let go of the fear and tension I was holding in my body.
I became aware of the construct of reality.
I could see God in all things.
I’d been this way since nearly dying a couple of months prior. I could see God’s presence in the sun-dulled paint on the car bonnet, in the shape of the branches of the trees, in the smell of the warm tarmac, in the sunlight that tickled my pretty pianist’s hands as I held them before me and marvelled at them. My boyfriend glanced over and smiled at me. I stretched my body out in the already-reclined and set-back seat and closed my eyes. Being said gently, Remember this moment, and I sensed myself as I was in that moment. And then I sensed myself as I am now in this moment, writing this blog post. I connected with my self, my spirit and my higher power in all moments, but especially this one.
The words that I write next are the words that I sent to myself back then. This is as I remember them:
It’s not about you.
Always remember that whatever others do:
it’s not about you.
Lounging in that car seat, I thanked my future self for holding me as I let go of all the things my dad had said and done the previous night. I may have napped a little, exhausted as I was.
When we arrived at my boyfriend’s house, his mom and dad and brother took the car somewhere, and we were left in the house alone. I loved that house. It was a little run-down in a very loved and very lived-in kind of a way. Crystal prism balls hung in the windows alongside his mother’s witchy charms of snake skins and guineafowl feathers and the webs of spiders that she’d catch in the garden and re-house in the windows as pet fly-catchers. Trippy art adorned the walls and there were books and records and musical instruments everywhere. The carpeted stairs creaked cheerfully, chuckling at the frequent comings and goings of the collection of characterful teenagers that the family attracted, most of whom were strays and outcasts like me.
I felt a sense of belonging in that wacky house with those artsy, edgy people and I’m grateful for the experiences that I had within its walls. Thank you house.
My boyfriend and I smoked a joint and sat on the couch in the psychedelic lounge. After a long moment I asked if he’d play guitar for me. He said yes, so I fetched his guitar for him. As his fingers began playfully entertaining the ticklish strings, I cleared the low coffee table of its various items. It was made from railroad runners set in foot-high iron braces and it doubled as a dancing stage for drunken and stoned people, mostly Waldorf mothers and skinny 17-year-old girls like me. I stepped onto the worn wooden surface and explored it with my bare feet, smiling at how young and unfinished my toes seemed on the scarred and weathered wooden surface.
We didn’t know how to express our thoughts and feelings to each other with words or actions and so we expressed ourselves with art and music instead. He didn’t dance but he liked that I did. I didn’t play guitar but I liked that he did. I rhymed my movements with his music and with his music he echoed my movements.
We conversed in this way; communicating our gratitude, love, excitement, hopes and joy to each other with our playful creativity. We traded glimpses of our authentic selves for each other’s.
We created a system that allowed for our relationship to generate novel consciousness.
Artists tend to do that in relationships.
Saturday 8PM
“I don’t want you to hang around me tonight,” my boyfriend told me as we entered the front gate of the house party. I blinked at him and before I could respond, he started walking up the front path, “I have important things to discuss with her that don’t involve you. I don’t want you hanging on to me all night. You can sit outside on the balcony. You’ve got your booze and cigarettes, you’ll be fine on your own.”
I gaped at his back as I followed him into the pitch-black house. The whole house was gutted and everything was black. “Where are we?” I asked him, “What is this place?” He led me up a bare concrete staircase, sans railings, in the dark.
“Her house burned up. Her parents are about to start renovating and they said we could have a party in here and smash some shit before they start,” he explained. Upstairs a girl emerged from the gloom, approaching us with a tiny tealight candle. My boyfriend introduced me as, “Don’t worry about her, she’s going to sit on the balcony.” He took the candle from her and led me out to the balcony. He gave me the candle and said, “I’ll fetch you when it’s time to go. I don’t want to see you or hear from you until then.”
Utterly baffled, holding a hot, molten candle in one hand and my bag with its bottles of brandy and coke and two packs of cigarettes in the other, I watched him sink back into the pitch-dark interior of the house. I heard his usual sycophants greet him with their usual suck-up phrases, stroking his hungry ego, and I laughed softly at how bizarre a situation I’d discovered myself in.
I was enveloped by darkness, standing alone within the small circle of light that the tiny candle provided, in an unsafe, burned-out structure and the person who’d led my unwitting self into this unfathomable situation had abandoned me in favour of another girl.
All about me seemed still and silent but for distant traffic, muffled laughter from the belly of the black house and crickets. I sensed God in all things. I breathed it all in and smiled to myself.
“Well,” I smooched my words through petulantly pursed lips to the candle; “I’m sure this will make for a marvellously interesting story to tell one day! For now, I’m in your good company.” I hummed the tune to This Little Light of Mine as I made a game out of fishing a cigarette out of my bag single-handedly and lighting it from the tiny flame.
“That’s the spirit,” a deep voice said gently from nearby. Hot wax slopped on to my hand and I choked on my cigarette smoke. My eyes had adjusted a bit to the darkness. In the darkest shadows of the overhang, sheltered even from the rumour of light that the scratch of a crescent moon provided, I could see a figure sitting in an Adirondack chair.
I stepped towards him delicately, moving the candle back and forth wardingly in front of me. “What manner of creature doth thou be?” I asked.
“Fear not, Elfling,” he replied, “I’m a creature of the friendly kind.”
A kindred spirit, said our spirits together. We both froze then. A wealth of communication passed between us on some other level in an instant and the power of it all was awe-inspiring. Without knowing how I’d gotten there, I found myself sitting in the chair beside his.
“Do you read?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I replied.
“What do you like to read?” he asked me.
“Everything,” I responded.
“Me too,” he said.
Sunday 3AM
I was crying drunkenly. It was around 3am and we were in my boyfriend’s bedroom. My boyfriend was pulling my clothes off my body in a rough manner and shouting at me.
“We talked about books! Books!” I wailed.
“Why him?” he raged and continued to manhandle me out of my clothes.
“Stop, please!” I begged him, “Why are you so upset? You told me not to hang around you so I didn’t! You told me to stay on the balcony so I did! I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to talk to that particular person! All we did was talk about books! And philosophy! And art! And music! What did I do wrong? Why are you so mad at me?”
He flung me, naked, into the cushioned Adirondack in the corner of his room. I reached for my long-sleeve top that had fallen on the floor near the chair. He grabbed my wrist in a bruise-grip that made my hand go limp. He shook this flaccid hand in my face while shouting, “Because you were with me she wouldn’t even talk to me! I tried all evening to talk to her and she kept avoiding me! I had to find out from her friend that she didn’t want to talk to me because I’ve got a stupid girlfriend! And then I find out you’d been with him all night! I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM! And I hate you too for doing this to me!”
Loud knocking sounded at his bedroom door. He flung my hand into my face and pushed me back into the chair. When he unlocked the door, his mother started talking him down. I quickly pulled my clothes on and grabbed my backpack.
“I don’t want to sleep in here tonight,” I said loudly to his mother over his shoulder.
“Let her out, please, [boyfriend’s name]. She can sleep on the couch and in the morning everything will seem better,” she begged him.
He opened the door just enough for me to slip through and as I escaped down the stairs he slammed the door behind me, shouting, “Good riddance to bad rubbish!”
Saturday 10pm
My balcony partner’s friend had brought out some blankets and candles, hung around for a smoke and then disappeared back inside. We became engrossed in an enthusiastic conversation about our favourite artists.
I was gushing about Francis Bacon when I heard the familiar sound of my boyfriend’s guitar playing from inside the house. I trailed off and my whole body responded to the yearning in his music. I felt sad because I could hear that his yearning wasn’t for me, but rather for the girl whose burned-out home we were in.
“I don’t like your boyfriend,” my balcony partner shared bluntly. “I heard what he said to you as you arrived. I don’t like the way that he treats people. I don’t like how he surrounds himself with fawning fangirls when he’s got a girlfriend. I don’t like how he treats his girlfriends. I don’t like how he treats you. You know his ex-girlfriend tried to commit suicide because of how he treated her?”
“Did you know that one of Giger’s girlfriends killed herself?” I responded.
“Giger is an artist who makes dark and psychological art but is actually a nice person. Your boyfriend’s just an asshole who plays guitar really well.” I giggled at the glee I felt in hearing someone say a bad word about my boyfriend. Most people were so smitten with him that they didn’t ever mention the darker, less likable aspects of his personality. Nobody ever mentioned the most interesting parts of his personality and I felt it was a shame.
I said, “I believe all artists are on a journey of self-discovery; not just through their art, but through how they live their life. I was just talking about Francis Bacon, right, and apparently he could be a right tosser at times. He was expressing this dark aspect of himself not just in his art, but in his behaviour. Hunter S Thompson. Caravaggio. Leonard Cohen. I respect artists who are willing to own all parts of themselves, even the asshole parts.”
“Ha! Your boyfriend’s no artist!” he replied.
Smiling mischevously, I turned in my seat to face him, tipsy enough by then to be so bold. I inclined my head toward him, showing him my crown, “It is my gift to see the artist in others. It is especially pronounced in him, just as it is especially pronounced in you.”
I raised my head and looked him full in the face. We held the gaze for a long moment and then he slowly bowed his head to me, showing me his crown, “As it is in you, fair maiden," he said.
I sat back in my seat and we chuckled at our creations; humour, absurdity, playfulness, enthusiasm, appreciation.
Artists know when we’re arting. Don’t let us fool you into thinking we’re not creating art just because we’re not creating visual art or music or writing. That’s one of our favourite decoys, in fact, to distract others when we’re working on our most beloved art works; ourselves.
We pretend we’re not creating when in fact that’s exactly what we’re doing.
We’re creating ourselves in every moment.
I love meeting artists when they’re undercover.
That’s when they do some of their best work. 😽
Sunday 4AM
I sat on my boyfriend’s couch. I was too wired to sleep. I’d put on all the clothes I’d brought with me and wrapped myself in blankets but I couldn’t stop shaking. I recognised that I wasn’t actually cold, I was in shock. I was over-tired, over-stressed and feeling unsafe. I sat on the couch in my cocoon of blankets and smoked cigarettes and drank water while my system slowed down.
Hand it over to me, my future self (my current self in this current moment) sent back to me. I know what all of this is for. Let it go. Let it come to me. I’m woman enough to use it for its intended purpose. I’ve got you, girl. You’re safe with me.
It’s not about you.
Always remember that whatever others do:
it’s not about you.
“What a beautiful story this will be to tell one day,” I thought to myself as I let go of my emotional attachments to the night’s events. Slowly my body surrendered all of its tension and stress. I fell asleep sitting upright, my knees folded up in front of me with my arms wrapped around my legs and my head bowed in towards my navel; showing my future self my crown, acknowledging the artist within.
A Timeless Sunday
We ate bacon and eggs on toast with mushrooms and tomatoes and onions. We had make-up sex. We got high and played video games and cards. In the late afternoon my boyfriend played hackey-sack in the garden with some other stoners while I studied in his bedroom.
I forget why, but Monday was a public holiday so it was a long weekend. Being a ladies’ man, my boyfriend had been invited to another house party that evening by a pair of sisters who were both besotted with him. I’d met them a couple of times before but I hadn’t been to their house. They were vapid and sweet and I liked them. They flirted madly with my boyfriend whenever we met with them but I had discovered myself to be an un-possessive type of partner so I found I didn’t mind. My attitude was one of acceptance; if another girl manages to woo him off me; so be it. I’d be upset for a time, sure, but I’d accept the situation and my feelings about it and move on.
I wore my long purple and blue skirt over purple pants and a long-sleeve velvet top in a deep fuschia colour. I put my hair up in an inside-out ponytail. I wore minimal make-up and dangly earrings. I felt… Surrendered, loved, supported, held, liberated, free, gentle, forgiving, lovable and divinely feminine.
I was connected with who I am today; calm, composed, cheerful and capable and full of love for myself.
Today I am a woman who knows that nothing that another does can truly hurt me.
I am safe in my Higher Power’s love.
I need for nothing from others.
At the house party, my boyfriend and I clung to each other like a pair of refugees who’d come through a warzone together. We’d shared a deeply unsettling experience the night before. We’d discovered parts of ourselves that were troubling and scary. Our acceptance of each other in spite of our dysfunctions enabled us to accept ourselves in spite of our dysfunctions. I sat in his lap for most of the evening and he held me with tenderness and pride, stroking my back and arms affectionately. We healed our hurts with kisses and smiles and compliments.
We were loving, lovable and loved.
At around 10PM I went to the bathroom and when I returned he’d fetched his guitar from the boot of his car. I sat myself on the ground in front of him with my knees tucked under me, my butt-bones resting on my heels. I nestled my hands in my lap and I bowed my head to him, showing him my crown, acknowledging his artist with my own. The mood of the group had mellowed from excitement to introspection and as he started to play, people spoke more softly, they moved about less and they settled into their chairs to listen…
He wove his apologies into a circlet of blossoms and placed it on my head. With his tears of remorse he fashioned diamonds and hung them from my ears and around my neck. His confusion at why he behaves so badly at times was wooden and stubborn and so he used his music to carve bangles out of it and slid them on to my wrists.
When the time came, I started to hum. I echoed not his physical music, but the music I heard in him.
When the time came, I started to sing. I chose words that rhymed not with each other, but with him. In this way I was his translator. I created forms for the chaos of what he’d discovered within himself. I served in this way gratefully, for I was exploring myself too in this undertaking. I understood that what he chose to do with the Work we’d uncovered together was none of my business because his choices and behaviours are not about me, just as what I chose to do with this Work was not about him either.
We are each walking our own path of self-discovery.
My voice was husky with the warmth of tears, low-pitched and salty sweet like burnt caramel and steady with the power of his conviction that these things were true of him:
I believe I need your love.
I need your love to fill me.
I can’t ever get enough.
I’m afraid it will kill me.
I believe I’m hollow.
I need your love to fill me.
I believe I need your love.
I’m afraid it will kill me.
When the time came, I returned to humming.
When the time came, I fell silent. He continued to play the same music but changed it so that it dissipated into noiselessness and the loving embrace of silence. For long moments all was still and silent. Two dozen teenagers sat together in solemnity, connected through the shared experience of the moment.
The entities we’d created faded away slowly.
“Are you crying too?” A girl’s voice asked. I blinked myself back to reality and turned my head to look at the sisters. They were holding hands, leaning forward in their seats and staring at me sorrowfully from about a foot away. I realised each of us had tears streaming down our cheeks and I choked out a giggle at our shared absurdity.
We Meet Again
Balcony Boy and I went to the same college. We never spoke about our conversation on the balcony. He expressed his dislike for my college boyfriend.
We worked in the same animation studio for a while. We never spoke about our past encounters. He expressed his dislike for my boyfriend at the time, a person who I later married.
I know our paths will cross again, for so my future self has told me. I’m curious to find out where and when. I’m curious to discover the next stanza in this rhyme.
And I’m curious to find out if I choose a partner who treats me in ways that Balcony Boy can approve of.
