Payphones and New Homes

Hey, all!

Many apologies for my lengthy absence. This past year has been, let’s just say an interesting one, and I’m ready to start anew.

By starting anew, I don’t just mean picking up a blog that I had lost in translation during last summer’s life circumstances. I mean, I’m literally starting a new life.

2019 rang in through the payphone chimes of a hospital psychiatric ward in Buffalo. I have debated for some weeks over whether or not this would be a part of me that I would share openly, but, as you’ll see in the video that comes later, I’ve decided to become unapologetically me. So, here I am. I have spent one week in a psychiatric hospital – think less One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and more Perks of Being a Wallflower. Just, less Queen and more Country.

I met amazing people, was given better help than I ever expected, and was woken at 7 AM every day with a, "good morning beautiful princess...." I made actual, real friends for the first time in years, and I finally was able to let go of all of my masks and feel like I belonged somewhere. Then, after a week, they sent me “home”.

The thing that no one tells you, is that home isn’t home anymore after you’ve been in a safe bell jar of insanity. Home is now people treating you with kid gloves and walking on glass to make sure they don’t…I don’t know…set off a bomb 12 floors above you? But, without a job, a real purpose, a hospital schedule, and now given all of the allowances that regular life provides…I was at a loss as to how to function.

I no longer knew who I was.

The hospital effectively stripped away all of the masks I spent years perfecting and creating; and left me with nothing to replace them. They told me to "start talking to my family", and that was it. But…now that they wanted me to talk, I couldn’t tell them who I was because, the hell if I knew. I hadn’t seen myself without a mask on since I was seven years old and pretending something didn’t emotionally hurt, making an excuse to get something from my room and sit and cry quietly for a few minutes.

By seven years old, I knew how to wipe my eyes and face just right, and how to make a fake smile reach my eyes, so that no one would know that anything had been wrong.

Two weeks and I had effectively been brought back down to seven-year-old Alice in Wonderland with everyone asking her who she is before telling her that she’s giving the wrong answer and near reducing her to tears.

Except…now I have my very own Absalom. Her name is Taryn Raine (aka the Remote Yogi). She doesn’t tell me who I am; she never has. She just gives me the tools to figure it out and I swear it’s like she just knows I’m ready. When I told her that I was “back home” she asked me to try something out for her, a new Self-Love Course that she and a friend created to help women heal themselves and become the most beautiful badasses they can be. I’m only posting about it now because I can be stubborn when I’m scared, and dear GOD am I scared of change and facing my own self head on. But dammitall-anyways she was right, and I needed this.

You can find Taryn and her courses here. (And I suggest you do, because in the three weeks I’ve been taking the course I’ve finally begun to put my pieces back together in a way that I never would have expected.)