Fall is my favorite season and not just because it’s my birthday. This is that birthday post with vanilla memoir from my childhood and a wish list for later.
Lady Gaga said this week: “I am enough,” and I’m going with that.
I was born in an isolated mountain village in the Pacific Northwest and raised by two well meaning but severely miss guided young people. I spent my childhood first in the bed of a semi truck playing with my younger brother while my parents hit the open road and later on the hard wooden pews of the many churches where my father was an itinerant preacher. I could ride a horse by 3, sang my first solo and 4 and had my first motorcycle at 5 years old - a 50cc three wheeler that was later outlawed because it was so dangerous to ride. I didn’t mind. I jumped that thing over every curb or hump in the road I could find.
As an adult looking back I’ve come to understand that my parents didn’t teach me who to be but how to deal with the people that this life would inevitably throw my way. To this day their frequencies haunt me in all my affairs. I see their likeness in the clients and artist I work with. What I do now I’ve always done it’s just come around again this time in a new, more stable likeness. I am so god damn grateful this year with my birthday coming around that I could just scream until I puke. I am so happy I have to grit my teeth when I smile to keep from shouting. What I have discovered along the way, what I have built, is a core group of individuals who give me the emotional and physical security to begin finally applying myself towards my dreams. Before I met them, it was just a gauntlet of assholes and petty muthafuckers. It wasn’t me, it was them. My job was to not listen to them and their gas lighting, and taunts and climb my way out of that hole. And I did. It took two god damn decades but I did it. I evaded poverty, loneliness, addiction and a broken home. What I survived is not for today’s post. What I gave up was having children, a decision I made practically at first but later realized was one of the best gifts I ever gave myself, and the men who would have been stuck in that domestic torment with me.
Two decades of lost art. Two decades of swallowing my story to survive. Turns out you can't selectively numb your emotions. I went “grey rock” to endure the abuse until the transit or the tides changed in my life because one thing I have reluctantly gained is the knowledge that no matter how badly you want change, it doesn’t happen until it’s time for it to happen. All we can do is make space for it in our life and keep doing the work. During that time the story seeds that found their way into my frequency found my land brittle and bare, singed by the flame of toxic passions.
If the flower doesn’t bloom, you don’t change the flower. You change the environment. And change? Real change? Is fucking hard. It takes time, so you need patience. This is the discipline part. You also need faith which is built through tracking progress and celebrating milestones. Persistence, resilience, fall down seven times get up 8 type of shit. Sometimes, doing the right thing will make a person want to scream. Desire is real. So is frustration.
Well I’m here to tell you that breakthrough and breakouts are possible. On my way to breaking out of the generational misery that should have been my life I had many breakthroughs that built up to the final breakout. I knew I was free when I found peace and I was able to hold on to it. How you ask? Bit by bit is the answer. I found peace in the chaos every chance I could typically through seeking out things like beauty and gratitude and eventually those energies became the dominant ones in my life and my brain began taking pleasure in the mundane and stopped craving the highs and lows of my former life. Chaos is only beautiful at a distance or up close. Everything in between is a loss.
A small part of me does hate it all. It’s like the last glowing ember of resentment just before dawn at the bottom of the burn barrel after an all night rager in the woods, because I can never get those years back. And I won't codify it with what I learned or gained or experienced because no one should be abused, full stop. There’s no justifying it or rationalizing it, only enduring it and hopefully eventually escaping/overcoming the cycle. I have lost many, many people to the same struggle that I was fortunate enough to survive. Recent events have ramped up the loss and I just say it again, “Life is not fragile, but it is delicate.”
Back to I’m so happy I grit my teeth when I smile. I’ve finally built a home around the peace that I built with my loved ones and now I have for the first time ever in my life a safe space that is all mine, the type of love and support I always wanted, that I always deserved and that most importantly I need to do the writing and the teaching that I need and want to do. That’s what this year’s birthday is about for me. Celebrating, with a deep sense of gratitude and relief the restoration of my domestic sanctuary and these are the walls that kink built. And lastly, it’s about looking to the future and preparing to do the MOST with the rest of the time we’ve got.
This year I’m asking for gift cards to my favorite apothecary https://bluemercury.com/collections/gift-cards dominavontana@gmail.com
