Night Terrors

Sometimes I'm happy I'm getting sort of old. Not that I have it all figured out. I spent the weekend with my most precious girlfriend. She seems to have it all figured out. Handsome, kind, wonderful husband? Check. Lovely home? Check. Pursuing her passion in life? Check.

We were both raised in and then left the JWs. She did more of a swan dive while I was a belly flop. But we had very different experiences. I was older, I had to get divorced. I did the back and forth with them for a lot longer. We've always had each other though since I got out and for our entire lives before that except for a couple of brief hiccups.

I'm still trying to rid myself of the little hell I live in, despite the fact that I think my life is great. I'm happy every day. And grateful. My subconscious and my nightmares won't catch up though.

I'm off work and I was cleaning my flat and I realized I'm a hoarder. I have every letter, every card, every picture I've ever received. I've thrown out 7 bags of garbage today. Some of them, even though I don't talk to those people, even though I don't see them, I still can't get rid of them. Every year more and more go away but it's possible when I die, someone is going to have to throw out a box of letters from someone I used to know.

Maybe that's why I still dream about them. Maybe that's why apparently I have bad karma. Maybe my heart is just too big for this and I was in it too long. Lately, my heart is expanding and letting new people in. I hope they will take over those old vacant spots.

Someone come and save my life :) Sorry it's all City and Colour songs tonight. :) 

"There's a degree of difficulty in dealing with me. From my haunted past comes the daunting task of living with memories." ~ City and Colour

Sullivan out.

The River

My dog likes salad. Shocking but true. I accidentally dropped mine on the way to the table because he was running under my feet. He ate it all. Lettuce, tomatoes, olives, goat cheese, avocado, red peppers, balsamic vinaigrette. Max is obviously very health conscious and clumsy. Just like me. :) 

I saw Ross today as per every Friday. Fridays are my fragile days. The rest of the week and up until 3 pm? Bring it on. after that though, I'm not so well. 

Ross: How's the 4 am thing going?

Me: The usual. 

I have nightmares and I wake up with a panic attack every day at 4 am. Maybe you wouldn't call them nightmares. It's just these old memories of people who are no longer around and they come back. They seem real and they haunt me. I wake up in a panic. 

Today Ross had an idea. He was like, you want to cut your family off? Do a visualization. Put them on a raft. Say goodbye if you like, but they're floating away. So I came home and I took his advice. I lit some candles and thought about it. 

It's funny because I told my brother if I died before him I'd like to be set out to sea on a raft. Have some bagpipes playing (I'm mostly Irish but I'm also Scottish.) And then it would be really cool if someone could send a flaming arrow and burn me up. 

So I put them out on a river. First Linda. She didn't have that annoying disappointed look on her face that I've seen a million times. She is smiling. Then Erin. She's not so happy but she goes. Then a really big raft with all the people who show up in my dreams and still haunt my life - all my ex-best friends. They're on the party boat. But they don't seem happy either. They pretend they are happy because that's what Jehovah's Witnesses do. Otherwise, how could we convince you to join us?

Lastly but most importantly, is my ex-husband.  He doesn't like being social so as usual, he's in the corner, strumming a guitar. He's always fine on his own so no need to worry about him. Yet, he is the only one I cry for. 

I don't send Vivian out on a raft. I can't do that, she's my baby. 

Will this finally make the nightmares stop? I doubt it. But if I can sleep past 4 am, that's a win in my books. 

Sullivan out.  

The Gift of Imperfection

My "Big Love" made a lot of promises to me after my life blew up. He used to say we'd get a house on the beach - at one point he was looking at private islands for sale because hell, we didn't need anyone else but us. We'd buy those kitchen counters that were actually just cutting boards because we loved to cook together. He said we would adopt a puppy who was "as perfectly imperfect as we were". Had I known I couldn't trust him I probably would have made different choices. Or would I have? Probably not, I was too in love. Would those different choices have been the right ones either? There's no way of knowing. 

The mistakes I've made along the way have been my mistakes. It was actually pretty liberating to finally be allowed to make mistakes, for the first time in my life having no one to tell me what to do. It was scary, exhausting, stressful. Most of the time I went with my gut. 

As a Jehovah's Witness there are no choices, no freedom, no independent thought. The constant stress of striving to achieve perfection will wear you down, eventually. My good friend and previous mentor, Stuart always said "Perfection is the enemy of the good". Good was never good enough for me in the past, but it is now. 

I think that's why I fell in love with Big, so hard, so fast. In my JW life I always had to be better, work harder, sacrifice more. With him, I was perfectly imperfect and felt completely loved regardless of that. I'd never felt that before - it was the greatest feeling in the world. 

As you know, I got sucker punched by a bout of depression two weeks ago due to yet another family shunning drama episode. If you've ever dealt with depression you know how quickly and strongly it can walk in your door and beat you down again, even if you've been doing great. But now I have a really good bounce back time. I have the tools, the support and the love to as Taylor Swift would say "Shake it off". (Y'all know I love Taylor) :)

Family can be both a blessing and a curse. We know too much about each other, we expect too much from each other, sometimes we try too hard to control each other. 

Some of my family though has always supported my vision of where I wanted to go now, even when I didn't know where that was. They have unselfishly been there for me through thick and thin. Celebrated my accomplishments, held my hand when I cried. Without my aunts, uncles and Grandma down here in Nova Scotia, would I have weathered all these storms over the past five years? 

Maybe. But I wouldn't have come out of each of them feeling stronger, more sure of the decisions I've made, more determined to be more like them. Most importantly, they love imperfect Margaux and do everything they can - not to fix me - not to make me into who they want me to be. But to guide me. To listen to me. To distract me with cute animals, delicious meals and lovely wine. 

Someone asked me on my last blog "where is home?". Home is here with them. Home is in Toronto. Without this home to come to though, the other home wouldn't feel quite so important.

Don't get me wrong, they're not perfect either. NONE OF US ARE!! Imperfection, I truly believe is a gift. It gives us targets, something to aim for, a feeling of accomplishment when we hit them. Kindness, compassion and being committed to always do your best, to help those in need where you can, to show people dignity and respect no matter how far they may have fallen and what mistakes they have made? That is unconditional love. That's the target. 

Within (I want to say minutes but it was probably days) I was coming home - all arrangements made for me by my favorite uncle. And it was the right thing for me. To just say yes, I'll come, pack a suitcase and get the hell out of my most recent personal nightmare. Come home and light some fires, dig out some snowstorms, spend time with the people I need the most right now. 

The thing about nightmares is...we wake up. Then we see the world and the people in it for all the beauty they add to the Universe. I feel very, very grateful, very, very happy. I'm ready to go home (the other home) on Friday and slip back into the extremely happy, successful place I was in not so long ago.  

Thank you a million times to these people who have always been loyal, always been loving and always had my back. It still feels like home to me here and it always will. 

PS - Big: I finally have that perfectly, imperfect puppy. You would have liked him. :)

Sullivan out. 

*Grandma and me*

Tell me about 4 am

I have a sleep problem. I wake up at 4 am almost every day, no matter what time I go to bed. Usually it's because I'm having a bad dream. By "bad dream" I just mean visits from ghosts of the past. They are SO REAL. I can hear their voices, see the exact color of their eyes. I remember our conversations. I wake up confused, disoriented and sad. 

My therapist likes to talk about this now. He's always asking me: "So, tell me about 4 am." Sometimes I can get back to sleep, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I do yoga, read books, listen to music, meditate.  

On Sex and the City the girls used to say it takes half the amount of time you were with someone to get over them. Considering how long I was there and the amount of people I've had to get over, I think I'm doing pretty good at only 5.5 years in. 

Recently I found something in a box. I had (geek alert!) a Winnie the Pooh guestbook that I used to leave on the coffee table for people to sign when they came over. This morning at 4 am I started flipping through it. Apparently I was a great hostess. I used to throw tons of dinner parties, I used to make cheesecake. I used to bring home boxes of mussels from PEI every summer and have a seafood-fest. 

The guestbook is actually quite funny, every page has a picture or a quote from Winnie the Pooh. People would add their own quotes, draw their own pictures, make fun of what one of our other friends had written. There's people in there that I completely forgot even existed. Then there's all the people who I don't let myself think about because it's too painful. Girls I was friends with since elementary school and was a bridesmaid in their wedding. Boys I was in love with at one time or another. 

Disclaimer: before you keep reading, this is a long one. That's what happens when you write blogs at 4 am. 

There are quotes from movies we used to be obsessed with, lots of thank yous, lots of compliments on the dinners and the one that gets me...lots of "I will love you forever".

That was back when I was a perfect hostess and a nearly perfect little JW housewife. At 4 am today I had to laugh. Because growing up that way wasn't ideal, of course I would have picked a different life if I could have. What I've had to overcome to get out? I couldn't do it again. I wouldn't survive a Round 2. 

I never answer the "tell me about 4 am" question. But if you'd like to know I'll tell you now what it's like. Sometimes it's lonely, sometimes it's sad or frustrating, sometimes it makes me happy. One thing is for sure though, I always know I'll feel terrible getting up for work in a couple of hours. Most of the times I wake up because of a bad dream. That means I'll be having a panic attack. It might take an hour or two for it to subside. 

Sometimes though, 4 am brings amazing clarity. There is only one person from that old life who used to be a close friend that I have completely hated. Even with all my efforts to be Zen, to have compassion, to forgive, to love. When I was suicidal I reached out to him for help. His answer? There is no help for the disfellowshipped. I've been upset about that for 5 years. 

Reading all his comments in my guest book next to all his ridiculous Batman pictures, along with everyone else's today, I realized that it's okay. We all have bad stuff that we wish had never happened to us. But before all that bad stuff, there was a lot of good, a lot of fun. If they hadn't chosen such an extreme way of treating me in the end, I may never have left. It was painful but they did me a favour. Because despite all the anxiety, despite the 4 am wake up calls, I'm really happy to have the life I have now. Those friends, that life was not a mistake. I didn't know any better. My marriage wasn't a mistake. It was the right fit for me at the time. And truth? I still love y'all. (Even you, you asshole.) :)

My therapist asks me why I can't just ask them to leave when they show up. It's because part of me doesn't want to. Part of me is happy to have that visit. But could y'all maybe wait until closer to 6 am? 4 is a bit early. :)

Sullivan out.  

Daydreams & Nightmares

My therapist says I should be writing more so here goes. (And, yes, I did just begin yet another sentence with "my therapist says".)

I had another unfortunate experience recently. Maybe Rosemary was right and I should just write a blog called "My horrible, terrible, really bad summer". Or maybe my psychic is right and I just have very bad karma. Either way, I was recently attacked by a man I didn't know. 

I was alone and the experience was terrifying. Thank the Universe I had the advantage of an extreme burst of adrenaline and a drunk, clumsy opponent. Ladies, if you ever find yourself in that situation (and most of us do apparently at some point in our lives, it happens so MUCH more often than you would think): scream, yell in their face, punch, kick, whatever you need to do. These predators are actually cowards trying to intimidate us into thinking they have all the power. In some situations, they do, and very bad things happen. But not always. Sometimes we can win. 

It's remarkable how our brains work, how we can store away hurt and fear and anger until we experience some new trauma and then all of a sudden, the past is back. I haven't been able to sleep since this happened, I wake up every few minutes in a sweat, having a panic attack because all of a sudden, in my sleep, I'm back in my past. I won't bore you with all the details, but I've managed to make my way through every significant trauma in my life - in my sleep - all the way back to the time our house caught on fire when I was 4 or 5 years old. I had completely forgotten that even happened. 

The good news is I've been getting through so many of them a night, I should be out of bad memories by the end of the weekend. 

I've always preferred daydreams to night dreams. In my head, in the light of day, there's always hope and possibility. At night, not so much. My subconscious takes over when I sleep and I can't control it. 

Sometimes, our daydreams turn into nightmares. The day I got married was one of the happiest days of my life. The day I got divorced was a waking nightmare. The day I was baptized as one of Jehovah's Witnesses was full of promise (although I was a brainwashed 12 year old), the day I was disfellowshipped and shunned was terrible. I almost didn't survive those experiences. 

I think though, that I got through them the same way I got through my most recent challenge: sheer will, determination and  refusing to give up. No matter who or what is our opponent if we don't give up we have a fighting chance. At least 50/50 right? I'm going to be really Canadian for a minute and quote Wayne Gretzky: "You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take". 

So when you're faced with something and you know in your gut what the right thing to do is, take that shot. And hopefully, eventually our subconscious catches up with us and stops being so afraid anytime we go to sleep. 

Sullivan out.