"I never will marry. I be no man's wife. I intend to stay single all the days of me life."

sketch from 2015 in Ireland.

This is a sketch I made the very first day that I was in Ireland for my post-baccalaureate at the Burren College of Art in 2015. I got there a few days before school started and I went to a pub in the tiny town of Ballyvaughn on the west coast of Ireland. This man, Patrick, followed me around singing to me. He was drunk and he was singing this song: "I never will marry. I be no man's wife. I intend to stay single all the days of me life." 

It was the most quintessential Irish experience that I could have possibly asked for. I sketched him while he sang to me. Obviously, I thought it was odd that he was singing a ballad made for a woman to sing. 

He eventually got shooed out of the bar because he was so drunk. But I have thought about this many times since then. I really think that he was channeling some kind of prophetic message to me. It was as if the faeries were speaking to me through him and telling me of my fate.

I wish I had registered it sooner. It took me many many more years of dysfunctional relating with men and desperate praying for help before I finally got it.

These past few years have been transformative for me. There was something that happened for me at Southwestern College where I went for art therapy school that was like a before and after moment of healing in my life.

We had a class called Hermeneutics of Depth Psychology where we learned about something we were calling "active imagination". In this class active imagination meant that we would take some time to go inside ourselves by imagining different parts of ourselves that we wanted to converse with. We did this in various ways and we also recorded our dreams and talked about them in class and journaled about them.

I really enjoyed this class because it was the reason I wanted to go that school in the first place. Not because of this particular class, but this class was in a series of classes called the "Consciousness" classes which is what attracted me to that school.

They are classes based in Mysticism, deep wisdom, decolonized thinking, and unpacking our cultural conditioning. They're spiritual classes.

After the class was over, I went on a hike with my friend Whitney who was in my class and she told me about how she was working with her inner children outside of class. 

I was in awe of how she described how deeply she was working with these child parts of herself and I felt inspired to do the same.

For almost all of my adult life, I had had dysfunctional relationships with men. It's been very painful and confusing and they have always been short-lived and often have left me wondering what happened.

Right before I left for New Mexico, at the end of my 35th year, I entered into a very dark season in my life. It only lasted about 3 months over the winter, but I felt like I was experiencing long, drawn out panic attacks. They were very scary and they mostly related to money and also the fact that I was realizing that if things continued to go the way things were going, I was never going to get married, I was never going to have kids, I would probably always be on my own.

This felt like a big punch in the gut for me. I feel like there are so many layers to this that it is hard to talk about it all without writing a whole book, which I may do some day, but basically, I think a lot of this had to do with the way I was raised, which was in a very conservative, mainstream American family where there was a LOT of pressure to get married and not very much, if any, creative, unconventional, outside-the-box thinking about ways to approach life. I also had trauma from seeing and being around my parent's profoundly dysfunctional marriage and I had trauma from my dad's verbally abusive behavior.

I think all of these things have affected my relationship with men and also the shame I felt about my dating life not working. 

When I started using active imagination on this part of myself a deep shift happened within me.

After years of therapy and spiritual teachers and somatic experiencing and dating coaching and life coaching, none of which helped me "solve" this problem, I finally started to find relief.

What happened was that I got triggered by a little thing, which was that a man who I had had a teeny tiny bit of romance with posted a picture on instagram of him with another woman with a heart emoji. That was it. But I felt this part of myself hijacking me, which it had so many times before. I could feel it happening. Suddenly, I was ugly and stupid and worthless and she was so beautiful and wonderful and smart and funny and confident and perfect. That was where I was headed internally. It's not a fun space to be in. Not at all. It sucks. But this time, I went inside. 

I closed my eyes and asked that part of myself to come to the surface. I just asked her if we could have a conversation and I wanted to know what was going on for her. 

She came. We had a long talk and I realized that I had never spoken to her before. It was like she was down in the basement of myself just sitting there lonely all by herself for ages.

She told me she was afraid of me getting hurt and she was trying to protect me. She told me many things. I listened. I was kind. I told her I loved her. I told her that I am the adult and I really can handle things. I asked her to agree to stop hijacking me and to trust me. I also asked her if she had any beliefs that she wanted to do the Byron Katie work on. She said she did and I facilitated the work for her. We said bye and I told her I would always be here for her if she needed me and that we could meet again whenever she wanted. 

Then I opened my eyes, and to my surprise, all the insecurity and bad feelings were gone. I was myself again. Completely. It felt like a miracle. I could breathe. I realized how silly it was for me to feel the way I felt because of such a little thing. And that none of those things I was thinking about myself were true.

I continued to meet with this part of myself as well as other parts of myself throughout the next months and especially whenever I felt triggered. 

Then something strange began to happen. 

I suddenly became flooded with information that was ungaslighting all the cultural conditioning I had received around marriage and relationships.

First it was a little book I found in a mini library called Toward A New Psychology of Women by Jean Baker Miller that was about how women are socially conditioned to loose touch with their inner autonomy when they enter into romantic relationships. I certainly resonated with this and it is also what I see in my mother and many other women. Then I listened to this amazingly enlightening podcast with Liz Gilbert and Martha Beck, where they talk about the marriage benefit imbalance.  Liz Gilbert says that studies show that when women get married, their quality of life in EVERY area (financial, mental, emotional, physical etc.) plummets, and then with every child she has, it plummets even more, while men's quality of life skyrockets in every area as a result of marriage. Whoa!

Then, I listened to this podcast on decolonizing sex with Kim Tallbear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) and I felt like my whole entire body had been craving this my entire life. I really did. This was the answer I had been looking for. I really was not designed for this western culture system where patriarchy defines what sex and relationships are. I was designed to be free. Suddenly, I don't feel ashamed at all anymore. I feel like I dodged a bullet. After many many other similarly themed informational messages in the form of conversations with friends, fictional books, other podcasts etc. I felt like I have had to say, "Okay Universe! I get it."

When I reflect on my time in New Mexico and at Southwestern College, I really believe that that was why I was led to go there. That was my main takeaway and it profoundly changed and healed my life. I am so grateful.