“Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she will not enter a house where her children are not welcome.” – Joe Hudson

July 4th, 6:34 AM

No one actually paints themselves into a corner – we think ourselves there. Most of us, if we are fortunate enough to be healthy and have a roof over our heads, don’t have many problems we haven’t created with our misguided intellect. Most of my anxiety, my unrelenting grief, all of my pain and autoimmune issues, all stem from suppressed emotion. Emotions that I cannot name. I am not familiar with them. I have successfully avoided feeling them for over seven decades.

Up until this point – oh hell…who am I kidding…I still think I can think my way out of this mess. Surely I can figure out solutions to my challenges. I’m a pretty smart person.

I use that terminology (pretty smart) purposefully today. I woke an hour ago wondering how my life might be easier had I been told I was smart growing up – rather than being told I was pretty. Pretty was bantered about by the adults as if it were the golden ticket and I had won that lottery. Surely anyone can be successful if they are born good looking. Who needs smart? After all, as a female if you were pretty back then you were far more likely to find a husband. Now, that was the real goal: marriage. What more could a girl want? I suspect that my parents believed that was the best I could hope for: a husband who would support me. What’s love got to do with it? And who needs love – let alone it’s scruffy cousin, respect – when you can afford alcohol? All is tolerable with alcohol. Throw a little cocaine in the party mix and you are happy. You’ve found the magic formula.

Jesusmaryjoseph. Yes, that is all one word for today’s conversation. So now that I have spent the last fifty-odd years in therapy and self examination, I have a deep understanding of how I got here. I’m still here – right here and no further. Suffering. You can understand your situation and your strengths and your shortcomings from now until the cows come home…but I am here to tell you quite adamantly, that will not change anything. Ya still gotta feel it to heal it. Damn it.

In the past six months of grief I have said that I don’t know how to do this. Meaning, I have never learned how to grieve. There are sorry few examples or mentors to follow. I’m grateful to Anderson Cooper for making the process so public, and for the teachers before. How often I’ve gone back and re-read Stephen Levine’s Who Dies?

But I am just now at this late stage in life realizing that the underlying problem is actually that I don’t know how to feel. I am well practiced at diverting, cajoling, distracting myself out of feeling. Because feeling? Terrifying. So instead I just live in a state of low-grade seething terror every day. Nothing I try seems to work…how many times has spirit, never abandoning me, whispered into my consciousness, “let yourself fall apart at the seems…”

Let yourself fall apart at the seems.

It only seems terrifying when you think about it. My problems, most? all? of which stem from poverty – financial or spiritual – exist because I am doing everything in my power to solve them. I can’t let my life fall apart. I can’t have more faith than what seems real. That would seem to be pretty stupid, and I am not that.

So spirit, slightly smarter than my intellect, must fool me. Thank you God. It must fool me in an endless creative way, which yesterday looked like a new face in my YouTube feed: Joe Hudson. He’s helping me fall apart. I’m so grateful.