Love, Libby

I am ready for her to be free…I know she is too!

It’s 9:30 PM. I am 8 years old and not in bed yet. My mom stumbled up the stairs earlier and my father sits on the adjacent couch watching something on TV with me. We are silent.

I walk upstairs to bed. My mom isn’t there. She is sleeping on the toilet. I wake her up and put her to bed. Kiss her and tell her I love her.

I am 8.

This happened for years. And to a young girl, it felt wrong. I knew it was wrong. I knew something wasn’t right.

I navigated this for years alone in my head. Nobody talked about my mom’s problems. So i just managed on my own. A sister who didn’t live at home. Another who was too busy being a hormonal teenager to be bothered with anyone but friends. And a father who was so blinded by a peculiar balance of complete adoration and resentment to my mother that I could literally feel it in my bones.

I was alone. And scared.

That hasn’t left me. If I am being honest, I have never felt safe. I am anxious about life most days, waiting desperately for the house of cards I live in to come crashing down on my head – so fragile, a cool breeze could come by and ruin it all.

But I forget to look at the bigger picture sometimes: I am ok.

I have never been less than okay. So I need to learn to trust this life and the process.

Growing up in dysfunction makes you feel uneasy. I went through life like this. When things looked normal on the outside, I was most likely faking it. As a matter of fact, I still do. But there are times where it becomes unrealistic to continue to fake it. Because deep into my core, I am a HORRIBLE liar and an EXCELLENT oversharer.

I have let that scared little girl have the drivers seat all my life. Sure I have shimmied the wheel away from her clutches at times. I made grown up decisions without her. But she always creeps back into the drivers seat. She didn’t know how not to drive. She’d been doing it her whole life.

Letting her rest and being the grown up she always needed is my life’s work. I am forever not wanting control. Neither one of us is a very proficient driver anyhow. But every day I try to show up for me and her so we can both feel at ease in our skin.

So, little girl, go play…rest…be free. And know that you are safe within me.

Love, Libby

Freedom

In the beginning of the year, I decided to explore something new creatively. I didn’t want it to be photography related in any way, take tons of time, or become a burden. So I started a 30 challenge to make a watercolor every day.

At the suggestion of a friend who did this for A YEAR, I stuck with a specific size and just started exploring from there. And you know what - I really sucked at first. Like…my first stuff was awful. But as I continued, I sort of watched it all unfold and stopped having expectations of myself.

This one simple act of showing up with nothing in my head and no expectations lead to some pretty awesome creativity. I experimented with paint, paper, brushes, and watched as the water took over every single image I created. Sometimes it was great. Other times, I ended up throwing it away. But each moment was a delightful experience in losing control of an outcome.

This dance became something I craved. I woke up each morning looking forward to seeing what happened with paint, water, paper, brushes and me. I got into a rhythm and found that the paper I thought I would hate, the brushes I didn’t like at first were the EXACT things I went back to over and over again.

Losing expectations and losing control was necessary at this point in my life right now. I had to lose some control to see how little it really matters. I had to give in creatively to something I knew literally NOTHING about other than the little palette of Crayola watercolors we distributed in art class when I was a teacher. We spend so much time having expectations on us and responsibility laid out for us. Sometimes letting something else have a little control - letting something be what it is without wanting to change it or manipulate it too much - is just where we need to be. It was like uncovering a path to somewhere new, somewhere that freedom took over and expectations were left behind for 15 minutes a day.

So do that thing – go take a dance lesson or hula hoop class. Sign up for that ceramics class you dream about. Learn to sew. Free yourself creatively a little. Then watch it all unfold with an open mind and an open heart.