01: The Gun and the Garden: Reclaiming the Definition of Love

“Love and abuse cannot coexist.” — bell hooks

Lessons From a Black Friday: Year Five

I think given the opportunity to sit and have a conversation like emotionally secure functioning adults I would say the following: We were together and I love you. I will always cherish our moment together. I forgive the rest but won’t forget it either.

02: Auditing My Life

Regardless of how you experience the intention and impact of infidelity, we all are manipulated by the stories, expectations, promises, ideals, traumas, and fears we bring to the experience. We are the fictional Everyman seeking to protect the imagined safety of the stories, even as the stories eat up our lives.

69: Thinking of You

Pain is not the enemy but the light over the path to growth. Despite the chaos, I am grateful to Painter for opening the door to this life and this experience. I continue to love her from afar and want the best for her.

46: Stories of Safety

Nothing I do or say will create a sense of safety for people avoiding their own traumas. I cannot love someone enough to heal the wounds they are trying to avoid.

44: Sunflowers

How we got here doesn’t have to define where we go. Living that truth is all that is required to break the patterns.

19: Opinions

Today I recognize my choices for what they were—an unfortunate and unskillful habit of treating how I felt like a directive. I realize how often, in intimate and vulnerable relationships, I responded with a habituated neurological urge to pursue what I considered comfortable feelings while avoiding the discomfort.

18: Sex.

There are places I remain frozen in the past.

An outcome of my marriage and the last several relationships is I feel as if I am sexually wrecked. I feel frozen between desire and doubt, analysis and paralysis, ambition and silence

12: Broken Cups

The Thing always breaks where the bonds are weakest, not strongest.

11: Slaves and Heroes

I have no obligation to anyone to be the same today as I was a year ago or even 15 minutes ago. I have the right to shed the ideas, opinions, behaviors, and beliefs I held even a short time ago when I realize they aren’t working for me.