Meadow and Monarch

Jun 1

A return to childhood nurtures the innate connection to radical self-love

I remember loving myself. I was eight. I delighted in playing outside just beyond our house on the hill in the farming community where I grew up. I spent summer days running, heart racing, along the trails in the woods until they curved around the bend and opened upon a rolling meadow. It was exhilarating moving from darkness into light.

I accessed this magical world when I slipped under the barbed-wire fence just down the hill from my bedroom window. It was like the whole collection of Little House on the Prairie books had hopped off their pages to homestead. Exactly five horses whinnied and cows grazed, lazily acknowledging me on my pioneering adventures. Here in the meadow near a brook, I apologized for nothing. I felt free, alive, in wonder with nature.

As I grew, I returned less and less to that meadow. It seemed childish to shimmy under the barbed wire in search of an entanglement with the herd of cows. My boldness in claiming the woods, the meadow, and the animals that roamed there caught up with me one at summer’s end. The landowners had spotted me adding feed to the horse’s buckets in the stable. I knew it was wrong, but my fondness of these five magnificent animals had grown, and I wanted to show them how much I loved them. But word of my unsolicited feedings came through my parents who calmly sat me down to share their and the landowner’s collective disappointment. No one was upset, it just needed to end. I felt so ashamed.

From that day on I avoided the woods and meadow altogether. I started apologizing. A lot. I’m sorry for this. Sorry for that. I began to anticipate that I would not be enough. I began to loathe some behaviors and traits – mainly an intense shyness – that followed me everywhere.

If you asked me at that age, maybe 10 or so, I still would have said I loved myself. By my teens, I would be less sure how to answer. I was obsessed with scouring my imperfect skin, growing out a perm gone way wrong, and completing my three-year sentence to braces (with bands!). I lathered myself with Noxema, kept the acne at bay by switching to skim milk, which now seems sad and bluish to me, and starved myself to fit into a homecoming dress. Surely, I loved myself. I was just a normal teen, getting the self-love beat out of me on a daily basis.

My shyness compounded the drive for perfection. I went to great lengths to not draw any attention to myself. I didn’t want to be seen. This is not to say I was unhappy. I was very happy at home, reading, drawing, and I loved hanging out with my close friends. That’s why it feels tricky to revisit my younger years to uncover self-love – did I love myself or not?

There was at least one night just before the start of my senior year that I clearly loved myself. It was my first date with alcohol. All summer long I had witnessed classmates at parties drinking and the pressure to join in had escalated. When we gathered at my friend’s house and a liter of wine cooler was passed around, I coolly accepted it. Some eyebrows raised. They didn’t have to say it, their expressions read it was about time.

Hours and a fruity bubbly buzz later we arrived at the old armory for the small-town teen dance. It was a scene from Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit video and it was filled with music, darkness, and my anticipation of coming out of my introverted shell. With the lights out, it’s less dangerous… The shyness began melting away, leaving a sweet, satisfied smile where there was normally a pursing, a tension. I looooved myself! A boy I’d watched but never talked to witnessed this transformation as I cleverly and coyly acted the way I’d seen people under the influence act. I slurred something I’m sure was only funny to me, tossed my head back to laugh, and then looked him directly in the eye. He laughed too. I was a natural. Alcohol and I were going to get along just fine.

Under the influence I was un-self-loathe-able. But as our relationship progressed, this indestructible feeling and this high became more insatiable and was met with equally matched self-loathing lows. I became quite the actress and high-functioning alcoholic, hopping on a spin bike the day after getting any amount of drunk, pedaling like mad to outrace my shame and frustration. Why can’t I control my drinking? What switch do I have that gets flipped and puts me in blackout? How did I embarrass myself last night?

During these years, I retreated deeper and deeper into self-loathing and shame. I moved from questioning to knowing. I am pathetic. I am not worthy of love. I am a bad person. I need to apologize. This language of shame was brought about by myself, mind you, not others calling out my actions and shaming me.

If I could talk to my younger self in my active addiction I would give her grace and support her like a beloved friend. I’d actively hold her truths. As Sonya Renee Taylor writes in The Body is Not an Apology, The Power of Radical Self-Love, “When we hear someone’s truth and it strikes some deep part of our humanity, our own hidden shames, it can be easy to recoil in silence. We struggle to hold the truths of others because we have so rarely had the experience of having our own truths held.”

In my experience, alcoholism is too big for many to hold. My truths were that I was (and still am, see Alcoholics Anonymous Step 1) powerless over alcohol. I had tried to help myself, but couldn’t. Others around me didn’t know how to help, so and collectively we smoothed things over and normalized and rationalized my behavior.

These were my truths from the senior year summer of 1989 to the summer 2013, before I walked into my first AA meeting, which. It was my first radical act of self-love in over two decades. I looked around at the community of souls seeking to triumph over addiction and desperately wanted them to hold my truths. And it was revealed to me that they could do so, empathetically, capably, and comfortably.

I spoke my truth to others who held the same truth and they let it sit there in silence without fixing or advising. I listened to others’ truths and understood that I was not alone in my most shameful behaviors. Exchanges in the rooms (as they’re referred to in AA) carried me for over a year while I worked on Step 1: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol— that our lives had become unmanageable.” I fought, wrestled, relapsed and held breathless conversations with my Higher Power while running. Mercifully one day at the end of a run the mantra Let Go, Let God truly flowed through me. If I knew how to act unapologetically, I would have dropped to my knees. It was an absolute gift.

We remember those moments that have been gifted to us. Just last year through a guided meditation practice, my imagination conjured up the meadow of my childhood and a gift awaited me there. It was a Monarch butterfly, one of the millions that decorated the woods behind our home, an annual stop along their migratory pattern. My butterfly flitted in during meditation, rich in color and vibrancy, striking in its dotted patterned, yet light and free. It instantly brought me back to the knowing, safeness, and self-love I felt during my youth. It was different in this moment though. It was more powerful than self-acceptance, self-esteem, or self-confidence, which I now know are external and fleeting. It was more grounded and innately true.

“We arrived on this planet as LOVE,” Sonya reminds us. She notes that the early incidents in our lives are the yarn tethering our adult selves to our childhood histories of shame and isolation. My threads of yarn were shyness, sensitivity, the constant seeking of external validation, physical and emotional abuse, denial, perfectionism and of course, alcoholism.

My meadow and my butterfly remind me that the ability to move from darkness to light lies within me. I am capable of holding my truths – even the uncomfortable ones – and allowing everything to exist while I remain in control of what I give energy and life to. If the world knows my truths labeled most shameful by society, I will not shatter. Stepping into hard truths with vulnerability, proves that self-love is sustaining and it will always serve to evolve my story.

“Unapologetic action empowers us to make new stories, better than the ones we’ve been saddled with for years,” says Sonya. Ditch the stories, she emphatically encourages, “…that have kept us from self-love. Humans made them up. You are humans. Make a better story.”

This is my story of meadow and Monarch. And in yet one more radical self-love move, I’m sharing it openly, at peace with the story of my past and unapologetically standing in my truth to hold space for others to radically love themselves too.

—- Another version of this story, A Monarch Emerges, was published in Her Path Forward in the fall of 2021. For background on the importance and why behind sharing this story, see Story Sharing as a Path Forward.