Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness
Section 3: Chapter 17—Hemostasis
Dear Reader: Welcome to Section 3, Wound Healing and Regrowth! In this section, I slowly begin to claim back my self-worth and sense of adventure from the clutches of shame. This chapter is also a bit of a love story, the story of how I met my husband. Oh, and Curiosa returns, too.
Enjoy!
Part 3: Wound Healing and Regrowth
When the skin is broken, the entire body becomes involved in healing. Blood rushes to the area and clots, eventually forming a scab that defends against germs. Wounds must be thoroughly cleansed if healing is to occur; otherwise, they can cause an infection far worse than the original wound.
Chapter 17: Hemostasis
During the summer in California, I began a workplace romance. Colleagues at work arranged for Todd and me to meet during a lunch hour. They squeezed the two of us in the middle of a round booth until our bodies touched then watched eagerly to see if we’d hit it off, and we did. After this we began flirting via the work email. He challenged me to a road race, so I laced up my running shoes one more time. I challenged him to come play pool with me, conveniently forgetting to tell him I grew up with a pool table in our basement. One nighttime, while out with a group, we ditched them all, grabbed a six-pack of beer, climbed on top of the roof of my rental house, and gazed up at the starry sky. As the evening gave way to the cover of night, we admitted to each other that our jobs, lives, and futures looked nothing like how we’d pictured them in college when we had been confident and enthusiastic. We feared that our dreams had been unrealistic and maybe we’d been naïve. Such honesty and vulnerability between us changed our bond from a cautious courtship to a committed relationship within weeks.
For my twenty-fourth birthday, Todd booked a surprise gondola ride for us in Newport Beach. When I saw the boat floating peacefully by the dock, messy emotions that I’d dammed up for months rose and overflowed, taking my date-only mascara with them.
“Are you all right?” Todd asked.
I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. I knew he’d been planning my birthday celebration for several weeks, barely able to contain his excitement. Still, I had not expected Italian singing, water lapping up against the boat, and a basket packed with wine, cheese, and crackers.
It wasn’t that no man had ever done anything kind for me before. In high school I’d had two boyfriends. One had bought me red ceramic roses because, as he said, they would never die, like his love for me. Corny, maybe, but as a seventeen-year-old I found it touching. The other had regularly brushed and braided my long hair for me and then waited at home until I returned from cross-country practice. While I had cared for both of them, I did not love them the way they loved me, and I ended both relationships.
Once I moved from North Dakota to Minnesota, I shed the reputation I had worn for too many years — a stuck-up-bookworm and introverted Goody-Two-shoes with high grades, whose middle-class parents had never divorced or abused her so what right had she to complain — and reinvented myself as a flirtatious, extroverted party girl living the college life who didn’t need to limit herself to only nice guys anymore. I traded a dating life filled with flirty phone calls, beers shared in the bed of my boyfriend’s pickup, and ice cream sundaes on a school night for meeting guys in public whom I’d met in online chat rooms and dating multiple people at the same time. Parties, hook-ups, the bar scene with alcohol and pounding music, the closeness of bodies on the dance floor — I loved it all. I loved getting to know people with no preconceived notions about who I was. It was a game in which I could become whomever I wanted, and I wanted to be wanted. After so many years of trying to be invisible, it felt good to be seen. After so many years of playing by the rules, it felt good to break them.
Intimate, female connection was what I most likely needed when I moved away from home. But breaking into established women’s friendship circles was nearly impossible; making friends with men was easier, faster, less complicated. So I told myself that I preferred male company to female company. I’d been lonely, but didn’t label myself lonely. Had someone suggested I was lonely, I would’ve scoffed at the idea. I would’ve told them that what they called lonely I called self-reliant. Still, I wished I’d had someone — a mentor, a teacher, an older friend — to suggest that my disregard for my body was perhaps something to explore.
With the men I dated, I did receive the human connection I longed for. But by the end of the evening expectations always surfaced. I could feel the shift in a single look, a hand on my knee, a brush against the side of my breast. I believed that I was making my own choices, that I was empowered in my sexuality, and that my sex life, though a little behind schedule, was normal — a term whose definition I now question.
When my first boyfriend, a professed Christian, asked me at age sixteen to have sex, I said no, God wouldn’t approve, and asked if he wasn’t worried about that too? He laughed, blushed, and said he did worry, but then broke up with me. This seemed normal.
The boyfriend who had braided my hair accepted my answer — that I was waiting until marriage to have sex. But our bodies were on fire for each other. Instead of intercourse, we bent the definition of “sex” to our mutual satisfaction. Also, normal.
By the time I changed my mind at age twenty, it wasn’t because I’d finally found the right guy. It was because I’d grown tired of waiting for marriage, which seemed decades away. I didn’t want to be a virgin anymore and decided I’d just pray for forgiveness after any sexual encounters. The guy I chose wasn’t a great guy, not by a long stretch, but it was consensual sex. I cried a little but told him he didn’t have to worry about that, and he didn’t give it another thought. We both assumed it was normal when afterward I drove home alone, first having to scrape the ice off my windshield while he fell asleep.
After my move from Minnesota to California, my habits didn’t suddenly change, so neither did the results. One man I met in a bookstore, a devout Christian, told me that if we were to become a couple he would be the “coach” and I would be the “player” in our God-approved relationship. Though we’d be loved equally by God, he explained, he expected to be the sole decision-maker while my grand purpose was to be a supporter. I have to admit — given the stress I’d been under and the heavy pressure of Shame after my Great Mistake — his offer almost appealed to me. But not quite.
Then Todd entered my world, and my dating life, which had been in a very dark winter, skipped over spring and bloomed into summer. When I first met him, I saw only a good-looking, clean-cut, preppy fraternity guy. I’d long avoided men like this — for a reason. The ones I had known were shallow, drank too much, and rarely acted independently of their friends’ opinions. When I learned Todd actually had belonged to a fraternity in college, my hopes sank.
But in the months we dated, I had shared many more truths and vulnerabilities with Todd than I had with anyone in years. I’d heard tender stories from him about the topics that mattered to me most — life, death, love, and loss. I didn’t have to pretend to be smart or happy around him. I didn’t feel coerced to flirt or engage physically in any way that did not come naturally to me. He saw into me — in that same intimate way that Steve, my Minneapolis boss, had, but instead of racking my nerves it calmed them.
So when Todd surprised me on my birthday with the gondola ride, I stood on the dock wondering how to explain my rush of emotion to someone else when I could barely grasp it myself. The fact that he believed me worthy of consideration and tenderness after seeing so many sides of me, reminded me that I had at one time believed myself worthy — if not of tenderness, at least of consideration. I settled for “No one has done anything like this for me in a long time.”
“Well, you deserve it,” he said. He took my elbow and guided me into the boat, and back to my sense of self-worth.
***
My improved sense of self-worth soon led to the realization that I had never really wanted to help rich people get richer. Mindful that it is wise to secure a new job before quitting a current one, I began to interview, making up appointments to excuse myself from work. Within a couple weeks, I received a generous offer from a company in Newport Beach, California. Both the work and the pay enticed me, providing all the elements needed to lead me safely back to the American Dream. But I hesitated, asking for the weekend to consider the offer.
Meanwhile, a friend of Todd’s who had recently moved from California to Portland, Oregon, invited us for a weekend visit. Our two days there, with our surroundings so green, clean, cozy, and quaint, seemed light years away from the ugly, brown sprawl of Los Angeles. Feeling fancy free at what would soon become our favorite brewery, the two of us pondered what it would be like to live in Portland, challenging each other to reveal what life for us was really about and agreeing that it should be about adventure, wonder, and passion.
“Hurry, go back and take the new job before someone else gets it!” interrupted Fear.
But in that same moment I felt a familiar breath near my leg. “Curiosa! You’ve come back!” I shouted, hugging my wolf then rubbing my nose against hers and scratching behind her ears. She thumped her tail and panted with joy. “I’m so glad you found me!”
I felt my belly flutter, my fingers tingle, and my heart lighten. Though moving to Portland before securing a new job might seem risky from the perspective of the businesswoman in me, another part of me that I couldn’t quite name yet knew it felt more right than risking my sanity and self-worth working for a company I didn’t care about or even taking a new job if it meant staying in a state that never felt like a home for me.
Todd, who had never lived outside of California, was excited to try something new, and the two of us spent the rest of the afternoon plotting our escape from corporate hell and dreaming of choosing our own adventure. We wondered what we, just two crazy kids in love with each other and with life, could make possible with only hope and trust as currency. Perhaps our dreams hadn’t been too unrealistic or naïve after all, we thought. We assured each other that we’d deal with mundane details like jobs after arriving in Portland.
Curiosa devoured the crazy ideas I slyly fed her under the table, while Todd and I clinked our beer glasses toasting to the thrill of adventure. When we left, the three of us let our hair, or fur, blow in the breeze as we rode in a rented convertible to sign a lease on an apartment just outside Portland.
“Wake up! What are you doing? You’re not even engaged, let alone married!” Fear warned.
“Buzz off, Fear,” I said.
“Who do you think — ” Shame tried.
“Shame, I get to choose my life, not you,” I asserted.
“I liked the guy who said he’d make the decisions for you,” Shame said, sulking.
“Get a life, Shame,” I retorted.
Back in my Los Angeles basement cubby the following Monday morning, I called the hiring manager from Newport Beach and said, “I want to thank you for your time, but I’m going to pass on the job.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, sounding surprised. “Because we can negotiate the pay and the start date.”
“Thank you, but I’m going to move out of state,” I said.
“Do you have another job offer?” she inquired.
“No, not yet, but I’m sure it’ll work out,” I insisted.
And I was sure it would work out. I was still young at twenty-four. I had a partner I trusted. And I had a college degree, a midwestern work ethic, and a perfectly good pair of bootstraps.
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