It started with a Fight.
Being weird brained, with ADHD, and a lover of music, I always seem to have a song lyric or title playing in my head that somehow fits with the thing that wants to be expressed in writing. It’s not always evident how it fits until I write. I told you, my mind world in strange and mysterious ways because I live with inner narratives and stories playing in my head at all times.
This essay could just as easily be called walking my way back to me.
But the song, ‘It Started With a Kiss’ by Hot Chocolate will not leave my head. I loved that song when I was younger. I loved Hot Chocolate! They were around in my teens and early twenties and, in fact, they were formed in 1968 when I was 8 years old. That’s weirdly relevant to this essay.
My life always seems to work like that. The memories that are triggered by a song, a movie, an image, or a book always have some resonance in the story that is asking to be told.
Do you remember the song ‘It Started With a Kiss”? It’s pretty sad.
It speaks to me of lost dreams and lost first love. For me, that’s self-love. At least, in this story.
So, what does that have to do with ‘it started with a fight’?
It was in February of 2021 when ‘the’ fight happened.
Hubs and I have been together since 1994 and married since 1997. We’ve had fights on and off for years, as most couples do. Or at least I think it’s normal. How can you be in a relationship with anyone for 30 years and never disagree?
I’m highly suspicious of those that say they have never had a fight in a long term relationship.
But I digress.
This fight felt different.
Words were spoken that hit like a big brick into the soul and cut into my heart like a knife. These words had been said before but this time they dug into my core and I turned into a catastrophizing mess.
I cried for at least three days. Lying at night with tears streaming down my face while he slept next to me. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I hasten to add that words were spoken by both parties.
The bugger, I mean lovely man, who had said the words that wounded apologized. I apologized for the words I spoke. We made up, and he went back to normal. Or at least, it seemed so. I don’t know if it lingered in his head.
WE went back to normal on the surface.
Normal service was resumed as they say.
My insides, however? They were churning like a cesspit of self hatred and feelings of never being good enough. My inner critic was in overdrive and would not be quieted.
The voices of my childhood swam through my head and heart over and over. At this point I couldn’t remember if those voices were said by others or were just my own beliefs about myself.
The fears that there is something intrinsically wrong with me, that I am unlovable, that I am and, even worse, NEVER WILL BE good enough, and that I can never do enough to fit in with others expectations.
I had lost my sense of ‘selfness’ somewhere in life, or lost a part of me. I didn’t love or even like myself much at all. Even marrying my best friend who, 99% of the time, is loving and thinks I am the bee's knees, didn’t fill that hole.
I was raised as the eldest of four with three younger brothers and a Mother who taught me that men ‘rule’ while women drool.
Okay, we don’t drool. But it rhymes.
I was taught that girls were less important than boys and men. That boys are more cuddly, that I should be a constant support for men. Not just by mother in truth. It was the culture.
Yet, there were mixed messages. I was ‘good’ at school when I was young. So the messages were to do well in school but then be a secretary, nurse, or teacher. None of those options floated my boat and they didn’t inspire me to try hard at school.
In a careers session at school once I filled out their form and said I wanted to be an astronaut or a male model. That went down well. Not.
Then there was ‘Church’ with its messages of original sin and blah blah.
I fought it. I grew up angry. I am a raging feminist. I fought and fight on the side of the oppressed. I probably battled pretty much every expectation of me.messages die hard.
But those ingrained voices die hard. They eat away at your mind like a worm in the brain.
I am not suggesting that I spent my whole life being miserable. I didn’t. But the hole inside was there.
Gapingly now that I know.
I won’t go into the whole history but when we landed where we live now, menopause was beginning, we entered my daughters’ tween and teen years, I didn’t make a lot of friends, and it felt heavy and cold. And this place is one of the most theocratic, patriarchal, and hierarchical places there is to live. At least in the Western world.
I was described as a trailing spouse because we moved for my husband’s work. I didn’t have a work visa until we got our green cards much later.
I felt discarded, of no value, and only there to be useful in the home and with the kids, who were struggling to fit in as well.
When we bought our first home here the male being who was our mortgage loan officer didn’t even include me on the forms because I had no work visa and wasn’t earning. Until I complained loudly that is.
Combine that with the hormonal shifts of menopause and of two tween girls in the house?
It was a perfect storm of hormones, feeling like an alien as well as being one in this new place, feeling undervalued, or not valued at all, and not even liking the place itself after loving the place we had moved from.
I hated it.
I had struggled for TWELVE years, by the time of the fight, to find my place here.
I would make some leaps forward but it was like a windy, weavy, mountainous uneven track. One where I would take a few steps forward and then backslide.
None of it was much to do with my man at core. He’s a wonderful partner and I love him deeply. It was a no brainer to say yes to the move here because it offered him an opportunity that was hard to refuse.
When you are in a long term relationship someone has to compromise at all times when there are major decisions to make. He had compromised his wants for my desires at other times.
Looking back it was a whole hill of beans piling up one on top of the other and I just couldn’t find myself here.
Believe me, I tried. I sought answers in many places and tried many things.
I even started a business doing a thing that I had ALWAYS loved and that had been a hobby for over twenty years.
I can’t claim I was miserable all the time, I am much too optimistic for that.
But there was a whole that I stuffed with food, and other unsatisfying pursuits. The heaviness of place showed in my soul, my mind, and my body.
I reached around 215 pounds by the time of ‘the fight’
But the fight turned a lever in my head and said ‘you have to look within’. The ONLY way is to heal from the inside out.
In the ‘you can’t make this shit up’ department I am finishing this post in a second silent writing session for the collective I mention below. Today I pulled an oracle card for us all. I pulled the Devouring Mother. The part of the self that turns us to stone like Medusa. The embodiment of ‘not-enoughness’ in every way.
I am today old when I discover that what ignited in the fight was me turning that devouring mother’s gaze back on herself as I learned to love myself again and to find that bright spark of creativity within that could turn this frown upside down.
Of course, I had heard and thought I understood that healing comes from the inside out before. But I had never felt it as deeply as the days after the fight.
What on earth does this have to do with Hot Chocolate, you might ask.
If you don’t know the song, these lyrics are a part of it.
“It started with a kiss
In the back row of the classroom
How could I resist
The aroma of your perfume
You and I were inseparable
It was love at first sight
You made me promise to marry you
I made you promise to be my wife
But you were only eight years old
And I had just about turned nine (just about turned nine)
I thought that life was always good
I thought you always would be mine…….
………You don't remember me, do you?
You don't remember me, do you?”
I couldn’t remember who I was inside. That shiny, bright, creative, inner child who was her own best friend and lover. Lost in imagination, fun, and fairytale.
I began to choose to learn how to love myself again.
At eight years old, the age of the girl in the song, I would have married myself. I was inseparable from my happy, inventive, and imaginative inner self. I wanted to feel that way again.
I began walking every day, a habit I will not let go of now.
Walking helped me to think, to process, to bear witness to the beauty in the world.
The first time I walked alone was because I had to escape the house. My man was working at home because of the Covid days when the fight happened.
We had said sorry and made up after the fight but the wound was deep within me. Because the words spoken spoke truth like a knife in my heart.
The only way forward was to heal my heart.
Quite simply, walking alone made me feel better.
I started to walk my way back to me.
I added other self care practices over time. I found support on my journey too.
I won’t list them all but I focused on things that brought me joy. Purely for fun and self fulfillment.
Things that made my heart feel full. Things that made me feel good and grateful to be alive.
Slowly, I learned to care for my inner spirit or soul. Whatever you call it.
This changed everything about how I work in the world.
I had followed my dream to become a professional Astrologer in 2012. I am good at it.
But ‘the fight’ happened when something significant triggered my personal Astrology chart and it changed the direction of everything.
And I can see exactly how it activated this shift.
But it also showed me that we have to choose to ‘do the work’, to look at things differently’, and that, as an Astrologer, I can’t heal anyone or make them better. I can only help them to see how to work with the energies and then they have free will as to whether they choose to change.
Today’s essay had been playing on my mind for a few days but this morning I ran a silent writing session for a writer’s collective I am in.
Because yes, a part of my journey of self love has been exploring my other long time dream. To be a writer.
The oracle card I pulled that ignited this post was The Medicine Woman from the W.I.T.C.H (Woman in total control of herself) Oracle by writer Angi Sullins.
Angi wrote these words
“A W.I.T.C.H knows her first and best healer is her own self…….. Rather than looking outward, expecting her people or circumstances to change in order for her to feel better, she challenges her own thoughts and beliefs when wounded, tending to the hurt with tender ferocity”
This has been my journey over the last three years. I feel reborn.
I am also literally 70 pounds lighter as I shed the weight of all that stone from the devouring mother’s gaze.
But the most important factor?
I made a choice.
I decided I didn’t like what I was creating and knew that I could create something different.
I also decided to look at everything differently.
I do mean everything.
I even like this place now.
I now want to help others to see that they too can tend to their hurts with tender ferocity and choose to turn the stare of that devouring mother around.
I am so glad I followed the nudges and walked myself back to me. To my selfness.
I am so happy that I chose me and mind magic.
I was inspired to write this by
of Sparkle on Substack.If you want to grow your Substack you should subscribe to her.
Beautiful warrior..you found yourself again..wonderful. Thank you for this essay!
I am on a very similar journey. My fight was in 2019. Wow, what a trip it has been since. I value me BEing, my Worthiness, and for the first time in so many years I Love who I am. Thank you for your words!