Breaking Free (Art Memoir - Offering 4.1)
From numbness to rebellion
If Trapped was the cocoon, this is the rupture—messy, chaotic, defiant bursting out.
(Offering 4.1 of Eclosion: An Artist’s Path to Power and Peace. If you’re new here, start at the beginning.)
I don’t owe you anything!
I’m not a part of you!
~Last Song by Sleater Kinney
The trauma I endured in middle school changed me. I was no longer carefree. I no longer felt okay in my body. I no longer knew how to play. Or talk to people. When I was introduced to drugs and alcohol, all of that changed. I suddenly had my solution. After a drink, I felt free. Suddenly I had things to say. Life was fun again. I was fun again.
With my newfound solutions—drinking any chance I got, playing hacky sack while smoking cigarettes or getting high in the back parking lot of my high school, riding my skateboard through the streets of Bismarck at night with my boyfriend, screaming along to punk rock songs while cruising in my car with my closest friends—I put on new armor. It was the armor of “I don’t give a fuck”; the armor of “You can’t hurt me”; the armor of “You are beneath my noticing.” I developed new defenses and shut out or shut down anyone who I thought might hurt me. Sometimes, this included the people who loved me.
I could go into vivid detail about that time of my life. I could tell you about the incredible friends I made and the crazy drunken adventures we had, about how alive I felt dissolving into my first love, about discovering myself through the Riot Grrrl music scene and the power I felt driving through the starlit prairie at night with Sleater Kinney screaming out of my car stereo, my friends and I screaming right along with them. I could tell you how I just wanted out, but was so afraid to leave, how I was changing and yet terrified of change. I could tell you about the silence of my household and my parents’ divorce. I could tell you about the times when, after drinking too much, the emotions would come pouring out and I’d suddenly find myself wracked with grief over my parents’ divorce and the pain and shame from middle school, so raw that I would climb out a window to escape or run off down the dark abandoned road we were partying on, or out into the night to climb a tree and hide while I sobbed. I couldn’t let anyone see me in such a wretched state. I was drowning in self-pity even as I didn’t believe that I deserved to have those feelings.
I could tell you about my first year of college away from home, how depressed and lonely I was, essentially flunking out and moving back home. I could tell you about my lovers and my friends, about my adventures as I moved from North Dakota to the West Coast to attend The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, WA, about the complete culture shock I experienced there, about the time one of my classmates participated in the WTO protests in Seattle, returning lit up with newfound activism, and how I just didn’t get it. I could tell you about how I fell in love with the forests, mountains, and rivers of the Pacific Northwest, how when I immersed myself in pristine nature, I found peace.
I could tell you about how I began building a career as a naturalist, how I faced and then overcame my fear of public speaking (mostly). I could tell you about the friends I lost, about the roller coaster that was my emotional life, a roller coaster comprised of exceptionally high highs and increasingly low lows.
Maybe someday I will. Now though, now I want to tell you about the man who helped me see who I really am, who stood by me when I finally broke free of the layers upon layers of armor that were dragging me down.
How have you broken free—from silence, shame, or something that once held you back? Leave it in the comments.