Month: June 2018

Living with Monsters

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Grief / Loss / Trauma

Suicide doesn’t end the pain. It just transfers it to other people. And I can attest to that the pain never goes away. You just get better at living with it.

It’s like suddenly a behemoth, scary, grotesque monster moves into your house and won’t ever leave, forever. So you just get used to the big blobby thing and live with it. You learn to talk with it, hear it out, sob your guts out with it, maybe even help it heal – slowly, be just a little less monstery…..But at the end of the day, no matter what you ever do, there’s still a giant fucking monster in your house.

There’s still this big ol’ cumbersome thing taking up all that space, making messes, and causing some people to run in the opposite direction from you. No matter how well you learn to deal with it, it’s still always going to be something to manage. Forever.

Please don’t be afraid to reach out for help. Making people you love live with that monster is way, WAY scarier.

National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255 ☎️

download (1)

Bon Voyage, Anthony

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Uncategorized

I don’t have words for the sadness I feel to have lost such a legend and hero. On a personal level, it hits me hard because Anthony Bourdain is one of the biggest influences and inspirations in my hunger to soak up the world and its stunning array of cultures, to travel far & wide & never stop exploring. He has been a personal hero of mine since I was a teenager, then just a traveling tadpole w/only a few trips under my baby belt. He whetted my appetite for bigger & grander (and longer) exploits in my future. Watching him engage with the world on his escapades made me starry-eyed. He made the great big world of grand adventure seem so doable (and MUST-doable) to me, and he made strange lands with unpronounceable names seem so approachable and magnetic. Those who really know me, know that I don’t see travel & exploring & soaking up the world’s cultures as mere luxuries. They’re therapy. Medicine. A lifestyle that has the power to heal – us & the world. They’re the best kind of education one could have on earth. And I relate to travel the way some would relate to their religion. For its values, the culture of travelers, its traditions, its lessons, its sacredness, its promises, its transformation, its way of connecting you to the Truth of yourself and of life, for all this, I have always claimed travel to be a sort of religion for me. And Anthony was a guru in that religion. Someone I look to with not only great reverence, but great relief and gratitude that he was on my team, forwarding an important mission that I so desperately want the whole world to be a part of. If only everyone were to travel more and engage with other cultures more often, I truly believe this world would be a much more peaceful, loving, richer place for everyone….So thank you, Anthony, with all of my traveling soul, for helping bring that possibility to life. For helping to restore the world one great adventure at a time. Your impact was colossal, your spirit magnanimous…Happy trails to you, on your next Big Adventure… 😥🙏🏽🌎💔✈️🍱🌮🥠🥡

0AMZgedO_400x400

Separation is a prison

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Interpersonal Relationships (non-romantic), Uncategorized

Separation is a prison.

I once rehearsed for a play using a Barbara Streisand song. Strange for a girl of 13 years old, but it called to me. The song was People from the film Funny Girl.

“People who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” it went. “We’re children, needing other children. And yet letting a grown-up pride hide all the need inside.”

I’ll never be too proud or too grown-up or too independent to say I need people. Community. Connection. I need support and I need kinship.

Can I survive without that? You bet. But the experience is that of solitary confinement. I can survive in a prison. I can pretty much survive anything. But I’m not interested in surviving. I’m interested in self-actualization, for all of us. We can’t be the fullest expression of ourselves without others, without relationship, without connection.

It seems really “cool” to say you don’t need anyone. I get the sexy mystery of that whole “lone wolf” gig. But I think the coolest people are the ones who surrender to the interdependence innate to their humanity. Though it’s not an easy task trying to make it in life without support or connection (even though it can be done doesn’t mean it should), for the official record, maybe we don’t need anyone to survive. But we sure as hell do to thrive. And for those of us who can own that, well, we are the lucky ones.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with you all, in our co-thriving,
Lyss

download

It’s the Clutching That’s Hard

by The Blyss Catalyst, posted in Grief / Loss / Trauma, Healing, Uncategorized

Maybe things feel hard because i’m clinging so tightly to the past and to the way i think they ought to be. When the winds try to blow you loose, of course it hurts if you’re clutching to a tree fighting against them. Losing the past surely brings some pain, but it’s nothing compared to the pain of grasping on to what is no longer for you.

I think underneath all this pain and struggle i’m feeling right now is ultimately the sense of losing myself – the self i’ve always recognized as me. The Alyssa I was with a mother on the planet, the loss of which reshapes the whole configuration of one’s world entirely. Mom’s not coming back, and I’m still busy resisting that, therefore i’m also resisting that the Alyssa I knew back when i had her is no longer the me that i am or am emerging into. I’m something i do not yet know. And that scares the LIVING BEJEEZUS out of me. I have never known me without her. I have never not known the security and familiarity of the me that I am through her eyes. I’d venture to say she was the most influential, impactful factor to my life, and thus the life i had was largely shaped by her being in it. My whole world had her stamp. The struggle i’m now in feels like one of survival, and the threat of it has been showing up all over the place – in the realm of money, living situations, work, relationships, well-being, etc.….but ultimately, I think it’s about surviving her departure with the Alyssa I know still intact. It’s a losing game, because that just isn’t possible. I’m not that girl anymore. I want to be, but i simply can’t be. I can keep parts of her, but by definition, i am not the Alyssa i was and have known for so many decades. So the overriding essence that’s there all over my life is this feeling of being no one for some time. This in-between being that isn’t this or that. Not anything definable or knowable. Not even to my own self. Just one big edgeless becoming. Into what I don’t know, because even the plans and visions and intentions I once had for myself – well they’re all part of the me that I was. With these past few topsy-turvy, turned-inside-out-y years, all has been detonated. Everything must be reconfigured. Except there is no “re-“ to any of this. I am not rebuilding because that would call for reconstruction from the old parts to build again some sense of order that I once knew. I have more new parts to me now than old and I’ve no idea yet how they work, what makes them go, what new things they can do.

Some of you may have read a passage somewhere out there in the personal growth space about a biology teacher named Mr. Bartlett. Here it is (by unknown):

I remember Mr. Bartlett. In biology class he discusses the transformation of caterpillar into butterfly —

”What is the process that goes on inside a cocoon?” he asks. “Has anyone ever seen a picture of the insect at the halfway point between caterpillar and butterfly? Does anyone know what it looks like?” No one has or does. The next week, Mr. Bartlett finds a cocoon in the woods and brings it into the classroom. We crowd around as he takes a blade and neatly slices it in two.

The cocoon looks empty.

“There is nothing in there,” says one of the kids.

“Oh, it’s in there,” says Mr Bartlett. “It just doesn’t have a shape right now. The living organic material is spun right into the cocoon. Caterpillar is gone, butterfly is yet to come.” We stare in wonder.

“Real Transformation” says Mr Bartlett, “means giving up one form before you have another. It requires the willingness to be nothing for a while….”

If you’re reading this and you’re one of the ones on my team who loves me, thank you for the space you’ve given me to be who I am, what I am becoming, and to be nothing in the in-between. And thank you for the grace you give me to be scared but listening me as strong through it all.

Have you also been clinging to a you or a past or some iteration of something that no longer is, and can you too feel the constraint of that gravity? Can you give yourself the permission to let go and be in the wilderness of the unknown for a while, in order to become something beyond your current definitions and known edges? Can you see the adventure in that, and are you willing to feel the pain and the fears of Real Transformation, trusting it will all be okay? Way way better than okay, for life rewards bravery. Can you keep in this sacred knowing? I am holding space for you.

Cheers to life, in all its configurations

OJ / Lyss