When The Soul Contract Ends.
A Post For Those In Long Term Recovery from No Contact.
I went no contact from my family of origin because it was time.
That’s really what it came down to. Not the favorite answer. With time, I stopped imagining what is being said about me. I know how I was treated. Tens of thousands of hours of research, education, and reflection, I have a PhD from the University of Life in Recovery and Healing My Human Heart. As a child, I didn’t have a choice but to endure the environment you created. It was hell but you know, hell means different things to different people. People make up families. Belonging wasn’t one of our core values. Our family valued protection of ego over the cost of anyone with a pulse.
I went no contact because I have known there is something in my soul code that required me to learn how to stand in the middle of rooms as a witness, observing what it looks like when people don’t live honestly because it would prepare me for what was to come. I had to experience the falls, the fumblings, the practices required for the texture of falling up through one’s life journey. Somewhere in my 20’s I realized it didn’t matter what I did do or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, growth is a betrayal to the conditioned addiction of our supremacist society. Withdrawal was sensing how human vulnerability would be made into some kind of joke and humiliation would be a common language of communication. Lighten up, right?!
Hm, thus life of a truth-telling Scapegoat.
I went no contact because acknowledgment is an endless and underlying core function of one’s ability to thrive. When I started studying systems of power (and my queer identities made sure I would), my grip on all of you began to loosen. I thought I needed you to survive. Rejection was going to hurt too much. Abandonment would kill me. In order for me to be of assistance, I had to be brave enough to help dismantle my participation in the dysfunction. You do that by sometimes being the target with a purpose. It was an odd finding of placement. Supremacy made me its scapegoat by being transgender and queer. I’m cool like that. Where minds are stiff with rigidities and invitations to emotional agility breaks bones, trauma will be compared and dismissed because somebody always has to have had it worse. When space is hard to come by I guess you could say I taught myself how to stop caring, or at least to make it appear as such - the last thing in the world I wanted to know how to do. This was to barely manage coercive control cloaked as love.
I went no contact because I needed to keep being able to identify how I feel. The suffocation I feel around you sets me back too far. When midlife came, when I became a parent myself, I was tired of living numb, and it gave me sacred pause. Numb from what, I didn’t know, but oxygen started rushing into the room. A door opened somewhere. A latch clicked. A hinge creaked. I told myself I could always go back if I wanted but first there was something I needed to go see about: the voice calling, asking me to face what I could not handle as a young person. No contact marked another milestone in my reparenting journey as a queer person.
I went no contact because my recovery process has included very a deliberate, conscious and intentional nervous system repair. It’s the most disgusting, raw, agonizing, grotesque human work anyone could ever do. It’s far from love and light and a little bit of go fuck yourself.
It’s I see my light, I get why you stole it from me, and now I need to move.
The reality wasn’t me walking away though I know it looks that way to you. I didn’t write anyone off. Ever. You can imagine the terror I must have felt when I inherently knew from the age of 5 that my intuition would lead me to listen to my darkest parts- the parts I believe not everyone signs up to understand. This is what made me odd and eager. I am wary of people who use humor too often to deflect human pain. To sense and feel our interconnected depth and breadth initiates a vast powerlessness that is often mistook for inadequacy and unworthiness. Refer to line 15 in the soul contract. It’s there. To live in duality; both insignificance and value bears a creative and courageous life.
I went no contact to tend to the tender psychological wounds that ached for the most air. Long wondering how far did the throb go. How twisty was the root. When would I stop standing in the middle of a suspension bridge between two cliffs, sending out heart frequencies without any feedback. Connection through joy became equidistant to indifference through apathy. You may have noticed my calls to you began to wane. But, my voice never left. Too aware and far too hopeful for my children’s future. Putting myself out there had been data and trusting my senses would reveal where the end of the contract lived. It was wedged at the intersection of hurt and possibility, creating enough static for clarity to arise. No contact wasn’t giving up or retreating; it was preservation. No contact swung wide the doors and windows to the tsunami of grief, sadness and anger. I would feel my way through it. Breathing in, breathing out, it is how I survived you. Anger frontmans sadness, holding someone up for as long as they can until the knees buckle eventually. A trusted friend I’d met long ago named Compassion was waiting on the other side for the careful repair and surgical resoftening of my body.
The day I received the handwritten letter- the one intended for me to pity you again, I turned on “Raven” by Jewel to move at the same speed as the dread, and we cut the rope together. Doubled-over in park in my garage, forehead to steering wheel, I replayed what I had learned of love. None of it included someone walking out of rooms, muttering under their breath. Rolling their eyes when invited into a vulnerable conversations. Pitying themselves after an ask of accountability. Repeatedly defending their intentions while the ignoring the impacts on someone else’s life. None of it included chronic messages of “No, I don’t want to know you and I don’t believe you.”
A couple minutes of gutteral sobs- the ones I’d been holding in- birthed safer and boundaried space. In the next breath, I stopped blaming myself for being wobbly, lassoing cosmic tons of energy back into my heart. Depletion had been the sign, not the origin. The 46 years was right on time and I wouldn’t say it should have happened earlier or later. Trust comes in stillness. Knowing this contract would end was not the devastating part; it was the relief in the aftermath.
Love had come, authenticity helps me carry the load.
I continue on free knowing I did what I came here to do.
And so did you.
Love across infinity,
The Smutty Raven
