Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 8

Arrivals and Departures

This week I discovered that all the humming I do — what Christopher calls my making tones — is an excellent way to liven up my vagus nerve, a method of giving my nervous system some help when I’m not able to have a cat lie on top of my chest and purr all day. Here are more easy tools to activate our sense of calm when it feels like we’re free-falling. And here is a Worry Disengagement Exercise you can journal your way through.

Before I get back into the flow of my love story with Chapter 8 of Ten Times I Said No To Love, I want to stress that my mountain region still needs your help as they rebuild after the devastation of Hurricane Helene. Contributing and connecting to the greater world helps us reset our systems and find balance in more ways than one. If you want to help — or are looking for help — my continuously updated list of verified individuals and initiatives connects you with people who are moving mountains. Keep them in your thoughts, and if you want to help, they sincerely need your donations.

Updates this week:

• North Carolina Board of Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselors: If you are a mental health professional and want to provide services to people in the path of Helene’s destruction, North Carolina has waived its licensing requirements for mental health specialists who are licensed in other states. Click the link for instructions. If you’re in South Carolina and need support as a result of Helene, Canterbury Counseling is offering six free sessions.

• 822,000 acres of timber — 41.1 million trees — were lost in the forests of western North Carolina when Hurricane Helene blew through. Asheville GreenWorks is launching a Tree Reforestation Effort connecting people with trees to plant.

• Here is a list of free or low-cost licensed mental health professionals offering services to victims of Hurricane Helene.

• Photos from Helene is a growing collection of photographs that have been recovered during hurricane clean up that need to be reunited with their owners.

• Southern Pressed Juicery in Greenville, SC is donating 100% of the proceeds from sales of The Blue Ridge Smoothie to benefit the rebuilding of Madison Natural Foods in Marshall, NC.

---

If You’re New to Stable Roots

Before my wedding and the storm, I was in the middle of posting a chapter each week of my rebellious love story, Ten Times I Said No To Love. It’s easy for us to pass love off — as a concept/emotion/feeling — as trite and predictable and boring. I want to revolutionize our relationship with love stories. The world needs them now more than ever.

You can find previous chapters here:

|| Chapter One || Chapter Two || Chapter Three || Chapter Four || Chapter Five
|| Chapter Six || Chapter Seven ||

Chapter 8 could not come at a better time because it’s all about the dialogue between our heads and our nervous systems. The dialogue between MY head and MY nervous system to be exact.

Let’s get started.

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

Chapter 8:
Arrivals and Departures

I must tell you
That I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me —
Because, if there isn’t, then there’s something wrong
With the world itself — and that’s much more frightening!
That would be terrible.
So, I’d rather believe there’s something wrong with me, that could be put right.

TS Eliot — “The Cocktail Party”

Anxiety feels like deja-vous, like remembering something I’ve forgotten, or like the familiarity of a perpetual presence. It creeps in like mist swirling low in a forest blanketing the moss and parting through the trees. Like fog, it is just as disorienting.

What if anxiety is a signal for us to remember our way back into ourselves — a loud, brazen bell clanging our way back home?

I have fought for as long as I can remember. I fought my grandmother with dementia as if I could boss her back into her mind. I fought the church, and I tried to fight the establishment, whatever that is. I’ve fought horses and imposters and traffic.

But the biggest battles that have suited me in a familiar outfit of scars are the fights that I pick with myself.

---

I pile a plate with food and wait for the elevator. When the doors slide open, they reveal my traveling companion on the other side.

“You do hotel breakfast wrong,” Jennifer says, motioning to my plate.

“I want to eat in my room.”

“That won’t work.” She takes my arm and directs me back through the hallways to the buffet in the lobby. “There’s no guarantee that what was edible yesterday will taste the same tomorrow. You need to make several plates with a selection of things and eat nearby so you can go back for more of what works.”

“What if I hate eating breakfast and I don’t want to be near people?” Because I do, and I do — anxiety rituals are as complicated as the Catholic Church. My scrupulosity is epic.

“You’ll be fine,” Jennifer says, sliding a bagel into an industrial toaster.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have eaten at all before an event. Today’s little talk is a two on the anxiety Richter scale, but my nervous system is sliding into old, habitual, deeply engrained patterns.

Plus, I’m pretty sure I fell in love last night.

I’m processing.

I wasn’t prepared for Christopher to present convincing evidence as to why we could be good together. I’m baffled and giddy and preparing for an internal battle that has begun with cortisol spiking like storm waves in my body.

“These eggs are awful,” I say. “I’m going to get some oatmeal.”

“See? I’m teaching you the ways of the world,” Jennifer says.

“This isn’t just about hotel breakfast, is it? This is you sticking it to the man. I’d be lost without your knowledge.”

“I know.”

*

Jennifer feeds me more wisdom on the drive to the horse event. After the opening reception, she made herself scarce from the demonstrations, presentations, and lectures and borrowed my sun hat to explore cemeteries and gardens.

She drops me off and I walk a shaded path to the sunny glare of a riding arena. I’m arriving late. My knee has not fully healed from the hay trailer fiasco and I wobble across the uneven ground.

The other attendees take turns riding a big, Spanish-bred horse in piaffe, a rhythmical motion of trotting in place. This fancy action in the horse requires fitness and years of training to perform on cue and there is some evidence suggesting the motion aids humans in re-wiring their brains.

I’m not a medical professional. I’m a human trainer with horses who chose this life because I needed some legitimate order for my body and mind that feel too much, hold on too much, let too much in. Like piaffe, we have loads of fun words for how our bodies relate expressively to the world: empath, intuitive, neurodiverse, sensory.

The words span the spectrum from mythology to pathology, but at the end of every exhausting, consuming day, I just want to normalize a sense of humans no longer having to cut ourselves off from feelings in order to be present and thriving.

The horses help me, but today I don’t want to be around people. I want to sit somewhere and bask in possibilities for the time I have before I fly back home and have the dream of what could be with Christopher shattered by reality.

He wrote this morning: When I got home from work last night, it was terrible because I wanted to tell someone, but everyone I could talk to was asleep. I couldn’t sleep. It felt like Christmas.

Jennifer has been confusingly optimistic and encouraging with a standard refrain on repeat, like a hard-edged mantra: “He really loves you. Don’t mess it up.” Her stance is that I’ve never been in a relationship where I was adored and cherished and she wants me to experience what that feels like, while also understanding that having never felt a healthy relationship, I’m poised to flee the unfamiliar.

She is right. I’m vacillating between new-love euphoria and trepidation.

I lean against the fence and watch the others take turns on the horse. Who am I without the horses? Spending time with Jennifer and Christopher gives me a taste of that. It’s like I’m looking at myself through a clouded mirror. I can just make out my border.

I make small talk with the people who come and go through the arena gate but I really want to say — something incredible has happened to me, and I’d like to take the day off from seriously horsing, thanks.

But I don't. And soon I’ll present the story of my life with horses, my anxious/intuitive business model, to a room filled with strangers.

I’m feeling myself from a distance, like I’m disembodied as I hobble behind everyone toward the meeting space for lunch. But I shock myself with how cool and easygoing I’m being on the surface before momentarily being in the spotlight. There is a narrative order I hear when I write and another that happens when I talk. I access very different parts of my brain for each and many times it feels like I don’t have to use my brain at all when I’m typing words together.

I’d much rather read my story aloud.

But as I watch them work out glitches in the livestream my legs and hands begin to feel numb. The sleeping dragon opens her golden, reptilian eye and scans the room for potential danger.

Some things to note about me and public speaking:

1. In middle school speech class, I told a hilarious story about sticking my hand in a pickle jar and no one laughed.

2. I gave up top placement and a lot of scholarship money as a Young Arts scholar — one of ten baby poets in the nation — because I was flown to Miami and expected to give a reading to a packed auditorium.

3. I have given many readings.

4. I asked my friend, a voice actor, to give a reading of a short story for me in an experimental, community theater.

5. I speak in public for a living.

6. In college, a great professor gave homework of two questions each day. We were expected, by random selection, to be prepared to teach the class on each topic. I dreaded it all semester, but when I was finally called on to teach, my talk was fantastic and the class clapped.

7. I will easily give impromptu speeches on any subject, but I hate having forewarning.

In this little room in Colorado, I open my mouth and begin to tell my story.

I talk about crippling anxiety and giving up my real jobs for horses. I talk about my ex-husband leaving and realizing I could build the business I wanted instead of doing what everyone else does.

I’m listening to myself from a distance as I speak and am shocked by how easy it is, how worn the words are, how I’ve written the same chapter over and over in the same way in my mind.

I’m tired of this story, my story, and the bullet list of reasons I always speak as if I’m asking permission, seeking validation, a question-mark pause at the end saying: Is this okay? Did I do it right? Have I made sure that everyone else’s needs are met before I figure out my own?

For a long time, I’ve just been going through the motions.

Later, as I walk down a dirt road and wait for Jennifer to pick me up in the rental car, I realize that given the choice — I don’t know who’s watching or offering me choices — but given the choice, I want to sit down somewhere in the middle of trees and be left alone so I can write a love story.

“How did it go?”

“I successfully completed the assignment,” I say, because I’ve used up all my words in the talk and in the continuously ongoing narrative inside my head.

Jennifer keeps after me with questions. Our bags are packed and we’re heading toward Denver to spend one more night before we board our separate flights back to the east coast.

Surround yourself with people who read your silence as much as your sounds. The horses teach me this.

“I’m pulling over,” Jennifer says as she turns into a gas station and parks facing a water culvert filled with trash and tall weeds. The brown of straight-irrigated prairie reaches out to the brown hills staggering abruptly up to the sky in the fading afternoon light.

We get out of the car and study the view like a landscape painting in a gallery.

I’m crying, but I don’t know why. What I do know is that it feels healthy.

“You can talk or not talk, whatever,” Jennifer says.

I don’t talk until I can catch my breath, but even then it feels like there isn’t enough air in the sky. “I hold everything together until I have time to rest and then I fall apart.”

“That’s what we do when we’ve been the only one in charge for too long. It’s what we do when we raise ourselves.”

“Why does everyone else get a pass?”

“Because our standards are unparalleled.”

“That’s one word for it. All in all, for a recovering agoraphobic, I think I’ve handled this trip well. You’re here to drive so I don’t have to think about that. Thank you.”

“Whatever is in my power to do, you know I’ve got you.”

*

We check back into the hotel beside the airport and we order fast food because I’m too tired to make decisions.

I really just want to be alone with my phone.

Christopher writes: What’s your favorite flower?

I hate roses, I write, thinking about how the store-bought ones smell like mortuaries. Wildflowers and sunflowers. I like these.

I look forward to flying with you one day.

I think we will travel well together.

*

My bags are propped beside the door leading out to the hallway. I’ve listened to Jennifer’s voice on the phone in the adjacent room for the past hour. Something has gone terribly wrong with a house she’s selling in Atlanta.

I’ve scanned the framed, geometric prints on the wall over and over with my gaze as I sit on the edge of the bed and try to work out my next move with the information I’ve pieced together through inference and fear.

There is no way Jennifer can drive me to the airport.

I can’t take an Uber because I need to drop off the rental. I bargain with God and I see if I can have the car picked up at the hotel. This is not an option.

The only way out is through.

It’s like the time a client proudly sourced a dump truck and a farmer with spare, moldy hay bales in a drought and I learned how to drive the big, lumbering mess with sticky gears and faulty brakes on an exit ramp leading to the highway.

Or like that time I had to back a stock trailer up a mountain because four horses needed a ride and there was nowhere to turn around.

Or like that time I had to merge right across two lanes without a side mirror because there was a sick horse in tow and I had to get him to the hospital.

I do not have a choice.

And if I wait here any longer, I’ll use my last tiny bit of conviction that I can make this happen.

Jennifer shakes her head as she comes into my room.

I hug her and start walking.

I am amazed as my feet carry me down the hallways, to the elevator, past the front desk. I realize that I don’t know how the vehicle works as I place my bags, in awe that I’ve gotten this far, inside.

I cue up a song on repeat, the one that Christopher gave me as I dragged the arenas that Monday when this all started, and dial in directions to the airport while being absolutely certain that I will avoid all highways and tolls.

Denver is a grid. I undestand patterns.

I’m driving myself to the airport, I message Christopher.

He immediately writes back, What? I thought Jennifer was driving.

If I stare straight ahead like a cart horse in blinders but don’t think too far ahead, I can make this work.

I hope.

I remember to slow my breathing, or that might be an automatic response. Who knows?

My hands and legs are numb. But they work somehow as I start the car and snake through the parking lot. My foot taps the brakes. I look right and left for traffic.

The first red-light is as long as the wait for recess, for school to be out, on hold with the IRS, a conversation with someone who doesn’t hear you, a busy railroad crossing when you have an appointment, eternity.

And then the traffic moves again.

I have done so many scary things in my life, but moving through patterns of anxiety is the scariest. Fear attaches to the most simple, mundane things. For me it isn’t about flying or spiders or ghosts — but normal, people things in normal people life: arrivals and departures, the grocery store, or a car traveling down a normal, city block in the light of the soft, bright sun.

It’s easier at night. Anxiety travels kinder in shadows and mist.

I am at once inside myself and I am outside looking in. Fear exists because we’re capable of holding opposing ideas together. This drive is both very long and very short.

In many ways, crippling anxiety has shown me where my home is because once it has put me through its motions, any reprieve feels like comfort.

The back road leading to the Denver airport is long and vacant and foreign. It’s a moonscape of construction and commuter buses.

My palms are wet. My stomach is sick. And as I see the sign directing me to the rental return, I can almost catch my breath.

I pull into the parking lot like waking into normalcy after an unsettling dream. I drive around in circles unable to find the drop-off point. I must be missing the sign, where is it? This grid of endlessly parked cars has no beginning nor ending. There must be a symbol here.

I finally give up, park in the middle of the street, and motion for someone to show me the way.

*

“There’s a hurricane heading toward Atlanta,” the airline agent says.

I’m checking my bags because the experiment of trying to be someone who can survive with only carry-ons has failed.

My thumbs are shaky as I type, I did it. I DID IT. I made it to the airport.

If you get stuck in Atlanta, I’ll come get you. Also, you get the badass award of the decade, so proud of you, sweetness.

From anyone else in at any other time, the pet name would annoy me, but I’m almost at my gate and feeling is returning to my extremities. I’ve relied on myself for so long safe in the knowledge of my self-imposed limitations. I feel both triumphant and weak. And I’m equally annoyed and honored by Christopher’s offer if the storm strands me in Atlanta.

I like to people-watch, I type.

They never fail to deliver.

I buy snacks and wait for boarding.

Christopher sends me detailed messages about the repairs he is making on airplanes. None of it makes any sense to me, but I stare at the plane parked at my gate and I’m happy it’s put together by someone with mechanical certainty. I wonder if the same is true for the world.

“Boarding will begin soon and we’ll give instructions by ticket type, but everyone will ignore what we tell you, so please feel free to board however you wish.”

I laugh as I scan my ticket.

*

I keep messaging Christopher as I fly. I tell him my thoughts. He tells me what he’s working on. I watch the dark/light landscape of clouds outside my window.

In the end, the winds are tame and my last flight from Atlanta takes off and lands me back home.

How have you been able to keep sending me messages? Christopher writes — for all his knowledge of the structures that keep the planes in the sky.

It’s called WiFi.

The ground and the sky. Dirt and air. I want to believe in both of these things at once. I want to believe that both things can exist and be true simultaneously — that I can be grounded and free.

I want to be comfortable flying but equally okay landing back home.

My mother picks me up from the airport. I tap the black elastic around my wrist and watch the roads follow through with their promise of the gravel drive and the tight portal of old, sagging fence that boundaries the fields into the farm.

Porch, I write, as my bags roll rhythmically across the slatted, uneven boards.

I sink into a seat at the round, filagreed table. I’ve made it this far, but I have several decisions to make.

I want to be someone who goes to the grocery store in the middle of the afternoon. I want to drive without thinking. I want to live without having to hold everything together.

Welcome home, Christopher writes.

I want to be frustrated in airports with you. I don’t want to experience this alone anymore.

Love the sound of this.

And to stare at the pond without needing to speak.

You are not alone in this.

I want to learn things with you because your mind is limitless.

He writes: So is yours, even if you don’t see it.

I close my eyes and lean back in the chair, but I glance down as my phone dings with a final message:

Yet.

|| Read Chapter Nine ||

Photo by Tobias on Unsplash

---

Thank you for coming along with me on this chapter of my journey that has taken too long to post. Come back next week for more windows into my second-guessing and fear-based responses to life and love.

I hope you’re all finding spots of light within the shadows of your worlds this week.

Love,
Kim