Truth is in the Intent

My dad told me to kill myself six months ago, in June.

When I talked to him after six months of no contact, he made a point to apologize for my faulty perception of things.

The apology of an abusive person frequently looks like, “I’m sorry you…”

“I’m sorry you thought I said that.”

“I’m sorry you’re mentally unstable.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you when you were sad.”

He never once apologized for hurting me, though. He isn't sorry about that.

The problem wasn’t that I thought he told me to kill myself. The problem was that he actually told me to kill myself. And I feel in my heart that he meant what he said, when he said it.

The problem wasn’t that I was mentally unstable.  It was that anyone who had a person in their life that dead set on hurting them would be mentally unstable.

The problem wasn’t that he wasn’t there when I was low... The problem was that he was the one dragging me down. From that time when he punched my arm till there were bruises when I told him to stop calling me names, to the time when he called me a slut for saying I was attracted to girls, and leading up to the day six months ago when I almost took my life.

It took five years of the cycles of abuse spinning faster and faster for me to realize that real love doesn’t ever look like that, and that he isn’t going to change. In fact, it took being in an authentic, real, loving relationship myself to see that love and pain are not unanimous; not even a little.

The dysfunction between my father and I goes back a long time, back to when I was sixteen years old. Arguably it could go back even further if you consider the extreme neglect that took place during most of my childhood.

At 16, my father used finding out that I smoked marijuana as an excuse to start physically and verbally abusing me. Ironically, I started smoking because I was depressed.

It felt like being punished for feeling bad, and those were some of the darkest times in my life.

Though he painted a pristine image to the outside world and had leadership roles in the church I was going to, the people closest to me knew of the horrors that would take place between closed doors. Horrors of my privacy being violated, of my sense of self being diminished, and of being put through immense fear, repeatedly.

Many of the people who would hear what I spoke of, wouldn’t be able to handle the dissonance that would take place within themselves, and would in turn question my honesty. After all, it’s easier to tell ourselves that the teenage girl just wants attention, instead of scrutinizing that there might be a more sinister issue at hand.

The abuse in and of itself was bad enough, but the hypocrisy and lies really destroyed. Gaslighting, rewriting the past, and denial were the closest I got to a meeting of minds with my father. Lies upon more lies.

Abusive relationships are akin to acid rain. You can’t tell just by looking at the rain how damaging it really is. But with time, you notice the statues it touches are corroded and rotting. The trees it touches wither. The fish around it begin to surface, belly up...

But it takes time to make the connection.

Some days, I don’t know why I didn’t kill myself.

Perhaps  I didn’t because of my closest friends and family.

Perhaps I want to believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

But many days, the phrase “What doesn’t kill you makes you wish that it did” resonates much more.

On good days, I’m a survivor that never has to look back. On bad days, I can feel like it’s happening to me all over again.

I’m writing because if I don’t talk about this experience, it’s going to continue to control me. I’m doing this for my own sense of release, and I’m doing this for other people who have gone through the same.

You are not alone. And the fact that you’re not alone, is really fucked up. Nobody deserves to be told the absolute lie that their life is worthless. No one.

I know it’s a struggle. I know what it’s like to battle inner demons every single day, to wrestle internally with things that are small to other people, such as, “should I leave the house today?” In fact, it's my goal to be as open as possible about my own struggles.

Like many abuse victims, I have a hard time seeing how any positive self-focus or self-care is not selfish. I beat myself up for setting the smallest of boundaries (as pointed out by my therapist this week), and wonder if deep down I really am a narcissist like my father. If you have gone through abuse yourself, you know what I’m talking about… Even long after the abuse is over, the abuser still lives in your mind, criticizing your every move.

How do we know what's real? This is a question I've been asking myself for a while.

The truth is in the intention.

Sometimes the people close to us accidentally hurt us. They do things carelessly that trigger our pasts, or tease us about something that we’re sensitive about, or overwhelm us with their problems. Relationships are messy like that, and we’re all destined to witness the limitations of language at least some point in our lives.

But sometimes, people set out with the intention to harm us.

Dr. Emoto's water experiments reveal the power that intention has on water molecules.

You can tell a lot about a person's real intentions by seeing how they respond when you tell them you feel hurt by their actions.

A person who truly loves and cares about you will feel bad about hurting you, especially since if someone loves you it is not their intent to hurt you. They will seek to find a solution, either by changing their actions completely, or by meeting you halfway; by getting on the same page.

A person with sinister intents does not care if they are hurting you. They will shame you for feeling hurt in the first place. They will refuse to take accountability for the part they played in causing the hurt, or in extreme cases, their behavior will worsen. Pyschopaths and sociopaths especially like being worse to their victims at this point, because they like to get a reaction out of you.

As I was sitting there crying that night, imagining the ways I would take my life, my dad towered above me, yelling that I was pathetic, worthless, and that he was embarrassed by me, until I became angry enough to ward him off physically. I’ll own up to the fact that I didn’t care much about hurting him after that point. It took a lot to bring me that low. The illusion that he cared about me was shattered.

Love has pure intent. Love is flexible, patient, kind… And is not self seeking, but symbiotic. Love has a spaciousness to it that leaves room for growth, for mystery.

Ill intent shows through its inflexibility, impatience, unkindness, and hatred. It is only concerned with the self; not the highest self, but the ego-self, which is concerned with hierarchy and survival.

Though it can be difficult to know the difference, in due time intent reveals itself. It is then up to us to move past the ego, towards love.

I am not so close minded to say that I would never accept an apology from my father. I love to wishfully think that some day he’ll call me up and say, “Gee, I am sorry I’ve been such an asshole to you and everyone else in the family. I’m sorry I was so blind to how hurtful I’ve actually been. I’m sorry that I couldn’t be the father that you all needed me to be.”

But for now, that is just a dream, and the words actually spoken still sting.

Is this release I’m feeling after putting words to it, what other people call ‘forgiveness’? Perhaps. But from my perspective, I am not quite to a place of acceptance, something that I’ve always felt was deeply intertwined with forgiveness. I will never accept that it’s okay to say that to someone, and I will never accept that things had to be this way. No… I won’t hold on to a past that I wish had happened. I won’t grasp an illusion that died many times in the past, over, and over again.

I do not welcome my father back into my life. Is it possible to forgive someone, and still condemn them from entering your life? For the time being, I’m going to say that it doesn’t, and I will be here, in a space of not-quite-forgiveness, with my eyes fixated forward, moving towards the hope that with time, I will become stronger, and more loving, than ever before.

Diversity Is Life

The conquest for sameness is at the root of all of the problems America is facing today.

I open my mind’s eye and see the resurgence of racism and white supremacy. I see the open persecution of native american, black, and gay, peoples. I see the mass extinction of animal species taking place now, and I cannot help but see that trying to enforce sameness is at the root of all of these.

Take it even further out, and I see institutionalized education systems and religions, cookie cutter beauty standards, and expensive, white marriage ceremonies before age 25.

We recognize our biological needs of having enough, and our emotional needs of being enough, if not met, manifest in feeling bad, either emotionally, or physically, or both. And yet, we go about addressing these needs in our own unique ways.

As much as we try, we will never be exactly the same as any other person that has been alive, ever.

Why is this?

Diversity is Life.

Where there is life, there is diversity.

Ecosystems exist with a vast array of different species living, interacting, and multiplying. Take away even a single species and the ecosystem is forever changed... Take away many species, and the ecosystem collapses.

Evolution itself happens as a result of differing concepts, ideas, and life forms interacting together.

It’s quite intriguing for me to observe as a medical intuitive that this quest for sameness has in fact led to a plethora of problems in our own gut microbiota; we are now scientifically finding that a healthy gut functions best with a diverse range of friendly bacteria. In the past this was obtained through bacteria naturally present in the soil that made its way onto our food, then into our guts… in our present, however, this intricate richness is mostly void, lost in the black hole of sterile, processed foods.

To end diversity is to end life itself.

We are living in a dying society, unable to hold space for differences.

We are all guilty of losing touch, and of forgetting. Let my words carry you towards remembrance, as I remember with you.

I am consistently amazed at how much of a fight it is, to enforce sameness. Sameness goes so against what life itself is, that you see a person must literally fight life itself to achieve sameness.

Sameness is a fight, one that eventually leads to death.

We fight weeds that grow between rows of commercial seeds. We irradiate the produce once it’s harvested, killing the bacteria that was thriving on its surface.

We fight the our natural tendency to be different. We have a critic living in our heads that tells us what to do, or not to do, in order to blend in and avoid being bullied.

We fight to pluck eyebrow hairs, we fight the urge to wear that one dress because it’s “weird”,  and we damn other people to hell if they don’t share our religious views.

We fight people who are not of our race. We attack and throw slurs and we get guns and hand grenades and tanks and...

Did it ever occur to us, that we could opt out?

What’s the worst thing that could happen, if we could cultivate within ourselves, a space for differences?

If instead of condemning the person who’s muslim, we just took a breath in?

If instead of restricting our diets, we allowed ourselves to eat what resonates?

If instead of graduating from high school then going to college then getting married then having 2.5 children… we just took a moment to reflect?

But beyond all this, if we allowed ourselves to be exactly as we are, without the need to act upon the whims of the “I”... Life itself, would change.

Life doesn't have to be a fight. Life itself is not war. Life is not unidimensional. Life is not closed. It doesn't have to be.

Life itself is peaceful, diverse, and expansive.

When we fight the diverse expansiveness that is life, life becomes a fight.

And ultimately, when we fight life, we fight ourselves.

It is time to stop running in the battlefield, and turn inwards.

It is time to see beyond the external circumstances to which we have no real control, and reclaim the only real power we have... that is, the power we have over our own minds, and the power our minds have to shape our own lives.

Two Suns

I find myself surrounded by trees in autumn. The sky is lit up like fire, and all above me there are golden clouds, burning; though I can hardly see beyond the dense forest of reds and yellows. The sunlight, like liquid, submerges everything below it in a shimmery gold color.

Red and orange leaves cushion the lush forest floor, as the yellow of the sunlight merges with the color of the trees. I stand in the middle of a pathway amidst the scene.

A sidewalk stretches seemingly endlessly in a straight line either direction. Behind me, there are mountains; ahead, a large expanse of water. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the sidewalk is untouched by the falling leaves of the forest... Yet immediately beyond the pathway the forest grows wild, burning neon with the transition of summer to winter; of daylight, to nighttime.

Breathing in the air, I am comforted by the familiar taste of ocean air, and of woodland forest. The breeze is soft and playful, blowing unpredictably in any direction that it chooses. I close my eyes and feel the subtle pull of my hair and clothes being completely at the whim of the changing airs.

There are two others people with me; three. Behind me, they are emerging from a building, walking on the sidewalk. The building is coming out of the mountain, and is constructed of white stone. Columns line its entrance, and it is quietly elegant; hidden by the fiery forest and its leaves as its sidewalk stretches outwards.

I recognize the two others who are walking with me. One is my maternal grandfather, who has often walked with me in dreams. And finally, my youngest brother is walking too.

As Miles approaches, we join hands, and walk forwards, as the other two continue to walk behind me.

Nearing the shore of what looks like an ocean, I notice a puddle of water to the left of the path, and break off. The others watch what I am doing for a moment, hesitating before joining. I walk over by the edge of the small pond, pull out my camera, and take a picture, revelling in the beauty of the colors playing upon eachother; reds upon oranges and yellows, with the sunset in the background.

To my surprise, I notice something when I am reviewing the pictures… It appears that instead of just one sun in the sky, there are two suns; two stars.

I gasp, and let the others know, pointing. We look at the sunset in amazement, perplexed at the two stars burning in the sky (The sun is technically a star, and so I thought of the scene as such).

Little did we know that earlier, the view of the two suns was obscured by the denseness of the forest. We could not see the breathtaking sight amidst the visual noise of our immediate surroundings.

As we each walk further down the sidewalk, we find ourselves at the shore of an ocean. The sidewalk continues outwards in a straight line, but we step off the sidewalk; this time standing on the light, soft sand of the ocean.

We watch the two suns in the sky, burning with the time of transition; as they light up the sky in a fiery vision of the impossible becoming possible.

I am filled with a great sense of spaciousness, of peace, as the vision comes to a close.

Change of Name

Many of you know me as Tessa Rae. However, I was not born with this name. The decision to change my name was one I thought about for many years before I finally made the plunge.

Born under the name Tessa Wray, I grew up quietly, and for most of my life I would go out of my way to avoid situations that would call attention to myself. Most of my life has been spent quietly in a shell.... In fact, I feel that learning how to express myself is a big part of my soul’s journey here on earth.

This fear had its grip on myself and my actions for most of my life. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I finally gained enough courage to start breaking out of the mold that my parents, church, and even friends, had compartmentalized me into. In all truth, I began to break out of the mold that I had put myself into.

Challenging paradigms rarely happens without consequences. Many of us are resistant to change because we fear what those changes could mean. We oftentimes think those changes are for the worse, and fear the permanency of change.

But change is just that. If there were to be any overarching law of this universe, it is change. No matter how permanent things may seem, they aren’t.

I have not spoken much about it, but many of you know that my father has abusive tendencies towards me. This actually played a big role in my decision to change my name.

It wasn’t until Middle School that depression began to flood my reality. It started out slowly, like a leak in the roof, until one day I realized I was submerged. I had no words for it at the time… all I knew was a numbness that started to eat away at my self esteem somehow became the new normal, that carried on all the way to my junior year of high school.

One day after school in my junior year, I found myself smoking marijuana with some friends I had just made. From my perspective, these friends were much more accepting and open than anyone else I had ever met in my entire life. Contrary to the religious friends that I had often been surrounded by growing up, none of them seemed to care about being ‘weird'. Though it was a small thing, that day turned out to be a turning point in my life for both better and worse; That day, I realized that the judgement had to stop within myself… and also that same day, was the end of a peaceful home life.

My parents actually found out I had smoked pot the very first time I tried it, and so I actually never got a phase of peace where I could enjoy the spiritual shift that had taken place within me. Instead, I was thrust right into what I now look back as being some of the darkest times in my life. If they had known that I had only smoked pot to feel better, perhaps things would have been different.

I feel it was a combination of finding my own path and thus making changes within myself, and fear, that brought out the abusive side of my father full throttle. There had been glimpses scattered throughout my childhood, but it was not until I was around age 16 that his behavior became more extreme, morphing into what I now recognize as overt abusive behavior.

Every day, I didn’t know what to expect; there was no way to tell. Some days my father would be okay and let me by with neglect, other days he would become violent and hit, yell, or berate me. He would sometimes cuss me out, then afterwards he would tell me that crying was childish and treat me like I was incapable of doing anything with my life. Oftentimes he would isolate me, so when I would tell other people of the unspeakable, he would be able to talk his way out of it, downplaying my own experience and oftentimes flat out lying about the actual events that took place so that touching upon any sort of truth became impossible.

Spiritually, this lead to a bizarre time in my life. Not surprisingly, I became even more depressed! My grades started falling as my home life became more and more unstable. It was a horrible cycle that began, where my success oriented father would become verbally and physically abusive because my grades were failing, which caused me to do worse, which caused him to be more abusive…

I felt I had nowhere to go, and no future ahead of me. Watching my father sit in church on Sundays made my blood burn. How could such hypocrisy exist in a person?

I would speak about what happened to people close to me, and they would be the only ones to know about the horrors that happened behind closed doors. Most people who knew my father publically I would not trust to confide in, as many of them simply weren’t aware of how bad it actually was when I would find myself alone with him.

Other people in my family were afraid of him when he would target me. I was desperate for help but I was the only one who was willing to stand up against him. This often lead to things getting worse. One time I called the police as I was in the middle of an anxiety attack, as my dad chased me through the house screaming at me. You can imagine my shock when the policeman told my whole family in a jaded tone, that my father “could do whatever he wanted with me, because I was his daughter.”

What does this have to do with my name, you ask?

Well, it was around age 16 when I first had the desire to have a different last name. I never liked how having the same last name seemed to tie us together, and at times I felt my father would treat me like I was an object that he owned, and as the police had said, could do whatever he wanted with me. I felt that changing my last name would be one final way to destroy the illusion that he held of me, whatever that illusion looked like. Because it was clear as time passed, that I was not the person he was trying to make me become.

It took five years of having minimal contact for me to realize he wasn’t going to change.

The dynamics of our relationship consisted of glimpses of normalcy, interlaced with very deep hurts, and no retribution. My father used lying and denying the past as a sort of apology, and in fact my father would only apologize if other people, usually my mom, pushed him to. Usually, he would say I was “crazy” for “remembering things wrong”, and would often shame me for having boundaries, feelings, or individuality at all. I was often apologizing for things I wasn’t even sorry for, and he was angry at me for doing things that had nothing to do with him at all.

When I was 17, I had my first spiritual awakening experience on a warm night in April. It was on that night when I realized that I had the power of focus, and I could in fact choose how I look at the various experiences that happen to me. I also realized that we are all part of something bigger than ourselves, pieces in a mosaic.

At the time, I had been angry with God and was doubting whether or not a god even exists. I told myself, if he does exist, such a ‘God’ could not be benevolent. That night, I suddenly saw myself where I was; I had been depressed. I saw that not only is God alive and benevolent, but we are we all in conversation with this God. I understood that my soul had chosen to come into my particular life for a reason, even though I couldn’t see those reasons from my temporal perspective. Though it took time for others to notice, my life was changed forever that day, and a shift had taken place within me, for the better.

While I was still depressed, I was given the tools needed to move my way out of it.

Later on that year, I found out my father was cheating on my mother. I found the phone myself when I was going to the bathroom and wanted to play a game my dad had on his phone. When I pulled out the phone, it was not my dad’s usual phone but instead a small prepaid phone; his mom was one contact, and the other contact I didn’t know. I decided to call the number and heard some girly voice on the other end pick up, saying in a flirty voice, “I can’t hear you…”

Apparently, finding out my dad was cheating on my mom was a shock to everyone else. It wasn’t that way for me. I had already known my dad lived a double life, and finding out he was cheating made me realize he had been taking out all the anger he had at himself, out on me.

I kept quiet about it still, following my best friend’s wise advice to stay quiet unless my mom said something about it, or unless my dad was going to go through with moving our whole family out of the state (something he was considering at the time).

It all happened so fast. I remember it in glimpses, snapshots… my friend Laura and I staying after school to work on art every day… eventually telling my brothers what I had found… My parents finding out about my brothers’ marijuana use… Meeting my first love, Miles… and I remember sitting with mom outside the grocery store parking lot in February, as she asked me if my dad was cheating on her. As the Valentine’s day decorations towered in sickeningly gaudy shades of pink and red, we found the phone he had been trying so hard to hide, and all bets were off.

I was no longer the sole target of my dad’s wrath. At this point, we had all been a target, save for my youngest brother, who was pinned the role of Golden Child. By this time I was absolutely certain that I had no desire to be tied to my father through sharing a last name, but I was not sure what I wanted to change it to. I thought to myself humorously, that at this point I would end up getting married to someone for the sole purpose of changing my last name (which was obviously a horrible idea, though funny to daydream about).

Meanwhile, I find myself on a contemplative path, no matter where I go. I have no doubts in my soul that we are in a constant communion with the divine, and no matter where I go I am in conversation with the universe, Source, God. We all are; it’s just a matter of listening, of discernment.

My father’s abuse is simply the shadow of why I chose to change my name… On the other side, is the light of conscious creation. For me, a change of name is a symbol of being reborn, a symbol of spiritual transformation and renewal, and an opportunity to bring myself full circle, after losing myself so many times before.

Many people who are close to me have said that I have changed in recent years. And while I have thought of these not as changes but rather, “becoming”, I understand that in many ways I have changed, and am not the same person that I was five years ago when I first awakened.

Like I touched upon earlier, the seed was planted many years ago, and has simply grown with the passage of time. I don’t want this post to mislead you into thinking that spirituality is an automatic key into sainthood, because it’s not. I would give anything to change some of the decisions I have made in the past, and I hope to talk about some of these decisions in future blog posts. I have found that sometimes losing ourselves can be an integral part of finding ourselves, though taking such a road is not an easy one...

Though subtle, I chose to change my name from Tessa Wray to Tessa Rae.

Although my name is not spelled the exact same way, a tesserae is actually an art term that is used to describe a piece that makes up a mosaic.

The older I have grown, the more I have realized how beautiful of a description that is… We are all pieces in the mosaic of humankind, all individual snapshots of the collective work of art that is life itself.

When looking at a mosaic, one does not see one piece and declare it lesser compared to another piece. But when we look at other people we inflict this judgement all the time. It is time to realize that we are all souls having a human experience, and that we are all on different journeys, all of them beautiful and unique in their own way. It is time to end the old paradigm of “eat or be eaten”, the old paradigm of survival of the fittest.

We are all in the same boat, and fighting each other does not stop the ship from sinking!

We think that we know what it is like to be another person. We like to think that if we were in the shoes of another person, we would be different. But in telling ourselves this, we fail to honor the divine in every individual. We fail to see that  we are all different and have different ways of learning, and that we all do the best we can with the knowledge that we currently have.

After experiencing my second spiritual awakening, I have committed to my decision. Fears of being called crazy, of calling attention to myself, and of caring what other people think, I leave behind as I move forward with my decision. And in doing so, I hope to awaken others to the power we do have to change what we can.

So often I see people doing things because they feel like they “have to” or “should”, and do these things at the expense of their own well being. I am here today to tell you that you are not doing anyone a favor by feeding into this illusion of “should”. There is no one right way of doing the dishes. And our lives, are no different. It’s time to embrace our very essence as creators, and begin to use the tools we do have, to create the sort of lives we most desire.

Nobody else can make that decision for you. And as hard as it can be to see at times, nobody can take that power away from you. It is always yours to have.

You are beautiful and unique. I wish you all a lovely week.

Stay Strong.

~Tessa Rae