6: When the Past Won't Let Go

Reading time: 8 minutes

Thanks for joining me! This email contains the sixth chapter of my “Dreaming In the Real” manuscript, a work in progress. Bi-weekly episodes reveal how immersing myself in the natural world while preparing vibrational essences helped me gain insight and healing after my adult life crumbled due to unaddressed trauma and childhood adversity.

We are almost finished with Part One, the nine chapters of the historical timeline. Soon, you soon be entering a magical and healing journey in nature. I hope my story inspires you to seek deeper self-awareness and connect to nature’s wisdom and transformative power.

PLEASE START HERE to access the episode list and preceding chapters.

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“Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. That, my friends, is called surviving. Not healing. We never become whole again; we are survivors. If you are here today, you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it thru hell and are still standing? We bear a different name: warriors.”  ~ Lori Goodwin

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SHORTLY AFTER I turned eighteen, my dad invited me into his office, my old bedroom. He took a cloth-bound ledger from a desk drawer and opened it slowly, pointing to my name and birthdate at the top of the page. He had listed every expense he incurred because of me over the last eighteen years.

I felt the ground shift beneath me as pointed out the categories of expenses, including food, clothing, bedding, medical care, and what he paid to the court for me to be in foster care. Maybe he was hoping for gratitude and appreciation, but I felt like an unworthy subject of his grand sacrifice.

Confused, a familiar rumbling in my gut erupted when he asked me to go with him into town. Silence filled the cab of his pickup as he drove and parked in front of the local State Farm Insurance office. I felt lightheaded and disengaged as he bought a life insurance policy in my name, with himself listed as the beneficiary.

"Happy Birthday," he said, handing me the insurance policy. His raised eyebrows and pursed mouth were condescending. I stared at the envelope, sure it was for him, not me—he wanted reimbursement if I died before he did.

I was grateful he didn't hear my response as we walked out the door.

After my dad made sure he was protected, I had my juvenile records sealed so that the troubles of my past wouldn't follow me into adulthood. Little did I know, the past ended up following me anyway.

I HAD A TOUGH time at school. I struggled to understand the system and didn't have anyone to turn to for answers or support. Dreams were the only thing that made me feel empowered. At a young age, I mastered the art of wake-induced lucid dreaming as a way to cope. Each morning, I would intentionally slip back into my dreams, deciding beforehand what I wanted to do and who I wanted to do it with. I was able to guide my dreams freely and do whatever I wanted.

While dreaming, I often walked through crowds of people with black, hollow, sightless eyes. I hoped to find at least one person to connect with, but they couldn't see or hear me. Similarly, I asked everyone in my waking life if they dreamed the kinds of dreams where they could influence the experience with their thoughts and intentions. The hollow eyes followed me into waking life—no one understood.

Recently, I participated in a workshop with Clare Johnson, who wrote a Ph.D. thesis using lucid dreaming as a creative tool. She teaches how dreams are a natural function to reconcile the memories and trauma we can’t process in waking life. Within the expanded awareness of lucid dreams, we can unwrap the meaning of our life experiences. Perhaps the dreams of people with sightless eyes reflected childhood wounds of not being seen, heard, or understood. Or maybe I was seeking missing parts of me in others, where I would never find them.

CONNIE ANNOUNCED she was getting married and asked me to be her maid of honor. We all moved out of our duplex in Rocklin, and I moved into a rustic cabin in the woods of Meadow Vista, just a fifteen-minute drive from my parents.

Giant oaks and old-growth cedars surrounded the cabin. I planted tomatoes and lived with my cat Canyon, a long-haired Siamese cross I found as a feral kitten, behind the Shanghai Restaurant and Bar in Old Town Auburn. I still attended classes, and for work, I made soup and sandwiches for my mom's half-sister at Marnie's Deli and watched her young daughter Susan in the afternoon. My aunt saw a better version of me than everyone else, so I worked hard to keep her faith.

I visited my parents at least once a week and always found my mom drinking. Feeling concerned and heartbroken, I started attending Al-Anon meetings. It was there I learned that excessive drinking is often a way of coping with past trauma and abusive family dynamics. That made sense for both my mom and me.

Feeling helpless and wanting to do something to help, some Al-Anon members helped me organize an intervention with her three siblings. Naïve and optimistic, I didn't foresee the disaster to come. The outcome was not what I had expected. Instead of receiving support, my family turned against me for suggesting that my mom had a drinking problem. In hindsight, I understand that my mom's siblings also struggled with alcohol, and acknowledging her issues meant confronting their own. Additionally, they rarely saw my mom and were unaware of how alcohol was impacting her life and health.

One thing was certain. Our family was a clan of denial and secret keepers.

AFTER LIVING in my quiet cabin for almost a year, my boyfriend Ron moved in with a promise ring, expressing a desire to marry me. Ron, who was kind and gentle, stood six foot three with a wild mop of reddish-blonde hair, a beard, an old Ford truck, and an acoustic guitar. We enjoyed singing along to his Cat Stevens songs and reading J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" together as we explored the rolling foothills and majestic Sierras. However, with the country entering an economic recession and construction jobs becoming scarce, Ron eventually took a job in Alaska. Before long, a one-way airline ticket to Anchorage with my name on it arrived in the mail.

Shortly after my twenty-first birthday, I found a job waiting tables at the Calista Café in the Sheraton Anchorage Hotel. I served gourmet coffee, fresh-squeezed orange juice, eggs benedict, and Bircher muesli to international travelers, pilots, and flight attendants. I made almost $150 in tips during the breakfast and lunch shift, in addition to union wages and benefits—more money than I had ever seen. However, the cost of living was high in Alaska, and after paying the rent for our tiny studio apartment, we could barely afford gas and groceries.

Ron and I enjoyed a year of liberation from our small-town past before the recession reached our northern home, and he lost his job. One afternoon, I came home from work to find him and several young men, strangers to me, weighing ounces of cannabis from kilos. Our tiny studio apartment was no longer a sanctuary. I gave him an ultimatum: stop selling weed and get a real job, or I would leave. Since ultimatums rarely work, nothing changed over the weeks to come. Ron continued to sell weed and began to sneak out of our bed at night to meet his friends at the Wild Cherry, a strip club within walking distance. Not having any tools or understanding to resolve the relationship conflict, I eventually left and moved in with some friends from work, breaking my promise and commitment to Ron. He moved back to California, and I remained in Anchorage as part of a multifaceted offensive on a past I didn't want to relive.

Alaska's untamed wild carried me. Sometimes alone but often with friends, I hiked and camped and explored Matanuska Glacier, the Kenai Peninsula, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the Brooks Range, Wrangell St. Elias National Park, and Denali National Park. Trains and boats carried me to the glaciers and whales of Prince William Sound and Resurrection Bay. Rainy outdoor bluegrass and Renaissance festivals filled the gaps. I ran up and down Anchorage's Delaney Park Strip in the twilight of the midnight sun and hiked McHugh, O'Malley, and Wolverine peaks. I attended spring break-up parties along the Susitna River, where locals wagered on the exact time the river, once frozen solid, would melt enough to break the sheets of ice and begin spring flooding. I enjoyed the Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage and the local beginnings of the Iditarod sled dog race. In summers, I rode my ten-speed bike ten miles to work through the wooded and sometimes wild Russian Jack Springs Park, where I mingled with shooting stars, glacier lilies, fairy slipper orchids, and the occasional wandering moose. On dark winter nights, I soaked up the radiance of the aurora borealis. Nature held me close.

After completing nine months of flight attendant training and travel school, I graduated as valedictorian of my small class of forty—a big deal, considering my past failures. I found a job as a flight attendant for a small commuter airline, flying fishermen back and forth between Anchorage and Dutch Harbor. It was fun and exciting to take off and land on the short runway bordered on one side by a steep drop into the ocean and a steep hill on the other. When the small airline went bankrupt, I took graphic design classes at the community college at night and worked for a travel agency during the day. I could fly standby for free on most airlines, so I flew home to Auburn to see my mom at least twice a month, but the frequent visits did nothing to assuage my guilt for leaving her behind.

Landing a well-paying job managing a travel agency in Deadhorse, where the Prudhoe Bay oil camps were still thriving, I sent men with pockets full of money on dream vacations. In my downtime, I visited a handful of high school friends who also found themselves working in the northern oilfields. When the tundra wasn’t frozen or the skies dark, I spent my time working out in the camp gym, picking Arctic cotton, watching migrating caribou herds, and naming the silky white Arctic foxes and wandering grizzlies scrounging for food in the camps.

I worked for four weeks, then had two weeks off. During my time off, I flew over 3,000 miles back home to see my mom. I was trying to find a balance between surviving and recovering from my past, but nothing had changed. Even though I escaped to a distant and unfamiliar place, I still felt responsible for her.

NEXT: Chapter 7: A Life in Flight

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