Wendy Blacke

emotional wayfarer

Category: Journal

Current ramblings, thoughts, plans.

  • Refilling the Shell

    a life update

    Dear Reader, life changes fast, and I’m here with an update. My website has been sitting for a while unused. I’ve been reflecting on why that is, and I think I’ve lost touch with the purpose of this space. Some of that is because I started posting somewhat-polished pieces on my Substack, and even started a podcast called THOUGHTSCRAPES on there. I’ve made 5 episodes so far and I’m really enjoying the process of creating them, but the hustle and bustle of summer and my kiddo home from school means I get to spend a lot more time with family doing fun summer things, so my priorities are settled into experiences right now rather than creativity.

    And boy has it been hot! If you’re reading this and not drenched in sweat, what is your secret? I’ve had to cut back on my mental health walks simply because I may perish in this heat. We went to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum on the weekend to say our annual hello to Scotty the T Rex and see the new owl exhibit, and even inside that building, which I’m sure is temperature controlled to protect the artifacts and displays, was almost unpleasant in its mugginess.

    It’s also been quite a rainy summer so far. I love rain and I’m grateful my house has held up its integrity with no leaks. Other parts of my city haven’t been so lucky. The cool thing about the added moisture though, is that there have been a lot of mushrooms popping up everywhere. A sign of a healthy ecosystem, so I’m always happy to find them in my yard. It’s also made me curious to learn more about mycology and mushroom foraging. I started following this really awesome woman named Alexis Nikole who goes by @blackforager on Instagram, and her entire energy around foraging is so infectious. She’s a well of amazing information and I’ve been slurping it all up, poring over books on local plant life, and can’t wait to start recognizing things in the wild.

    Possibly my biggest news is that Taylor and I are engaged. He surprised me by getting down on one knee on a video chat all the way from where he lives in Texas. He had mailed me a ring and the moment was so perfect and beautiful. I’ve never felt so seen and accepted by someone, so the yes burst out with an enthusiasm I didn’t know I was capable of considering marriage is something I’ve actively avoided in the past. Turns out I wasn’t anti-marriage, I just hadn’t found someone who loved me the way I needed to be loved to feel safe.

    As a natural reaction to getting engaged, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’d even want from a wedding. I’ve decided the most important things to me (in order) are:

    1. Darwin is there
    2. I make my own dress
    3. It’s in a forest or garden

    Other than that I really don’t mind the details. I’m just so happy to love and to be loved by someone who I can share a mutual vulnerability with, and who never tries to dull my sparkle.

    I’ve picked up the knitting needles again. Strange timing, given the heat, I know, but from my air conditioned basement TV room, the seasons don’t seem to matter. I’m just making a simple dishcloth right now, or rather, finishing one I started probably 6 months ago or so, knit one corner of, and then abandoned in my knitting bag. I am going to need more practice with lace, so once this is done, I’m moving on to a nice summer top with a lace panel on the body and sleeves. I’ll make it out of this lovely dark teal cotton/linen blend yarn I’ve had in my stash for a few years.

    I started a new book a few days ago called Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Mexican-American woman who is also a Jungian psychoanalyst. I really enjoy Carl Jung’s work, and this book seems to be a wonderful mix of Jungian concepts through a feminist lens focused on empowerment and return to form. Getting in touch with our inner wild feminine, so often suppressed in patriarchal society.

    Speaking personally, most of the men I’ve known in my life, and plenty of women too, have tried to control, hurt, suppress, or shame me into a box. I’ve lived feeling like I need to shrink to fit, and I’m sorry to say that I did. I lost parts of myself along the way. I’d bend and twist and cut off the pieces that weren’t acceptable until what was left was someone I didn’t recognize. I was someone who existed trying to be loved and learning I couldn’t be without adding or subtracting, hiding and abiding. I’m learning to love myself exactly as I am, and I’m refilling the shell I became.

    Maybe the new purpose of this space will be documenting the joy I’m rediscovering in life; the things I’m learning on my path back to the me I was before the world told me that wasn’t acceptable. I’m building back my creativity, my curiosity, and my connection with nature and my personal spirituality. I’m in the middle of healing and it’s a beautiful place to be and grow.

  • I Lied About My Life

    I Lied About My Life

    I never had an easy time making friends. If you read my last post, “23 Meadow Way” you know that we moved around a lot, often urgently without getting to say goodbye to any friends I did have. When I got to a new school I was the weird kid, the quiet kid, the poor kid in decades-old hand-me-downs who rarely looked up from the floor or desk.

    When I did make friends they never stuck around for long, and in the early days that real life unfriending usually followed me sharing something about my life that highlighted how damaged I was and bummed people out. Over time I learned that the more people knew about my life, the more likely they were to leave it. Certain parts of my story made classmates uncomfortable, and certain parts of my life made their parents hesitant to invite me for sleepovers or allow their kids to come over to my house. It felt like they thought my trauma would rub off on them, like it was contagious.

    When the pattern kept repeating itself I started building defenses against it. I remember telling people I didn’t have a father at all, that I was a test-tube baby. I would make up stories about my past that had no basis in reality, but I thought these narratives might make me easier to be around. I told people my dad died, or that my mom went to a sperm bank in order to have me. I tried to frame myself in a way that was less sad, more easily digestible, more wholesome. It would work for a little while, but the stink of child abuse comes from beneath the skin of our outward mask, where it festers in the dark. Sooner or later, at every stage of my life, everyone left.

    There were friends I’d have for a year or two, maybe more. As I got older, people were more accepting, but I was never anybody’s best friend. When you move around so much, you meet a lot of people who already have best friends from kindergarten. I always wanted that. I never wanted a big friend group, just one best friend or a few close friends to have a deep connection with. I’ve had plenty of coworkers I get along with. I’ve had friends as an adult, but there comes a point where suddenly they don’t have time for my anymore. Plans get cancelled over and over until they never get rescheduled. Messages slow and then grind to a halt. Everyone carries on with their separate lives and I’ve never found a way to reverse that so I let them drift. Deep down I know I can’t really blame them.

    I haven’t lied about my life in many years now. I have embraced my history and who I am. I’ve written a lot about it, and some of that has helped people. I wear my mind on my sleeve, and I’m still not great at making friends. Most of the people I consider friends these days I’ve met through a shared love of books with my Bookstagram account, but even then people tend to drift away after a while and it’s hard not to think it’s because there’s just something about me so deeply broken that I can’t see but others can, that makes me difficult to be around. I feel very grateful to say that I do feel like I finally have a best friend. Taylor, if you’re reading this, thank you for being a real one and sticking around even through all my darkness. It’s a pleasure to do the same for you. 🖤

  • Smoke Signals of Thought – Self Sabotage

    Smoke Signals of Thought – Self Sabotage

    For as long as I can remember, creative pursuits have been important to my wellbeing. As a small, terrified child, drawing or writing or really making anything with my hands was an escape from the anger and abuse that surrounded me. As a teenager, visual art took on an essential role – I drew and painted with reckless abandon as a way of working through a lot of deeply laid anger, resentment, and fear. As a young adult, art and writing continued and I learned to hate myself less. I picked up other creative hobbies like knitting and sewing. I even spent a few years making a very comfortable living freelancing as an artist, writer, and knitwear designer.

    And then I stopped.

    As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed a cycle. As soon as I start to see some success with any creative pursuit, my instinct is to pull back, or to quit completely. It’s like I want the success but at the same time I’m afraid.

    • I have been successful with art, with companies sending me free art supplies, and barely being able to keep up with commission orders.
    • I’ve been successful with writing, making a living writing ghost-writing articles, running a successful blog with my personal writing and even had reviews published in art magazines.
    • I’ve been successful in knitting, having many knitting patterns I designed and wrote published in calendars, magazines, and a book of patterns.

    All of these things I quit once I started to see the success I did. But, what’s interesting is professionally, in my “day job”, my “career”, I’ve found a lot of success and it doesn’t make me uncomfortable. Why?

    I’ve pondered and looked internally searching for answers. I become so frustrated with myself when I feel that deep, essential part of me pulling away. I want to reach inside and shake myself, to snap myself out of that fog of self sabotage and stay the course when it’s going well.

    Part of it is impostor syndrome, I’m sure. I’ve never felt quite good enough. When someone compliments something I’ve made, my first thought is that they’ve made a mistake. My first inclination is to play it off, or make an excuse, or insult my own work. I’ve gotten better over the years at just saying “thank you!” and taking the damn compliment, but I still feel all these things inside. Maybe I always will.

    I’ve wondered why I seem to have this fear of success for my creative pursuits, but not my career pursuits and I think it comes down to creative pursuits being so much closer to me. Sharing a painting feels like opening my heart a little and pouring out a little blood onto everyone who looks at it. When I share something I’ve written, it’s like opening a little window into my psyche and inviting people inside. That is scary as hell. What if I paint out my soul, what if I lay bare in my writing and it’s rejected? Perhaps pulling back so I never know is safer. Perhaps hiding it all behind a wall again keeps me whole and unknown. Maybe that’s why I’m more comfortable sharing paintings I’ve done of characters and celebrities and less comfortable sharing the art where I’m really saying something.

    I want to feel brave. I want to shrug off mistakes. I want a thicker skin.

    Hell, reading back through this post, I’m scared to even hit publish.

    Perhaps I need to learn to let go and reclaim the unapologetic creating with reckless abandon of my youth and who gives a shit about the rest.

  • After All This Time

    After All This Time

    I get impatient with myself. I’ve had over 30 years to put myself back together again, yet here I am still finding pieces.

    As far as I’ve come, the journey seems endless. I’ll be breathing normally again, accepting love again, feeling strong again, and in one moment I’m back there in that old white house, a scared little kid wishing her father would stop screaming, stop hitting, stop threatening, stop hurting, stop touching me there.

    I must not be worth much, I tell myself. Right? Girls who are worth the space they take up don’t get treated like that. For someone to treat me like that at 3 years old, at 5 years old, I must be defective right? There must be something fundamentally wrong with me. I’m not worthy of love, of being treated with kindness. I turn the darkness into a joke.

    And I know. I know these things aren’t true with my head, but my heart still believes it deep down. I’ve made a life out of saying it out loud hoping to take away its power over me. I’ve spent dreamless nights and waking nightmares carrying it all, this cathedral of blistered memories in a tattered box, because it’s too heavy to ask someone else to carry.

    I live surrounded with people who care about me but I keep wondering when they’ll realize their mistake. I avoid talking about what happened because I don’t like the looks people get on their faces. I don’t want to taint the present with the past. It feels like I’m always hiding a side of me. Like I’m playing the part of the happy ending, lonely and hoping nobody notices I’m wrong for the role.

    I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. My life is better than I ever thought it could be. And yet still, after all this time, I struggle to feel like I’m fully part of it.

  • Prelude to September

    Prelude to September

    I used to have a blog that I posted to daily for several years. This blog was an outlet for me to explore a grief that I recently realized is largely unknown to the people in my life today. While I was actively navigating the early stages of this grief, it felt the like the people around me were right there with me, reading and crying along by my side. Now, almost 12 years later, as my life has moved and changed, as it tends to do, the people who were around me back then have largely vanished and been replaced with different people. But the grief is still there.

    I’ve been writing a lot over the last year. Initially I thought this writing would become a book, and some of it will. Eventually. But I find my writing to be opening up a lot of doors back to the grief I experienced 12 years ago. I will be posting a lot of the writings about that moment in my life in a month long event here on my blog that I’m calling Poems for September. Before I do that, it makes sense to share a bit about why September is so difficult for me.

    In 2003 I met Dave. We worked together in a call center and became friends. He was creative, funny, interesting, warm, and we got along swimmingly on the same team working 3:30 pm to midnight fielding calls from cell phone customers. A few years passed and we eventually both found other jobs but kept in touch through social media. In 2010 I was leaving a toxic relationship when we started talking more frequently. He asked to meet up for coffee to catch up and I agreed. He picked me up in his orange VW Beetle convertible and we went to a little Ethiopian coffee shop. We talked for hours about life since the call center and then he drove me home. I’m a big hugger, so I went to give him a hug before I got out of the car. I can’t describe it other than to say there was something different about that hug. It was like a quiet desperation hid beneath the surface and I think I fell in love with him in that moment.

    We started texting constantly while he went on a trip to California with a friend, and by the time he got back, he asked me to move in with him. I did. Up until that point in my life nobody had ever been so honest, so genuine, so comfortable to be around. Nobody had ever encouraged me artistically the way he did. Nobody had ever made me feel so free. I felt safe and things moved fast. I got pregnant 3 months after I moved in with him.

    But, it wasn’t all rainbows. These things never are. Dave was sick. He’d been having seizures in relation to his diabetes. They were starting to affect him cognitively. I was by his side at every doctor’s appointment where they called him a liar because their tests were coming back normal. Medications were started and stopped, diets were started and stopped, varying levels of insulin were tried to avoid his blood sugars going too low, which was the suspected reason for the seizures.

    My tummy grew and we talked about being parents. We talked about marriage. We adopted a dog. We went on a trip to California together. He was on a waiting list to see a specialist for the seizures. I gave birth to our son on August 16, 2011. We were so happy.

    Then, on September 10, 2011, I woke up from a nap with the baby to find Dave’s on our couch. He was too still. He’d fallen asleep, had a seizure, and suffocated in the leather. I touched his shoulder, pulled him. He was gone. No, no, no.

    I remember screaming his name. I remember calling 911 with 1 hand while holding our son, breastfeeding with the other. I remember hoping the EMTs could revive Dave somehow. I remember not wanting to hang up with the 911 operator because I didn’t want to be alone with these feelings. I remember EMTs and police arriving. I remember asking them if they could save him, and the look on their faces when they told me they couldn’t. I remember the coroner showing up and asking questions. I remember the policemen going to pick up my mom to bring her. All the while holding our baby to my chest. I remember a man dressed in black saying “we’re ok to take the body now” and hating him in that moment: his name is Dave. I remember promising Dave’s lifeless body that I would be the best mom I could and that I’d always love him and remember him. I remember not sleeping for 3 days because I worried that our son would die if I did, so I watched his chest rise and fall while the tears soaked my pillow.

    The day Dave died was the worst day of my life. We had precious little time together, and even littler time as a family. On September 10th it will be 12 years since he passed and it hasn’t gotten easier. The grief has never gotten smaller. I’ve just grown around it, much like a tree will grow around an object that isn’t supposed to be there. I still think about and miss him every single day of my life. What we had and what we created was so beautiful and I will carry it with me forever. Our son is empathetic, kind, funny, and a beautiful soul like his father was. If you’re reading this, I hope you enjoy the collection of writing that will come throughout September. If you have similar wounds, I hope you can find some healing here.