Just Old Gray Tales

Our attachment with our parents and caregivers are the first protoypes for our relational narratives. They inform gender expression, our ability to self-regulate, self-esteem, habits, values, interests, etc. That's a lot of fucking pressure! After working within the child welfare system for over 5 years now, I've seen how hard parents work to be good enough parents. No doubt, there's a bell curve, there are definitely shitty, toxic parents out there - a lot of them! However, I truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that people are always doing the best that they can.  Parenting is fucking hard, and children are not as resilient as we tell ourselves (Bruce Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog ), which means generations of people in the modern age make do with what they've got. Even when people are trying their best, many don't have the tools to be good enough parents, so 40% of children report at least one type of childhood trauma. These traumas can affect not only

The people closest to me know that I absolutely pour into my relationships and I keep the health of those relationships as my top priority. Those same people would also tell you that my relationships have been, and continue to be, a strange adventure. I feel like I was predisposed to be an amiable and meek person, and this is the narrative of how I'm learning to speak up for my wants and needs. Spoiler alert: apparently that's a key ingredient of a healthy relationship. As a 16 year old, on June 6, 2007, I wrote this in a journal,  "I think I'm one of those people that can get by with a little love given to them, but in turn tries to hand out so much more than they've received. I'm not saying I haven't been loved, because I have. But I've realized...I've got problems that, if I don't take care of them now, will become major problems for me when I'm an adult."  Somehow, I intuited that my ability to give more than I receive would be a do

A few months ago, my best friend gifted me an experience for my birthday; she learned awhile ago that these are much more meaningful to me than gifts. She and I are very different people and I knew the whole thing was uncomfortable for her, which made her efforts mean even more. As we were sitting atop the lookout point at Coronado Heights , I found myself in a state of amused wonderment at just how stark our differences are. Seeing the expansive prairie below, the brain train started to run on the track of what I had read in Sapiens  about mankind before we became a settled, agrarian species. I shared my musings with Alissa. A tribe could grow up to 250 individuals before a smaller group inevitably formed and split off, which means everybody knew everybody in their immediate vicinity pretty intimately. In that moment, I sincerely wished I could go back to that era and experience what it meant to live life with no thought other than fulfilling your part of or contribution to the commun

Human Design (HD) is a garbage pile of trash that could arguably tell you more about yourself than a natal chart ever could. No, it's wonderful, I'm just mad that it told me more about myself than I've learned in 29 years. If you haven’t done a natal chart, I’d highly recommend starting there, as HD was overwhelming when I first looked at it, and I even had a guide! HD uses the same basic biographical information as natal charts, but then takes this genetic information into the body and chakras with a different vein of research. You can get your free chart here ; you'll need your exact time, date, and place of birth. It's gonna look something like this.  My beautiful, intelligent, expanse of a human being partner and I were doing a little excavation of meaning from our charts by skipping around in  Human Design  by Lynda Bunnell and Ra Uru Hu. Fun fact, Wendell and I are both Generators. 💗 The major questions that came out of my exploration of charts with my beaut