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Friendship, Guest Posts, healing, Inspiration, Women

Importance of Female Friendship

October 8, 2015

By Nicole Baxter

I never understood the importance of having female friends until eight months ago. Before then I didn’t think it was that important. In fact, for years I felt that having female friends just set you up for nothing but drama and heartache. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t say this just to say it; I say it out of experience. When I was younger, I had trusted my best friend with a traumatic event only to have her betray that trust and ultimately cause a lot of pain. Looking back even to this day, I cannot decide if it was that betrayal that caused me more pain or the actual event. It was then I made the decision to never allow myself to get close to another girl and hence began the wall I erected. I could be friends with females but to trust them was entirely a different thing. I didn’t realize then when I made that promise to myself, how the importance of having close female friendship really is.

If you were to tell me a year ago that I would once again trust and allow another female friend into my heart, that I would reveal things to her that have occurred but never told anyone (let alone things I would not even admit to myself) I would have told you that you were crazy. I am not even sure how it started other than it happened at a time that I needed it the most. You know the saying: people come into your life for a reason.

At first it was only little things here and there but soon I began to trust her more and more. All of a sudden I wanted to tell her everything even though it was hard and still today hard for me. The more I shared the more I began to see what I had been missing out on the last 20 years. I had closed myself off to others and now with her help, guidance and love I have begun to open my heart up and everyday it is opened a little more. She has encouraged me to go after the dreams I put off, picks me up when I get down on myself (which is a lot lately), always telling me to be to myself, and that I am powerful and enough. Continue Reading…

Addiction, Awe & Wonder, Guest Posts, healing, Inspiration

Enough

October 7, 2015

By Holly Groome

I was four months pregnant and I just left my soon-to-be ex-husband’s house. He told me he wasn’t sure he wanted to reconcile from our separation. I couldn’t drink it away. I couldn’t cut it away. I couldn’t shove my fingers down my throat again. I couldn’t even think about suicide for the second time; not with this life my husband and I created squirming inside of me.

I drove through town, as if someone had injected a grey cloud into my brain. I stopped for a milkshake, simply because. Then I drove on auto-pilot to a tattoo shop. Yes, wretched of me to get a tattoo while pregnant. But the other options to handle my pain weren’t really options.

I sat in the car with a pen and a bank deposit slip, and started numbly scribbling single words to ink into my wrist. About three words in, I had it. ENOUGH.

Twenty minutes later, my 5’1” frame allowed me to softly dangle my feet on the tattoo chair, as I sipped my milkshake like a child, hiding my newly pregnant belly. I sat there as the sweet bliss of the needle dug into my skin. It wasn’t a sick kind of pleasure. It was a relief. These six letters etched into my flesh were telling me what I had to do.

Four years later, I still get asked what the tattoo means. My answer is never the same, for it speaks to me differently, at various shifts in my life.

I smile and say, ENOUGH of the Bullshit. ENOUGH to my bulimia. I am ENOUGH. Sometimes I say all three.

Most understand me. Some almost shudder at my honesty. And some seem completely confused as if I said it in Pig Latin.

I don’t mind the reactions. It’s mine. I own it. It saved my life; literally and more than once. Continue Reading…

beauty, Guest Posts, Inspiration, Life

The Idea of Being Enough, or a Credit to My Kind

October 6, 2015

By Ashley-Elizabeth Best

I am stuck in myself, indulging the constant loop of compare and contrast. Growing up poor and with a single mother of five I struggled to prove I was more, that I could be different than my family and transcend others’ assumptions about me. I’ve always been a self-improver and work tirelessly at my imperfections. There are many incidents from my childhood that have stayed with me and for a long time made me feel I could never be anything than what I was then—a tired and unhappy kid helping to raise her four younger siblings with her struggling mother.

Every Sunday we stuffed a stroller full of dirty laundry in garbage bags to push downtown to the laundry mat. To get to the laundry mat we had to pass a dental office a fellow classmate’s parents owned. Most Sundays he earned his allowance mowing the lawn in front of the practice. I’ll never forget the look on his face every time he saw us five kids and our mother pass by with our stroller, something between pity and a recognition—I know who you are and what you’ll be. So I performed the smart poor girl who has potential, but as one classmate said within my hearing once, she’s either going to get pregnant or go to university.

I measured ‘enough’ in all the wrong ways for years, for decades. I had terrible anxiety, agonized over everything I said to others—did they think what I said was stupid? Was I stupid? Can I post that on Facebook, is the grammar right, is the structure right? Was my performance making me good, making me enough? Mistakes terrified me—someone like me could not afford to make mistakes.

Everything up to my early twenties was done because of fear. When I moved away from my family to attend university, the constant fight for their survival and well being left me empty and lost. I started taking creative writing classes and slowly began to grow a feeling of possibility, that a life of my own was worth fighting for, and that maybe writing could help nurture my growing confidence and independence from my former dependents.

Years later, after school, working, serious medical problems, and constant little tragedies which have befallen my family, I am still poor, but now know I am worthy and that my life is meaningful. I have a poetry book coming out and am deeply at work on a novel. I have a life of my own despite and because of my family. I am enough for myself and my pen. It took me a long time to realize self-worth is something I could earn through self-compassion.

I do not dare to compare myself to others, I no longer look for evidence that I am inferior because of my past. I look forward knowing life is a sequence of feelings, some will last and most won’t. They are all a performance of singular parts acting as a whole in the absence of a frame. I am not a credit to my kind, I am a credit to myself. I am enough. I am.
Ashley-Elizabeth Best is from Cobourg, Canada. Her work has been published in Fjords, CV2, Berfrois, Grist and Ambit Magazine, among other publications. Recently she was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her first collection of poems, Slow States of Collapse is forthcoming with ECW Press. She lives and writes in Kingston.

Join Jen Pastiloff at one of her Girl Power Workshops or On being Human Workshops by clicking here.

Ring in New Years 2016 with Jen Pastiloff at her annual Ojai retreat. It’s magic! It sells out quickly so book early. No yoga experience required. Just be a human being. With a sense of humor. Email barbara@jenniferpastiloff.com with questions or click photo to book. NO yoga experience needed. Just be a human being.

beauty, courage, Guest Posts, healing, Inspiration

This Space

October 5, 2015

By Sarah Miller Freehauf

I once filled this space, this body, this dispensable cavity with food—rows of black and white cookies & TV & bedtime. I once filled this space, this body, this dispensable cavity with pills & space where no food was allowed to touch. I once ran on a treadmill for three miles in this space, this body, this dispensable cavity. I moved 200 pounds of this space, that body. After—a man came to me with a smile and asked how many miles did you just run? A man came to me with disbelief and asked how many miles I just carried that big space, that big body, that big dispensable cavity.

My mother used to say you better watch it. My father used to tap and smack our bellies and call us belly-women and I hated him in that moment though loved him deeply every other. My brother used the toothbrush more often than I did. My brother used to feel the praise of coaches and mother and father on how he was trim and good and how that boy body was all Midwestern man. My brother was worse off than I. He ate salad, he dispensed it, he ate salad, he moved his large baby fat ridden teen body until some man at the gym said something to him in disbelief—something that sounded like you are good.

I kept running and moving that space of mine and eating things of the earth and everyone in disbelief said how many miles did you just run? How many pounds did you manage to rid? Everyone in disbelief including the man at the gym and our father and my brother—skinny and in shape and everyone proud of him—everyone in disbelief asked how many miles and pounds did that space, that body, that dispensable cavity rid?

And then because that space is dispensable, because of shame, because of fat stored in a place that it is supposed to be, because everyone in their disbelief—I cut my chest. I let a man cut my chest, I let a man remove, in his disbelief, eleven pounds of fat. I let everyone say in disbelief—your body looks better, looks good, looks healthy, looks small. And this body still has the anchor scars and the cookie scars and rotted esophagus to prove that all the disbelief was believable.

And now I run and men watch. And now I run and my mother says good. And now I eat things of the earth and others say how.

Now—I run. I move my body, my space, my figure, my form and most days it is still not enough. But my body moves and that is good. The moving is mostly enough.

Sarah Miller Freehauf is the Founding Editor of Teenage Wasteland Review–a literary journal just for teens, Editorial Assistant for Divedapper, a reader for [PANK], former Managing Editor for Lunch Ticket, and recently received her MFA in Poetry from Antioch University, Los Angeles. More importantly, she teaches high school English and Creative Writing in the Midwest. Her most recent creative work can be found in Stone Highway Review & Poemeleon.

Join Jen Pastiloff at one of her Girl Power Workshops or On being Human Workshops by clicking here.

Guest Posts, Inspiration

Enough Is Enough

October 4, 2015

By Elissa Cirignotta

I am enough. We are enough.

I am enough and I always have been. I am whole & I am part of your whole. I am complete. I am perfect.

I have experienced how easy it can be to forget this truth. Time and time again. I forget that I’m connected to the intelligent ebb & flow of life. I forget that my essence is pure. I forget that within me, God can be found.

I write it down, I recite it, I post in the bathroom… I surround myself in this truth and I plunge into this reality. Just as linguists claim it to easier to learn a language when you are fully immersed in the culture, the people, & the day-to-day living experience, so it is also true for your spiritual evolution. You could move to Italy to learn Italian and just as easily move within to learn… well everything.

I am whole. I am complete. I am everything. I am everything I need.

We live our lives in search. In pursuit. In hopes of a better… a better tomorrow, a better job, a better spouse… sometimes better children. And our prayers are for pleas of help and assistance to bring us that in which we truly believe will bring brilliant peace and happiness, if only we are able to obtain it.

Years of awareness and practice going within has taught me a new language with new vocabulary that is full of yesses and thank-yous. Instead of the plea to the great unknown to “take me there”, it has become, “bring me here”.

Bring me HERE. Now. To the stuff that is happening NOW! To the reality I created. To the reality I am creating. Bring me here. Be here now Elissa. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, healing, Inspiration

Why I Make Time To Get Away

October 2, 2015

By Nina Carroll

I realize there are many facets to why I need time to get away. The most important is that my spirit calls me to a sacred safe space to breathe in the many possibilities life offers me. I become my true authentic self when I observe me in an environment living each present moment. The getting away helps me to balance the distractions of my daily hustles and bustles to work, obligations towards family, friends and my struggles with my monetary responsibilities to live a sustainable lifestyle within the everyday mundane stuff. I rather “let go” and surrender these attachments and/or entanglements. I realize they do not always serve me. Instead, I try to practice staying focus on my internal state I discover unravels and empowers an authenticity of my true self.

I recently had the privileged of a two weeks stay at a remote artist community. The best two weeks I had given myself for quite some time. A dream had come true for me. The setting was in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I felt more alive, free and open, being just where I was without any reservations or second thoughts. I was able to contemplate, reflect, meditate with being my true self with everything and everyone life introduced and offered me in this surroundings. I took nature walks, read and wrote poetry by a running creek, soothed my wounds in a natural hot springs that baptized my soul, which soared me further up into the majestic mountains. Until, alas I found myself one night sleeping under a bush thicket with bare necessities not making it back in time to my destination. I realize this became the catalyst catapulting the time needed to reveal what I was to experience during this getaway. My spirit had guided me to a place, where I had to recognize I must live life to its fullest no matter where I need to getaway.

However, I need time to getaway to a place that becomes a sacred space for me. Where my healing can begin to process in this space, so my spirit and I can connect. In this space my spirit helps me to facilitate and make an assessment of my spiritual, mental, emotional and physical state of well- being. I consciously make an effort not to resist my inner needs calling, but to go further, deeper within myself to alleviate whatever is pulling me away from hearing those needs. This getaway becomes the perfect time where I show-up, seek my truth; shine my light. I can relax, unwind, meditate as I take a deep inhale and breathe through my heart, mind and soul; exhale slowly to discern what entangled discords, distortions and defenses I have built around them. I practice releasing these blockages daily through meditation. A vital source that helps me to heal my heart, mind and soul, so I can easily, gently and openly flow with my spirit and life.

beauty, Guest Posts, Inspiration

The Fat Girl’s Benediction

October 1, 2015

**A note from Jen: A version of this essay was originally published on one of our favorite sites, “The Rumpus.” We are thrilled to share it here, with all of you.**

By Tabitha Blankenbiller

On the morning I’d had enough of my body, Twitter was quaking over Colleen McCullough’s obituary. It stated that the wildly accomplished writer was “plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless a woman of wit and warmth.” Who knew someone could be full-figured and brilliant? My friends were livid. I was disgusted. And I was panicked. What if I careened off the road, right now, in these revolting stretchy pants that aren’t fooling a goddamn soul? Let me die painfully, shamefully, without kindness or honor. Don’t let me die fat.

As I roller-coastered through the backroads, I tried to remember the last time I was in a house of God. Not since my last visit to the United Methodist Church of Wilsonville. Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It has been 1,011 days since my last confession.

Two years since my last visit and nothing about the church’s Tuesday night Weight Watchers meeting had changed. The same woman who had taken my information four years ago still stood behind the multi-purpose room’s kitchen counter. On these Tuesday nights, us Eaters Anonymous members shuffled in with our weekly food trackers. We made whatever sacrifices we could: unzipped boots and kicked off sneakers, running to the bathroom to purge ounces from our bladders. The truth flashed onto the scale, evidence of a “good” or “bad” week. The line corralled next to a table selling dinner plates with patterns depicting proper meat-to-starch-to-vegetable ratios and serving spoons to ensure you only scoop half a cup of brown rice (white rice is evil). Miniature scales to make sure you did not accidentally grab four ounces of almonds instead of three. Keep on track. One day at a time. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Inspiration

See Me In September.

September 11, 2015

By Beth Levine.

I’ve seen a few sunrises since the days when I eagerly picked out my first-day-of-school outfit or packed the car to the roof for the ride back to college. So why, when September rolls around, do I still feel that rush of expectation, of the excitement of new possibilities? While most people are grabbing at the last BBQs of summer, I am eagerly anticipating getting back into action. For me, New Year’s isn’t in December–it’s Labor Day.

It is coded into my DNA that September means getting back to school and friends, and picking out new clothes, pencils, erasers and books. (Yes, I know, I am dating myself. These days it would be new iPads and laptops.) The smell of new textbooks and the knowledge that the path of my next nine months lies within them. Would my teachers be nice? Who was in my classes? But most of all, when I was a school kid, September was the time when the slate of the previous year was wiped clean and there was the chance to start all over. Maybe this was the year I wouldn’t feel like a monstrous dork, maybe this was the year (dare I say it out loud?) a boy would notice me and the world would recognize my immense genius. Hey, why not think big? Anything was possible.

Binders, Guest Posts, Inspiration

A History of Listening

August 28, 2015

By Donna Steiner

I had a lover who whispered to me. Not just in public, to say something private, and not just in bed, but often, as though we had two distinct languages, one audible and one intimate. “I made you pizza,” she’d whisper, and it was thrilling, although I don’t think she was trying to thrill me. We were surprised by one another, gliding into relationship, building a new thing of hushed tones, notes and silences, pauses.

Throughout my 20s I lived in big, cheap apartments in central New York. The locals called them flats, and they were laid out like ladders, one room after another, stretching the length of three or four story houses. Typically the living room would be at one end and the kitchen or a bedroom at the other. Living on the top floor was the best in that it was the quietest. The other floors usually meant you could hear upstairs tenants walking, which always sounded like large men wearing heavy boots or women in heels. I thought of myself, then (and now), as exceedingly quiet, but I practiced on occasion one noisy habit. I liked to lie on the floor in the living room and listen to music turned up loud. Those were the days of large stereo speakers. We had two and they were crate sized. I’d lie right between them and put on “Jungleland” by Bruce Springsteen, feeling the base pulse up through my hips and shoulders and thump against my ribs. I’d wait for the 4-minute mark where Clarence Clemons’ saxophone came in with a long, slow, lamenting riff and I’d feel transported, in love with everything. And then I’d play the song again. And again.

Once, perhaps in retaliation, the downstairs neighbors embarked on a course of John Cougar Mellencamp songs, a full album, played on repeat. For weeks. To this day, I have a bit of difficulty listening to Mellencamp, and the names “Jack and Diane” send a little shudder through me. Continue Reading…

Binders, Guest Posts, Inspiration

Mirror, Mirror

August 17, 2015

By Anna Quinn

I want to write about the visceral dissonance my head and gut absorb each day as I scroll through images on social media—the pumpkin martini recipes and beheadings in Iran and cute cat videos and acid thrown in children’s faces and new iPhones and thousands of faceless bodies—women, children and men blown to bits, continents away. I want to write about the strange juxtaposition of these things and try to make meaning of it.

But what I really want to write about is that recent video floating around Facebook—maybe you’ve seen it—the one where women are in a department store, and one by one they look into a mirror, and the mirror begins to talk to them and the mirror asks each woman how they feel about themselves and the women don’t feel so great—one turns her head away, another feels like a dog, another shrugs. Then, the mirror gives the women personalized examples from their friends and families of how they are an inspiration to others, how they are so beautiful on the outside and inside. The mirror says things like, You’re beautiful! You’re enough! And when the mirror says this—You’re beautiful! You’re enough! the women’s eyes well up and a couple of them cry. I watch the way the eyes and mouths and bodies of these women soften and release, and I cry too, because of what it means to be human.

But what I really want to write about is how, in my messy conflicted mind, when I place myself in front of the talking mirror, the mirror shouts, “There’s no fucking way you’re enough!” and I know the mirror doesn’t say this because I’m ugly or worthless or broken. I know the mirror says this because it knows I can’t possibly be enough when fucking courageous as hell journalists are getting their heads chopped off while I fall asleep in a queen-sized bed with Garnett Hill flannel sheets, and one in four children are on food stamps while I’m at Trader Joe’s questioning whether or not the spinach is really organic, the salmon really wild, when mothers and fathers with babies wrapped tight to their chests fight to cross murderous borders, fight to find Safety while I fight to lose that last ten pounds.

But what I really want to write about is how, when I get like this, some of my friends say things like; for god’s sake, Anna, settle the fuck down. You’re so intense. What’s with all the guilt! Stop apologizing for stuff. You are right where you need to be. Focus on all those positive vibrations! Don’t take yourself so seriously. We’re just a speck in the universe! Continue Reading…

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