#NerdsUnite: On a Quest to Find My (Bat)manhood: First Steps.
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Taco. (Funny how the important the word "buddy" is in that sentence.) We've been Facebook buds for sometime now, but he's about to embark on a personal quest and has asked to write about it. I only have one more thing left to say ... HIT IT TACO!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @Redknave
Batman is known for saying “victory is in the preparation,” so about a week before I left for Texas I had to figure out what I wanted to do when I got there. I couldn’t get it out of my head that this was going to be my Batman Quest. Before Bruce Wayne dons cape and cowl to fight crime, he left Gotham to learn what he needed to learn to eventually become The Batman. If I were going on a similar quest, I had to have some kind of End Goal, something that I was building myself into. Bruce built himself into the Batman, and now I just had to figure out what hell I was going to do.
I needed order, I needed a plan. So I made one, and on it were things like “deal with abandonment issues”, “daddy issues”, ”mother issues”, “become better writer,” “deal with touch issues,” and “deal with One Bad Day” Etc. I have this idea, that everyone has just One Bad Day, one moment in their life that everything falls apart for them. For Bruce, it was when his parents died. For me, it was what caused my PTSD at such an early age and still fucking haunts me. My goal at the end of the road is to be able to tell people exactly what happened and to not feel like shit while doing it.
I’m not there yet, not by a long shot. But I am inching forward little by little. One way I dealt with some of the issues is through EFT. Not sure if it’ll work for others, but I’m talking about it just in case it does. So Dawn, the lady I was staying with, realized how sensitive I was to other people touching me. I would flinch if she put her hand on my shoulder to pat me on the back or when she would check to see if I was running a fever. It got to the point where she suggested that before we deal with anything else, weneed to deal with this. I was okay with doing EFT. All I knew of it was that it was a type of energy work, and stands for Emotional Freedom Technique. The one thing I remember clearly from that night is crying. A lot. We began, and she would tap on some parts on my face and I think my chest. I’m basing this off of my memory so the exact places she tapped on elude me, but I’m fairly certain that she tapped somewhere on my face. As she did that she had me repeat after her. She would say “Despite ‘feeling like this’ I love and accept myself completely.” The idea is to take out what you are currently feeling and replace it with Love. For this to work, you have to feel the emotion that you are replacing. I think we originally started out dealing with “fear” but that quickly changed. In the middle of this, old feelings surfaced and I was stuck there crying.
I didn’t want to keep going, I was just stuck there crying asking myself “Why wasn’t I good enough for my mom.” At that moment I couldn’t remember a single time that my mother hugged me or held my hand or did anything motherly towards me. And I just laid there crying. Dawn kept telling me to repeat after her, that I love and accept myself completely. Each time she said this, it became harder and harder to repeat because I just couldn’t believe the words. After a while I forced myself to say those words to myself, and it became easier after awhile. I don’t remember what I was thinking or what happened next. I just remember being able to have someone touch me without me flinching. I may not understand exactly HOW things happened, but things did happen.
And now I don’t feel like I’m not good enough to be held by a loved one. Though, even with that, I’m not completely out of the woods yet. But I’m getting there. All I know right now is where I’m going. So I’m just going to ride this out and see where this takes me.
“Ride the Spiral to the end, you may just go where no one’s been.”