Experience

When Mike and I split up, more than three years ago now, I left our relationship with the belief that everything I had been doing for my entire life wasn’t working.  I knew that because my marriage had failed, I needed to find a new approach to life.   And, as most women who haven’t known the difference between codependence and independence, I turned my new “freedom” into rebellion.  I went to bars.  I went home with strange men.   I got a tattoo.  My first, and only, tattoo ever.  I was a rebel.  Everything I did was extreme.  Especially the tattoo.  I didn’t just get a tribal arm band.  Not a butterfly on my shoulder.  It’s not a cute little sea creature frolicking on my ankle.  NOPE.  I got an angel.  A HUGE ANGEL.  Right in the middle of my back.  Now, granted, it may be obnoxious in size, but in my defense it was strategically located in a place that VERY few people will ever see it.  Barring a mid-life application for a pole at a strip joint, it will never effect my employment opportunities (Don’t worry folks, that will never happen.  And not just because of the tattoo.)  It will never receive questioning stares from strangers.  It’s very personal.  But it’s there.  I know it’s there.  And it does have meaning. 

As I was in a crisis of faith at the end of my 12 year marriage, I pillaged the internet for something to believe in.  I’ve never been a God or Religion girl.  I’ve never been the girl who forfeited all to a higher power.  I didn’t need too.  My spirituality has always been strong.  My faith in our connectedness has never wavered.  It just so happened, that at the time I felt most alone in the world, I really needed a spiritual entity to identify with.  Naturally, like all people in the midst of spiritual crisis, I Googled it.  Somehow, I found myself perusing an alphabetical listing of angels, kind of a Yellow Book for the faithfully impaired.  Before that night, I had never really thought too much of angels.  I mostly had considered them God’s bitches.  I likened it corporate bureaucracy:  God gets all the credit and capital, meanwhile his minions are taking care of everything for him, at the expense of their bank accounts and their souls. Essentially, I figured that angels put in all the hours, yet reaped no benefit from their efforts.  Not to mention, angels are NOT psychologically sound.  It’s just a fact.  They’ve got the world’s demons to contend with.  There is absolutely no way anyone could be stable under that sort of pressure.  At that time, I really had no place for angels, or their boss, for that matter, in my life. 

But that night, as I sat, soaking in too many Grey Goose/cranberries to count, absorbed in 12 years of failure and a resounding desperation to cling to something I could understand, I turned to the angels to help me make sense out of everything that was happening in my life.  It was that night, that I met the angel Barchiel.  Barchiel, the internet told me, is the angel of compassion.  Barchiel was tasked with teaching mortals the beauty of the human experience.  As I read Barchiel’s bio, I had an ah-fucking-ha moment.  I thought to myself:  “THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I NEED!!!!” I did need that.  I needed a path to compassion.  I needed to understand the beauty of the human experience.  I needed what that guy had to teach.  I was really excited about Barchiel.  This was going to be my salvation.  I just knew it. 

Convinced that I’d found a way to save my soul, I drank a bottle of $6 wine, found a generic angel image that I had printed off the internet, and walked over to my neighbor, who was inking people in her garage.  I said “this is it.  I’ll give you $100.”  She looked at it and looked at me and said “I don’t have a chair to do this in.  Can you grab one from your dining room?”  Done. 

As I sat naked, from the waist up, sitting backwards in a pub chair, my soul sister next to me, I felt every pull, every tug of that needle.  I don’t like needles.  That’s the reason I had gone more than 30 years without ever a desire to sit in an artist’s chair.  That, and until that day, there was no story that I felt I needed to be told on my body.  In that minute though, I was alone with my thoughts, with my pain.  I delved really deeply into the idea of Barchiel’s purpose:  The beauty of the human experience. 

With a needle in my back, my germanic, scandio-norwigian skin under assault, the physical pain had nothing on my mental anguish.  At the same time, though, I felt a reprieve from the pain.  I sat silently, as the ink crossed my spine.  I was more aware, in that minute, than I had ever been before.  While I was quiet, I began to sob.  The artist stopped.  She asked me if I hurt.  I said “Yes.  Yes.  I hurt so bad.  But it’s not because of you and your needle.”  I hurt because of the last 12 years.  I hurt for the last 31 years.  I hurt because I never knew how to express emotional pain.  So, finally, when the physical pain manifested itself, I was forced to acknowledge it.  And, at the same time, I became aware of the beauty of the human experience. 

The human experience isn’t about laughs and hugs and butterflies.  The beauty of the experience isn’t about everything that is beautiful.  We would have no concept of laughter and love if we never knew their antithesis.  I didn’t know that until that night, when I revealed more of myself, both physically and emotionally, than I ever had before.  Before Barchiel, I didn’t understand that we need to reveal ourselves to others before WE can understand who we ARE.  Sometimes, being naked and vulnerable is the only way to understand that pain is part of the beauty. 

-Inner Peas