Cassandra "Caz" Stark

Stark and I found a house we love – a rare and beautiful thing for two people churned and pressed by a paradox of choice. We’ve been to so many places in the world! We’ve done so many things! We have so many locations we love, and we rarely have to be in one place at any time. So, let’s go!

Throughout most of our time together, “Let’s go!” has been our motto. Proof! In just a flash of time, almost as a joke, we decided to move to Australia. Knowing we were “on our way out” for over a year, it still became a last-minute decision when we went from Australia to Washington, DC. This is how we roll.

Since then, we’ve talked about moving almost anywhere – another State perhaps, France, Portugal, The Netherlands, Switzerland, or maybe even Patagonia. We’re driven largely by cooler summers and happily dumping our ski-pants-covered asses in a pile of fresh, fluffy snow. The snowy skies are the limit.

On a recent hike, I explained my appreciation for our current home to Stark. We have grown alongside this home. We have torn down our walls and rebuilt them in the same two years that our home renovation tore down its walls, exploded at the seams, sprung a few leaks, required pivots, went on backorder, and was put together again with pristine beauty. The process of simplifying is, coincidentally… a very complicated one.

We didn’t demolish our personal walls and rebuild on purpose. It just sort of happened. When the mind and body align, it’s go time! You don’t really get much say in the matter when your life is like, “Hey! Your trauma is showing.” By the time you’re like, “Huh? What? Where?” you’re on a slippery slope to flashback land, and all you can do is find the plans to renovate and rebuild. Yup. Happened.

Some relationships deteriorate and fight over prolonged struggles such as the “neverending renovation” – of home, let alone self. Yet, we grew. Through all of this, we became stronger. As the space, we lived in grew tighter, we began to wildly expand who we were, how we were, and how we communicated with each other.

I mean, we were rendered “homeless” during a pandemic no one thought would go so long – forced to move hotels one after another as they shut down and stopped servicing any guests. We lived an accidental Kubrick moment on more than one occasion as we escorted ourselves quietly from completely abandoned hotels in the middle of once bustling cities for no reason other than we were the only people staying there with a staff of one trying desperately to accommodate us. Here’s Johnny!

We’ve picked up sheets from the front desk as staff shook in fear that we would exchange absolute death if our fingers grazed, and we’ve had hotel managers give us the keys to the hotel market simply saying, “Serve yourself.” It’s been a weird number of years (for everyone).

So, I love this place we call home. Robbed of a TV-level renovation unveiling, it only feels like home in hindsight – in that way, you can laugh out loud over moving back in before we had shower doors or toilets forcing us to machine-gun press the elevator button early in the morning to sneak onto the building’s roof bathroom to brush our teeth or take a piss before anyone saw us in our skimpies. (I say “us,” but that was definitely just me).

My point is… after so many years of looking, dreaming, and calling “home” a temporary state and having any other sense of home be even more temporary (we lived in at least six different places in DC alone), the idea of a new home has come blaring in as both a threat and a relief!

I’ve had to BeMo all about it.

This isn’t the first time we’ve found a home I liked. This isn’t even the 25th time we’ve gone out with a realtor. Yet, every time I fall apart and start stacking threats like dirtbags ’round hurricane fortresses. “It’s fine. It isn’t my home anyway. It’s your home. I don’t even have to live there. This is never going to happen. I don’t know why we are doing this. This is a waste of everyone’s time. Our realtor is going to hate us. We can’t commit to anything, including ourselves!” This is where my sassy “You” note would be all like, “Shut your mouth!” Because I know that is some serious BS (belief system) at play. I am so happy I can quickly turn back and laugh at myself because holy FUNCKing hell, that is a glitter bomb of emotional truth with so many goodies in it to learn from.

I knew my automatic behavior of stacking walls and barfing emotional threats was an anxious reaction to feeling unsafe. That seemed devilishly obvious. But it is important to me to ask myself why I constantly drown in such BS (belief systems) for no greater reason than I LOVE Stark, and I do not want him to ever believe otherwise because I went off the emotional railroad and crashed.

Understanding what learned behaviors are triggered as fight-for-survival instincts helps me significantly reduce throwing verbal knives at the people I love. Instead, I have the insight to make super awesome self-soothing ninja stars and flash them at the people I want to go away rather than project that onto innocent people to manifest a self-fulfilling prophecy of abandonment issues. (Ya, that’s a lot in one sentence. I unpacked it. You can, too.).

So, I did the work. I busted out my 5 Whys practice from the BeMo Extra part of my BeMo Pocket Guide, and I went to town to figure out why I react so poorly every time we talk about moving (even when we agree on it).

It looked something like this.

5 Whys

Subject: Why do I attack all the wrong people when I find myself in a hopeful situation such as house shopping?

Why? I feel like I have no sense of control over whether or not the situation moves forward, even if Stark tells me I am included in the decision-making process.

Why? I’m not buying the house alone. I would have to hustle to cover half of it, and if I don’t, it isn’t mine to share or decide on.

Why? If I can’t earn it, I am indebted to a scary litiny of potential “show me you deserve this” situations that I am sure I don’t want to be a part of.

Why? PTSD. This is a previous, emotional truth that is waving a red flag bleached to come across as a peace flag, and my mind is not allowing me to bleach out my emotional truth.

Why? I’ve been here before. One summer, I moved 18 times in 3 months. I’ve been chased out of homes because of relationships that fell apart. I’ve had to leave so many times because where I was staying was unsafe for me. I’ve been threatened. I’ve been asked for money I didn’t have in order to stay. I’ve been accused of the craziest things. I’ve been homeless for years. I’ve been told I have no home to go to and felt that to be an absolute, real thing far too many times. I’ve been on the run. I’ve been in hiding. For years, sleeping in my car, able to drive away at any moment, felt safer than stepping foot through dozens of doors because of others’ perceptions of how I had to “earn my keep” – “family,” “friends,” and otherwise.

Ok. So, what now?

I understand where I am coming from. I can stop taking this out on Stark because, at that moment, I am unwilling to recognize how much fear hope gives me. Instead, I recognize that this is how I feel, and this is why. I know automatic coping mechanisms (knee-jerk survival reactions) are based on fear. Stark is not the lion. To me, hope is the lion. The idea of happiness and perfection is a lion. But I know perfection isn’t really a thing, so I can already let that go. I know that happiness exists in wanting what you already have, and I absolutely love where I already am in my life. I know I am capable of using my words to say out loud, “I am feeling a lot of fear right now because this is a very exciting situation, and I want this to turn out for us so badly, but I also know that we are going to be ok no matter what happens. I just need you to hold my hand and remind me that there’s nothing to be afraid of. I am ok. We are ok. This is not me losing a home. This is not you trying to dupe me into thinking I have a place to stay just to take it out from under my feet. We’ve got this.”

The Results

To be honest, the information I dug through was obvious (to me) and dangerously close to more truth. I know there’s more to it. I don’t have the full picture yet. I don’t know if I want the megapixel detail yet. That is ok. It will come to me when it is meant to.

For now, I know that the idea of losing a home, changing homes, being kicked out of homes, having a home taken out from under me and more are all PTSD triggers. This has all happened to me.

What I need is a sense of stability. I need to know what we’re thinking here. I need an open conversation about it because it is really hard to live every day in a place marked with the curse of “temporary” without any idea of when or where we’d be moving on. I just can’t. How does one appreciate the moment if it feels constantly fleeting? I need to know where I can settle, even if it isn’t forever. I just need to settle long enough to trust space.

It gets even more interesting.

I’m starting to think the healing process goes through five stages of coping behaviors, just like grief goes through five stages. I certainly know the more you dig down into emotional truth, the more you dig yourself out of the hole of your beliefs. I don’t know exactly the physics behind that, but I do know all that flung dirt turns into the hill you eventually use to walk out of dark holes.

Even after the 5 Whys, my subconscious decided to dig into that. It went on its own journey. By that, I mean within 24 hours, I started to repress what I knew about this new house we both loved. To be fair, while we’ve both liked houses, the big deal is that this is the first time we’ve both been on board. Yet I am falling asleep at night thinking, “What the crap? What was I thinking? I think this house only has three bathrooms for five bedrooms, and none are in a hallway. It doesn’t even have a coat closet. It’s going to look so junky and be unusable. This is a complete waste of money.” I was convinced I was right. So, I let it go. Silently. I was completely fine with letting go of the house. I felt like I had dodged a bullet!

The next morning, remembering this lucid conversation with myself, I decided to check my work. That self-checking “You” note went something like, What? Girl! That is not even true. Nothing you are saying or “remembering” is actually true.

Interesting.

I read a quote recently that I really like. It said something like, “If you aren’t willing to change the future, you will rewrite the past.”

Exactly.

My psychology-obsessed brain thought this was really fascinating.

So often, people rewrite history in order to make something all good or all bad. Why? This has a lot to do with an insecure attachment style. If you’ve never properly emotionally weened yourself from your parents (something that is their job to provide for you, not necessarily your job to figure out on your own unless you remain in complete neglect and have to figure it all out with renurturing skills at a later date, so you stop acting like a 3-year-old at the age of 40 – I’m l looking at myself here), you’re stuck in a preoperative state – meaning that your brain puts you in a childlike place with your parents and other authority figures. This place means that you see things in black and white. As a child, Mom or Dad can’t be bad, so they must be good. Children lack the skills to create a cohesive story or see the big picture that someone is neither all good nor all bad. The cohesiveness begins somewhere around the statement that people are complicated. And…most importantly… it isn’t about you. Children have no understanding outside of, “Mom isn’t bad… I feel bad… so I must be bad.” In other words, children think it is about them.

Long story short, if you find yourself in a situation with another person or an object where you are repressing what you know or regressing to acting childlike in your understanding that something you love so much is now “the worst thing that has ever happened to you,” you can be sure there’s work to be done there.

It is hard to explain to people how this works in adult relationships – how they are reframing entire truths about someone to be “all good” because they’re standing at their funeral or “all bad” because they broke up or divorced. Relationships are touchy-feely, and so is talking about them or calling someone out on preoperative, all-or-nothing thinking. The fact is, it isn’t helpful to tell someone that’s what they are doing. People have to travel their own path in their own time. But for me, having traveled so many paths all over the place round and round, back and forth, and learned so much about all that BS (belief systems) and behavioral patterns, it really tickled me to think that this object was churning up so many feels inside of me. It’s a house! Sure, it may be the best house ever and feel like the one. So, why am I repressing what I know about it? Even after I proved myself wrong and dealt with the psychological regression of having hope for something I didn’t earn or deserve? Why did I then move on to try to discover what I have to hate about it?

Learned behavior.

This was just another way of trying to protect me. I stopped throwing verbal knives. Now I was moving on from hurricane sandbagging to steel structures. Let’s stack them high. Let’s keep all the complicated feelings out.

At the end of the day, despite this rollercoaster of emotions around whether or not we’ll do the damn thing, none of that really matters. What matters is that I have been able to unearth some more automatic behaviors and insecurities that I get to work on.

I know I don’t have to find anything wrong with the house to justify a lower offer. I know I don’t have to find anything wrong with the house in order to brace myself for dealing with the disappointment of having it potentially slip through our fingers. I also know I don’t have to attack Stark when I feel an odd combination of excitement and fear over a much-desired change because we’re on this journey together. I really want him to, ya know… move in with me and not be like, “You crazy,” and walk away.

Perhaps none of this sounds like amazing progress to you, but my truth is: it is. We saw this house 48 hours ago. It was love at first sight. Like all unrequited love, this is the rollercoaster I’ve been on. The fact that I can instantly walk away from black-and-white thinking and work through how I am feeling in real-time without going atomic is something I am so proud of myself for being able to do.

As for now, I’ll let you know how it goes. Maybe we’ll get it. Maybe we won’t even try. Who knows. And that’s ok. I dealt with that, too, when I moved on to an Imagined Future post in my BeMo.

So you know what I know? The future is fantastic! No matter what…