Blog - Hillary L McBride

Loving myself through pain

In August of 2019, after changing into hospital gear to get ready for my MRI, I looked at and placed my hands on every part of myself, lingering longer in places with pain. Finally I met my own gaze in the mirror and out loud I said to my physicality, my very self : “well done. You have worked so hard. You have been in so much pain, so vocal about where it hurts, thank you for speaking up. I’m listening. And the doctors are listening too. Thank you for working so hard to protect me after such awful and scary things happened to you”. There was an older man in the stall next to me struggling to put his hospital gear on and he chuckled at my profession of compassion. I smiled wondering what it was like for him to hear all that. I pulled the curtain back and there was a nurse standing motion-less with tears streaming down her face. She said that in 30 years of working in imaging at the hospital she has never heard anyone speak out loud kind things about themselves/their body. We wondered together how much more difficult it is to heal when we are also contributing to our own pain.

I was rear ended by a distracted driver on the highway in December 2018, and in February 2019 hit head on by a truck that lost control in the snow. Somehow I lived. I refuse to let my inner dialogue contribute to the injuries that happened to me. I refuse to shame, control, punish, or ignore my body for telling the truth about what happened in these very scary moments of my life that linger on into the present. My body is allowed to tell the truth for as long as she needs, and I will not stop her. We will be together the whole time, and with my words I will remind her that even though she thought she would die then, we are safe now.

You are good- A meditation

You are good

You have always been good

Right from the beginning

I’m sorry that anyone told you otherwise

This breath

This head,

These hands

This love

Those feet

That smile

Your ears

This heart

This breath

Good, all good. So, so, so good.

You are loved

You are so loved

You are lovable

You have been working so hard

I don’t have to know how, to know that it’s true

You are precious

You are not a mistake, you are so on purpose

You are not broken

You never were

I’m sorry that you might have thought that

I’m sorry anyone might have made you think that

You are enough

You are so so enough

You do not have to earn your enough-ness

You do not have to grovel for value, for love, for goodness

You already have it

You already are it

You are loved

You are love

Prayer

Be close to me
This was the song the instrument of my being has played
Please, dear God, be close to me
Never really knowing if that was happening
How would I know
What does that mean? How would it feel?

Be close to me
Let me feel you here
I asked – I asked so many times
Tumbling from my lips, as easy as breath
I begged you, and so stuck on begging I felt alone
All I knew was some idea of a space I was asking you to fill
Did you not want to be close to me?
Did you not want to pour into the space in my mind I had made for you?

And with resignation my lips grew quiet.
Space, the ache of the absence
My prayer, dried up
Silence

“I have always been closed to you” – you said
Or maybe was it me that said that?
I’m confused: whose voice was that?
Have you been there, here, all along?
Did I miss you, all along?
Was it you, within me, that cried out, asking for us to be together, to be in a kind of loving dance?
I’m letting my mind wake up to the knowingness that the dance has been happening all a long
Perhaps like an echo of something of yours woven into me
A cry from within myself, responding to myself
Was it you who wooed me into silence?
I thought that was my doubt, my grief, my awareness of my aloneness
Maybe it was you, who shut me up,
Who stopped the incessant grovelling
For something I already had
Here
You are here
I only want to stay
Quiet forever, to go to the places you have always been
And discover them, trace the interior space of your dwelling
To know the million miles on unexplored territory that you have invited me into

Even in this moment

And
Like a mother growing a child- sharing a body
Like a son, looking in the mirror and seeing the face of his father
Like lovers inside of each other
Like breath in my lungs
You are so close to me

Fear and the responsibility of privilege

This weekend I learned something I realized I needed to learn in a new way: I can begin again.

This came up while leading a women’s embodiment retreat in California (Sacred Feminine Retreat in Ojai, for those of you who want to join us sometime), in a conversation about race and the body between the white women and the women of color who were at the retreat. I had a many chances to ask and talk directly to the group about race over the weekend, and out of fear I didn’t. I didn’t want to do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, and unknowingly add to the problem of women of color feeling misunderstood or marginalized.

But my fear kept me silent, and that silence is part of the problem: it meant that the thing that needed to be named didn’t get named. It perpetuated the silencing of the experiences and voices that were most needed in a conversation about women’s bodies.

What one of the women speaking up about living as a marginalized woman/body said so moved me. She said, “as white women your fear in trying to dismantle racism and your privilege is uncomfortable and it keeps you silent. If you’re trying to name the problem, to change a system, and you use the wrong language or do it in the wrong way, you will be corrected and it will feel uncomfortable, but that is an important part of the learning- we as women of color are always uncomfortable in the spaces of others, and we have survived being uncomfortable and corrected. So to get a taste of our daily experiences, and to not perpetuated the problem, you need to speak up. And if you do It wanna wrong, learn and try again”.

While it’s one thing to deny or be ignorant to ongoing racism and marginalization of people groups, it is another to know there is a problem and do nothing out of fear, discomfort. My own fears that only impact me are mine to deal with when I’m ready. But when my fears reinforce a cycle of marginalization, silencing, and colonization- I need to feel the fear and move with it and through it. Because for me as a white woman the worst thing that will happen is discomfort or the end of relationship, far from what happens for people of color if we don’t: more beatings, more rapes and more murders. White men and women, we need to speak up. Let’s educate ourselves and use our voices. And when we make mistakes we will learn from them and begin again.

Dear Body, I’m Sorry, I love you

Dear Body, I’m sorry and I love you.
Hillary McBride, 2018

Dear Body,
I’m sorry for telling so many lies about you. I called you ugly, a waste of space, just this and just that. I reduced you down, and used words with you I would never use with others. I told myself and other stories about you that were not true, and did not honor how sacred you are.

I’m sorry for all the times I’ve hurt you, both on the outside and inside. I have starved you, scraped you, plucked pulled cut and burned you. I scrubbed you too hard in the shower. I filled you with food then made you empty yourself. I have celebrated when there was less of you, and screamed at you when I thought there was even just a ¼ inch more of you where there used to be less. You never asked for this. You never deserved this.

I’m sorry for the ways I have neglected and ignored you. You told me so many times, “this isn’t safe”, or “this feels good”, or screamed at me “LISTEN TO ME”. But I silenced you. I covered up your voice with distractions, and the promise that maybe I would love you, that maybe I would love me, if you just stopped telling me things.

I’m sorry for how I’ve kept you stuck and small, when you wanted to expand and be free and wild. I sat there, trying to be ‘good’, but it cost you. I told you we couldn’t climb the tree, instead we would sit still with our legs crossed. I made you think you were better if you behaved, and didn’t challenge anyone’s ideas of what it means to be a woman.

I’m sorry for how I believed what other people said about you. They said you were so many things, they called the beautiful life giving parts of you bad and horrible names. I let them. I said nothing, sometimes I laughed.

I’m sorry for blaming you for holding all the feelings I didn’t know how to feel. You have been so good at telling me when I’m in danger, when I am alive or full of joy. But the hard things were too scary. Just to get away from feelings, I tried to make you go away, to be invisible, to shut up.

I’m sorry for putting you down just to fit in with others. It seems that other people felt safer being around me if I told them I hated you. But I let you down. I want to find a way we can belong, without hating our bodies to feel close.

I’m sorry for making you an object to use, and be used. I am sorry I felt better for a while when I let people use you. I really thought I would be more lovable. And when you told me you didn’t like it, I didn’t listen.

I’m sorry I didn’t know how to protect you from a world which told us both that you were for someone else’s pleasure, not quite enough of that, too this, bad, ugly, broken, a thing, a puppet, not wearing enough, the best thing about me, dangerous.

I’m sorry for hating you when you did nothing wrong.

I love you for staying with me, for never really leaving me even though I have tried to leave you. You are there, always. As long as I am there, you will be there. Here, we are together and we can and will never be apart.

I love you for the ways you let me experience life. Through adventure, through taste and smell and sound. Without you I would not know any joy. Without you, I would not even be alive. I used to think my mind was safe and you were what was unsafe. Now I know my thoughts told me lies, but you never have.

I love you for allowing me to love others. To hold close my dear ones, to make love, to grasp a hand, to wipe the tear away from another’s cheek. It is through you that I can show and feel love, and know what being connected really means.

I love you for helping me move. Taking me from here to there, fast and slow, with intention and sometimes without even knowing it. Together we have travelled the world, and see it all. You will help me appreciate others, and the uniqueness and beauty that each of us are.

I love you for introducing me to time. No one else will take the journey of life with me, all the way from beginning to end. As you change, I will remember what we have been through together. When you show lines and marks, it will be the storybook of what I have lived, reminding me daily of all the times I have laughed, chopped apples carelessly, fallen from the swing set, and squinted to see the beautiful day under a bright sky. Skin, you tell me about what it means to become wise, and joints, you remind me that we are not permanent. But, I refuse to shame you because you cannot do what you used to.

I love you for teaching me how to rest. You remind me to care for myself, and have deepened my understanding of what it means to be present and still. In teaching me how to rest, you have taught me how to need, and in needing I have allowed others to love me, and give me parts of themselves. Through rest, I understand the rhythms of life. I understand that humility is a spiritual discipline, and I do not have to do it all to be loved.

I love you for helping me touch. Myself, others, the softest petal on the flower outside the front door, sand against the heels of my feet, and the neck of my lover. Touch is a poem that says it all.

I love you for carrying life inside. You have always had life within you, even before you were born. Each month, I am reminded of this. I plan my week, what I will wear, what activities I do or not, because of this life-reminder that you bring to my awareness. Oh, how this reminds me that we are connected to those who come before us and after us. And you remind me, always that I am not alone, even when I am alone, we are together. All of the versions of us both I hold in my memory.

I love you for being a miracle on the inside. There is so much to you I will never understand; Why you and I wrestle sometimes in the morning about when to begin the day, or at night. Why you make a clicking noise sometimes and not others. Why you seem to like it when I feed you some things and not others. You are a mystery to me. And instead of frustration, now I feel full of wonder, and appreciation.

I love you, just as you are.

Loving myself through pain

You are good- A meditation

Prayer

Fear and the responsibility of privilege

Dear Body, I’m Sorry, I love you

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