Weekly Drop No. 6
On the other shoe dropping, tattoos, and choice
The Other Shoe
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom” has always been my favorite Viktor Frankl quote. Knowing that Viktor survived the holocaust and still somehow found his own power and freedom instills hope in me. As someone who lives with complex-PTSD, finding that space between the really hard things that have happened in my life and continue to happen in the world, and my response (reaction) has been an enormous challenge. In fact, when I started my healing journey, there was no space, not even a millimeter. I went from one triggered reaction to the next most of the time. The only place I was able to maintain space is when I was doing it for others — but for myself, it was completely inaccessible.
In early spring of 2019 (about three years into my own trauma healing work), my oldest was in the process of beginning their life again. They had moved in with me a little over a year prior when their marriage and their mental health had fallen apart in equal measure. I know first hand what it is like to have the rug pulled out from under you and I welcomed them with open arms. I did my best to support them over the course of the next fifteen months as they pieced themself back together. Their hard work and tenacity were awe inspiring to watch and I felt extremely protective of their new found albeit tentative stability.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl
As the things began to fall into place and a new life began to come into focus, a very familiar anxiety emerged for both of us. One we both knew all to well — that anxiety that creeps in just over your shoulder and out of sight when things begin to feel like they are taking a turn for the better, when life begins to feel more spacious.
I will never forget them naming this lurker out loud just days before they were set to move out.
What if I can’t do it?
What if the other shoe drops?
I feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The truth is it had dropped many times throughout both of our lifetimes. Our universe had imploded over and over again — separation, moving, abandonment, betrayal, violence, loss…so much loss. Life had just felt like a frequent, if not constant, rainstorm of shoes and I was just as tired as they were of life yanking that rug and throwing that curve ball. When this is the norm, the way things have always been, it is what your mind and body are programmed to expect.
But for whatever reason, on this day, I questioned it out loud.
Who has the other shoe?
What if there is no other shoe?
What if we have full possession of the goddamn shoe?
This opened up a conversation that had a huge impact on me, on both of us I think. We explored what it meant to be in a chosen response to what the world throws at us, to claim the other shoe for ourself, to find that space between stimulus and response that Viktor talks about — what if that were an option — rather than living in constant contraction and waiting for the next bad thing to happen.
Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, my oldest and I’s love language is tattoos! We decided that we should get a tattoo of the other shoe together to remind us that it’s not floating around out there somewhere waiting to drop on us but completely within our powerful “shoe collection” the entire time. To be that constant visual — in the form of a red converse high top — that we have control over our response to what life throws at us.
The truth is life is gonna life, that is just the reality. And on May 2nd, the day after they had moved into their new apartment, that is exactly what happened. The universe turned upside down yet again and their father, my ex-husband, was rushed into the ER never to set foot outside a medical facility again. He was diagnosed with a stage IV glioblastoma that was removed immediately and two weeks later, as my oldest and I drove across the state to see him for the first time, we scheduled our other shoe tattoos with the same woman we had gotten our first mother-daughter tattoos with.
“Everything can be taken from a (hu)man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms; to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances — to choose one’s own way.” - Viktor Frankl
I cannot begin to describe the tears and grief that flowed for me that day — after getting that tattoo, seeing my ex-husband completely debilitated in a hospital bed and feeling the pain of my children’s impending loss, I sobbed myself to sleep. I sobbed not only because I knew what was ahead but also because I so desperately wanted to choose my response to it all. I would like to say I did choose my emotional response but that would be dishonest. I grieved, raged and screamed inside and at the same time chose to show up for my ex and for my kids to the best of my ability. I showed up for a front row seat to the horrors of brain cancer and the three ring circus of the medical-industrial-complex for the next 5 months.
It has been five years since, most of which was taken up by a global pandemic, and I am finally beginning to have an embodied sense of what Viktor was trying to convey. He knew that “everything can be taken from a (hu)man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms; to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances — to choose one’s own way”. He had lived in the face of hatred, death, grief, loss, persecution and the absolute horror of genocide and somehow, miraculously, had chosen his own way.
This is no longer just ink I tattoo into my skin hoping it will sink in from the outside but rather, it has become a lived experience, it has begun to blossom from the inside out because of my spiritual practice. The repetitive returning to the (Hrid) heart, the breath, the universal consciousness of oneness has shown me the path to the space within me, between my inhale and exhale, between my thoughts, between my emotions. I also regularly look at my shoe tattoo and remind myself what I have been through in this lifetime, what my children have been through and that I have more freedom and choice now than I ever have.
Freedom to love, to grieve, to accept, to surrender. Freedom to choose. I own the other shoe, loves…I own the other goddam shoe.