A story of a Young Girl who is Finding her Way towards Integrating her Past.
Side note before I begin:
It's funny how life unfolds. I've found myself wearing four distinct hats across different online global learning communities.. Decades ago, after paying the initial fees, I evolved into a role model, mentor, facilitator, host, guide, and community leader in each of them. These affiliations embody the closeness I deeply desire and cherish.
When I contemplated joining the Influencer’s Program last year, I saw it as a final opportunity to enrich my resourcefulness and resources. The program's appeal was heightened by its Jewish community, resonating with my connection to Israel's challenges and the teachings of mystical Kabbalah. It felt like I wanted a year of transformation, a journey to become the woman I aspire to be. Shifra's message truly resonated with me.
Yet, as the Influencer’s Legacy year draws to a close, I am saddened that my continued participation in This Gateway of Higher Consciousness depends on overcoming a barrier, reminiscent of my eleven-year-old self whose worth and inclusion seemed tied to external validation.
I've decided not to join the Gateway. The story that follows is about a young woman who is also me—a woman discovering the joy of claiming her “no.” I wanted to share this with all of you, my cohort.
My next step is to embrace this powerful part of myself by seeing her, listening to her, and valuing her without needing her to do anything.
With love and gratitude to each of you and for our collective.
You shine very brightly in my heart.
Taye
So here we go....
The bright morning sun filtered through my bedroom window, painting patterns on the walls that reminded me of distant memories. An email notification blinked on my phone, pulling me away from my thoughts. It was from Dovid, the webmaster of my year-long Influencer’s Legacy Program. The program was nearing its end, and the email text jolted me awake because I had to think about final reflections and next steps.
I took a deep breath, feeling a swirl of emotions—excitement mixed with the familiar echoes of being left out, like the time my family was turned away from the Jewish Synagogue because of an inability to pay. Followed by even deeper memories with parts of myself I hadn’t fully faced.
With the blink of an eye, I was transported back to my eleven-year-old self. There she was, vivid and alive in my mind’s eye. I saw her sitting alone in the living room, wearing tight jeans that pressed into her soft, round belly, her vibrant red curls spilling over her freckled face. She was a little chubby, a little awkward, and painfully aware of her isolation. I saw her eating Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes, the wrappers strewn about as she lost herself in the drama of Luke kissing Laura on the TV screen. That young girl, lost in her world, felt so achingly familiar.
“What do you want?” I asked her, this reflection of my younger self, the girl with eyes full of longing and a heart brimming with dreams.
Her reply came in a whisper, almost too soft to hear: “A boyfriend. I want a great guy.” But then she hesitated and spoke again, more urgently, “I want a friend. Someone I can talk to.”
A lightning bolt of her intensity struck me deep in my heart—transcendent of time. Here I was, an adult with a full life, yet still craving that deep, soulful connection I’d yearned for as a child. It was as if I was watching my life unfold all over again, with its layers of pain, loneliness, and a perpetual search for belonging.
I remembered the agony of that time, feeling as if I was the only one in the world carrying the weight of secrets that felt too big to share. My parents took me to the dentist because they were concerned about my buck teeth, and braces were slapped on me, marking me as the next project for newly-minted dentists the following school year. For years, I was pulled out of math class for free dental appointments to fix my teeth. The mirror-kissing stopped.
Another secret weighed on her. I had my first orgasm before I was ten years old. Certain I would become a slut or go blind, I stoked my forbidden pleasure in secrecy, thinking that would prevent any punishment. Meanwhile, yet another secret came out, one she had never shared with anyone: “When I got my first period, my mother slapped me in front of a neighbor. Every month, excruciating cramps reminded me of that day. I felt cursed, my underwear stained with blood.”
These confessions echoed long-lost truths. My eleven-year-old self was so vulnerable, her desires so simple yet profound—a friend, a confidant, someone who would understand her without judgment. Her secrets, carefully guarded, mirrored the hidden recesses of my adult soul, parts of me I had kept hidden even from myself.
As I faced my younger self, I realized the lonely adolescent inside me was not a relic of the past to be dismissed or ignored. She was a crucial part of who I am, even now. She was a protector, a keeper of my dreams, and the guardian of my vulnerabilities. She has been waiting for my love and acceptance patiently. Her biggest desire was when I would come back to see her, embrace her, and claim her as myself.
The years that followed my adolescence were filled with explorations, seeking out connection in all the wrong places, and often feeling more alone than ever. The eleven year old starting spitting out more memories of isolation and desperation.
Mark, popped right up in my conscious awareness. He was my first real boyfriend at fifteen. I married him at nineteen, and I thought he was my best friend and lover. Yet, in that relationship, the echoes of my younger self’s fears and desires began playing out.
Right on queue, I became terrified any time the urge came up in either me or him. Whenever I saw Mark wearing his gold terry cloth underwear, which I recognized with razor-sharp precision, it meant he was in the mood, and I cringed. Then, I braced myself for his advances that usually felt like I was the prop for his own gratification. And, like a good, dutiful girlfriend and wife, I submitted all the time. Then I slowly increased overeating as a way of numbing how dishonest I felt.
My marriage to Mark lasted two years, as the eleven year old reminded me. I knew this relationship had to come to an end the night I met Rusty at a bar down the street where I worked. This was love at first sight. I walked into the bar, and he was singing “Killing Me Softly with His Song” by Roberta Flack. Immediately, Rusty walked right up to me—his beautiful voice in my face. That was it.
Current me commented to the young girl I once was about how Rusty helped me open up, even though I couldn’t help but notice the things about him that made my insides tremble. Like the fact that three of his brothers were constantly incarcerated while his mother and four sisters shooed away a daily supply of bill collectors. Still, there was a part of me that wanted a boyfriend, and she was in tremendous conflict when she realized that Rusty was never going to be that guy. I began bubbling up with love, pinching her deliciously chubby cheeks. This was my current-day sign that she had been with me all along.
Her memory lingered. I needed to move out of NY to CA so as to break away from Rusty for good. I couldn’t trust myself to be anywhere near him.
Still communing with this younger aspect of myself, I told her how Rusty had taught me to receive a passionate kind of affection. The problem was, in his wake, my body had been split in half. I had to choose sides—inside a deep, dark ravine lived the bad-ass lover like Rusty and the nice guy friend like Mark. Safety and lust could never meet in this body. Pleasure was dangerous, forbidden, and had to be kept secret; this was my conclusion from that scene.
Instead, I chose neither. I moved to San Francisco. Within my first month, I gained 40 pounds. I’m sure this was a solitary move, allowing me to take a deeper look into what the good guy and the bad-ass meant to me, though I had no idea. What I was aware of was my constant craving for food, troubled by how one type of man truly turned me on, while the other felt safe and cozy without any novelty or charge whatsoever.
I describe this period of almost ten years as my tippy-toe into womanhood. Within the walls of my private sanctuary, the impulses of a growing body, mind, and heart left me more determined than ever to hand-select the man I was going to let in fully and wholeheartedly. This would happen, I told myself over and over again. Even with no evidence whatsoever, I knew I was destined to meet the love of my life one day as an integrated person. I would never have used those words, but I was committed to becoming that kind of person for myself—the kind of person who feels good about everything she does and doesn’t do because she loves herself and knows that love is important to her.
The years that followed, in my late twenties and early thirties, were exploratory. Mixed-gender parties, Castro Street bathhouses, makeup sex, get-off-it sex, friendship sex, for-no-reason sex, breakup sex, transgender sex, and bisexual sex. There was no shortage of transactional arrangements, each preceded by consent and lacking any emotional attachment. It felt important to me, perhaps inwardly guided by my eleven-year-old self, to know that I was heterosexual and to begin exploring what I had and what I liked in terms of my body. I had no good references or role models for that.
One day, by introduction, Frank came along. He was my neighbor on Union and Hyde in San Francisco, and every time he saw me, he began talking. In this relationship, I became the center of his world. I loved his crooked smile when he would make dinner, and physically, he was devoted to me only. By then, all I wanted was more of a one-to-one male/female relationship. One where I was attracted as well as safe, and where our roles became more clearly delineated. A real man.
I lasted a year with Frank, almost daily getting my fix of attention, caress, and affection. It was with Frank that I knew I had integrity with myself. There’s my eleven-year-old at work, showing me via Frank the potential for convergence of the bad boy and the good guy—a man who cherished me but wasn’t afraid of me either. A man with whom I wasn’t afraid to be myself, or afraid of myself.
Then, one night after this epiphany, I saw Frank on TV being handcuffed and arrested with a bag of money. As the news report would have it, the man I knew as Frank had deserted his family and children. Alias Frank had apparently found a bag of stolen money. Instead of returning it to the bank, he kept it, waiting for enough time to pass so he could claim the loot. That infamous night when he was caught, our love affair came to a screeching halt. Because of the lengths I went through breaking up with Rusty, breaking up with Frank was relatively easy. I had no contact with him whatsoever after that.
During the next couple of years that followed, I buried inconsistent, conflicted feelings by becoming celibate, covering up huge swaths of uncertainty about the poor decisions I had made and feeling lonely and unlovable. I see now my saving grace—really, my eleven-year-old? She was showing me gratitude for myself, and even though a relatively teeny part of me was listening, I knew enough to not get in over my head with the wrong men. At the time, I felt like my only option was to be alone. Lonely. And face myself, even though a parade of roommates came and went.
So many memories were surfacing, one after another and at the same time. These memories immediately followed the knot in my stomach when I received The Influencer’s Completion Letter from Dovid. All of which reminded me of something else about myself—that I was unfit for love, and at the core, I was unlovable.
Therefore, any affirmation of my going forward into the next program had already been determined. I was not their Soul tribe because they were not my Soul tribe. It bothers me to affiliate with a group that purports to be my Soul tribe because my body registers differently. In all probability, this is the reason why I have come and gone from many groups over the years. Keeping my solid 4 is confirmation of my participation as important to me. Only full inclusion unto myself is what I am coming to find as deliberate action.
Still, I was processing Dovid’s text because it also brought with it a force that welled up through my entire body, as if it came straight from my toes up to my voice. I just could not evaluate the next offering from Shifra with any real clarity.
I believe The Gateway was in the birth canal at precisely the same time that I had two more months left in Influencer’s. For me, I was in the third trimester, as my eleven-year-old confirms. I fell into the void as if the program had officially ended, and then began feeling victimized once I had already free-fallen into a void. Such strong feelings were a shocking surprise to me.
That’s when my eleven-year-old told me, “NO,” and she was right there in my body. I realized the lonely, alone adolescent inside of me was an extremely futile part of what was also happening inside myself. Her seeds were so ripe and ready to flower, and all it took was my focus and engagement. “Wow. She is a real protector. Someone who really does have my back. And I can trust her to inform me like the riverbank who holds the river. She claims me as I am! She claims me and who I am not yet!”
After several days and a few emails to Basya and Shifra (my coaches throughout the program) regarding Dovid’s email and trying to organize where the heck I am, I stepped into this new potential—one of my own authority. I love this because the younger version of myself is helping me pinpoint and express the accuracy of my full experience. Right now! This is what I do for my clients! I help them find the fullness of their experience so that they can take the next step towards their own fulfillment! I feel so happy for myself and my emerging eleven-year-old. We’re in this together.
Click click click click click—another memory from her arises. Daniel appeared in my life many years after the riffraff—(okay, exploratory!)—phase of my life had ended. I met Daniel when I was 33, at my friend Madsy’s house one springtime afternoon. While waiting for my car to be repaired, he and I stumbled upon one another—as friends of Madsy’s who had not yet met.
He and I instantly hit it off on a weekend camping trip when I felt his take-charge, direct, opinionated nature with an uncanny interest in me. I know this because he prepared every single thing we could have wanted or needed for this trip. Then he picked me up at work and we went to the most beautiful campsite in the world—in the Trinity Alps in CA. I felt so tenderly embraced by his deep listening, and I was so excited to hear everything he had to say. We didn’t even pitch a tent that night. We slept under the stars, with the most exquisite shooting stars every few minutes. For the first time in my life, I knew the feeling of being in awe. I found him so interesting, and I was so interested. Immediately, we locked in. On the most subtle levels, I felt like we were weaving a cocoon where we could be together even when we were apart, that this would continue forever.
I tested him by having no filters with what I said. That was the confirmation I needed for my entire body to feel relaxed. For days, weeks, and months, Daniel and I spent all our free time together. Early on in our relationship, I said a resounding YES to everything Daniel. That was in 1983.
Claiming my NO is how the chapter in my Influencer’s program is completing. Claiming my YES to feeling so grateful and nourished as I follow my eleven-year-old into my 40-year relationship with Daniel…
I hope you come along for the ride.
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