Hope Architect

I’ve been toying with the thought of writing this story for a very long time, but I kept finding myself getting stuck at certain points or finding distractions that meant I wouldn’t have to keep writing it. I came to the realisation it was taking me so long to write this because I felt like I didn’t have the answers to everything that I wanted to get on the page. Throughout this period of back and forth with myself I was taught a really good lesson: We don’t always have the answers to everything, thats what makes us the messy people that we are and if I wait around trying to get them all I’m never going to get anywhere.

This story shares things I haven’t spoken about publicly before (at least not at this scale), but in my old age (you can laugh all you want but I am at the back end of my 20’s!) I think its time I stop pretending we are perfect saints and start realising everyone does silly things, that everyone makes mistakes, we are all human. Our lives are fucking messy, It’s up to you not to let your mess define you.

 So here’s a little bit of my mess. 

Do you ever hear a song and immediately get transported back in time to a distant memory of someone that you thought you’d forgotten, someone you’d avoided thinking about for so long to avoid the pain? This time the memory comes back with a little more bite than the last and you feel every single ounce of your being getting torn to shreds at the thought of thinking about the person that you swore to yourself you’d never think of again? A long time ago I left a relationship and after I left, I was haunted by memories of the grief I never fully processed. Throughout that period of my life I realise now, that person was the song I couldn’t get out of my head.

For as long as I can remember I’ve structured who I was by the relationship that I was in and tried to find my sense of self through somebody else. I didn’t recognise what I was doing until I was a few years into therapy and I needed to end a relationship that I had been in for about three years. I ended it because the two of us as people had changed and for the first time in my life I was starting to sense this internal surge, a surge of energy inside of myself that wanted something different. This surge came about because I’d made a mistake that I couldn’t live with any longer and because I’d begun to understand the reason I’d make the mistake in the first place. This was a mistake that I thought was going to cost me everything, turns out, this mistake was what would give me everything I have. 

As always I’d like to point a few things out before you read on about potential triggers that will be in this story. These include but are not limited to:

• Suicidal thoughts & ideation
• Mentions of:
  • Dissociation
  • Numbing
  • Escapism
• Transgender identity changes (Transitioning, Grief, Loss & Trauma from the perspective of a loved one)

I feel like out of everything I have learnt in my life the most important thing to do is to keep yourself safe, if you feel uncomfortable after reading any of those points please stop, take a time out and come back and read this when you are in a safer place mentally. 

Who was I?

 All those years ago when I ended things I had a lesson that I needed to learn; who is Kierin Spark when he is alone? Who is Kierin Spark when he doesn’t have any of the close friends or family that he had come to rely on throughout his relationships? Close relationships that would have only been available if I had stayed in the relationship (so I thought). Who would I be If I started listening to that small voice in my head telling me life has more to offer than feeling stuck in a relationship with someone that despite being in love with I knew wasn’t the right person for me? 

Ending that relationship was hard. This person was a wonderful human and somebody that I was extremely proud to have within my life but no longer someone that I could see a future with because the way we thought about life was heading down two very different paths. My path was full of changes, changes that I wasn’t anticipating (who ever is?!) to come in the future. Of course with every big journey in life there’s generally a mistake or two that you make along the way. 

At the point of ending things I had been in therapy for almost three years and while that may sound like a long time to some, the work I did in those three years was mostly spent building the foundations of trust between me and my therapist. For anyone that’s recovered or is in the process of recovering from complex trauma you’ll know first hand that this bond can take a very long time to form. It’s not because we don’t want to trust, its because we have no fucking idea how to. 

In the year leading up to me leaving  I had a significant change in my life; my brother made a courageous decision to transition from female to male. A decision that is generally made after years of living in fucking agony wondering who you are, disconnected from yourself and those around you because of how uncertain you feel on the inside. At the time when I found out about this transition, I was caught completely off guard.  If you have ever had someone in your life transition you may have experienced something similar, or completely different. For me when my brother transitioned I had to grieve the loss of my sister and learn to accept that at some point in the near future I would have a brother in my life who would no longer be the sister that I grew up with.

For a twenty-three year old that barely had any coping skills, this was going to be quite the journey.

The first thing I did after coming to grips that this was going to happen? I  changed the entire structure of my therapeutic sessions to be focused on understanding what happens inside of the mind of someone to want to transition from male to female or vice versa. This opened my eyes to a world I just wasn’t aware of, I had no idea just how much pain, stigma, hatred, anger, shame & countless other emotions anyone who wants to transition have to live with daily. The time I took to understand this changed my view on a lot of things – (I will write about this transition in a story that I will co-write with my brother in the coming months!) Coming to grips with this change wasn’t an easy feat and had a pretty severe knock-on effect with my relationship. 

the inevitable mistake

Accepting this change, to begin with, caused me a lot of pain, pain that my partner wanted to protect me from and block from getting to me so I didn’t have to experience it. We were both similar in the fact that neither of us really understood what was going on or how to handle the situation, we had some major differences in our overall views on life and the flexibility in which we could live. This transition caused my partner to begin to show a lot of frustration toward my sister as she could see just how much pain I was in and she just wanted it to stop. Coupled with the fact that I hadn’t quite learnt how to communicate my needs meant that we couldn’t keep moving forward together. This created a severe disconnect between the two of us and over the course of a few months we grew apart. Reflecting on this now I realise that I wanted somebody that could listen, somebody that could hear what I was saying but not be judgemental of what was going on in my life. That person I wanted could never be someone external, it always had to be me. This change started me on the trajectory to discover this, but first I had to really dig deep and fuck things up as good as I could. 

With all of those unmet needs sitting below the surface it was inevitable that unless I dealt with them, they would present themselves to me in ways that I wouldn’t necessarily like. I had formed a close relationship with someone from work who became my ear in the hard times, who didn’t have any judgement and would listen to me wholeheartedly. Over the course of a few months this relationship became closer and one night out with this person I got blackout drunk and cheated. I thought I was in a lot of pain at this point, this silly mistake was going to make things a lot worse.

I don’t have any excuses for what I did.  No matter how lost I was no matter how much pain I was in cheating was not the right answer. There is (as there always is) another side of this story that I won’t tell as its neither my place nor the message I’m trying to communicate, but I had to bury what I’d done for about six months, and it was fucking excruciating. That was six months of some of the most intense shame, self-hatred & self-destruction I have ever put myself through. Some would say that I deserved it and ‘that’s what you get for doing what you did’ but I don’t look at it that way. The remorse I had for what I’d done and the time I’ve spent between now and then working out what my needs are and how to voice them is what gives me the confidence, clarity & certainty that what I did back then will be something I never repeat again. 

One mistake doesn’t write the rest of your life, as long as you don’t allow it to. You always have the power to change. 

Something I have learnt in the last few years is that people tend to hold a lot of opinions & judgement about others, and more often than not those feelings are felt toward people they know absolutely nothing about. I lived in fear of a lot of these opinions throughout the course of healing from the mistake that I had made. Fear of never being loved again, fear of no one ever accepting me for who I was since I had done something so terrible. That fear took away quite a few years of my life, years I can’t get back, and that’s something I can’t change. But what I can do, and what I did, is turn inward and begin to make sense of the chaotic world in my mind. Once I let go of those opinions and judgement I had toward myself I realised I had one mission: Get to every corner of my mind that needs help, shine a light on it and offer it love. 

I remember spending nights thinking that I wasn’t worthy of being able to sleep in the same room as her, share moments with her because she didn’t know what I had done. I wasn’t living in a good place mentally, I didn’t quite have the courage to speak about what I had done, so I allowed everything to boil over to the point where I ended up needing to leave to ensure I didn’t lose myself even further or let her be with someone who had done what they had done.

The Opening of the flood gates 

It was about three months after I’d ended things and asked her to move out that it really hit me, mostly because I had done everything in my power to not be at home and spent as much time as I possibly could in Queensland. The night that my defensive wall came crashing down, I’ll always remember: I was standing in the kitchen washing the dishes after I had just made dinner in the apartment we used to share together & I thought I heard her voice saying something to me about making sure I took my clothes out of the washing machine. My heart was in my throat and tears were welling in my eyes, The realisation that she was no longer in my life set in. I sat down in the kitchen & just cried, I mean sobbed, I couldn’t get off the floor. When I finally found the courage to stand up and make my way to my bedroom, that crying continued for the rest of the night and for quite a few weeks. 

For so long I had felt this overhanging sense of numbness that seemed to be blocking me from my emotions, simply hearing her voice in the kitchen struck a chord because the numbness was gone. It felt like I was in a river of pain that I was never going to escape from. I’d left a relationship that was safe, I was closer to her parents then I was my own, I was closer to her family then I was my own at the time & our circle of friends came mostly from her work. I felt very lonely and very distraught to the point where I thought that just taking my own life would make the pain go away. Wouldn’t it just be easier for me If instead of waking up every day facing this despair and pain I just wasn’t here anymore?

 I was wrong thinking in that mindset, oh so very wrong.

Therapy changed the day that I decided to leave that relationship, I remember it was information overload for a while there. I still have all the little booklets I was given on loneliness, shame, caring for kids (inner kids), recovering from depression, finding hope etc. I haven’t quite gotten to throwing these out, I feel a lot of pride in looking at those booklets and remembering the young man who tried his best to read all of them when he couldn’t sleep, when he struggled to eat or when he’d be wiping vomit off of his shoes because he’d gone out the night before and written himself off to try & escape the pain inside of him. I tell my therapist this a lot and as much as she hates to admit it;  she saved my life by giving me the tools to save myself. 

The pain came and went for a long time, sometimes I thought I was getting better and the slightest little trigger would pull all of the emotion buried deep within me to the surface rocking me to the core. On the third or fourth time of this wave hitting me all of the work I had done in therapy came to a head. I decided It was time for me to use a technique I had been using when I was in therapy: talking to the emotion (yes talking out loud, it seemed wacky at first but I still use this technique to this day). I discovered that the wave of emotion was a mixture of loneliness, shame, guilt, self-hatred and abandonment, turning to it asking it a question was fucking horrifying – but also the biggest turning point in my life. Turning to those emotions and asking them what was happening revealed a lot to me (I wrote about some of this in the many faces of abandonment if you would like to read more) and ultimately is what made me start to believe in myself. That numbness hid me from all of those emotions, and it did a damn good job of it. Taking that first courageous step and talking to the pain revealed to me that the only way forward was going to be through. 

It’s been a few years now since I made that decision to begin to face the pain that was in my body, it definitely hasn’t been all rainbows and sunshine but my perspective on life has changed. As of writing this I’m currently going through a break-up of a relationship that I was very invested in. The pain sucks but instead of running from it I sit down at the start and end of the day and ask it to come forward and be with me. To sit together and cry, or write or do whatever we need to do, together. I dreamt about being at this point as a teenager, to not feel lost without someone and to not feel like my whole world was going to end. Don’t get me wrong, I still have all the same thoughts and they are absolutely welcome, the difference now is that I no longer believe them and because I no longer believe them, they stop doing so as well.

How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you – Rupi Kapur

In my journey of healing I’ve come to understand a lot about myself, the first is that I am quite resilient. I’m sure you’ve been able to gather that as a reader but what If I told you that I never fully believed that about myself until two years ago? What If I told you that up until two years ago for a majority of the time I felt like I was worth nothing, that nobody cared about me and that I wasn’t going to be able to get anywhere in life. I would wake up and get a few seconds of freedom before my mind would take over again and all of the self hatred would come back.

I’ve spent the last two years getting to know the voices who used to throw hatred, shame and guilt at me and transformed them into the inner voices that push me to keep moving forward, to take courageous steps, to speak to a room full of people I don’t know and to remind myself to check in everyday. To get to this point it took a lot of me convincing myself that the work I was doing in therapy was going to work even though I felt like it wasn’t. Something inside of me just kept saying “turn up, just keep turning up” so I did, even on days when I felt like walking into my therapists office and sitting down on that chair was the last thing I wanted to do. 

I learnt how to sit with the pain of all of those emotions and give them love. Love that I didn’t get to receive when I was growing up. This love became the most powerful thing inside of myself because after 24 years of disliking myself and daydreaming about living someone else’s life, I slowly started to fall in love with myself. I kept going to those hurtful parts of me and getting to know what happened, witnessing younger versions of myself go through absolute hell and choosing to go into those memories and protect them, giving myself the love I always looked for externally.  I started showering myself in love and the best bit was that the more love I gave to myself the more I started to feel my body again, the muscle tension lessened as I was no longer holding anxiety within my body, I started sleeping properly and I began forming really good relationships all throughout my life, the pain was easing. 

I used to be quite needy, needy in a very unhealthy way. This neediness is what caused me to end up in few relationships that weren’t quite right for me, because I was so focused on one thing: Making sure I was never alone. I’d really begun to trust myself and the skills I’d learned in therapy so facing loneliness felt more like a challenge than it did a scary thing to do. The most interesting thing I learnt when facing loneliness is that all it ever needed was me. It just needed me to sit with it and let it know that It was loved and that I was there. No matter what happened in life I would always be there. Mindfulness helped me achieve this, I remember being so skeptical of whether or not ‘focusing on your breath’ or ‘separating from your feelings’ could really work but I stopped being skeptical when I realised I could get to this inner essence that was stronger than anything I’ve ever felt. When I could get to this state, I could sit down with the loneliness and ask it what it needed, sometimes we would colour, sometimes it would like to go on a pretend walk. No matter what it wanted to do I would just do it.

This mindset shift changed my life. 

We get one life, lots of chances to make an impact, to help others, to go to sleep feeling grateful, to be in love, to express your needs and have them met, but most of all we get one good go at doing the most important thing. Loving yourself. In all the lessons I’ve learnt since leaving that relationship this was the most important. I spent a long time going out on the weekends, avoiding the pain that was inside of me by diffusing it with alcohol, random unfulfilling hookups and countless other methods of escapism when all I needed to do was learn how to look inside. 

I’m still on the path of giving myself unconditional love and I feel it’s a path that I’ll always be walking, growing more and more love as I move along. Knowing now that I can turn inward to get the love that I need has given me the ability to create wonderful relationships in my life. I’m closer to my Dad than I ever have been, I have very special bonds with both of my brothers and I am surrounded by some of the most wonderful humans I get to call my friends. I don’t think I can thank the people who stood by me in this period of my life enough.

Family isn’t just blood, family are the people that turn up in your life in the darkest moments, those people who have nothing to say about you but good things. They are also the people who will call you out on your shit, will stand with you in shame and let you know that even though something you did may not have been the best if you take action and heal they will continue to stand right beside you. I feel so much gratitude for the beautiful humans I have in my life, they have stood with me through everything I’ve been through, my career journey, the loss of my grandparents and the healing of my major trauma. Never in a million years when I left that relationship did I think I’d be able to have a relationship with people like I had with her family. Not only did I do exactly that but I created so much more. 

As mentioned earlier I write the final part of this story while working through the early stages of a relationship ending, and along with it comes pain I’m familiar with. The pain of losing the connection I was able to share with her, her wonderful family and the awesome friends I met of hers along the way. Sometimes things just don’t work out, and this was one of those. As I close this chapter in my life I know now that other doors are going to open and that I’m going to discover new parts of myself I didn’t know existed, but that doesn’t take away the pain, at least now I can be one with that pain. 

Some people come into your life, not to be with you forever but to teach you things you need to learn.

Reflecting on my intention

My intention with this story was to give hope. Hope that your life can change and there are different ways to move forward than your mind might be telling you. I’ve noticed over the last few months my life story is no longer about the trauma that affected me as a kid, my life story instead, is about the person all that pain created and now lives in the present. The person who sits here and writes this to you unashamedly vulnerable. I let go of the anchors of my past and I want to help others do the same. I don’t have  all the answers but there is a little bit that I can tell you that might help. Healing is about finding what helps you to move through it, that might be therapy, that might be talking to your family, that might be meditating, whatever it is that works for you. It might suck for a while as you move through the pain, but there is light in the darkness as long as you’re willing to shine a light on it. There is always love inside of you. 

Closing the door for good

As I close this story out I know I’m closing the book on this for good, I no longer need to revisit the past and I am at peace with where my life is at and so fucking excited for what’s next. One thing I learnt which is really important, is sometimes the answer to resolving memories of past relationships that keep coming up in your mind, is less about trying to find thousands of different ways to resolve it, or reading the next best self help book. Its about finding closure in your life. Closure doesn’t need to be talking to this person or seeing them in any way. Closure can be something that you sit down with the intention of journaling out your final goodbye. In the interest of wanting to help others to get to the same point I got to, I’m going to share the final thing I wrote when I closed this door two years ago. I call it ‘the thank you, I never gave you’.

I remember leaving you like it was yesterday and the memory of doing so no longer hinders me, but I never told you how I really felt about you. I never told you that for so long my life felt like it was in ruins, and that there was no clear end in sight, but when you came along and entered It the shift I experienced was amazing. I had a purpose and that purpose was you. I never told you how grateful I was that you were there for me when I first started therapy, that you were there for me when my first therapist abandoned me and made me feel as if I was worthless. Ill always remember how you were to me the night I came home and broke down on the living room floor. I didn’t think I could keep going but your energy and your strength helped me find my own. I never told you that the things that you accomplished and achieved made me so proud and still do to this day. I understand now that leaving you was a lesson that I needed to learn, so that when I found the love I was looking for I’d never take any of it for granted. I hope you found light and love in your life and I’m sorry that it couldn’t be together. The mistake I made was never your fault, that was mine. I know just how much goodness you have in your heart and I know that will take you to places in this world that not many others can reach. You changed my life when we were together, and continued to do so even after things ended between us.