“Bless your heart, Danna. Bless your stupid, delusional, pea brained, Pollyanna heart, Danna. You will never, ever learn, will you?”

True story, circa late last night. I’m standing in the greeting card section of Target. I went there looking for floating candles for a memorial ritual I’m constructing this weekend for a family. But I have lost my way and have instead been meandering up and down the aisles feeling unsettled and woebegone.

My mind is in overdrive, as usual, turning over the events of the day and those prior. Not large events, just tiny moments of outreach with others.

If I were a tree, I would have to choose olive because one of my compulsive ways of being is my continuous need to check-in and offer branches of reconnection to nameless souls in my life who might rather I did not. I have no idea where this need to re-disappoint myself comes from. A therapist might trace it all the way back to birth; that as an adoptee, I will perhaps always seek to heal wounds of severance. I liken my tendency to be something more masochistic. That despite knowing I should not touch the hot burner I will do so anyways, because I feel compelled to self-inflict pain.

So, I’m having a moment in Target as I recall one of these many incidences of sharing heartfelt words with a person who has been doing their level best to ghost and cancel me over the years. And I’m back to wondering why I keep dropping my stick at their feet and wagging my tail like Sparky the puppy dog whose earnest expression whimpers, “Like me! Play with me! Pat my head and say, good girl!”

Perhaps we all have traits we despise about ourselves. Or maybe that’s not true of others…I don’t know. What I do know is that I supersonic hate this driving need I have to bark up wrong trees. Years ago, I saw a meme about how we are not everyone’s cup of tea. And to get over it. I wish it was that easy for me. I wish I could set others free instead of attempting to hold them and myself hostage in some kind of wishful fantasyland where I am perennially liked by them and therefore, deemed worthy.

Because there’s the rub. Even after 55 turns around the sun, I still attach my self-worth to external validation. Sigh. If my external longing can’t come true in this lifetime, then I sure hope for a finish line crowded with exuberant and proud souls in the afterlife who will say, “Good job, Danna. Well done! You rocked that thing called being human. We love you!”

It’s all so silly and Pavlovian and yet there’s always a fresh lesson and brave new wisdom for me to glean in this place of exile and orphanhood. And so because it feels initiatory, I consider it to be a kind of altared state. I say altared because even as it feels icky to be rejected, unliked, or spurned by others; my own process of reclamation, self-soothing, and mothering myself back to wholeness – that ritual is holy and it’s an apprenticeship which needs to look a tiny bit different every time I find myself back in this dark wilderness.

Toko-pa Turner, author of the extraordinary book called Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, considers this work essential. She believes “we must learn to become the loving mother to ourselves that we never had. This ‘remothering’ is the ongoing practice,…of learning to care for your body’s needs, validating and expressing your feelings (even if they’re unpopular), holding healthy boundaries, supporting your life choices, and most of all—being welcoming towards all that is yet unsolved in your heart.”

Rolling out the welcome mat to all my many inner orphaned Annies is not my usual practice but it’s one I endeavor to get better at because Target store pity parties are no fun. It begins with telling myself the truth about my long and self-destructive history of not letting those aspects of Self be held in the light and deemed equally worthy as the other pieces of Me that I don’t mind revealing to the world.

Psychotherapist and Grief Tender Francis Weller names this shadow work in the context of unprocessed sorrow. As the fourth of 5 Gates of Grief, he calls it Grief for What We Expected but Did Not Receive. Now, I’m no stranger to the pain, confusion, and disappointment of unrequited communications and have done my best over the years to face hard conversations and conflicts rather than sweep them under the rug. This is not to say that my rug doesn’t have a few messy severed relationships, but I’m committed to healing and I will work through many/most of these in good time.

But this is where it helps for me to get to the root cause of my pain: my unmet expectations. It’s astonishing what I will place on the other as theirs to tend on my behalf. The truth is: I have no business putting the onus on others to scaffold the architecture of my self-esteem. And that’s my Aha…my takeaway in these scenarios.

If I am to be truly self-sovereign, then I must own that I am responsible for my own “Atta Girls.” I am the one who must appoint myself to the role of Chief Cheerleader + Champion of Me. What of that stuff called soul witnessing and recognizing my wholehearted interbeing pursuits then? That’s on me to decree those Honorable Mention, Best in Show, and Participation badges.

And that brings me back to the stationery aisle in Target. By this point, I’m looking at congratulatory greeting cards and am lost in reverie about my failed attempts at reconnection, which I have reframed as pathetic; having long since judged, juried and banished this shameful part of myself to a castaway island. And so, as I stand there in tears, I shake my head, and with a sigh of self-loathing, I look away and decide to turn around and redirect my attention to the shelf of giftware behind me.

And that’s when I notice it. A lone trophy that says “MOST EXTRA.” I mean, of all the inane things I should glance upon in that precise second, a tacky gold statuette of a drum majorette striking a keen pose while holding a baton is not what I expected. But it was precisely the thing my inner Champion needed to see right then and there.

My hand immediately reached for it. It was a To Me, Love Me moment and I couldn’t help but smile amidst my tears. The Goddess in Charge of Retail Store Coincidences was on the beat and then some last night.

Now I’m not saying trophies heal all wounds but what the heck? It sure can’t hurt to have a visual reminder for the times when I will round the bend of life and find myself lost, disillusioned, and once again, seeking validation or belonging outside myself.

These are messy times and each one of us is feeling all the feels at this point in the pandemic, circa March 2021. I waffle between the drudgery of my everyday “have to’s” and the higher road of  “get to’s”, which my work as a funeral celebrant delivers me in spades (because it could so easily be otherwise).

Finding a trophy that names one of my core sources of shame (going above and beyond or being too much), and which relates to my experiences in peopling this past week, was kismet. I shall place said trophy on my Misfit Altar alongside my print-out of Toko-pa Turner’s Black Sheep Gospel truths, namely: (#5. Venerate Your Own Too-Muchness).

I am MOST EXTRA and it’s time I looked myself in the mirror and stopped apologizing to others for being who I am, in the same way I need to stop making myself smaller or shaping myself differently to fit the world.

As Walt Whitman says, “I contain multitudes” and I need to finally embrace and celebrate that! We all do. Our individual longing to belong has a long and storied history that is uniquely our own, which is to say neurotic but also endearing. Because it reveals the shimmering bits of our individual humanity.

I’m still (and always will be) the woebegone waif with the dark brown eyes who holds her bowl out to the world as if to say, feed me, please. But maybe just maybe, I can also learn to be the Benevolent Mama Goose with the soup ladle who bestows self-nourishment with a wink and a smile.

So thank you, unnamed person in my life, for kicking my inner Girl Scout Cookie Seller to the curb. I know you don’t want what I’m selling and never have. I can’t promise I won’t stop knocking on your door because who knows, one day you might need a sweet treat to feed your soul. But I do hereby promise to stop putting you in charge of how I feel about myself.

Bless my precious and Most Extra heart.