the misfit west

Tag: personal essay

  • archetypes & anguish

    archetypes & anguish

    Archetypes start appearing in therapy for me, likely due to my partial immersion in reading and writing through an English degree. The narcissist, the crying woman, the immigrant, the joker—these archetypes, ancient and ever-present in our subconscious, haunt my sessions.

    Binary thinking, which seeps from the leaky faucet of my family’s culture, brews a tempest within me—a seething storm of thoughts and emotions, desperate for release through the art of writing. Instead of succumbing to the allure of sleep-filled afternoons, I grasp my pen and seek solace in the fluidity of ink on paper.

    My mother, with her elegant yet indecipherable cursive, often found refuge in writing—a trait I both admired and envied. I wish I could have emulated her elegance, although I was far more adept at maneuvering my ’89 Cadillac Deville down hidden backroads, finding comfort in the hum of the engine over the humdrum of classrooms and the banality of city life.

    They say depression is anger turned inward, and I feel like I swallowed a bean burrito of rage that sits in chunks in my stomach, ready to unfold and spill all over my meaning and purpose. I seethe with resentment towards clients and friends who blatantly disregard my time, vanishing without a trace, only to mirror their own forgetfulness with misplaced anger when I don’t honor a session they neglected. I rage at my family, who seem to revel in a parade of dysfunctional behaviors, and I despise myself for responding to their chaos with my own brand of destructive actions.

    I navigate this labyrinth of discontent, confronting the criminals in my life, both literal and metaphorical, by delving into drug-fueled dark corners of suspicion, uncovering the sordid pasts of those around me in search of reflections of my own flaws. An article about a shifty storefront in Sheridan serves as a stark reminder of the constant shadows of deceit. Once a silent observer of this underworld, I become acutely aware of its existence through my ex-boyfriend’s involvement.

    It started simply: I clicked into the dark theme of incognito mode and begam analyzing his LinkedIn, Reddit—anywhere I can investigate the people and entities he claims to have founded or led. Simple searches reveal that none of these men at his newly found “Starseed Village” have any formal education. The only commonality is their involvement in cryptocurrency. My paranoia isn’t entirely unfounded; what I uncover is a hard reality.

    I could write about that man for a long time and I have. When another man once asks me what’s MY problem, what’s so wrong with me that two men would pull a gun in my face and why I chase them away, I try to explain over my discomfort with how he perceives that I create these things in my life, that I am just trying to save my brother. Family members are not exempt from my skip tracing distrust, and I find out things I don’t want to know here either. Another long story short, I find crimes committed by a family member, including some charge that actually lists intercourse as the offense.

    Life becomes very hard when your family members are criminals, all of your exes have been shady AF, and then what becomes true is that you cannot exist in this system and be exempt from it. These people represent my shadows, my unfinished work, my own anger at myself for times I’ve crossed boundaries.  I don’t feel angry anymore, at least right now, and maybe I’ll even eat a burrito.

  • elegy in green

    elegy in green

    The last safe place is getting packed into cardboard.

    I run my fingers along the frame of the window in the dining room—the one that looks out onto the gravel-dusted front yard where a stubborn Oregon grape root plant grows. He wasn’t a gardener, but there was something poetic about that hardy, jagged bush surviving all the suburban attempts to tame it. This townhouse sits tucked in the stillness of Centennial, nestled mid-row between two others, three stories tall and just over 1,500 square feet. Grief doesn’t echo here—it settles between drywall and shared beams.

    The late June wind sighs through the screen with that same high plains exhale: dry, cold, relentless. It doesn’t caress; it scrapes. And yet, somehow, it sings. That sound has always reminded me of a cello played with a knife.

    This house smells like old cupboards and dusty carpet. It carries ghosts in the baseboards and secrets in the attic insulation. I used to imagine this place was a heart with four chambers: the den where he died, the basement where I stacked grief like firewood, the hallway where I paced every night with my dog Angel crying over probate emails, and the garage full of tools I never learned to use. I stayed because I was trying to keep something alive. But it turns out you can’t resuscitate a myth.

    They stopped speaking to me. One took the cat. Another said I’m dead to him. What am I supposed to do with that kind of silence? It thickens, curdles, then hardens around the edges of a life. And still, somehow, I keep feeding it my attention, as if love can be coaxed from absence.

    I move the last box onto the floor, next to Angel’s food bowl. She’s watching me, three-legged and wide-eyed, always sensing the unspoken before it becomes sound. Her fur still smells like vet bandages and cedar mulch from the yard we never got to plant. There was going to be a garden here. There were going to be sunsets watched from the porch. There was going to be a lease, a deed, a dream with a date stamp. Instead, there was only the grind of maintenance and the slow death of inheritance.

    I keep thinking about his voice, the way he used to speak about Atman and witnessing the self. He was tall, wore khakis and a button-up pocket shirt with pens always tucked in the front. He drove a ’93 Camry he had painted green, not for flash, but function. A vegan Buddhist with a complicated heart, a disciplined body, and eyes that held more questions than answers.

    He built a life out of principle and breath. He sketched maps of the soul and sometimes flirted with distraction. But he showed up. For his students, his practices, his routines. Now what’s left is brittle paperwork and a war of emails. The home became a battleground where no one showed up for the funeral but everyone arrived for the scraps.

    When I lie in bed at night, I replay the funeral playlist in my head. Boston. Jethro Tull. That one track with the flute solo that sounds like a rebellion unfolding in real time. that always makes me ache in a way I can’t quite name. It plays over the hum of the oxygen concentrator that still echoes in my memory, as if the walls haven’t realized he died.

    And now I’m moving back to Wyoming, not for the state but for the space. For the sagebrush that curls like old calligraphy across the hillside. For the wind that tells the truth whether you want it or not. For the chance to build something of my own that isn’t just a response to someone else’s absence.

    My new place is small, barely 500 square feet, but it’s mine. I’ll have a yard for Angel, a quiet for my work, and a foundation that doesn’t shift under someone else’s name. I’ll keep the loveseat and the bed. I’ll leave the piano and the rage.

    This isn’t healing in the traditional sense. I still feel the rot beneath the crown. But it’s forward motion. It’s the muscle memory of hope. It’s the body remembering how to want.

    I will not assist in the sale of this house. I will not pretend that what happened here was neutral. I will not sanitize the story to make it more palatable for people who chose to stay away until it was time to collect. Let the court see what the wind already knows: that a storm left unchecked will tear down more than just shingles.

    This house was once a haven. Now, it is an elegy.

    And I am the one who will write it.