From Axford to Weed to Axford :: From Dependence to Independence to Interdependence

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: I changed my last name from Weed, married name from my ex-husband, back to my original name of Axford.

Most of you probably already know that much information. I just thought I’d be sassy since so many asked me if I was going to make an official announcement.

There it is. It’s official, it even says so…well, mostly official. Waiting on the Social Security office is another story altogether.

Initially I was a bit surprised at how interested in this fact many of you were. Then I thought more about it, more of the meaning behind why I was doing it came to my awareness.

Of course you would be interested. The whole reason I hadn’t done it until now is one that I myself, as a HSP, have spent hours contemplating: who I am.

And, there’s another element to it: what my take on marriage is. That’s a BIG one.

Many of you asked if I had gotten married, and the answer is yes and yes. First to my ex-husband, and now to myself, as I look forward to the possibility of a third marriage in the future. Let me explain.

To be quite honest, the name change snuck up on me.

When I separated from my husband about 3 years ago, it was because I woke up in a life that I didn’t like. I had built it based around everyone else because I didn’t even know myself or what I wanted. This included my ex-husband. My marriage was sort of like picking your favorite color when you’re color blind…and blind-folded. I did my best given my circumstances and he did his best, but we didn’t know what we were doing and there is no way we could have.

As is common for the HSP, I went through an awakening period where I had achieved all the external stuff I thought I “should” have and realized that I still didn’t feel happy, or enough. This life I was living was not it. I started to awaken to the fact that I liked things and I didn’t like things. I didn’t know this before.

The separation process from my old life that was a construction of me rather than an expression of me was a painful process. It truly was like a phoenix. I was consumed in the destruction, the flames destroyed me. And that was a beautiful death…such a beautiful death indeed. I died in the flames. Or maybe it was like I had been living as an acorn until now, and now I had been planted in the ground and burst out of my shell. I was growing as a sapling. That’s very fresh, new, weak, and uncertain.

I began the slow rebirth process from the ashes. For the first 2 years after the divorce, I was sort of in a haze. Drifting in the ashes. I didn’t know who I was. It was scary and new to be so unsure, so unknowing. Slowly strengthening and growing in this new self. Feeling weak in my newly accepted and realized sensitivity. Fumbling and clumsy. Exploring and experimenting.

Especially, I didn’t know what I wanted in intimate relationships. Elaine Aron often talks about how HSPs are often less satisfied in their partnerships because they have such high expectations and can feel all the areas that are out of alignment in such a strong way and so immediately. I think it’s also because so many of us have a tendency toward codependency. I certainly did. I needed someone to validate me because I didn’t validate myself, I didn’t feel ok about the way I was. I needed to be needed for my role and the amazingly sensitive things I could do for people. I couldn’t comprehend that someone would just enjoy ME, I didn’t know who ME was or how to express that.

So, there I was in the ashes. That was no state to pick a new last name.

What’s in a name? It’s how we identify. It’s the label that can represent where we come from, what clan we belong to, or what clan we choose.

I had Weed on everything, my licenses and diplomas, etc. etc. And, I didn’t have anything that I wanted to switch to more. I didn’t feel like Ane Axford and I didn’t mind being Ane Weed. Though, I always had a sense that I wouldn’t stay Ane Weed. So, I was just stewing in the ashes. Neither here nor there.

In the last month before changing back to Axford, I had 4 well-loved and respected men in my life (all very sensitive) ask me what my maiden name was when I told them that Weed was the name I took on when I got married. All of them had almost identical responses: “ANE AXFORD! That’s an amazing name! I love that. It sounds like a made up spy name.”

My response was one of startle, “Oh, it is?”

I had never had anyone tell me they loved that name. In fact, most people are quite excited about Weed…can’t imagine why, though.

I had always taken my name for granted and thought it was just kind of weird. No one else had my name. When I was younger, I longed to be a Smith or Johnson…even a Wilson. I liked my first name, but sometimes got sick of having it mispronounced and having to explain it.

OHHHHHHHH!

It hit me.

I got sick of being misunderstood throughout my life and having to explain myself in general. I also grew up in a family of HSPs who didn’t understand themselves. We felt guilty about the weird things we liked. Our different names and ways of being. I had mixed feelings about being an Axford.

I remember being very excited to take on a new name and a new family. I still adore my ex-husband’s family. I felt like I could finally be someone. It was a tricky way to jump out of being ME and be someone else.

My dad was not very open or comfortable with his sensitivity, in a sense rejected it. And, my mom seemed to see herself as very sensitive and that was a weakness. Sensitivity was a curse, an illness to be resolved and a burden to bear. Both my parents seemed in agreement on this.

All of my siblings are sensitive too, to varying degrees and we have all dealt with it very differently.

So, together as a family, I felt this elephant always in the room. This huge, pressing elephant of sensitivity needed to hidden as best as possible, not talked about, and no one knew what to do with it. Maybe we can cover it with a table cloth and pretend it’s a table? Well, I’ll at least be polite and look the other way when it seems to be showing it’s head…and definitely when it’s defecating. We all felt ashamed of it. We all felt that there was something wrong with us. And the worst part, that there was nothing we could do about it. We all felt that we could never have what we wanted, that we could never be intimate and feel just right about being who we were.

We were all these acorns huddled together, getting delicate and brittle, so huddling all the more closely together in our delicate state.

That’s why I didn’t feel like being an Axford.

A lot of the process I was going through in my own life since divorcing was about strengthening this weak sensitivity muscle. I allowed myself to use it and to feel weak and clumsy with it. Eventually it grew quite strong. I continue to strengthen it. I started having different interactions with everyone in my life. My interactions with men changed significantly. I started meeting more men who were more comfortable with their sensitivity and connecting with them in intimate ways. I started sharing myself and being appreciated. I realized how beautiful I was, in every way, as a sensitive person.

I also read some books that were interestingly timed.

Both books are by the author Elizabeth Gilbert.

Right as I was going through my separation from my ex-husband, one of my dearest friends gave me “Eat, Pray, Love.” She said that it sounded like what I was going through…that turned out to be an understatement.

Liz gave words to the very deepest parts of my experience related to my divorce and all the questions I was asking in my life. I was trying to understand my very purpose, what in the world “faith” is, and who I was. I would find myself SOBBING at times, laughing out loud, and only being able to read a few pages at a time. It was so thick with the deepness of me. She was telling MY story.

Then I saw how popular this book was. She was telling all our story, all these HSPs doing our best to make our best life and waking up one day to realize that actually living life comes from the heart not the head…we just hadn’t had anyone to show us that our sensitive hearts are just right.

ALL of the characters in Liz’s books and life existed in my life. This was sort of comforting and sort of difficult to take in. She confirmed to me the difficult outcome of some relationships that I knew must come. She also told of new and better relationships to come. I was still a bit unsure of this, but hopeful.

To sum up these years in the ashes, a quote from “Eat, Pray, Love” as Liz describes her transformation and coming to live a fairytalesque life from the life that was not hers (Side note: I grew up Mormon in Utah…I live in Manhattan now. So, my HSP transformation may be compounded by the Mormonism/Utahism.):

“What keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years—I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well—the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.

I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting here and wonder if it was me, who is now dozing on the deck of the small Indonesian fishing boat [for me, Ane, this would be substituted with sitting in a very European café in the West Village typing a blog post for my own business which I absolutely love, after which I will ride my scooter home to my quaint apartment and enjoy some time with the best friends a person could ask for in a very spring-like and luxurious NYC evening]—who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years. The younger me was the acorn full of potential, but it was the older me, the already-existent oak, who was saying the whole time: ‘Yes—grow! Change! Evolve! Come and meet me here, where I already exist in wholeness and maturity! I need you to grow into me!’ And maybe it was this present and fully actualized me who was hovering four years ago over that young married sobbing girl on the bathroom floor, and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl’s ear, ‘Go back to bed, Liz…’ Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me.”

That book got me through SO MUCH.

I would read some passages like scripture as I was going through some of the inevitable separations and struggles.

And now, now that I have gone through that growth into me, I am looking toward connection. I needed to be independent. Just as first the acorn is attached to and dependent upon the tree, I was dependent in my relationships. Then, I broke free and planted in the ground. That fall to the earth and being buried and breaking out of the shell to shoot forth as a tender little green thing was SCARY and HARD. And so necessary. I needed to be independent. Now that I’m growing, I want to attach my roots to other strong trees. I want a sold place to connect to, roots that intertwine with others in interdependence. Each piece a part of the process: dependence → independence → interdependence.

That brings me to Liz’s next book: “Committed”. She makes peace with marriage.

I just finished reading it. Though she was determined to avoid marrying again, due to her Brazilian partner’s inability to enter the country, she must marry her partner in order for him to stay in the U.S. with her.

So, she has to come to terms with marriage if she wants to be with her partner in the country where they both want to live together.

After this newfound independence and focus on ME, I have fear about how I can enter into a committed relationship again. How to create this interdependence? So much of my questioning, and Liz’s questioning, is about the balance between masculine and feminine, between head and heart, logic and emotion, Greek and Hebrew, Democrat and Republican, sensitivity and economy.

A quote from “Committed”, a book which goes through a detailed analysis of all the very questions that I asked about marriage and relationship, how to be committed to the other and to the self:

“It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us. Because ‘they’ (the powers-that-be) have never been entirely able to stop ‘us’ (two people) from connecting our lives together and creating a secret world of our own. And so ‘they’ eventually have no choice but to legally permit ‘us’ to marry, in some shape or form, no matter how restrictive their ordinances may appear. The government hops along behind its people, struggling to keep up, desperately and belatedly (and often ineffectually and even comically) creating rules and mores around something we were always going to do anyhow, like it or not.

So perhaps I’ve had this story deliciously backwards the whole time. To somehow suggest that society invented marriage, and then forced human beings to bond with each other, is perhaps absurd. It’s like suggesting that society invented dentists, and then forced people to grow teeth. We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact, we invented the whole damn sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversive of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.

To a certain extent, then Felipe [Liz’s new hubby] was right: Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.”

I see now. I get to do both, set up my ideals and then do what I want responsibly. I get to create my version of interdependence. I get to do what I want.

I realized that I WANT TO BE AN AXFORD! I want connection to my father and my family. I want to intertwine my roots, I want to walk along hand in hand through this life. I needed to go it alone, to have this me calling the younger me forth. Now I’m here. And now I want to connect. And, I am.

I’m ready to be Ane Axford. I’m forever married to myself. I’m not taking on anyone else and I don’t want anyone else to take me on. I don’t need anyone else now, and I don’t want to be needed by a partner. I am the tree, no longer an acorn and shell-free. I enjoy myself fully, I enjoy others without needing them. I want them. They are who they are and I am ME.

I have risen from the ashes and I am Ane Axford.

Here I am.

SO, that’s the story…at least the shortest version of it I could tell.