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  Love me, Loudly

  Love me, Loudly

  JESS KOLBE

  Copyright © 2020 Jess Kolbe

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN

  9780648933601 (Paperback)

  9780648933618 (eBook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the Author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidentail.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  A Cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia.

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  I am forever indebted to my beautiful parents who love and support me, with uncompromising belief.

  They are two genuine gifts in my life that I am so lucky to have and cherish every day.

  Bree Downes-Smith, who understood what I am trying to achieve and her willingness to always show up for Love me, Loudly.

  Enromous thanks for the woman she is and the woman she will be.

  I hope you feel a little less disconnected and a little more heard. To be emotionally bare, is love accepted, of self.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  HER | One

  HIM | Two

  HER | Three

  HIM | Four

  HER | Five

  HIM | Six

  HER | Seven

  HIM | Eight

  HER | Nine

  HIM | Ten

  HER | Eleven

  HIM | Twelve

  HER | Thirteen

  HIM | Fourteen

  HER | Fifteen

  HIM | Sixteen

  HER | Seventeen

  HIM | Eighteen

  HER | Nineteen

  HIM | Twenty

  HER | Twenty-one

  HIM | Twenty-two

  HER | Twenty-three

  HIM | Twenty-four

  HER | Twenty-five

  HIM | Twenty-six

  HER | Twenty-seven

  HIM | Twenty-eight

  HER | Twenty-nine

  HIM | Thirty

  HER | Thirty-one

  HIM | Thirty-two

  HER | Thirty-three

  HIM | Thirty-four

  HER | Thirty-five

  HIM | Thirty-six

  HER | Thirty-seven

  LOVING. LOUDLY.

  ABOUT AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  He stands before me, bare, peeled back. Naked in heart and soul, something we have both grown accustomed to. Being emotionally naked. I take in his body, drinking in every line, every muscle, lingering in all his special parts, the ones I love. The room is full of our scented energy, salty sweet, with earthy undertones encouraging our raw selves to reveal themselves. His manhood hangs heavy and full, glistening with the glow of me. He allows me the time to take him in completely. His body is moulded by spectacular genes and a life lived of hard physical work. It shows in his body and face, a man put together well. He is all mine and I entirely his!

  I never knew love could be like this. I never thought that I could be loved. Love didn’t feel like an option for me. I could never have dreamed us, nor even considered the love that exists within me. I didn’t truly understand the friendship that comes with love, that I could be accepted in both my known self and my wounds. I thought I had to get a man, desperately cling to him and hope he never finds out how broken I am. I mean, who could love someone like me?

  I was so very wrong. I discovered a capacity within me to love, and to learn to receive love, to be comfortable in all my insecurities, my demons, trust and need for control… These are what I have found made me the perfect woman for my love and his history, the perfect man for me, a gift in this life for both of us.

  I told myself that if I started journaling my experiences it could protect him from my broken parts, my manic mind. I needed to put my fears somewhere, and writing became my freedom and our story together of learning to love.

  Our lovemaking has evolved immensely in trust and emotional vulnerability. This is how I find myself on the hard timber floor, him manoeuvring my hips to his liking, hands purposefully gliding over my skin, waking my every sense, calling my body to him. I lean, allowing him in, trusting him unconditionally. I am open, exposed and submitting to his will, to his passionate heart. We experience unspoken moments where we exist in body and in heart, safely exploring our felt emotions and each other, at times in tender touch and others in mind-blowing love making.

  A year ago, if you said this would be me, I’d call bullshit and yet here I am. You see I was damaged with pieces of me broken off and drowned in the depths of a shivering abyss. Then I found a strength that I never knew had survived within me. I fled from everything external, from everyone trying to fix me, to find my own internal courage and to learn that I had all that I needed to be freed from my caged heart. I rose up from the depths of pain into a strong woman who could be grounded in her real self and true to her wounds with grace.

  The universe presented me a gift in this man, Sam, and my monsters came back with a vengeance, attacking me in the dark scratching at my soul, tearing my heart, dragging me back to that dark abyss…

  My thoughts are stopped in their tracks with one look from the man I love ever so deeply. He catches my eye, eagerly awaiting my encouragement before holding my gaze and pleasing me. Heat swirls around my throbbing thighs, aching for his sex, collapsing into him, savouring every touch, relishing his strength. His eyes are alive with purpose, the heat spinning around us as he watches me admiring his every move. Our intensity increases with our love.

  Our connection is interrupted by my battling thoughts again - how the hell did I get so lucky? I feel the joy rising in me as the sensation of my love brings appreciation to my heart. Joy comes bounding out of me in this moment capturing me as we build our love making together. Sam feels it too. I move to tame my joy, falling to my knees in front of this man, in complete faith. I am love expressed in this instant, in him, in us, for this man loves me ever so loudly.

  HER | One

  For my sanity and to slowly drip feed my love to my crazy I began to write. Creating a place where my fears can flourish rather than controlling me from the corners of my mind. I instead release it all in words, allowing the idea of writing to someone help me to let someone into my pain, and to practice being with my pain.

  Monsters are real and terrible things happened to me. I lived my fears and fought hard to not be controlled by what happened to me. I truly have never known the love of another, and I want to.

  I need to let my anxieties and trauma out, let them run through what they need to, in order for me to function as best I can and not have the anxiety monsters ruin my life.

  Before we begin my love story, let me tell you how I got here. I must share with you, how this curvy and oh so sassy warrior, found a love she didn’t know existed within her. I don’t always feel enough in my life and I am learning to accept that my best is enough.

  My life has been a warzone and because of that I am always on, like a simmer. Truth be told it’s more like a long bubbling boil. Ready for anything, my brain only seems to experience “on” mode, awaiting the next blow. My survival mode can be a foreign thing for me, only realising I am, at times operating without quality control, spending too much time in my thoughts and thinking everyone is out to hurt me. Stuck in survival mode, no one’s ever getting too close. My only motivation in life was survival. I only focused on potential dangers. Everyone was a threat. Thought patterns letting me think I am my thoughts and that every thought is a truth.
I’d then process my life according to the data those thoughts collected, whether it is rational or not. Logic doesn’t matter to the survival part of me. My adrenaline fuelled thinking compelled me to predict the world and manage the next punch, either from myself or an external threat. Essentially, my brain operates to survive life; to endure, not to thrive; not to live loudly. Living a life where fear is in control and I’m operating to avoid being hurt again. I learnt and ran from the so-called “experts”: professionals who tried discovering my broken parts to “fix me” as I was broken, or I didn’t feel properly in order to heal.

  ‘Perhaps, I was not broken. Maybe bent a little - more a sign of the fighter in me,’ I thought. I was doing my best considering what happened to me. I have discovered that there is actually no fucking “right” way. There’s no unlocking some part of me in the deepest of holes that could free me.

  I found I could trust myself and show up for me, whatever that looked like. I didn’t trust that my feeling could be right. I had to express, I had to tell my story, daily, to be free of it in my way. I had to stop arguing with myself. I had to start choosing the life I wanted, otherwise I wouldn’t make it.

  So, I did.

  I stopped engaging in mindless bullshit of what I was meant to do, because I was failing at that too. I had to listen to my screaming heart. I just couldn’t keep failing at healing. I was teetering on the edge, not sure if I could come back. I wanted to live, not just survive this ever-present pain, which was numbing me to my core. I could no longer stand the pain. I committed to be present in my feelings and in life, basically to show up in what was authentic and real for me.

  This meant I had to learn what was authentic for me. My monsters had even switched me off from myself and who I was under the weight of my scars. If I was sad, I let my body shudder, I was just fucking sad. If I felt down, I allowed it in, I’d weep. I’d argue with my body, tear at her agony. I’d find that feeling within my body and just sit with it, hold it, like a mother would with a toddler. I taught myself to discover what sad could look like beyond being frozen in petrified bodily fear. I learnt what happens when I accept my fear, when I accept my body to freeze, what happens if I comfort and allow acceptance of what I am feeling, rather than fighting it away, pretending as if it’s not happening. This is where I found freedom, by designing and creating ways to spend my feelings. I freed myself from the cage that I was locked in.

  I don’t design my feelings. They’re a truth to my experiences, my pain, an old scar, an old belief, reacting to my environment. If we weren’t meant to feel, why are our first few years of life lived in feeling only? This became a mantra in the dark times to allow the feelings to exist. I just let them be, without judgement, and they stopped owning me. I learnt to emotional process by chance. I stopped battling myself as to what I should or shouldn’t be thinking, feeling, being, healing. Fuck that shit. I realised I never failed me. I never let myself down. I was fighting for myself every day. I write my own fucking story. Somewhere in all of my mess I showed up and discovered how to spend my emotions, not just acknowledge what I am feeling. To find ways to put physical action to my feelings and this, was my freedom. I came up with an encouraging mantra, allow, accept, and spend.

  I have had extreme versions of all emotions. Expressing these is not the easiest of options and I have previously preferred to run from, ignore, push down or attempt to lose myself in other things to feel something other than what I needed to feel.

  NOT ANY FUCKING MORE.

  I am that crazy chick that hums to her own tune, smiles at the world and feels whatever, wherever. I have an ongoing relationship with myself and my past. I have good days and bad. The more I allow, accept and spend, the more skilled I become at understanding me and how I react to things, in that I have a history that follows me around and the world can still be a harsh place. I am beginning to trust myself to have my own back, and work through whatever I am faced with. I have already survived so much.

  Everyone has a story. Their traumas, anxieties, mental health, depression, PTSD… the pain is yours and only yours. Every person at one time or another has wanted it all to be over, or to end. My realisation is not new, nor is my battle. I’m not fucking special in what life has dished out to me, not to make any of it okay or justify actions that hurt me. When I allowed myself to stop trying to get over my life and began a relationship with myself, from a perspective of kindness and learning, it all changed. Rather than ‘I should be this’ or ‘should be that’, I became curious about how my body and brain processed things. I learnt a lot, as rather than telling myself what it should be, I actually listened to what I needed. No-one was going to ride in on a white stallion and save me. There’s no fucking knight in shining armour in this story. So, I needed to goddess the fuck up and find my own armour. There are no miracle answers. I had to create, not wait for something external to fix me. I would have been swallowed by my monsters lost in their torment, tearing at my heart. If I had waited one more day.

  I refused to be on the same gut-wrenching merry-go-round spinning out of control. I stripped my emotions bare, finding a way to me and accepted her as whatever she needed to be. So, in letting go of a design of what should be, I found the evolution of a woman who could be happy, strong, and that she evolved in her style, not perfection, nor broken, just being and contentment poured in, with moments of pure joy. I stopped letting my past attempt to control my future. I had to free myself otherwise I would end it, end the suffering and I wanted to live. There’s more, there has to be more to life, and I wanted it! I clung to hope, as the opposite was death. I stopped engaging in this mindless bullshit of ‘should’! Should be healed, should not be depressed, should be over it by now, should change medication, should listen to this podcast, should find a man, should be happy, having it all together, picture-perfect white picket fucking fence and let go of all those shitty expectations and knowing that white picket fences were never going to be my thing. I ran with kindness and a gentle approach to myself. I learnt to be ok with my emotions, as they are not my enemy and they had a right to exist in my world, because fuck me, my horrors petrify me into disbelief. I found that I didn’t break, I felt release. I didn’t get lost in my darkness anymore, I spent less and less time there, while discovering that my darkness is how I coped, actually my own protection system and the safest place in the world for me. I stopped trying to hide my feelings, stopped trying to prevent them from being expressed, and stopped holding back the tidal wave of pressure. I accepted and acknowledged that they have a right to be in my world because they reflect the depth of what I have lived and are the way forward in retaking my life.

  That was a few years ago. It took a few months to get everything out of my system. Warnings should be compulsory for what antidepressant withdrawal is truly like, how you attack yourself internally and after that horrible time, I have not looked back. I am me in compassion, not judging myself harshly. I practiced not fighting with what should be and allowed my body, mind, and brain time to heal. I got out of my own way and trusted myself. Something, a long time ago was taken from me and I fought so very hard to live through. My shame consumed me. I was wrong on the inside. I couldn’t trust myself, so I had to trust others and I listened to everyone, desperate to get away from me. I did what I was told, even when everything in me was saying no. If you scream ‘No’ long enough it loses its meaning. Not even heard by me, when I was still attempting to speak, and no-one was listening! No-one truly heard my empty screams muffled by my own compliance with fear.

  I’ve had it all, therapists, shrinks, pills, spiritual healers, mindfulness shit to a near fucking exorcism and the stupid thing was everything was external to me. No one said I had the power! It felt like not one person, including me, believed in my ability to heal. I couldn’t comprehend what happened to me, let alone figure out what to fucking do. So, I made a promise to strive to feel in control of myself and that’s how it started. In search of control and choice, I discovered my freedom. I
learnt to allow and accept my body’s expression of my emotional experience when I am triggered. This was my biggest hurdle, to learn to trust myself to be out of control and trust I can put myself back together. I discovered that I always did, I could always come back to me, even if that looks like a fumbling mess sobbing uncontrollably on the floor, or, to frozen in a zombie like state, or to walking around as if nothing in the world affects me. All of it is me working ridiculously hard and successfully because I am still here. I used to fight myself and hide my hands shaking, ignore my heart thumping so hard it feels like it is going to break free from my ribs that contain her. I would force a shutdown to contain everything internally, while inside silent screams rained down on me. And yet, I would deny it, tearing away at my insides! I was scared to feel, frozen by fear. Frozen in a false sense of control, that made me feel safe. I thought I could break out of that. I had the illusion of control. Now, I feel with my body and heart. I learnt to allow space, to allow time to nurture my screams, to scream until my screams ran out or my hoarse throat pained me so. Through practice and self-trust, I discovered that breaking a little was the best thing I ever did. No resistance.

  First, my trust was ripped from me, and then I handed it away in order to ‘heal’. This ultimately became the source of taking back my power, in realising I had the power within me. It is far from ideal and I don’t want it to be, I’m proud of me both in my mess and my grace. It is my choice and I have one, a choice for the first time, in a long time. This type of surrendering to self, means I’m in the driver’s seat and growing stronger and happier every day. It’s far from fucking perfect and I have called it an epic fail in the middle of the night while being tormented by my past and yet survived to stand on my own two feet in the morning. I still have days where my brain is running the fear show and my thinking is off on mad thoughts based in fear or whatever I’m struggling with at the time. I’ve come to realise I am not alone in this. We all as humans experience this. I thought there was something very wrong with me. Some of us have fears that are real, the monsters in the dark are really, there, attempting to tear our souls from our bodies. I want to make sure my fear response protects me in the future when I need it too. Bad things happen all the time.