My Reckoning

We are faced with choices every day, all the time. 

For many years of my life, I chose to follow my base impulses, good and bad. I grew up lonely and needy. I got out of a toxic family situation by letting fear and disinformation drive me. I moved in the world feeling blind but wanting to understand everything. Along the way, I numbed my pain with drugs and bad relationships I desperately hoped would keep me safe from my unknown self. I worked in a profession that caused me great anxiety but that was better than other options and less scary than following my dreams. I chased people who didn't want my desperate energy, I lived and loved for validation from the external, anything I could find that was outside of me. I prayed for rescue.

3 years ago, I began working with an energy healer who helped me start to turn that long train around. Who was I? Was I worth the effort of drawing breath? Was I worth the effort of untangling myself from all of the complicated relationships that brought me through to where I was? Could I even find all of my brokenness and bring me home? I was well supported during the time of these investigations, and I learned a lot about what it is to be the soul who embodies this physical presence. I also found myself hanging on for dear life to the woman who was guiding me. She brought me to the presence of God within myself, and she as my mirror was everything I wanted--strength, vision...perfect love. Through the lens of this attachment, I almost broke my marriage.

I also found it again, more deeply--the reasons I love Rainy, how much I would be giving up without her at my side, how rich and bold my life is with her in it. I reined in my magical thinking and reminded myself over and over that I could not live in that room where I moved through dimensions of divine wisdom, that I had to find a way to create that place for myself and within myself--and that I could do those things for myself. At some point, I felt strong enough that I knew I needed to break away from my steadfast guide and move forward without easy access to her. 

Rainy and I moved to North Carolina a month ago, driven by longing for the mountains and the forest and the fact that we can work from any home we make--in the United States, at least. We have been in a state of displacement all this time while we have looked for our new home in this beautiful place. I have been feeling myself getting more and more disconnected since before we left Florida, and now, hundreds of miles away from some familiar faces I love, I have felt the darkness within myself growing. I have felt resentments building as I questioned the authenticity of "healing." What is that, anyway? There is a part of me that declares it is all bullshit, all of this zen magic crap that makes us feel better while the world is burning down. What is the point of the effort when there are so many false prophets out there, selling healing as a form of ego feeding?  What is the point of the effort if someone like a woman I knew all of my life and who broke me unapologetically in a time I was uniquely vulnerable is now advertising herself as an intuit and an empath come to heal others? What is the point of the effort if I am still sitting here by myself in this room, feeling lonely? I CALL BULLSHIT.

Growth is like a sling shot. Arm yourself with knowledge, examine the knowledge from a place of regression to the comfortable, shoot forward.

I am many things. I am a first born child who made a couple a family and whose every breath was deemed a miracle for my first 4 1/2 years on the planet. I am a sister who lost her pedestal to a brother assumed more important because of his gender. I embody the fallout pain of a bitter divorce. I am the lonely transplant to a southern sky. I am a survivor of bad things happening. I am an escapee from a prison called family. I am a woman who has been moving through the world and trying to figure it all out ever since. I am a human falling, thinking I have to grasp those places that seem solid in the rock, not realizing that what I am falling into might just be the me I have been looking for--the beauty of a soul manifest, a love sent to the earth in this time that so desperately needs love. I do not realize that we are all falling. I am a person who can see things differently now, and I am sorry.

I am sorry for my grasping. It brings me deep shame to admit my darkness, my weakness. I spent time the other night googling what is wrong with me, because Google has all the answers, as you know. The closest thing I could come up with is that I have a ruminative cognitive style. It's true, I am a brooder, always have been. So what do I do with that information? Do I go back to a place of holding a victim story, that my obsessive mindset is not my fault? Or. Do I reflect on this with all the knowledge I have now? I am a brooder, I am obsessive, and I let myself fall into patterns of behavior that do not serve anyone well, just the same as a junkie stares at a needle until she feels unable to do anything else but pick it up. And then I lie about it. And again, I am suffering for my compulsions, because no one likes to be on the other end of that. Consequences, man. Insert my mantra, I am a human, not a robot. I am not unforgivable, but that may be only up to me.

What I know after all of that is this: My healing is not bullshit. I have walked a path of crooked, wobbly stones to this place where I write from, down the Old Fort Grade in a house that does not belong to me. Has that not been the story of my life--that I have walked in a life that didn't feel like mine, while at the same time finding depth and richness in all that I have walked with? In my discomfort, I have remembered that darkness will teach me every bit as much as light. But I was never meant to languish there--I was coming to mine the diamonds. Just now, I have found my strength. Everything that has been freely shared with me is a part of who I am now. I am almost whole, and I know how to get to the rest of me. I carry my mother and my father in full acceptance inside me, owning all of me that is them. I never got to do that before. And through them, I can reach all the way through the ancestors to the beginning of everything, the core of life itself. I know I can get there, and I know that this is my journey.

Along the way, my heart breaks, and this breaking of my heart is the key. The way I came to life was as a form, a basic imprint. It is the way I break and put myself back together, time after time, that is the art. I make the choices of what piece goes where, how what once was an apex will now become a wing. 

I make the choices. I choose beauty, I choose joy, I choose hope. I will emerge from this darkness with love.

Grow Julie, grow.