I feel like I’ve been stuck for over a year. It’s not true really. I’ve been grieving and recovering from what I now affectionately term “the year from hell”. I’m an incredibly strong person – I have managed a lot of change and challenges in my life, but 2010 really did break me. I had many people ask me why I wasn’t curled up in a ball on the floor. I was. It just wasn’t on the outside.
And I think this is why it’s so hard for me to see that I wasn’t “stuck” last year – I was healing. It might have been easier for me to accept if I had been in the hospital or had an injury I could see. Then I could have pointed to something and said “see – there it is – I’m waiting for that to get better”. But when it’s my emotional state, it’s hard to point at it because it’s hard to see it when you’re trapped in the midst of it. And so I spent much of last year going “yeah, ok, I’m still healing and it’s slow-going for me to get stuff done, but I can snap out of it and get moving”. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t until the dam started to crack earlier last month, that I began to see any improvement. I went through the motions, but I was getting done in a month what would have taken me only a day to complete two years before.
And now, as the dam breaks and the waters begin to flood through, I can really see where I was. I was floating in that deep water abyss formed by the dam. Periodically, I’d tread water to prove to myself that I could get my head above the water, but mostly I didn’t. Mostly I stayed immersed in the murky depths, sinking down into the gestational fluids of my own healing. Soaking in the pain and the grief and the overwhelm until it had permeated my being.
I can’t say that I’m happy that I had the year I did in 2010. But I will say that I have a much greater understanding of depression, grief, pain and shut-down than I had before. I am a better coach, shaman and healer for the experience. I think I’m probably a better person for it.
But that’s not what I wanted to write to you about today (although clearly I needed to say it). What I wanted to tell you about today is the change that is flooding through my life and the lives of those around me. In the last week, I’ve gotten my mojo back. I’ve gotten a ton of work done compared to the last year. It’s still not quite up to the level I had done before everything fell apart, but I’m feeling that level of energy returning. And there’s more.
I wrote on Valentine’s Day about the new man in my life and how amazing he is. Well, he brought change with him. Just before he met me, he had gotten a job in his field for the first time in two years. Then he met me. Then, we found him a new apartment, so that he could reduce the commute from his old place to the new job. And over last weekend and this weekend, we cleaned out his car and got it detailed so that the last vestiges of his depression from the last couple of years was gone. Then he helped me get started on mine.
This weekend, we cleaned the front hall of my house, got one year of my mother’s back taxes done (one step closer to being done with the estate work), and we got my headboard mostly covered. (It was built for me as a gift from a friend almost a year ago now to keep my head and neck warmer since the wall over my bed is sorely uninsulated, but it was delivered as raw plywood that I needed to decide how to finish.) We also reset the altars in my home. It was well past time for that.
I have three altars in the house that we changed. One is a personal altar. One is a house altar. And one is the altar I set up around my love life. (I also have an ancestor altar and a money altar, but we didn’t change those. Perhaps those will be next.) Obviously, since I have manifested this amazing new man in my world, it was time to change the love life altar to include him in it. I reset that and my personal altar and built a connecting point between them (previously, although they had been side by side, they had been completely different and not energetically connected.) Below is a picture of the new altars.
And then I reset the house altar and that really made things feel different in the house. Here’s a picture of that one.
I see a lot of change happening around me. One of my housemates got a new job (he starts today), another friend ended a long relationship. Things are changing a lot – again. Thankfully, this time most of the changes seem to be for the better rather than the massive breakdown of a couple of years ago. We’ll see how it goes. I’m hanging in.