The Long Pause

It’s been over a year since I last posted. A long year. With so much death and hatred it has become difficult to see past the bad and retain hope. A friend’s boyfriend was in Charlottesville during the riots and was so affected by what happened that it pushed him over the edge of his already teetering depression. He took his life. Friends and family have lost jobs and family members, been diagnosed with cancer, and have had to move away just to afford to live. None of that is new, but it builds on the already unusual surplus of negative energy that weighs down our world.

Despite that, some good has come from this year. One of my very good friends got married to her best friend. I got engaged to my boyfriend of 6.5 years in July and we’re planning to get married next year. We moved from northern Virginia to southern Maryland for his job, which pays plenty well for us to live. I’ve found a Pagan community to socialize with and I’ve transitioned to a full-time job. Things are going okay and despite the raincloud of my depression slowly following me, I can run out from under its downpour often enough that I don’t feel like I’m drowning. Some of that is because I’m on a stable regimen of medication. More of it is because my Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is going well. I started it about a month ago to progress with coming to terms with my sexual trauma from college. That someday may be another post I write in detail, but I’m not there yet.

One thing I’ve been trying to get a better hold on is my daily practice. Whether or not you are Wiccan or have spiritual practices, find something you do every day. I’m sure most of you have a routine in the mornings: brushing teeth, washing your face, eating breakfast. Find five minutes that you can sit down, clear your mind, and breathe. Let your thoughts drift by like colorful inner tubes on a lazy river. Focus on the breath, the IN and OUT of the air through your lungs. If you are religious, give a shoutout to your favorite deity. Whenever I see my cats I remember how much Bast has supported me and loved me and I thank Her for blessing us with our two derpy fuzzballs.

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not, remember to express gratitude to those around you. Be a little extra nice to the cashier at the grocery store. Say “Thank You” to your spouse or partner when they bring you food on the way home. Give an extra hug or pat to your pets before you leave. The output of that small positive energy you expel will hopefully multiply and help tip the scales to balance out the negativity going on everyday.

Thank YOU, for the few of you who do read my posts. If you’d like to have healthy discussions with me or others in the comments you are most welcome. Questions? Ask away.

Breathe, ground and repeat.

On Dealing with Death (a pondering)

Have you ever experienced the sudden, echoing, yet fleeting feeling of overwhelming fear in your chest?  The one where it feels like something wraps its icy hands around your heart, squeezes, and it pulses across your body like frozen lightning. As soon as it appears, it is then gone and you’re left somewhat dazed with the shadowy leftover of sadness, panic, and confusion as to how it happened.

When I was in middle & high school, I used to get this feeling often and without warning. I would be walking home from the bus, sitting in class, or reading a book (entirely unrelated to the mention of death). In middle school, I was the quintessential goth: chain pants, black, shirts with ‘funny’ and sassy sayings on them, and a love for My Chemical Romance and The Used (which I admit, a decade later, I still love those bands–RIP MCR). I was obsessed with the dark and morbid, surrounding myself with all things that screamed death and darkness. Despite all of that, I was terrified of death. It was a five letter word that struck in me a fear of the unknown, of not existing, of drawing a final breath with lungs burning for air. I tried to immerse myself in the idea of it so I could feel more comfortable with it. I wasn’t suicidal, my brain was racing to the end of my timeline–when I was eighty- or ninety-something and on my deathbed. I figured that the last fifteen years of my life have gone in a flash, why not the next seventy? In the moment of that aforementioned fear, it felt like that moment would be tomorrow and it gripped me so tight that it would send me into a panic attack. A few years later I developed depression that was noticeable enough to seek help. I was harming myself to feel pain through numbness, and my inner voice was very mean. The venom in the things I told myself was so intense, especially late at night, that I would make myself cry until I passed out from exhaustion.

My first memorable experience with a close family death was with my maternal grandmother’s passing in 2008. I couldn’t comprehend how someone could exist one moment, and not in the next. I would remember the tears on her face whenever we left her house after a visit (she lived 6 hours away in WV and we could only visit 4-5 times a year).

I wonder if she was thinking that it might be the last time she saw us?

She passed a week before Mother’s Day weekend that year, when we were to go up and visit to celebrate it and my mother’s & my birthday (ours a week apart).

How can someone look so different when their face is still, gravity pulling it down, body so strangely still with no breath to swell the chest? 

Other deaths of distant family friends have felt disconnected and unreal, since I didn’t know them directly. Other than family pets, I’ve only yet felt such sadness after the death of my mentor’s mother last fall before Samhain (Halloween). Although I only spent time in her presence two or three times, her passing hit me hard. I knew it was coming–she was sick–yet it still came as a tidal wave of confusion and surreality of not understanding where she had gone.

How is it that I can no longer hug her, talk to her, see her, when I just did that last week?

I’ve been trying to approach a different way of coping with death as a concept. It’s a natural, inevitable part of the life cycle–despite how much we strive to put it off.

No one gets out alive.

When I fully embraced being Wiccan, I was immersed in the understanding that we were once a part of the earth and the force of life that swirls around us. When we have our physical incarnation to carry out a living journey, we must eventually come to terms that someday we will rejoin the life force embodied by the earth. We will merge with it and nourish the next cycle of life that comes after us. We will be come a part of the grass, flowers, and air that lives on after us. Green burial actually highlights this point, that being buried naturally into the earth will aid the process of new life. The embalming fluid, concrete, chemical-treated wood, artificial materials, and ash of cremation is an attempted barrier made by the living to separate themselves from the idea of the withering, rotting corpse that will become of that person in a matter of days and weeks. We try to prolong death even after it has happened.

I collect animal skulls to remind myself of the simplicity of mortality. The fascination of seeing this beautifully macabre thing that was once encased in blood vessels, muscle, skin and fur/hair/feathers is a stark reminder of the almost incomprehensible concept that it once lived as I do now. I keep them (and clean them) to honor their time on this earth. I care for them because that is my way of acknowledging that life force. Someday I hope that there will be one who remembers my life force like that.

So then I ask you to do this for me. Listen to “In a Week” by Hozier. Don’t just listen to the lilting melody, really listen to the lyrics. This song on repeat has instilled a calm in me that I’ve never known. It places beauty of nature next to the sad realness of your death (and that of those you love), and–at least for me–helps me deal with the bigger picture of the world. Though I may be hardly a speck of dust within the blink of human existence on this planet, I will someday contribute to the future of its environmental prosperity.

Ten years later, that cold feeling of fear has become a heavy stone suspended in my ribs. The warm pulse of my heartbeat is much steadier, despite the smoke-like evasion of the fear that once sent me into a spiraling frenzy.

I’d call that progress, wouldn’t you?

Breathe, ground, and repeat. One day at a time.

Pre-Quarter-Life Crisis (Whining/Rambling)

As a 22-almost-23-year old, I have just enough experience to give me stories and plenty of naïveté to have no fucking clue as to what I’m talking about. Just enough pizzaz to make me dangerously obnoxious…in a wise way. I’ve officially coexisted with depression and anxiety for five years, I’ve dealt with sexual assault and abusive friendships, and I’m in a relationship that I see as one of those rare first/last everything kinda deals. At the same time…I don’t know heartbreak and I have lived a pretty cushy life with parents who are still together and provide me with everything I’ve ever wanted and more. From some perspectives I have no place to complain about anything in my life, no matter how superficial. From others, including my own, I am not one who has experienced unimaginable hardships and I do not compare my life to those starving children in Africa that are often held over your head as a child who doesn’t like vegetables. As someone with depression, it is unfair to belittle your pain, emotions, despairs and fears because someone somewhere is having a life one billion times worse than the single most terrible second of your own life. There will always be someone out there who is suffering, but that doesn’t make your suffering less important.

My mentor taught me something that I try to remind myself daily: “Sometimes other’s feelings aren’t our work.” That’s not to say, “Fuck everyone else, I’m the only one whose feelings matter,” but rather, “My emotional well-being is slightly more important than others, because I am the one who lives my life and I can only heal others if I first start healing myself.” As a natural empath, I absorb the pain and emotions from those I hold dear. My first instinct is to try to take their pain away, because it hurts to see them hurt. It took a long time to start acting like a sponge and not dry wood: to then wring out others’ pain after I have absorbed it so it does not affect my own mental health, rather than sucking up all of their emotions only to let it poison me from not letting go. I’m a work in progress, but then so are you.

Moving on to the purpose of this post: I have no idea where my life is headed. I went to college pursuing an art degree. I graduated with a BFA with a photography concentration, a minor in Spanish and another minor in Art History. In the real world, that pretty much means diddly squat. Before I graduated, I loved photographing people and capturing the inherent beauty of the human form. A few months after graduation, I get a job at a family portrait company and I thought I found my dream job. My anxiety gets in the way, I end up resigning, and I’m now a low-level manager at a retail store. I get enough hours to be just around the maximum hour requirements to remain at Part-Time, and I consistently question if I want to have a career in photography because I’m afraid that working in a medium I love will spoil it. Within a year, I’ve gone from wanting my own studio in ten years to doubting my entire career path. I’m throwing up my hands asking, “what ELSE am I even good at?” because all I can do is carry a rough conversation in Spanish and write OK scholarly papers. They don’t prepare you for the real world in school, especially for those of us seeking higher education in a field that’s kind of a crap shoot. You’re either ‘in’ with the good connections and find your niche in a gallery or industry, or you’re a starving artist who has a day job to pay the bills.

I went on a hike with my boyfriend yesterday with my camera and the kit zoom lens it came with, and I had fun photographing the nature as we went along the trail. I though I took some great photos, but when I looked at them on my laptop they are not nearly as sharp as I had hoped. My camera has limited capability in how far you can push its high detail and sensitivity to light, which I got spoiled on from the professional-quality cameras we used at school. Even when I get excited to take photos for fun, I get disappointed because the quality ruins a fairly good picture (or at least an attempt at one). I don’t have the money nor the budgeting skills to buy a better camera (or even a better lens for the one I have), and it’s frustrating to see something you used to be passionate about slowly swirl down the drain. I have no idea what I’m good at, I’m scared of people (especially strangers), and I don’t have a Go Get’em attitude because I have low confidence. If there was a job I could do at home without human interaction that could give me enough money to do the things I wanted, that’d be a dream and a half. Clearly it’s just a dream, we can’t earn what we don’t work for. Every night by the time I get home from work, I’m repeating my “I hate people” mantra over and over in my head. I understand why retail makes people so bitter and sad. On top of that, dealing with the pulsing aftermath of dealing with self-repressed memories of traumatic experiences (with the help of a therapist) only makes everyday things feel more daunting. Numbness, lack of focus, my thoughts flittering around like a swarm of hummingbirds on crack in a cloud of confusing gas. I can’t even make my daily practices consistent because of my inability to instate and repeat a routine on my own. Since the beginning of this post I’ve lost my direction of where this was going to end. I guess I’ll just stop here for now.

Still breathing. Trying to stay grounded.

It’s A Kind of Magic (rambling/revelation)

Yes, that’s a reference to one of my favorite Queen songs, but that’s not what this post will be about.

Everyone knows Disneyland is a magical place, right? Well, as a kid at heart and one who had never been to any Disney theme park until the ripe young age of 22, I have finally experienced the magic. Of course I know that (SPOILER ALERT) the characters are just actors in costume, but I put that aside for three days while I let myself fangirl out and revel in the fact that I was meeting my childhood friends: Pooh, Eeyore, Snow White, Belle, etc. I let myself accept the unbridled awe and excitement of new discovery and exploration; I allowed the tears and shivers well up during the fantastic shows in the full moonlight. I let myself feel everything because that freedom is a kind of magic.

Magic is the shiver that runs down your spine like the pinprick of a static shock when you listen to an amazing song and it washes over you (“You Are Not Alone” from the Into the Woods movie comes to mind). Magic is the warm swell in your heart when you first realize you’re in love, and every time after when you are reminded of that love. Magic is the soaring quietness of your mind in the full moonlight at midnight, meditating on the cool ground as you inhale the damp coolness of late-fall air. What people don’t often realize is that magic is an everyday thing: no matter how fleeting. It’s in the constant routines of our most mundane tasks and it’s in the grandeur of a sabbat ritual.

Whether you’re gathered around a candle-lit Yule log in a cauldron or you’re brushing your teeth and planning your day, magic is there. Don’t ignore that unnamed feeling tugging at the corner of your mind when you catch a glimpse of that magic. Pause a little longer outside and smell the air around you, feeling in that moment the senses of the earth and world around you. Stare into the fire a little longer when you light your hearth or candle, and notice the electric blue fade into the pale yellow-orange that dances with the air. As you wash your hands, watch the water flow a little longer and notice the rivulets streaming around every curve of terrain on your palms and knuckles.

Noticing these little moments of magic allow us to appreciate the less-than-exciting parts of everyday life.

Breathe, calm, and ground. Blessed be the New Year.