Category: Personal Moments

When I was twenty two, I snuck into my grandmother’s bedroom and stole her bottle of sleeping pills.

I swallowed the lot.

At some point the next day, I woke up. Ravenously hungry. I seem to remember eating about four bowls of cereal, then I went back to bed and slept for the rest of the day. Eventually I woke up for real.

I woke up and realised that I hadn’t died, that I really should have. That no one had found me or saved me or discovered me but that I had still woken up. It was a serious attempt and well executed but I was still here.

There must be a reason.

I told my mother and we dealt with the practicalities of whether there would be any further side effects. Then it was never mentioned again.

There must be a reason.

I told my boyfriend and a couple of friends who added it to my catalogue of ‘crazy’ and never mentioned it again.

Life carried on. My addictions carried on, my crazy head carried on. But no one mentioned that I had just tried to take my own life.

There must be a reason why I am alive because I should be dead. So I decided to find out. I started my long and powerful journey on this road to healing and self discovery. It really is self discovery because what I discovered is that my true self had been totally and utterly buried under my assumed self, the one I thought I was supposed to be. Good and bad.

I am still uncovering it. As I approach 40 I have reached a new layer. A layer of ownership.

I have realised that up until now, up until this very blog as I write and unravel it, I have believed myself to be inherently wrong. The bad one. The one that has had to do therapy and workshops and write and share because I am troubled and damaged.

I am, in part, troubled and damaged, though I wasn’t born this way and I don’t intend to die that way. I am a little broken still but other people have played a part in that and some still do. I have protected those people by believing that it was ‘just me’; I have protected their reputations and facades by being the ‘difficult one’.

Just this week I broke up with a friend because she decided to throw her judgements at me in the name of love. And I realised that that is what I have accepted for nearly 40 years. All in the name of ‘love’.

Except now I have really woken up. I have woken up to my truest self that was born full of pure love and joy. I will no longer be the black sheep or the fall guy. I will no longer accept judgments in the name of ‘love’ & ‘family’ on my life. I am stepping out from these bonds and into my freedom and it feels invigorating and amazing.

And also deeply sad. I have lost my sister, my cousin and two friends to suicide. This awakening has brought new perspective on their passing and that of so many others. Our wounds, that which create the pains, some so great that only death seems to be the answer; these wounds are created from our lives and from the unhealed wounds of our families. This is not to place the burden of blame on any individual but nor will I carry on protecting the damaging acts of others. For me, my desire for death and escape was not because I was ‘genetically malfunctioning’, or ‘in with the wrong crowd’ or even because I was ‘a troubled soul’, it was because the open spirit I had arrived on earth with had been utterly crushed.

Ownership means I will take what is mine and heal that. I will no longer carry the infected wounds of my ancestors. I do this for me and for my children so that when they come to me in 20 years and say ‘I hurt’. I will be able to say ‘let us go and heal together’. For my children’s pain is mine, somehow I will have been part of creating it and, to be complete & loving with them, I choose to also be part of healing it.

Over the years I have had my astrology charted, my numerology configured, tarots read and all sorts of other magical and mystical directions. Some good, some bad, some exciting, some unnerving…. but there has been a theme, a message that has been consistent throughout; I was going to hit my mid 30’s and experience cataclysmic grief.

By the time I was approaching my 35th birthday, I had managed to convince myself that it would be my husband, he works in a risky environment and I had somehow rationalised that the scale of grief I was destined to encounter fitted for him. I braced myself. I spent a year waiting for ‘that’ call; it never came. I am now 38 and still, thankfully, wedded to and loved by my husband.

And yet, in the last two years I have been having energy healing and the appraisal that I have received again and again is that my heart is full of grief. And it is.

I had presumed that grief belonged to the rites of the dead but in fact it is simply for death, not just of life but of relationships too. When I was 35 one of my closest familial relationships began to die, where before it had been wounded and healed, wounded and healed, we had begun a deeper disconnect than ever before. Who knows where life will take us and what resurrection may occur in the future, but for now the reality is that I have had to say goodbye to something I never thought I would.

It has been and continues to be a deeply painful process. Acknowledging it and finally recognising it as grieving, brings light to the darkness. Knowing that I am saying goodbye to an attachment in its current form is allowing me to release the raging anger that I have held, it gives me permission to feel the sorrow and confusion and to reclaim the joy and lightness that I have lost.

I think, as a western society, we are poorly equipped for grief, in all of its forms, and firstly we must remove the assumption that it belongs only to those moments of physical death. I think many of us are grieving and so much of our global anger comes from grief; from loss, from rejection, from abandonment, from painful goodbyes.

My homeopath is helping me to release the layers that have caged me in this unnamed pain and I can feel my spirit fill with love again, raising me up to the surface. After my very first remedy I gasped for air; I had spent the last few years forgetting how to breathe.

So here I am now, facing this cataclysmic grief that has always been my destiny, I have named it and recognised it and now I can heal.

 

With grateful thanks to Anne Do Espírito Santo http://www.annehomeopath.com

Once upon a time I was a party girl. For all the reasons anyone ever is, lots of fun and a whole lot of numbness. I even remember one long summer in my teens being absolutely determined to go out every single night, accepting dates I would have otherwise have rejected, just to be out.

With the parties came alcohol and drugs, a sure fire way to numbness and oblivion until the morning at least. I can’t say it was a particularly happy time but it certainly enabled me to get by without having to face any of the darkness that I held, any of those feelings that are just too strong, too hard, too scary.

Years have passed and so have some truly special healing moments, releases and understandings that have forged me into a saner individual, one that can function emotionally and settle into the normality of society (just about!).

And yet I find myself here, mother of two, wife, writer, home maker and cook; I find myself remembering fondly those moments of oblivion. I find myself feeling nostalgic about crazy amounts of alcohol and surreal nights with strangers, with people who don’t know me at all. I find myself thinking, that would be nice right now, that would be a little bit easier than this.

Because parenting, relationships, even just being a good friend, can feel so damn difficult at times. All these mirrors to me, all these dynamics that open up my awareness to the unhealed, to my shadows, to the parts of me that I would like to ignore, are standing firm with solid reflection.

And I don’t want to look.

I don’t want to see that I’ve been a grumpy mummy for a whole week and actually it’s nothing to do with my kids; I don’t want to see that I can feel so jealous of my friends’ other friendships that I twist with discomfort; I don’t want to see the broken relationship with my mother; or the moments with my husband where I lack the most basic elements of compassion. I don’t want to face any of that. Oblivion sounds so much easier.

But I do remember that it isn’t. That is has its own empty, heartbreaking breath, jagged and lonely. I do remember that I was always teetering on the edge of life, wondering what lay beyond, yearning for a little flash of contented happiness.

So in these moments of nostalgia, I sit and remember the wild giggles and raucous skirmishes and know that I still choose ‘now’ because I finally do have a hold on my own reality, a tie to each day that draws me back and settles me into those minutes of blissful content in between the ache for oblivion.