Displaying items by tag: strength

Recently, I have felt as if I am unraveling. I am watching myself fall apart mentally, emotionally, and maybe even physically. It’s uncomfortable and I am resisting. I want to feel whole again. I want to be in control of my life again. Just when I feel that I have a grasp on this thing we call life, another wrench is thrown into the proverbial smooth running machine. 

I’ve been on an official healing journey for over three years, but really, the journey began many years before that. 

The human mind is more powerful than we can ever fathom. When you start to filter in positive thoughts, your life will begin to transform. ~Buddha

Life tends to either build you up or knock you down, and we never know which one it will be at any given moment. The latter seems to be happening to me lately. I am caught in a chaotic swirl of the universe’s energy that caused a series of bad luck events. All of them happening within a three-month span knocked me down for the count. I didn’t want to get back up. I wanted to lay on the ground, hiding from the world so that nothing else could get me.

When one negative event after another gives you the proverbial punch in the face, it can be hard to think clearly or rationally. Emotions tend to take control and make everything worse. The mind starts spiraling into a paranoid view of the world. “What else is going to happen?” haunts your thoughts, despite your best efforts to remain positive.

There have been very few Christmases that I haven’t spent with my family in Pennsylvania. Growing up in a small town, the holidays were some of the highlights of my childhood. A crisp morning greeted us on the short walk to the humming car, pre-heated and all ice crystals melted from the windshield. The air smelled fresh and clean, as if the snow and cold hit a reset button on the usual scents of, where I grew up, nearby cattle farms.

Two years ago, in December of 2021 I spent the Christmas and New Year’s holidays by myself, exploring the countryside and cities of North Carolina, searching for places to feel like I belonged, for a place I could call my home. It was a tumultuous time for me. I was still grieving and trying to heal from the loss of my husband and my life in an unexpected divorce. My heart leaked with failure, depression, and pain. My mind urged me to run far away from the pain and memories of my past. 

“Transitions are almost always signs of growth, but they can bring feelings of loss. To get somewhere new, we may have to leave somewhere else behind.” ~Fred Rogers 

For the past two years, I have traveled to a number of places on my own. I made these trips because after my divorce, reality hit: nothing is guaranteed in this life and I wanted to make sure I enjoyed as many places as possible. I was still a living, breathing, functioning human being. Losing someone that meant so much to me was not in my plan, but traveling was, and always will be. I set about making lists of all the travel destinations I wanted to pursue, along with times and dates for these journeys. Then I started planning and preparing. 

The pain and grief we feel when we lose a loved one to death or divorce is one of the most intense feelings we will ever have. The emotion literally feels like physical pain. Like a hammer came down on your foot or a brick just fell on your chest. If you’re human, you have experienced these things and have developed ways to cope that work the best for you personally. 

There is a story in the Buddhist tradition about a clay statue of the Buddha in a monastery in Thailand. Over the years, it was protected in the monastery from outside invaders. One day while it was being relocated, one of the monks spotted a crack in the clay. When the monk looked closer, he noticed that underneath the clay there was solid gold. The clay statue had been made of gold the whole time!

The sway of the instructor’s hips mesmerized me. Jingling like bells, the tassels of her dress sashayed in rhythm with her hips as she twisted and turned. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her flawless figure, her precise foot fall, the way her shoulders sliced through the air as she maneuvered across the dance floor. At that moment, I fell in love with belly dancing.

     At thirty-six years old, my belly roiled with nerves about taking my first formal dance classes. I had enjoyed dancing since I first watched Britney Spears and the boy bands in middle school. When I moved to music—even if I were alone in front of my dresser mirror--a feeling of longing washed over me. When I dance to music, confidence eclipses my fears, and I move into a natural rhythm even though I have no formal training. 

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly things can change. Over the course of a year, you could be living in an entirely different state. In just a month you could be working at a different job. In a week, you could welcome someone new into your life. And in mere moments you could lose someone you love. Your life is flipped upside down. Anyone who has ever lost someone they love knows exactly how this feels.

Time is constantly pulling us along, always changing, always putting new opportunities and new people into our lives. But it’s also taking things away that we might hold onto tightly. We all have these pictures of what “the ideal” is, the myths we tell ourselves when we find the perfect job, the perfect mate. Attachments are dangerous, yet they are necessary.

One night, I had an anxiety attack. I was in my apartment, with just my cat, Jinx. I had just indulged in one too many glasses of wine and a depressing amount of ice cream, trying to stuff down my sadness and quell my racing mind. I thought of reaching out to someone, a friend or my sister, but it was too late. I was inconsolable. I wailed and cried, and I couldn’t breathe through my nose. My shallow breaths caused me to panic even more. I heaved and wailed with my arms wrapped around my shaking shoulders, and tears stained the floor and soaked two dozen tissues. I couldn’t save myself from drowning in my own tears.

I kept chanting over and over, “Please come back to me, please come back. I promise to love you better. I promise I’ll love you right. Please just come back to me.” At that moment, there was nothing else in the world I wanted more than my husband to be in my arms.

After a few minutes of this, I had a sudden and uncontrollable urge to look at his picture. I hadn’t wanted to go back there since the day he asked for the divorce. It was too painful to see what we used to be. But for some reason, I wanted to see him on this night. I rummaged through my closet until I found what I was looking for: a mound of pictures of us in a Walmart photo envelope His was the first face I saw when I opened the pack. They were mostly on our wedding day, and again, I crumpled into tears, clutching the pictures close to my heart, promising I would love him better if he would come back to me.