Something interesting is happening to me. I am learning to
find my Self.
*******
Within the last five years I have noticed a distance behind
my eyes. I’d look at photos of myself and see a shadow of what used to be me. “Oh,
that’s just part of getting older”, I’d say to validate my feelings. When I
looked in the mirror I didn’t know who I was anymore. After all, in the last
five years I married into the military, moved away from the only place I ever
called home, gave birth to two girls, went through my husband’s terrifying
deployment to “the deadliest place on Earth”, and endured four (yes, four) cross-country
moves. Throw in life’s natural forces such as family births, deaths, a cancer scare and
people cutting me off on the freeway, and you have yourself one completely emotionally spun out of control mama. These past five years have taken a
toll on my mind and body. And it was making itself visible in several ways, particularly in my reflection. At
most, I put on 65 pounds. And because of that, I started avoiding mirrors
altogether. Who the hell am I? I’d ask myself. I didn’t see the 20-something
hot spring chicken I once was. You know who I’m talking about. The one who
danced on a bar to the song “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, stayed out until 5am
skinning dipping with the girlfriends after a far too fun Girls’ Night Out, and
the one who could pack up and leave on a jet plane at any moment’s notice –
alone. That’s not me anymore. Well then, who the hell am I?
But, something interesting is happening to me. It's not happening overnight. Rather, it's showing itself slowly like a good hand of poker. I
gave birth to my second daughter, Kennedy, in October, 2011 and I immediately
struggled to find a balance in life. I was working from home for Walt Disney
Internet Group, I had a newborn, an energetic 3-year-old, and a husband who is
absolutely amazing, but couldn’t help me with my day-to-day life while he was
at work. In hind-sight I held it together with my mind. I created a model of
how things should be. My type-A personality kept me and everyone close to me neat and tidy
with no room at the bottom of the list to pencil-in an unexpected event. Everyone
had a schedule. I kept to that schedule like everyone’s lives depended on it.
No one could deviate from it. The house had to be a certain way. Always. If it
wasn’t, I unraveled like a thread from a quilt, asking the universe why these
things happen. If my 3-year-old took all 20 pairs of my shoes down from my
neatly organized shoe-shelf, and strewn them all about in a mismatched, chaotic
mess for the umpteenth time in one week, I lost it. I’d ask the ceiling, "Why do these things happen
to me? I could have easily left my job to focus more on
the girls, but I loved my job. I needed my job. The hours were very, very late
in the day, but I told myself that I needed it to keep something for me and
only me. Plus, I liked having my own income. I was often an emotional wreck held together with a daily structure that I created in my mind – and nothing or no one could drill a hole in that structure otherwise I’d really loose it.
Well, something drilled a hole right through my structure. My
work decided not to continue with me and I was given three weeks until my last
day. I was devastated. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. I had always ended
a business relationship on my terms – not theirs. I wasn’t fired or laid-off. I was simply
contracted out with them, and they chose not to renew the contractorship based on business needs. Somehow,
the thought of not having the job I loved didn’t make it into my perfect,
tidy little model that I built up in my mind – and I was really hurt by it. I
loved that job. I felt rejected. And because of that, I cried a lot. I really
was an emotional wreck over a little piece of what I thought I was. If I wasn’t
a contractor for Walt Disney Internet Group, what was I? Wife? Mother? What
else? What would my friends think if I
didn’t have a job anymore? What would my goal-driven, extremely ambitious family think? I would be completely financially dependent on my
husband if I didn’t have a job. I’m a 21st Century liberated woman
who had a serious problem with that. It was a dark time because I
felt lost. I didn’t know where to belong. I remember texting my husband during the day with, “I’m
just so unhappy. I can’t stop crying.” Day after day he
came home, hugged me tight and told me that it was going to be OK. I wondered how could
one little thing in life bring me to my knees in sorrow? After all, no one had
died. No one was physically hurt. The only thing that hurt was my ego. I obsessed
in my mind what I could have done differently, but I always came back to knowing how
hard I worked for them. I really did work hard. And then I started allowing my
ego to shoot back thoughts like, “Oh, I’ll be something bigger than this someday.
I’ll move on and become big in other ways and then they’ll really be sorry that
they didn’t want to stay with me because I’m freaking awesome!” Still, at my
core, I was lost, confused, and I didn’t know what to do. Again, I would look
at photos of myself and see a lost woman who didn’t know who she was anymore.
With stress compounded inside me, I scheduled a massage to
help release the tension. I told the massage therapist to focus on my back,
neck and shoulders. As she worked her magic, all this nasty energy
started rising up through me. And I cried. I cried right there on the massage
table. Sure, I lost the job I loved, but c’mon, this crying thing was getting a
bit ridiculous. Then, out of nowhere, something told me that I needed to go see
a psychic. To this day, I still have no idea where that thought came from. But
as I laid on the massage table with all this dark energy rising from my core to
my surface, I felt a very strong desire to see a spiritual advisor. Now listen,
so that you don’t start thinking I'm a “freak” and not "freaking awesome", let
me emphasize that I do not see psychics. In fact, I have never seen a real
psychic before all of this. My husband and I went to a palm reader at a Renaissance
Fair once as a joke when I was pregnant with our first baby to see if the woman
could actually guess the baby’s gender (she did). It was all silly and in good
fun but I don’t consider that “seeing a psychic.” I have never seen a spiritual
advisor before this time in my life. I always thought it was weird
witch-craft-voo-doo stuff – and it was never for me – until I suddenly felt
like this is what I needed to do.
And so, with lingering compounded stress and dark energy, the next day I saw Psychic Kristy.
To be continued in Finding my Self: Part Dos
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