When I was a teenager I believed in everything metaphysical. Back then we called it "new age". Everything from psychic awareness to reincarnation and past lives to astral projection.
And God. I believed in God. God as as the Source of all things. I believed that God existed in me and in all other living things. I believed I had a purpose, that everyone did, and that we existed in this world to figure out what that purpose was, to fulfill our purpose and to experience all that life had to offer along the way.
I loved astrology and tarot. I loved self-hypnosis and past life regressions. I loved ghost stories and reading about UFO encounters. Once, I even saw one. I'll tell that story later.
Basically I loved everything that would have gotten me burned for a witch back in the day.
I had a rich inner world that was connected to...well, whatever God is. Connection to myself, my loved ones, my environment. I'm not able to define the nature of God but I am convinced it has to do with connection, and I had that. It was great.
But then I graduated high school and began my adult life. Like a lot of people with childhood trauma, I didn't fare so well. I didn't function on my own, outside the stability of my grandmother's household. I floundered, many times, though my grandma was always there for me. My support.
I got caught up in life. Working. Partying. Drugs. Men. Stressing. Worrying. I stopped engaging in activities that used to bring me joy. My heart began to hurt, not just here or there, but all the time.
I tried to kill myself when I was twenty. Thinking back on that, all I can feel now is shame for what I put my grandmother through. I didn't even really come close to dying but the scars that remain are nasty. Plain to see.
Five months after that I had a miscarriage just as I was entering my second trimester.
Life went on. I continued to flounder. I'm sure I've forgotten more bad decisions that I remember, and I remember a lot of bad decisions in my early twenties.
When I was twenty-five my grandma died and the whole world, my world, ceased to exist.
I ran away, far away, to a place where no one knew me. I had a child. I got married. I had another child. I stopped believing, in anything. I wanted to but I couldn't. I began to see my teenage beliefs as infantile and just plain stupid. I lost any connection I had once had to God. I accepted that there was nothing beyond this life, this world, that they together were the one and only. I arrived at atheism and for a time, I found comfort in that. I no longer had to try hanging on to connection anymore because it simply wasn't there. It never was.
Overall, my life was static for a long time. Years of isolation. Depression. Anxiety. Overwhelm. Financial struggles. Fear. Despair. Anger. No family. No friends. Years. I took antidepressants and eventually found one that worked well for a long time. Therapy. A lot of self reflection. A lot of tilting at my own inner windmills. There were some good times, too, with my kids. There was some happiness.
I've always thought a lot. Always tried to figure shit out, other people's shit and my own shit, in an attempt to change things. Asking myself questions, mostly why? Why this? Why that? Did this happen because of that? What did that have to do with this? But if this happened because of that, then what about this other thing over here? Is this other thing connected to that, and if yes, then how so? And why? What circumstances made this possible? How was this or that outcome reached?
In the last several years, I've found a lot of answers that way. I thought I was doing pretty well, given what I was working with. I had no problem giving myself a pat on the back for growing, through my own efforts, into a better, more self-aware person. It's no small feat to actually learn from your mistakes (as first you have to recognize and take responsibility for them, which is often difficult to do) and do better by others, and yourself, going forward.
My point, though, is that I took all the credit. I mean, why wouldn't I? I'm the one who did all the thinking, after all. I put the puzzle pieces together. Nobody helped me, I learned from my own experiences in life. I paid attention, and though it took years, I was the one who figured shit out and my life began to change in positive ways.
Or so I thought.
My life fell apart. Completely. Utterly. Suddenly.
There was a pandemic. I was betrayed. I was divorced, almost overnight, after sixteen years of marriage and twenty years of being together. I was sick with lots of different things. I was a single working mom.
I was struggling, I'm still struggling. But something changed in me. Something changed and it wasn't because of a truth I'd arrived at by thinking about it, like I normally do.
It was realization. Revelation. It was like a switch inside me being flipped on.
And I knew. I knew that there was nothing wrong with me. I knew I was a good person. Not a perfect person, but a good person. I knew that I didn't deserve to have been treated how I was treated by those closest to me in my life. And I knew I wasn't going to spend another moment hating myself.
I realized that everything I'd been doing, despite all my ruminations, all the personal growth I'd achieved, hadn't yielded the outcome I desired. Clearly. So, what to do?
Again, the switch flipped inside me. The opposite. When faced with any problem, circumstance, choice- I should just do the opposite of whatever it was that I would normally do.
And so I started to get back into the things I enjoyed when I was younger. Astrology, tarot, hypnosis. All thing metaphysical/new age. I figured, why the fuck not? Who cares if it's "not real"? It makes me happy. I choose to believe in it because it fills some kind of need inside me and what's wrong with that? Besides, I've always evaluated reality based on my own subjective experiences and perception. We all do. And my evaluation tells me there's more. I know. I know because I'm an Aquarius and we are the I KNOW sign.
I've been working on getting back that connection with God. Because it's the opposite of what I would normally do. But what I've come to "realize" lately is that the connection was always there. It never truly went away. It was just eclipsed by my preoccupation with a shitty life. In my self reflection, God was guiding me. When those realizations happened, when those switches were flipped, that was God speaking to me.
I'm listening now.
