Why I Disappeared.....

(Or ‘How to run a business when you can’t even get out of bed in the morning’)

"Wake me up inside

Wake me up inside

Call my name and save me from the dark

Bid my blood to run

Before I come undone

Save me from the nothing I've become"

Bring Me To Life 'Evancescence'

I always thought I needed someone else to wake me up so I could actually feel again; it turned out the only person who could honestly do that was me. Feeling empty, like your life force has drained away is a hell of a feeling – or lack of feeling as it were. The last year has been so incredibly difficult for me that I can’t even begin to explain it in a way that makes sense so forgive the epic level of rambling that is about to commence.

My life has been a series of downs, of pain and anger and upset, of feeling like I’m constantly crying, emotionally broken and like a failure. It only takes one thing to begin a snowball of events that begin to make you feel like your life is falling apart. Happiness can go from the brightest moment in the sun to the darkest corner of the soul in barely a minute. I met someone, it didn’t work out, things fell apart, my computer was hacked, it crashed – several times, my car kept having problems, I met someone new and fell in love, my mother had surgery (an intense, emotional experience for me), I moved out of home, bought an investment property, got a job and then found my own health issues, masked by my IUD, had come back in a way that is going to require some specialist surgery at a later date but meanwhile is still causing me a lot of aggravation. All of that in that order in the span of 18 months (more or less) is something of a trial that I broke under.

I lost my passion for anything – if you follow any of work (tarot, witchcraft or herbal) you’ll notice there was a marked lack of work on any of those platforms in the past 12 or so months. I had no energy or care to even go there and try. I wasn’t interested in life, my work, my passion or even being present in any moment. So much emotional bullshit had taken its toll and I wasn’t even interested in existing. Here I was, in what should of been the happiest time of my life, moving out of home to live with guy I love, a whole new experience and yet, I spent more time crying than I ever had in my life because the year had been so freakin’ hard to deal with. Moving away from my parents, my home, my beloved gardens – it was like ripping out a part of my soul and shredding it into tiny little pieces. I was happy to be moving in with my love, don’t get me wrong, yet I was so conflicted because leaving the comfort, familiarity and easiness of living at home was painful. I was happy and devastated all at the same time. It took a long time for me to think of where I live now as home, such as it is being a rental, even now I still refer to my parents home as “home”. My partner has given up on correcting me, I think he knows he is my home but where I grew up, that is such a huge part of my soul that it is always going to be home as well.

I was in a situation where everything was new. Living with another person, being responsible for that person’s emotional wellbeing and having to consider someone other than myself all of the time became such a struggle. I wasn’t used to it, nearly 12 months later I’m still not used to it. I’m moody, emotional, loving, funny, kind and cold all at the same time. I know my partner finds me hard to live with on occasion (to be fair, he’s sometimes hard to live with too) but he also brought about some form of healing for me. When I was in the darkest moment believing that the world was a place I didn’t want to be in anymore, his love, his quiet being there for me without truly needing to understand why I was being the way I was; it gave me moments where I could be this horrible person trying to work through stuff and not worry that he was going to leave me. 

Before all of the moving out home thing though, my mother had to have surgery – a knee replacement and it was one of the emotionally hardest things for me to deal with. I looked after her and was happy to do so, she’s my Mum. But seeing her in that level of pain, the slightest movement bringing her to tears, the weight of it all, and know you can’t do anything is hard. There is nothing more that you will make you feel profoundly useless than seeing someone you love in pain, a pain that you can’t fix, comfort or take away because only time can do that. I was trying to manage a life that involved looking after my mother, running the household because she couldn’t, finding time for a boyfriend, having other things constantly go wrong to the point that you are absolutely convinced the universe is out to get you and ruin your life. I more or less had a breakdown because the weight of it all became too much. There were days when I would just cry and cry and cry because I didn’t know what else to do.

Having only touched on it, it’s hard to explain all the ins and outs of everything that happened. When my computer was hacked, it had a virus put on it and there was some horribleness that happened with that – it all becomes too much when it’s an avalanche in a small space of time. I also found out that my endometriosis is back with a vengeance. I have an IUD so it masks it – not my umbilical endometriosis (a nice rare kind that affects 1% of women with endo) that got worse again, to the point that my belly button bleeds quite regularly now and often turns into a giant swollen purple haematoma (yay life). My uterus and ovaries are fused, I have a large cyst on one of my ovaries and all of this is going to require surgery by a specialist – a level 6 laparoscopy I believe my doctor said. And it never gets easier, especially knowing that with the level of surgery that is going to be needed to be done, the recovery is going to take some time. It’s not my first go-round with endo surgery, but it’s yet another experience, another trauma that impacts when you already feel emotionally fragile.

I disappeared from my own life, checked out of my own existence. Who I was before 2017, I don’t even remember her. She was a strong girl with a lot of opinions who did her own thing and didn’t really care what people thought of her. She was still complicated but she tended to be a lot happier and open. Who am I now? I don’t know. I still find myself crying a lot - my health issues aren't going away any time soon, and my beautiful Bella girl (my 12 year old rescue cat) has her own health issues so that has thrown me; it's am emotional experience for me because she has to be away for over a week and I'm just not prepared for that at all. But I’ve had to come to a place where I feel comfortable with my emotional state yet there are days when the simplest things still upset me, when I don’t want to get out of bed but I try to. I’m still emotional, raw and a harsh word will have me breaking down into a sobbing mess because I don’t have the strength to deal with it. I’m like an open wound that continues to bleed, to hurt and to not really heal but whoever I am now, she’s a mess, but somewhere in all of that, she’s a beautiful mess discovering a new strength, a new way to exist. 

I am trying to live back in my life in the best way that I can. I’m slowly coming home to the things that I love. Thankfully all of this hasn’t affected my ability to read cards – it seems to have honed it somewhat (benefit of being an empath I guess), my witchcraft - I’m finally finding my path again (or those who were part of my practice before are slowly finding me again – Spirit will have its way), I’m beginning to love working with my herbs again and learning who I am again. It’s not easy, it’s a struggle each day, sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation to do anything yet there is so much I want to do and slowly it’s all coming back to me. Ultimately I have come to a place where I am okay with being broken, being fragile, because somewhere within that brokenness, that fragility, who I am has begun to emerge and from there is where the healing road to wholeness begins.

 (Also published on Hedge Wylde)