Alchemic Verse

August of 2024 is when I knew my life needed to change, profoundly. In the interest of balanced and honest recounting, it did not always feel desperate and miserable. There were periods of comfort, familiarity, kindness in the time leading up to that first true Tower moment. The ease and security of pleasant periods held me for years before I irrevocably changed to no longer fit the puzzle I’d snapped into.

When I began to let go of people pleasing, realizing a lot of my life was based around trying to earn love and acceptance rather than being authentic, the ease evaporated, and the security disappeared. There were several experiences where my edges bent and broke off, changing my shape until I seemed to belong to some other, unknown puzzle. The change was ultimately slow but felt like a shrinking, or like Alice growing too large for the door she’d entered when small.

It felt like a large-scale version of child me wincing at every step; I suffered silently in shoes too small that crushed and mangled the joints of the toes, cracking my toenails permanently. Just like little me, older me learned to bear the pain, lest I incur the additional wrath of the response when asking for my care or standing up for myself.

By the end of July 2024, something had to give. I’ve had dreams come true before, usually scenes mundane enough to be largely forgettable, but specific enough that they stand out in memory. Some years prior, I’d dreamed my work sent me to one of their locations across the country. This time last year, I lived those dreamed moments of booking my travel, on a video call with my coworker. There were specifics I vividly remember feeling at the time in my dream were odd. ‘I don’t work for that part of the company’ – by July 2024, I did. ‘I don’t have a role that would have me travel to that location’ – this had changed also.

I gasped, and she asked why. I replied that I had the strangest deja vu as I clicked the buttons in Concur’s baffling interface to book my hotel and flight, and the dream came back into focus. I know science explains deja vu differently; regardless, this was the portentous moment where I began to feel shifts in my world too profound to ignore.

That trip was absolutely awful – every day was some battle that wasn’t my job to fight. Every largely meaningless corporate conflict kept falling into the lap of the lore-keeping, communicative teacher and diplomat role I assumed at work, trying to make peace among older adults who’s composure rarely stayed long enough for them to learn anything at all. My former boss called me ‘the golden swiss army knife’ without realizing the implication of calling me a tool.

The scorching heat of the American southwest baked my skin russet while I sweat my way to some rare shade under which I could have the worlds most rapid smoke break and try to calm my nervous system’s response to the waves of stress, conflict, and unfair expectations. The nights were barely any cooler; I sweat through the sheets of my comfortable but lonely hotel room bed every night, regardless of the thermostat’s lies.

In being unable to sleep, the time was spent rapt with wonder at one of my now-favorite series and the patient encouragement of a distant friend late into the morning hours; I’m convinced to this day these conversations, that series, and that person saved me from utter collapse and shaped my future profoundly.

A year later, I’m living somewhere different. My marriage is over, and the new new position I have at my job is becoming unbearable to face each day. I’m clinging to the knowledge I have of how to create inner stability, lacking outward stability, which is quite the feat, having me begging “please, show me what to do, show me where to go” at the sky, on the days where being adrift in the wind feels less like flying freedom and more like being blown and battered to shreds.

Tomorrow, the sale of my house so many miles away now will be finalized, and what comes next requires big and more longterm decisions on how best to take my next steps, particularly relative to where and how I want to live. The typical folks one would ask for guidance have largely excused themselves from my world, having been less than supportive of the decisions I have already made [divorce, sell my home and move] that didn’t align with their vision for my life, and the role they preferred I play in theirs.

I look back at journal entries prior to August 2024 and marvel at how differently I feel about myself now, about life, and about what I want to build with however many years remain to me above ground. Many of the hardest experiences I spent my life fearing have now come to pass in my reality, and in doing so have proven to me how resilient I can be on my own, how I can persevere beyond the confines of what I felt my definitions were. These were defined by victimhood of trauma and lack that I accepted like concrete shoes on my dreams.

Gratitude carries me through the dark minutes where doubt and fear threaten to end both struggle and progress in falling frozen. Instead, I choose to be grateful for this great becoming, for the knowledge through experience that while I didn’t [don’t] want to have to do this on my own, that I can. In the spirit of gratitude, I suppose I’m not truly alone, after all. I woke up from a particularly sad reset-nap to my sweet dog, who moved from the other size of the bed to snuggle onto my shoulder. She helps me to remember the warmth of being loved every day.

Wherever time takes us next, I hope with every cell in my body that we find our way and carry love’s warmth.