I think most people get to a stage in their life where they begin to question everything and I am wholeheartedly there! I feel like I am at that same spot I was in my twenty’s where I was questioning and trying to figure out who I was and where I belonged. I was dreading hitting fifty this year. I had already had two major health episodes in my late forty’s that required hospitalization and surgery two years in a row. These previous health issues combined with the dread of aging, the economy, and the disaster called our current US government all have me analyzing my personal beliefs and where I fit in or belong in this life stage.
As I moved through my late twenties and into my early thirties I always felt as if I were treading water. Never able to get ahead and always near sinking into disaster. I constantly worried about what others thought of me, especially my parents. We are very close and for some reason I have felt as if I needed their approval in any of the choices I made in life. Unfortunately, I had a long history of ignoring their advice and making poor decisions which ultimately led me to reach out for their help when things blew up in my face. Being a parent myself of a now twenty-five-year-old, I know that some of this was by their design, as you do learn from failure. Well eventually! What amazing parents I have, they were and are still there for me when I need them. As most young people do I was thinking of the end goal and never how I would actually get there.
Several times in my life I have felt like I was alone in a cold dark ocean hoping that someone would throw me a life line. I was trying to make it as a young married woman in a marriage that was destined to fail at the start, to divorce, being a single parent, to the dating scene, and finally my second marriage to my amazing husband and best friend of now sixteen years. At this stage of life I still feel as if I am barley able to keep my head above water yet there is solace in not going alone this time. Of course, I am treading water for different reasons but no matter where you are in life everyone has spells of not being able to stay above the waterline.
I have spent the last eighteen years in the child welfare field. Typically, this line of work has a very short lifespan and for most people in the field you go into it each day swallowing secondary trauma, smiling, and joking with co-workers just to keep the tears and emotions at bay. I know, I know, that’s not healthy, but I don’t know any other way. I do have creative outlets as you can see on my website and those help greatly. Ultimately I yearn for these creative outlets to become my fulltime work.
When I was young I based my self-worth on what others thought of me. I was a military brat and moved from state to state, even living in Germany during the Gulf War, the decline of the cold war and fall of the Berlin Wall. At the maximum I lived in a state for about three years, which felt like forever in a military family deployment. I was always starting over. Nothing was permanent, and everything changed all the time. My home, friends, or lack thereof, school, climate, and local cultures were always in constant flux. It wasn’t all bad as I did see much of the country and a lot of Europe as well as witnessing historical moments. Moving was hard though. I was in four different schools during my fourth-grade year. My family was not able to secure permanent military housing during one of the several times we had to relocate to California in the 1980’s. As you read this, if you were a military brat I am sure you can identify with this.
Not having the ability to really put down roots made me turn my heart to my grandmother’s home for that stability. She was always there, always sweet, well when we were, and nothing ever changed. That was something that made me feel that I at least had her house to call a permanent home. In 2004 that all changed. Sure, I was out on my own, married to my first husband, had a home of my own, and a new baby, but when she passed it was like a link in a chain of love and security was broken. There were several other tragic passings of close family member that followed. Those family members that were left in that small town got busy with their own lives and moved on elsewhere and the connection to the small town that I called home was gone forever. I still mourn the loss of my grandmother and the security I found in her home and the small town where everyone knew me and my family by name.
Now in my fifties, I am at a crossroads of reassessment and reinvention. I hear my true self calling and I am answering. I know what I want for the rest of my life and I also know what I don’t want. This is comforting as I have never felt so sure about where I’d like to be in the next five to ten years as I do now.
A large contributing factor to this feeling is my rediscovery of witchcraft. Yep, oh God she said it, what a nut.. yes witchcraft! I dabbled a bit when I was a teenager, but I don’t mean the kind of witchcraft that you see on TV or what you read in fiction books. It’s a love of nature, listening to intuition, reading, sharing, and learning like I have never before. Community is another big factor, however; I have not joined any groups or covens at the time of this writing. Though I am a solitary practitioner at this time, witchcraft feels like a perfect fit. Synchronicities are a big part of the path that I am on and leaning into those rather than dismissing them has been mentally rewarding. Magic is everywhere and I don’t mean in the theatrical sense. There is magic in nature, and science! Yep science! I won’t go into that here but there are a lot of books that I can recommend if you are interested. What I am learning and experiencing feels like magic to me. I have found a new way of listening and thinking. I don’t mean listening in a human conversational sense, but what is a room full of people at work telling me when I walk in? What do the seasons tell me? What are animals telling me along with plant allies?
It’s all so amazing and wonderful, but also and most importantly it’s helping me break free! Break free from societal conditioning, expectations, and the norms that impress upon you that, yes you need the newest car, yes you need the big single-family home, yes you need a certain type of “respectable career,” and yes you should dress and act in a certain way and yes make yourself smaller so you fit in. No more! I have vowed to lead my life in a way that I see fit and to stop trying to fit in to societal narratives. I don’t think that I ever fit in because I was never meant to. Had I known my true self decades ago instead of ignoring her I would have been freed long ago. Speaking or writing about breaking free is easy; to try and fully live it is not an easy transition, but I am taking baby steps. I often find myself in deep contemplation about the plant, the universe, magic, psychic abilities, and other topics that would label me as a flake or mental. I don’t care. I know who I am and I am confident!
I hope you have enjoyed my first blog post. One day I hope to turn my writings into a book that maybe one day will help someone else know that the path they have set for themselves, though not traditional is ok. Something we are losing rapidly is human intellectual curiosity and self-exploration. Stop doing what the algorithm says you are supposed to do.
Live your true self. Stop fitting in and break free!!