MAKING LIMONCELLO :: One foot out of the water

One foot out of the water

The only thing certain is change.

I often go into therapy with a topic that I want to talk about and we end up going down a totally different path. Trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Well, I suppose I’m in the right place for that definition to fit. Or somedays it just feels like that. 

Life has been such a whirlwind of confusion and questioning since I returned from a year of travel and self-growth. I sold my house this spring. I knew I didn’t want be there anymore. So I’m back in San Diego but it’s all so different for me. Of course, I expected a transition this time around on some level because I’ve always had a huge adjustment period after lengthy trip, but this has been NEXT LEVEL. Everything I own fits in a 10x10 storage unit and a few suitcases.

I started seeing a new therapist recently as my guiding light, Sylvia moved out-of-state and I need face-to-face for this kind of stuff at the moment. Last week I came in with an agenda (which we didn’t touch) and then we ended up backing into the recurring theme of my frustrations of not running at the same speed I used to. When you’re born a Capricorn and then find your way into entrepreneurship, you really do run in high gear all the time. Foot on the gas pedal. Always consumed with goals, tasks, things I know need to happen. I learned a long time ago to survive on very little sleep. I had regular anxiety attacks. There were never enough hours in the day. It was impossible to turn my brain off. 

And then trauma and PTSD shorted out my circuits and rewired my brain. I didn’t have any say on that one. It just happened. 

I was always a planner. I thought things out long-term. Everything had a place in that plan. Then the plan changed. It didn’t matter how I had things mapped out because bad things happen and shift you to another plane sometimes. And that’s just life. 

My friends hear me say that my life is weird all the time. Sometimes I think that my current life was running on an alternate plane that was always in parallel to my real life. And then one day, the train switched tracks and here I am. It’s like that question I always asked of what would have happened if I chose to go to UCSB instead of UCSD? That kind of stuff trips me out. Maybe I just read too many Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child. 

So that’s all lead-in to where I am at right now. I realized as I voiced my issues out loud at therapy that I’ve been blocking myself, afraid to put both feet in the water. Holding back from committing 100%. I’ve been living in the present moment, seeing where the tide could take me yet still stubbornly leaving one foot firmly rooted out of the water. I’ve not let myself completely surrender to where I am at the moment and where the tide may take me. It’s a resistance that I haven’t been able to pinpoint. The itch I couldn’t scratch.

And then my therapist pointed out the (now) obvious...I’m afraid to trust again. 

She delivers this news and everything starts to make sense as I sat across from her with my mouth wide open. Major ah-ha/DUH moment. She educatedly points out that grief took that away from me. And then she follows with, “And that’s totally normal.” (Thank doG she validates me like this because grief and the fallout of loss really make me feel cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs sometimes.) 

There’s a deep-rooted belief somewhere in my subconscious that the universe betrayed my trust and our agreement. I guess that’s to be expected when the course of life changes in a single moment. I wasn’t even there when the universe cracked open and pulled the ground from beneath my feet. I walked into the aftermath where the plane I was traveling on shifted and took my life down a different path as I joined that alternate universe that perhaps has been running parallel all these years. I didn’t even have time to pack my bags. All I could do was try to reason with the loss, the change, and the new path ahead.

Being back in San Diego has been challenging because this is ground zero for me. And it seems that so much has changed for me, but then the transition I’m facing now has just been sitting here waiting patiently for me. There’s no escape from it—no matter how many times I have a moment where I just want to go. ANYWHERE. I can’t count how many times I’ve searched for the first flight out of town or thought about just hopping in the car and driving until I run out of gas. It’s like wanderlust on crack.

It’s simply time to face the music, two years and some odd change later. I’m taking steps each and every day to continue growing as I rebuild my life and my business. I’m sorting out options as I step out into an unknown future and look for that net to appear. That takes faith. It takes trust. It takes hope. It takes courage. And it takes energy. A lot of energy. 

How do you rebuild trust in a universe that betrayed you? 

I’ve been going through The Artist's Way this fall (I’ll be blogging about that), relearning to trust the forces that be. Learning to earnestly listen to my inner voice and being open to where it’s telling me to go. It’s learning to separate the universe from the bad things that happen. Sometimes shitty things just happen. And no, everything STILL doesn’t happen for a reason (insert throat punch here). Each time I make a little progress with that separation, it helps build a little more trust in the universe. It opens my mind to manifesting the good that can happen. A little more of that anger fades away (yoga also helps with that A LOT). 

So this fall, as I watch the season of change unfold, I’m working through my own season of change. I’m retraining my brain to trust and remind myself to live life to the fullest each day. 

And I have to embrace a whole new series of changes yet again.
I’m saying yes. And I'm putting both feet in the water.