Hello Darkness My Old Friend

I was making sounds that sounded like an injured animal. I am sure I was very loud.

My brother and niece were enjoying a beautiful father daughter dance at her wedding. They were dancing in the barn that he and my sister-in-law built for the event. It was a true labor of love. It was just all so beautiful and deeply moving.

So many emotions were happening, all right there in plain sight, causing me to impersonate the injured animal.

The entire day leading up to the wedding, I had a lump in my throat. I had arrived early, desperate to be of help to the bride and my brother’s family as they were preparing for this big event. I gladly ran any errand they had and was pleased to do it. It felt like the least I could do. The lump in my throat urged me forward. This was the wedding of my eldest niece, the first of the “kids” to get married in our family.

If I had paused long enough to check I would have noticed this lump in my throat was mom sized.

I hated so much that my mom wasn’t there. My dad too, sure, but it was different. Dad has been gone so long but my Mom was there for all of it. For their life events and teeth falling out and graduations and loves and cross country moves. This just felt like a travesty. The beauty and love and wonder of the day paired with this loss was staggering for me.

And so I had some wine.

I talk to dead people for a living, I know that those we love are with us all the time. They attend events like these in Spirit. But that knowledge didn’t matter to me that day. She should have BEEN THERE. Like in real life, not in Spirit. Laughing, dancing and being awkward about her own overwhelming feelings.

This is where I learned to be awkward about feelings, from my mom. She used to tell me not to waste time on my emotions. That is a direct quote that I heard so many times. That advice, while given in love, made my life really hard so many times.

I now know from all the work I have done with Human Design and Astrology that my feelings are my superpower. They are how I make decisions, how I connect to Spirit and how I help others heal. They are how I know what direction I am moving in life, my internal compass if you will.

I am so much better at feelings now, but I am still always learning. I also don’t drink very much alcohol anymore. I joke and say that I was born with the capacity for 40,000 drinks and I had them all, so I am done. The stopping part started several years ago with allergic reactions to alcohol but mostly, it overwhelms my very sensitive system. I have a condition that makes it hard for me to process chemicals and toxins in my body. Alcohol is in fact poison to my body.

And yet, when I was overwhelmed by all the feelings I couldn’t express normally, I drank wine.

Hello darkness my old friend.

I taught a class about Human Design recently. In that class I talked about my relationship with alcohol. It is a big part of my backpack of shame as I call it. This is the place we stuff all the things we don’t like about ourselves or are ashamed of. Most of what is in my backpack is big feelings soaked with alcohol and drunken nights. Throw a whole bunch of unprocessed grief on top and that bag is packed tight.

We also talked about how even though we don’t like the stuff in that backpack, when we hide any of our stuff good or bad, we dim our own light. We can’t keep things in there and also be healthy and whole. Sometimes we can’t feel joy or love. An overloaded backpack keeps us from the good stuff in life.

My mom had this capacity to feel everyone’s feelings in a way that made them bigger than they might have been. It’s part of her Human Design. I, on the other hand, have an enormous capacity to have giant feelings. It is in my Human Design chart. Therefore, when she was around me while I was having giant feelings, she may have felt like a tsunami was coming. Therefore, her advice was: “Don’t waste time on those feelings.”  It all tracks.

And here I am, human, mildly damaged and learning every day how to have feelings without it creating more problems.

In the light of day, I am certain my mom was around that entire day. She was there before it started and after too. She may not have liked feelings, but she loved her grandchildren and she also loved a party. There is no way she was not present.

She was present in so many ways. I think the part that got me was how hard my parents worked for our family to have what we needed. And since they both died young, they missed out on this stuff, the BIG stuff, the rewards for a life well spent.

And yet they didn’t miss it because they were there. They were there in my brother building a barn for his eldest daughter. They were there in the friends and family who gathered to celebrate this young couple. They are there in the way my niece and her new husband enjoy each other immensely as my parents always did.

I miss them every single day.

As for my backpack of shame, I am working on emptying it out. I have come to realize that most of the things in there in some way helped me in the moment. They helped me to get closer to freedom, they helped me do things I would not have done on my own, sober in the light of day. For that I will always be grateful. This understanding helps let those things be free and makes it easier for me to get in touch with the good stuff that gets otherwise caught up. I love my life right now; I love my family and my work. I do not have it all figured out yet but I know I am so blessed; I would not trade anything I have right now to have a less empty backpack. Things happens as they are meant to.

Well, if I had a way to do it, I would make it so my parents never got sick, suffered and died like they did. But that is not up to me.

And what they all want (including your people too) is for us to live our best lives. I hear it every time I sit down with someone. To our crossed loves ones, they will see us tomorrow. They have no sense of time. We are human however and for us we know it feels like a lifetime until we are together again.

We make the most of what we have now because that is how we honor our people. We carry on with pain in our hearts but also making room for all the joy and love we can muster in our short lives, because that is truly what we are here for. That is where the magic is.

Love, Christy

xoxoxo

PS May you be blessed with big feelings and not need wine to express them. If you do, that's ok too. We are all a work in progress!