I feel you, I go back to that moment when you touched my shoulder and you said, “I’m gonna get drunk at your house on Christmas.” Weren’t we all so desperate to recreate Thanksgiving? That longing for belonging. I can’t be sure, but I think that the alcohol killed you as much as it soothed you. I can’t see you anymore. There is pain in that realization.

Did you know? That’s what I always wonder. I accept it though. I accept that I will be missing you forever. My biggest fan. My guardian angel. My forever favorite. You and I  – we have the biggest <3s. Yours couldn’t take the hurt. This I’m sure of. I hope you have peace now. I honor you every day. I am fearless when I am reminded of what you could always see in me. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for living. My example.

I have always had a curiosity and a deep interest in talking about things… things that I learned as I grew older that no one seems to really talk about. Like actually talk about them.

I learned to quiet myself and to stop myself from bringing many things up. Recently I found myself feeling bitter. And saying – when do I get to talk about the things I want to talk about?

It has led me to feel bitterness towards the simple things in life. I know this is wrong. Because I know how much of a deep appreciation I have for genuinely all of life and every single person that I come across and even those whom I do not know.

I marvel at how at any given moment there are BILLIONS of us doing things all at the same time. It’s quite extraordinary.

But yet I still feel this sense of bitterness when I look around at all of the people in my life and think – who do I have to talk to?

And by that I mean – about the things that IIIIIII want to talk about.

These past 2 years have been such a journey for me with regards to the path of self-discovery that I have been on for the past decade. The past 6 months have been that times 1000000 LOL>>>>> INTENSE. For real.

But also clearing and healing and alsoooooo a deeper trust and relationship with myself has emerged. I can talk to myself about the things I want to talk about. I can talk here about the things that I want to talk about and I feel sure now that I will encounter people who also want to talk about these things the more that the world knows that these are things that matter to me and these are topics of discussion that I feel are important.

So I feel good now about being able to share my thoughts and feelings about the things that truly and deeply interest me. To the point of fascination really and also sometimes to the point of despair.

Death. Death for example is a huge topic that I feel I’ve almost never had an honest conversation about. So now here I am in my 20s wrapping my head BIG TIME around the fact that we are all going to die. When I was a child I felt almost as if I could escape it. I remember thinking about it then and just feeling like oh well that won’t happen for FOREVER. But I also remember having a HUGE fear of one of my parents dying.

I feel that for me a lot of fear comes from the unknown. And how I ease those fears is usually by reading, talking and learning about whatever it is that I am scared of so I can prove it wrong or come to accept it once I know more about it.

I don’t remember learning anything about death. It was so mysterious. SUPER  mysterious like where the hell do all of these people go? Besides in the ground. Which also freaked me out because I wanted to know what happened to them there too. I hesitated in my research for years and I will say I still feel I don’t know too much about that process because in many ways – learning about death is accepting my own.

I listened to a podcast yesterday – Coming Out with Lauren & Nicole – and on it one of the guests was talking about how she had come out to herself first but up until that point she had loads of feelings that she wasn’t sure what to do with. Loads of feelings that she didn’t necessarily feel ready to accept yet.

Nuance. Nuances are plenty in this life. But there seems to be none in death.

Death is final.

What that made me think of though was that there are so many feelings that come up for me with regards to death and sometimes I don’t feel ready to accept them. I have been VERY deeply investigating this work now though. Since Christmas 2018 when my Uncle died very unexpectedly. Unexpectedly to us anyway. But I KEEP wondering if he knew.

I feel that I’ve been given some hard knocks in this life. For sure. And for the most part I allow them in and I learn from them and they become a part of my human experience and give me knowledge or help me to reconnect with a part of my wisdom.

This though … for a while I just felt like this was so flipping unfair.

I feel like the black sheep in my family. Not as much anymore – it’s not to say that I am not the black sheep because I probably still am but I don’t FEEL it as much anymore. But we also don’t have much of a family structure anymore.

A big extended family fell apart about 5 years ago and it’s been a shit storm ever since.

But this – I felt like a black sheep and I felt my Uncle did too because he was. He could always see in me what I feel I wasn’t able to see in myself.

He would encourage me, no matter what path I was on. And I appreciated that SO much.

I wondered if he had ever had that -maybe not. Probably not. I feel he had to go it alone for most of the time that he carved his path on this Earth.

Up until his death I had been very lucky in the sense that things for the most part went the way you thought they would – the oldest people were dying first. And it felt like the natural order of life. A few years back my other Uncle died and that was quite a shock. It was very upsetting to me. But this hit me very hard because our relationship was different.

He was the one person in this whole family who I felt was there for me. Who understood me who got me who supported me no matter what. Who literally would brag about me as if I were the most special person in his life EVEN if I was selling dirt on the street LOL. I don’t know what I did to deserve that but I am grateful.

I think we forget that we deserve many many many things simply because we exist. That is the way this works. You were given life. And I was given my life and because of that I am deserving of all that a human life can offer. This includes love and admiration and amazing relationships.

So like… where the hell did you goooooo man!!?!!

And here’s the thing – I can research other fears and things that I have and usually prove them wrong within a decent amount of time because we seem to have answers for lots of things. But  NOW I am getting to questions that THERE IS NO ANSWER TO UNTIL YOU KNOW. You don’t know until you know.

I know that there are people out there who have experienced near-death. I feel I might read more about that. I’ve read a bit about it. I also know there are people out there who have super strong beliefs about what happens after death and I wonder how that makes them feel.

Either way it happens for me or any of the many ways in between – I need to and deeply desire to accept death and my own eventual death.

I feel this is necessary for me to allow myself to LIVE.

Talk soon,

 

B-

 

** Photo was taken in Erris, Ireland – by the infamous Erris Burke