Lifelines

I’ve always been a bit of a “jack of all trades” type. I like to get experience across a variety of arenas and take with me knowledge and insight I can gain in my brief time spent with them, but I generally don’t hone on any one activity extensively. I’ve had jobs such as: babysitting, washing school buses, a soldier in the Army National Guard; working in retail, at a daycare, at a doggy daycare, at a factory, as a delivery driver, putting ads in the Sunday paper before delivery. I have worked part-time with a couple different family friends with their handyman businesses, which introduced me to various aspects of home-improvement and building construction; and I worked on and off for the better part of a decade in mental health. My hobbies have been fairly widely spread as well. I’ve been into music, dance, dog training, landscaping, writing, doing puzzles, working out, scrapbooking, reading, collecting, and painting (both as an art hobby and home improvement method). I like activities that involve some planning but find I tend to get more fully consumed by a project when I just jump in with both feet, even if it means learning as I go. I am also most drawn to activities where my mind can stay preoccupied enough with a task that some concentration is required but not so much so that it can’t wander down other mental paths to piece other thoughts and stories together. Massive bonus points if I can listen to music as I do it. When I couldn’t have my phone or mp3 player out on the floor of the factory, I would listen to music while I was on my breaks, and I would end up repeating the same song over and over sometimes so that I had more of it to sing to myself while I was busy stacking boxes in a truck or whatever else the day’s role required of me.

I talk in circles. Story A might lead to story D and F before ever coming back to B, C, or E. I think that’s where some of the variety in my activities has been important as well. I love variety—in the activities I’m engaged in or the people I’m working with or around; although there are always some trusty “go-to” scenarios as well. My day to day routine with my niece and my dogs stays fairly consistent, and I might listen to one certain playlist several days in a row without dipping into other music options. I might even exhaust one specific activity—like I may get on a roll cleaning the garage or a specific room in the house over a few days’ time and then take several weeks before coming back to the task. The greatest constant in any of the activities I find myself participating in, however, is that my mind does like to wander through different conversations, stories I’ve heard, quotes I’ve heard in movies, lines of songs or from books I’ve read and really process different layers of the spoken word and what it carries within. I love considering how those words hold deeper meaning in my own life and connect to different stories I carry with me. I like finding ways for others to hear or see those words and think of them or ponder them differently and share their own experiences of them. I have found that when I write a story or even when I have written papers for school, I connect to them best when I start with a quote or song lyric that I can tie in with the story I’m trying to tell. It may be early on or it may come closer to the end. All these things have been sorts of lifelines for my journey along the way. In times that I have struggled with any aspect of my life, there’s always been someone or something that has helped to ease the burden in some way, even if I've sometimes needed distance from the situation to be able to realize it.

When I have painted in the past, my work has almost always been abstract, mainly because I didn’t think I was that artistic. Recently I am finding the urge to start dabbling in other genres. I got a couple 2 foot by 3 foot canvases and my first inclination was to put them together and cover them completely in magenta and black paint. The starting idea was to paint something that would eventually get posted on my webpage where the identity or brand is Mystic Fuchsia Lifelines, but the largest bottle of paint I had was a magenta color instead of fuchsia which I figure is really close enough, so I painted the entire canvas a mix of black and magenta because I couldn’t stand having a blank white canvas staring at me from beside my desk. Then after a great many days of staring at trees in the back yard, I started painting a massive tree between the two canvases, a wide trunk and wide spread branches covering the majority of the canvases. The first attempt didn’t set right and I eventually painted over it with more of the magenta and black to "erase" the tree. My 5 year old niece asked about it pretty quickly, wanting to know where the tree had gone and insisting I should put it back. It was a few weeks before I got around to it but eventually I did. It stayed brown tree and branches against the brightly colored accented mixture and varying shades mixed of the 2 colors on the backdrop. Then my niece wanted to know why it didn’t have leaves, and eventually I added some leaves with a bold turquoise color that matches the trim in my office space. She seemed satisfied with my project from there but I knew more was to come. One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve had to spend a certain amount of time with each layer that has gone onto the canvas, as though each layer has had its own "season" to exist. Whereas the first tree I was especially critical of and didn’t like how it looked (another difficulty I have in starting new projects with a desire for "perfection" from myself), the second tree had much less time where I was dissatisfied with the way the branches turned out and when I added leaves it kind of felt like going from winter to the end of spring or beginning of summer with the explosion of greenery.

I recently started reading a book several influencers or life coaches that I follow on social media have recommended—Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. In the first section she speaks about a poet named Jack Gilbert (no relation) that she ended up taking the same role he had had within the University of Tennessee, Knoxville the year after he left. She recalls a conversation she had with a student who told her that in a conversation about her hopes for the future as an aspiring writer, Jack Gilbert had once said to her “Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hiding inside you are hoping you say yes” (Big Magic, 7). This quote stood out to me because I had been struggling with whether I even actually wanted to be a writer any longer. I had quit my factory job back in October with the intention of pursuing this big writing dream and kept finding myself being warded off by various fears stepping up into my path. There was the fear of failure and also its counterpart the fear of success since my whole life had seemed to prepare me for small-time living. Imposter syndrome rears its head frequently as well—who am I trying to break from what my life had set me up for, why should anyone listen to me? But the thing is, I’ve always had this idea that one of the greatest feats my life lay before me to tackle was finding my voice. I knew it because some of my earliest traumas were centered around my voice or my mouth so that I stopped speaking out and tried to avoid being called on in school or having to speak to anyone and rarely smiled, so when I read this quote I knew it needed to go on my tree as well. Do I have the courage to be a writer as I’ve always felt some part of my purpose has been to do?

My passion and what I believe is my life’s purpose is twofold. On the one hand, I am certain it involves writing and the use of written word and more specifically storytelling and connection as a means to confront, on the other hand, the massive beast of depression and mental health issues so many struggle with. I struggled with suicidal ideation for the majority of my life, I have relatives with mental health issues, I've sustained a traumatic brain injury that eventually brought an end to my short-lived military career, and several smaller concussions over the years. Much of my emotional and psychological healing has come from writing through my pain and even redefining different pieces of the puzzle--like my TBI ended up being a sort of factory reset in a way since I was in graduate school and had to start asking questions and speaking up to make it through the classes. Then I ended up graduating with a much higher grade point average than I'd ever had in my entire life.

I feel part of my purpose is as a healer in this way. I've spent years trying to sort through my harmful beliefs and making sense of the world from my experiences, and I think there is a group of people in existence who would be open to hearing about my path and what I have to say while seeking their own healing as well. It's not about snapping your fingers and making all the pain go away so much as it is offering the realization that you aren't alone and there is so much more that unites us than actually divides us--despite what politicians and the media would have us believe. There’s also something about being able to bleed out the stories onto paper with ink and pen. It takes longer than it does when typing something up on the computer, but there is something very real and honest about writing it out with use of your own hand and seeing your own script recite the words back to you. I like writing while out in nature because it becomes a means of meditation of sorts. If I lose track of what I’m trying to say, I may zone out for several minutes doing nothing more than being distracted by birds in the trees, geese by the pond, or bugs going about their daily routine. Being lost in thought surrounded by nature where nature can do what nature does. It is the greatest teacher of all, and all you need to do is calm the mind and observe.

I love making connections that others might miss. Like the wounded owl I recently wrote a story about called Wounded. My desire to want to help this owl out got slowed down by a naysayer until the opportunity to help had passed and he’d wandered off into the neighbor’s pasture and was nowhere to be found. As I felt defeated while going back to the house I realized that as owls symbolize intuition—my intuition had also been injured with all the times I allowed naysayers to cause me to second guess myself—sometimes I was the naysayer myself. Most recently at the time of the owl’s appearance, I had a morning I felt seriously inclined to go in late to the factory I was working at for my shift. I felt like I should go 2 hours later than I was scheduled to be there. The job wasn’t that important. I was merely a cog in someone else’s money-making machine and if I wasn’t there, someone else would be around to do my job. I couldn’t rationalize a good reason for going in late and I was pretty sure if I stayed home 2 hours, I’d have a hard time wanting to go in for the rest of the shift so I continued on and went at normal time anyway.

Long story short, within 5 minutes before getting to the factory I got hit by a school bus in an S-curve on a road. I was already in the curve when I realized the bus wasn’t stopping and I had nowhere else to go, so I came to a complete stop and waited for the bus to hit me as I heard a kid on the bus yell to the driver, "you aren't gonna make it! You're going to hit her!" right before coming to stop with my door now pinned so I couldn’t open it. I then had to have the local firefighters who came to the scene help figure out how to get me unstuck from the side of the bus while avoiding the drop off into the ditch on the other side of my SUV. I ended up being 2 hours late to work anyway. The outside influence of my "rational mind" kept me from trusting my intuition and in that way my intuition was in a sense, injured just like the owl had been, as it seemed somewhat quieter and less available to me in the day ahead, but luckily it's otherwise fairly forgiving.

People always ask a lot of themselves or of other people, and far more often than not, we struggle to make room for their or our own failures. We are chronically way too hard on ourselves and in other ways not hard enough. For example, it took getting to the end of my retirement funds that I’d taken out in order to pursue the writing dream for me to actually step up and start writing because I was so afraid of the possibilities that it carried with it. The possibility that I might be able to have a life without the standard 9-5 type job that has always been emphasized in my life; the possibility that I might live up to any of the dreams I have had for myself—despite the fact that they often go against what others believe should even be possible. I recently wrote in a stream of conscious writing that I had felt the need to put together a fish tank in my office because even when it’s too cold to go outside and observe nature, I still have a little bit of nature in my space. The sole purpose for a fish is to be a fish. Sure the plants, rocks, decorations, lighting, etc. reveals a little of myself with the colors I chose and all that. I even chose what types of fish to put in the tank. “But fish cannot be told what to do. They merely do what fish do. They swim and explore their environment, clean up algae build up, and just be fish. No one asks or demands more of a fish than to be a fish. What good would it do anyway? They don’t listen. They can’t speak. They aren't suddenly going to grow wings and fly if you tell them to. They can observe you but won’t engage in any way. They just look at you and swim away; while doing their own thing” (1/5/21).

I’m kind of like the fish in that way. I work better when I can just be. And then I find the flow that is most suitable for what I am aiming to accomplish. If I am experiencing a particular degree of dissonance—that’s usually when I will turn to painting or something else. I will listen to heavier music that makes me think and I will replay conversations in my head over and over, regardless of whether or not I’ve had them in person. I process through the noise in my head until I have something to sit down and write about. I let life bring the lessons to me through nature, or the people I encounter, and I'm always open to learning new lessons that life offers and I try not to fixate on any one thing that comes up out of the blue. When it’s just me, nature, and the pen and paper, I can find a flow with what I am thinking and want to say. If I approach my computer and haven’t already spent time with the pen, suddenly there’s a specific purpose behind my being there and what I’m trying to do and I get lost in the expectation I have for myself in that way. I start hiding away and I cease to be/do what I am meant to be/do.

I used to believe in heaven and hell like the church speaks of. Even after seminary, I no longer do. I think we find ourselves in hell when we get trapped in the idea of what’s expected of us and try to follow societal dos and don’ts rather than trust our intuition and pursue what brings us our greatest joy in life. The worst times in my life have been the times I have tried to fit into the ideal others have for me and I realize how dissonant that in and of itself is to my being. The best times have been when I have embraced even the weirdest aspects of my life, or my own personal eccentricities. My greatest passion is in helping others find lifelines in their own lives. The people, the songs, the lines from books or movies, something they overhear from a stranger that is exactly what they needed to hear at the right time, anything that keeps that person hanging on for one more day; because I know what it’s like to be on the brink of plunging into oblivion and having someone who stepped in and made space for me to exist as I was and not as I was “supposed” to be.

That is what I want to do for others as well. I think most of the mental anguish we put ourselves and others through has everything to do with expectation based on some made up idea of how things are supposed to be. For this reason, my greatest passion and purpose in this life is helping others find lifelines in their own experiences and helping them to find means of connection in their own existence through use of storytelling. I think a healer’s biggest task in life is to help people to realize what they can do to help themselves find healing, and be supportive and hold space for them to find a way to accept themselves in spite of the trauma and pain they may be going through so that they might choose to keep going another day. My goal is to do whatever I can to help make my little piece of the world a little bit better for someone else and hopefully for many. I believe that if we do what we can with the gifts our lives give us (and we all have gifts, even though many may struggle to believe that), the good we put out in the world will be multiplied as those that we help with our gifts choose to help others in the same way that we helped them--with whatever talents and gifts they each come to realize they've been given.