Warning: eating disorder trigger.
When we experience grief over the loss of a person, environment, identity, etc, what we’re often grieving is the loss of the fantasy that whatever it was represented for us.
This was my experience with the loss of what I had come to think of as “the perfect” (aka thinnest) body. When restriction failed me and I gained a lot of weight, I grieved the feeling of being untouchable and forever in control. The numbed out fantasy world that I was floating in evaporated, and I landed flat on my face.
Fantasies are there for a reason. They give us perceived safety from a reality we’d rather not living be in. When the bubble bursts it’s frightening and might feel excruciating, but it’s from there that we are given the opportunity to build a life we won’t need or want to run away from.
spirituality
Fun and nothingness.
Re-learning how to engage with expression for fun and nothingness right now, rather than as a means to an end.
After experiencing severe burnout from forcing myself to draw literally all day every day, I went multiple years without doing it at all. Before I had a logical “reason” for, say, spending the entire morning on a watercolor of a vase. “I can justify this because it’s for my animation portfolio. It’s work. It’s acceptable because it will eventually earn me money”.
The picture in the photo is an example of that. It was a birthday card for my grandma almost exactly a year ago, and it gave me a valid excuse to sit at my favorite cafe and lose myself in drawing the tree for 2 hours (or find myself, depending on how you look at it). ;)
It can feel scarier to do something just because we want to. Because it’s fun. Because it’s a necessity that we don’t understand but never goes away. This is when we enter the mystery of life, when we begin to admit to the existence of forces beyond us that we can’t wrap our logical minds around no matter how hard we reason. It becomes our invitation to wonder and to experience the world with new eyes.
It was never your fault.
My mentor and I were chatting today about the law of attraction, and the widespread idea that you need to take responsibility for vibrationally magnetizing the experiences in your life.
Unfortunately this is a very widespread notion in the new age spiritual world, and can cause large amount of emotional/psychological damage. It can make you feel terrible about yourself whenever your life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, because your immediate thought becomes “what am I doing wrong to be attracting this?? Must. fix. my. vibration!!”
My dear, relax. The reality is a LOT more complex that that.
The truth is that it was never your fault. If you have been wrongfully treated, abused, etc, it was not your fault. You did not cause those experiences to happen. You did not deserve them because you were not meditating enough, or because you do not own enough moonlight charged crystals. While I am all about taking ownership and responsibility over what we CAN change in our lives, and while we can fiddle with the subconscious beliefs, energetic signatures, etc that are influencing you in a way that has a major impact on your quality of life, we also live in a reality and in a system where some things are simply out of our control. Covid is a perfect example of that. We can choose not to wear masks or get vaccinated, but the result is that certain environments, people and activities will then be off limits to us. We can find this angering and unfair, but it is the reality that we live in right now.
So let yourself off the hook. Keep a safe distance between you and anyone who tells you that you caused horrible events to happen. Take ownership of your life and remember that you are an extremely powerful being, while finding the relief in not needing to take responsibility for everything.