Getting Ready to Launch

I have received my approval from the board of health to begin my practice as a licensed massage therapist in the state of Tennessee.

This is beyond exciting for me, and I’m incredibly grateful for and proud of how far I’ve come. I didn’t publicly chronicle the journey, though after the challenges I faced to get to this point I’m filled with a sense of relief and quiet determination as I begin this new season of life.

That being said I wanted to share some logistics here: I plan to be updating my website very soon to include the details of my massage practice, and it’s possible I will be changing platforms. Since I’ve never done this before I don’t know how much information will transfer from the old site to the new site, and you may need to “re-subscribe” to my blog once everything is set up. I will do my best to convey any necessary details of that once I have more clarity on it myself.

In the meantime, thank you to my readers who have encouraged me throughout my journey, whether you knew what I was up to or not. I look forward to sharing more of my adventures with you as I grow. Until next time, take care.

A New Season

I’ve kept it quiet from most of the internet for awhile, but I think I’m ready to announce something I’ve been working on for the past year and a half.

In a few weeks I plan to graduate massage therapy school and start my own practice as a licensed massage therapist. I have been attending night classes after work for the past almost 18 months and this season of life is nearing its end. I can’t begin to express the depth of the challenges I faced just to keep myself going in the midst of balancing work, homework, and battling my own inner demons along the way. One thing my school has emphasized throughout my journey has been the importance of addressing my own inner wounds so I don’t project them onto my clients. They talk about Carl Jung and the shadow self, about setting appropriate boundaries, about keeping myself healthy so I can better assist my clients in their journey to wellness. I have learned many lessons on this road.

In a few short weeks I will have a whole new set of challenges to take on: that of studying for the state licensure exam, setting up my business, finding a commercial space to rent, marketing, and more. I’d never seen myself as wanting to be an entrepreneur, and yet here I am. I have no idea where this road will take me. It may turn into a side business while I pursue something else, or it may be my livelihood for awhile. One thing I am certain of, and that is I’m excited to be nearing the end of my work-school-work-school hustle. To say it’s been exhausting would be an understatement.

Onward.

The Pursuit of Wisdom in Relationships

I have two pursuits in the forefront of my mind during this season of life: to contribute to the healing of the world, and to pursue wisdom.

I have often wondered what the pursuit of wisdom looks like in the midst of personal relationships. In many situations I have felt healthier being single than I have dating, mostly because I haven’t always pursued the most healthy of relationships. Looking back over those situations I would usually feel a sense of freedom when they were over, because I could finally reconnect to myself again, and I’ve wondered if I’ll ever feel like myself when I’m with another.

That being said, because my goal is wisdom rather than a relationship, my philosophy has been that I’m going to continue pursuing my own growth, and if someone wants to join me in that journey I welcome the company. It can make for a lonely journey, though. The healthier I become, often the more isolated I feel, because not everyone is pursuing the same things. We are all at different points in our journey, and it can be hard to find people to relate to. That’s when I begin to wonder if I’m actually healthy or if I’m rather missing something crucial by not being in closer community with others.

I crave community. I crave closeness. And yet I feel like I can’t hear my own inner spirit if I don’t spend enough time by myself. It’s a constant tug-of-war, trying to figure out what the optimal balance is. Maybe it will take a lifetime to figure out.

The Passion Conversation, Continued

I discovered a few years ago the idea of cultivating a passion instead of finding it. The article on the Minimalists website explaining this idea brought validation to the struggle I felt so strongly in college to find something I was passionate about so I could be like my peers. During one lecture in college the speaker even asked, “What are you willing to lose sleep over?” as an exercise to determine what we get excited – or passionate – about. But the silent answer I came up with was that I’m not willing to lose sleep over anything because sleep is important. It’s important to live a balanced, healthy life.

And so my journey of personal growth developed over the years. I still love sleep every bit as much as I did in college, and I become vexed if I can’t have my sleep. As I have explored in many of my previous posts, I have many interests and many things I love to learn about. However, I only love to explore them if I can do so in a healthy way.

As I’ve grown, I’ve realized I do indeed have passion within my being, just not a traditional, 21st-century type passion. My passion is not for a particular career or cause, but for life itself.

Living Without A Passion; A Yoga Practice

These are some thoughts I began to write a couple years ago. I have often felt insecure that I didn’t feel passionate toward a particular career or cause like many of my peers did. This is a snippet of my mental process.

Reflections from February 2018

I bow my head, palms together in a prayer-like position. Close my eyes; breathe. I do not feel a particular passion toward anything.

I reach my hands up to the sky – feel a gentle pull in my muscles as my body awakens. I do not have a dream job, only varied interests.

I touch my toes; my head pulled down by gravity. I accept what is. I have a bucket list of things I’d like to try, but more importantly I just want to be.

Weight shifts onto my hands as my feet shoot back to land in a plank. I am strong; I work hard. I pay my bills and reduce debt. I am learning to purge my possessions to live more simply.

Lower onto the belly. I enjoy cleanliness and wellness. I like simplicity and natural products. I diffuse essential oils and buy bamboo toothbrushes. Arch my back, feel the stretch in my throat. I enjoy animals and nature.

I raise my body up until I’m in an inverted “V” shape – my hands and feet on the ground with my hips toward the sky. I’ve often wondered if something was wrong with me because I don’t feel a passion toward a singular career. I just want to live a balanced life. I breathe in, breathe out. I let go of my insecurities.

I walk my feet up to my hands and slowly rise to standing again. I long for more in life, but I am also learning to become one with the present.

Lighting the Inner Fire

Every so often, my spirit goes through cycles – periods of light and shadow much like the passing seasons.

Recently I found myself in a shadow. Disconnected from my sacred Essence, I felt lost and alone. A heaviness settled on my chest as I found myself stuck in an isolated darkness.

I do not have a formula for how to escape these shadows. For this particular storm, reading an inspiring book to remind myself of my inner flame was enough to rekindle the fire within. But still the heaviness remains. Some days feel lighter than others. I walk a sacred path and I recognize the value of my solitude. When I can, I connect with others to share a kindred flame, strengthening myself for when I am alone again.

My journey is one which no one else can walk for me, and that is hard. Keeping my soul fire lit is a lifelong learning process, although (simply enough) it is best fueled by love. Sometimes I forget that. But today I remember. Today I am connected to my soul fire, however faint the ember.

My Blog Anniversary 2020

In January of 2013, I began this blog as a sophomore in college. I was having trouble deciding what to major in, and I began writing as a way to help me figure out what to do, to help me figure out myself.

At first I wrote often – almost every week. I wrote about things I enjoyed and things I wanted to learn more about. Things that confused me and things I longed for. I changed from declaring an undecided major to a bachelor of science in multimedia production, although I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with that. I chose a broad major in hopes by the time I graduated I would have it figured out, but graduation came and went and I still had no idea.

I continued to write, though less often. Writing was how I processed my thoughts, and in many ways it felt easier to write than it did to speak. I found that in the act of writing down what I’m thinking or struggling with, my process feels more complete. I don’t stumble over my words the way I do when I try to express myself verbally.

At the same time I wanted to maintain a healthy boundary on expressing vulnerability on the internet, so I kept hand-written journals and would save the less private thoughts for publishing online.

Throughout my journey I sought other ways of processing life: therapy, yoga, walking, and connecting with friends. Writing became just one of many tools, a supplement to help me create balance and to live more holistically.

These days I continue to write as a form of self-discipline. I’m still figuring out how to balance privacy without seeming sterile. If I do publish something online it’s usually with minimal details of events and people, and with a greater focus on reflections and emotional process. Countless times I’ve heard the advice “write what you know,” which often doesn’t leave me with much to write about other than myself. And so my journey continues.

“I Said Yes!”

“I said yes!” The all-too familiar phrase flashes across my screen. My first reaction is joyful surprise at another of my friends accepting a marriage proposal. My second reaction, almost simultaneous with the first, is a pang of grief. My friend enters a new stage of life, never to be the same again. I am losing part of her.

Perhaps I feel some jealousy when a couple gets engaged; I would love to be married someday. But not yet. I am called to a different destiny for the time being. What I do feel is a form of nostalgia for the girl I used to know – the one whom I’d stay up late with, talking about our dreams, our insecurities, our sexual frustration. No longer would we share the kinship singlehood provided. She has found her calling to be a wife, and I do not wish her to neglect that calling. It is as it should be, but it still hurts.

The challenge of saying yes to something is sometimes it requires saying goodbye to something else. We will not cease our friendship simply because she is getting married. In fact perhaps our friendship may take on a deeper meaning because she is following her calling, becoming more the person she is meant to be. But our friendship as I once knew it will be no more. Something has shifted, grown, evolved.

The woman I described above is not just one friend, but multiple of my friends who have evolved, one by one, to meet their calling. I, like Jo in Little Women, question “Why does everyone have to go off and get married? Why can’t things stay the way they are?” But just as I would not wish children to remain children (when they are meant to become adults), so would I not wish for my friends to remain single when they are meant to be married.

Strangely enough, the engaged women I see on my social media feed are often people I have lost touch with. I have longed to connect with them, but our paths have taken different turns over the years, and the closeness I once felt with them is but a memory. I cherish those memories, I grieve them, I hold them close to me. Most of them may not even know how deeply I valued our connection, however short a time we had it. Through life changes, our individual communities changed, and it was no longer practical to share the same closeness we once did. Oh, but I miss that closeness.

As I say goodbye to the parts of these women I once knew, I find myself saying yes to something else on the horizon. Not a marriage proposal per say, but a calling nonetheless. A deep stirring within my spirit, beckoning me to move. I will not neglect this calling, much like my friends will not neglect their calling to marriage. My soul whispers, “It is time.” And I am ready.

Snapshot: My Lovely Saturday Night

“I’ll be taking wonderful care of you tonight,” my waiter said as he opened his notepad and readied his pen. My order was simple: water, lobster bisque, and biscuits. He dashed off to the kitchen, his feet almost as quick as his speech.

Alone with my thoughts, I took in my surroundings: the soft thump, thump, thump of the base drum on the radio, the low lighting creating an air of privacy, the Canadian man sitting behind me talking about his trip to Florida. A baby cried in an adjacent room. Nearby, some servers gathered around one of the cash registers to share a joke. I wondered if anyone would find it strange for a woman to eat dinner alone in a restaurant, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Wearing my new (to me) sweater and sporting a fresh haircut, I figured tonight was as much a night as any to celebrate. It had been awhile since I’d taken myself “out on a date,” and the gift card I had received gave me the perfect opportunity to do so. I would not look at my phone tonight. Instead, I savored the environment – the mainstream, commercialized bistro I had learned to love from childhood – and drew comfort from its familiarity. I basked in gratefulness for the beauty of these moments, moments I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

I had lost sight of something. Of myself. I had forgotten how nice it felt to do something special – by myself. Here, now, I could be fully present, and present I was – well, at least until I realized I had almost finished my soup. It was so good I nearly forgot to enjoy it. The bisque tasted like the sea and like a warm hug all at once, and the cheesy, buttery biscuits melted in my mouth.

I thought about how I had no one to talk to there, but I didn’t mind. My soul was content to rest and reflect and simply be, without having to focus on conversation. Sometimes loneliness is a beautiful thing.

The waiter gave me a small bag to pack up the extra biscuits; I gave him an extra tip for his sweet demeanor. My spirit was overflowing with joy from being fully alive and fully myself. It really was a quick supper – I was in and out in under and hour – but my heart was full. And so was my belly.

A Respectable Young Lady

I got the “lady” thing down. When I was a girl, I learned all sorts of “lady” skills that would prepare me to be a decent woman and successful housewife. I make applesauce. I spin yarn. I can knit and crochet. I paint, sing, and play the harp. I can make quilts and clothes, and serve afternoon tea.

The problem is, activities such as those are no longer as popular as they used to be. Spin yarn? Many people don’t even understand what a drop spindle is, or they have never seen a harp up close.

Felicity Merriman and Elsie Dinsmore were my childhood friends, but I have learned that girls like them remain alive only on the words of a page. While girls my age learned about makeup and name brand clothing, I was out riding horses. While so-and-so was dating her first boyfriend, I was wondering if it was morally okay to wax my eyebrows (would it be vain?). By the time I reached young adulthood, I thought I was well on my way to becoming an accomplished gentlewoman (I use the term loosely). You can imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that a proper gentlewoman is not esteemed in the same way she would have been a century ago.

These days it appears that society values a woman who is career driven more than housewife driven. Many women today are being awarded for accomplishments that, a century or two ago, only men would have attempted. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it means we’ve allowed women to go above and beyond the original expectations of their gender. I think, however, that there is something to be said about a woman who can manage her home well, career or no career. There is a certain beauty that is lost when the art of housekeeping is thrown to the wayside in pursuit of what used to be left to the men.

That’s not to say that pursuing a career is a bad thing. I myself am studying to get a bachelor’s degree, after which I would like to manage a flock of goats (maybe), grow an herb garden, and possibly build my own house. Yes, with my own hands.

Do you remember the term “calling” before it was used in reference to the telephone? In the Victorian era, ladies would pay visits to, or call on, each other. In higher society, women would keep track of who called on them and to whom they owed calls. Paying a call could be compared to paying bills, they were so important. Today? “We should hang out sometime.”

Sometimes I wonder what the hell men are looking for if not a housewife. I may be late in saying this (by about 100 years), but it seems that the woman is having to find a new identity, since it is no longer defined by the skills she acquires for running a home. In a way, this is freeing, because it gives her more independence to choose her own path. In another way, however, it leaves people like me a bit confused about what to do when I’ve spent a significant chunk of my life training to be useful to a man.

Please do not take this as a self-pity rant (although that’s exactly what it is, so forgive me). This is not to say that I cannot survive without a man taking care of me, because I have complete confidence that I can. I think more importantly, I am trying to find my place in 2014 when I feel like I should have been born in 1880.