I’m going through my blog entries for the purpose of collecting some of them into one or more books with specific themes, such as mental health and my Awakening.  I didn’t get very far into reading through them when I ran across one from fifteen years ago, right after I started this particular blog, in which I make wishes for progress in nine separate areas of life: positivity, compassion, judgment, loving self-discipline, meditation, yoga, karate, time with friends, and writing.

Oh, my sweet summer child.  If only I had known what I yet had to endure in addition to everything else I’d been through in my 39 years of life.  I cover the events of my life since that post in a more recent one entitled “200”, in which I make an overview of the last 15 years.  To quote one of my favorite bands, Nine Inch Nails, “I am not who I used to be”.  How could I be, just from sheer experience and the passage of time?

But it’s more than that.  To quote another favorite band, Depeche Mode, “if you try walking in my shoes, you’d stumble in my footsteps”.  I’ve been through so much in those years.  Have lost so much, and yet also found a great deal.  I lost ten years of my life in two separate five-year chunks because of psych meds, and yet in the chemically imposed darkness of those years, I was still able to glean insight and make my way back towards the light-filled ordinary world.  About all I’ll say for all of that is that one Dark Night of the Soul is enough for anyone.  Mine was so long and so convoluted that at times I wondered if I hadn’t ended one only to begin another.

I believe I’m emerging from the tunnel, though.  Since last August, I have been in the process of essentially assembling all of the different elements of my life that make me, ME.  I finished unpacking and decorating my house, enabling me to get a look at some old photos that unlocked a lot of happy memories of forgotten friends.  I was able to import my playlists from the old streaming service I used into the one I use now, re-establishing a musical continuity in my life that I had been seriously missing.  Putting all of my music back together in one place together with assembling a Home from more than ten years worth of moves and stuff in boxes made me feel whole in a way I wasn’t intending or expecting.

I feel much more put together than I have since I was 23 years old: 31 years ago.  That was a year of great change for me: divorce, moving, job changes, keeping up with school, being ditched by my roommates and getting awesome new ones, being thin and pretty, loving my job, meeting my future husband, and actually enjoying life for the first time ever.  And at 54, even though I don’t look like her anymore, I am feeling more like her.  I see her and my current self like the maiden and mother aspects of Fate.  She was Clotho, the Spinner.  Now she’s transformed at long last into Lachesis, the Weaver.

And about time, too.  I’ve been operating on the level of Clotho all these years (for perfectly valid psychological reasons) when I needed to be operating on the level of Lachesis.  Over the same months that I was physically “weaving” my life together, I was mentally “weaving” it together in such a way that enabled me to grow up and be at least closer to the maturity level I ought to have by this age.  And I’m glad.  My immature self could make some really stupid decisions and mistakes (again, for perfectly valid psychological reasons).

The post from 15 years ago was written a few months before being diagnosed bipolar and beginning what I call the Medication Dance, an awful jig that would eventually put me in a 5-year-long downward spiral I refer to as the Zombie Years.  Needless to say, this seriously threw me off my game.  All of those things I was wanting to work on and make progress on fell by the wayside, one by one, until all I had left were creature comforts to get me through each day until I could fall asleep to Star Trek, again.

Then came my Awakening 8 years ago.  Since then, I’ve picked up the dropped threads of my pre-Zombie life to the best of my ability and tried to make up for the lost 5 years, all while going through yet more incredible stress (see 200) as well as dropping into another 5-year-long hole following The Madness nearly 7 years ago.  Talk about being thrown off your fucking game.  I got thrown off my game while in the midst of recovering from being thrown off my previous game.  Not cool.

As I went through the process of re-reading the first of the older posts, I remembered having done so before a few years ago and having to stop, because I got really angry.  Angry because before all of the awful medication turned me into a zombie, I was actually getting a good spiritual bead on the world, the Universe, and myself through following a Buddhist path, in addition to my usual Earth-based stuff.  I recalled how my world dissolved over time, and I couldn’t bear to watch myself slowly struggle, and fail, not to descend into darkness through my old posts.

Well, now that I’m venturing another look, I feel like it’s worth seeing how I’ve progressed in those nine areas.  Some I did well in, while others fell by the wayside.  Let’s assess my progress, shall we?

Yoga and karate definitely went away pretty much as soon as I started taking the offending medications.  They disaffected me in both mind and body in such a way that I could no longer follow either practice, much to my dismay from both a physical and mental perspective.  I had relied heavily on the two to provide me with physical, mental, and spiritual exercise, and losing them was a heavy blow.  Now that it’s 15 years later, I’d like to see about re-establishing those habits because they were good for me, and perhaps more importantly, because I enjoyed them.

I also want to re-establish a meditation habit that I was briefly able to get going after my Awakening.  However, like some of the other habits, it fell by the wayside, a victim of a lot of stress, plus just everyday life.  I would like to put it with the yoga and the karate again, since both disciplines incorporate meditation into their practices.  I always said that karate was the yang to yoga’s yin, an active partner to a more passive one.  I’d really like to have that again, because it felt awesome.  I have everything I need, I just need to make it happen.

As for writing, it is a constant in my life, with the exception of a 3-year-long suspension of all writing (and indeed, almost everything else) in my life in the midst of The Zombie Years.  I couldn’t think anymore, and so I had nothing to write about.  It was awful.  I feared not just for my mental health, but my neurological health because I had become incapable of normal cognition.  I rarely spoke, and only in short sentences, because I could literally no longer think.  In the spirit of bushido, that is a fate I would not even wish upon an enemy.

That changed upon my Awakening.  In fact, one of the things I began doing once the initial awakening cycle was over was to start writing, and I didn’t stop for 7 years.  I more than made up for the 3-year drought in writing.  I recently got over yet another year-long slump in writing, but that was mostly because I was fucking exhausted after 7 years of inner processing via the process of writing itself.  As my therapist observed once, “you are a writer that processes by writing.”  Now I’m back to semi-regular journaling with some blogging.

I’m sad to say that time with friends didn’t increase, mostly due to my mental health, but also because everyone was just so freaking busy.  Still, it was hard  to visit when I didn’t have the mental wherewithal to actually have a conversation.  I felt like a stone that could barely speak.  Gradually, I just withdrew into a cocoon of slow and unconscious self-destruction.

After awakening, it wasn’t much better, because I could tell that people thought I was still a bit…not quite stable.  I found that confusing given the nature of my conversations with others, which were often of a spiritual or mystical bent, things we had all spoken together of many times in the past.  I felt I was doing the same thing, yet I was getting a very different reaction.

Now I live 2200 miles away and am slowly reconstructing a social circle via the church we go to.  The people there are very kind and know about my mental health difficulties.  Xephyr had to bow out on a few church responsibilities to take care of me during this last cycle.  Apparently they’ve been asking about me, seeing how I’m doing.  I appreciate that, it’s nice, though I’m not brave enough to go back and see people in person just quite yet.

That leaves positivity, compassion, suspension of judgment, and loving self-discipline, all things that are clearly related, especially under the umbrella of Buddhism.  I have been working on these things very hard for the last 8 years, both in and out of therapy.  My therapy sessions aren’t so much a place where I do actual processing, they’re check-in sessions where I tell him what I’ve been doing on my own, and he lets me know if I’m still headed in the right direction.  I usually am, and if I’m not, I only need a minor course correction.

I have to say that I’ve been largely successful at suspension of conscious judgment, and even some subconscious judgment after all this time dangling my feet into the River of the Collective Unconscious.  However, I am still at the whim of quite a boatload of unconscious judgment that likes to sneak up on me like a hungry shark.

Still, my relationship with Judgment is much more amenable than it once was.  At first, I envisioned it as a screeching harpy with filthy feathers and very sharp talons that liked to dig into my shoulder.  As I worked over time to temper the judgment, the screeching harpy that screamed about every single tiny thing it thought I did wrong slowly transformed into a tiny owl about the size of a tennis ball.  It still makes noise, but not judgmentally like the screeching harpy.  Like a good archetypal owl, it hoots softly, and only to send a message, typically amounting to “hey, are you sure that’s a good idea?”, since that’s typically the only kind of judgment I require these days.  I just have to make sure I listen for those soft hoots, and actually pay attention to them.

Until I dealt with the judgment, the other things, the positivity, compassion, and loving self-discipline, were utterly impossible.  Finally achieving a level of adeptness at suspending judgment allowed for something really important: understanding, for without understanding, I could not achieve compassion for anyone, not even myself.  Perhaps especially myself.

Now there is room for positivity and loving self-discipline, although they have not yet manifested.  The loving self-discipline will allow for the yoga, karate, and meditation that I’m wanting to re-cultivate.  I’m annoyed that I’m fifteen years late to all of this, but I suppose late is better than never at all.  I’m not going to sit around pouting about it, I’m just going to try my best to be grateful to have another chance.