getting to the heart of the matter, hooray.

cw: suicide-adjacent conversation.

open: what am i doing here?

if we’re being honest, i’ve been kind of tiptoeing around what i really want to write about.

the reason i’ve been holding back is i don’t wanna turn this whole Substack into a content warning.

the thing that has been on my mind, on and off for about twenty years, is being Here. On earth.

specifically the question that has been on my mind is whether or not To Stay.

if i could distill what i’m doing here with Am I Doing This Right? it’s this: discovering what it means and what it takes to choose life.

so the content warning (and you can consider this the warning right here) is about conversation that sits just ahead of talk about suicide.

because i can’t talk about what it means to choose to live without the other side of that, and how uncomfortable it can be.

i remember at one point in my life being motivated by freedom, and the way it looked was very clear.

freedom meant living on my own, away from my parents.

my own apartment, a space away from alcoholism and yelling and bullying and fear, where i could create my own peace.

somewhere along the way, after i was in my own apartment, i got lost and started to consider It.

obviously, i did not choose to take my own life.

but i didn’t really decide to live either.

it didn’t seem like there was anything really worth living for.

out of fear on both sides, i froze.

·

coming out of limbo came down to grace.

at my core, i’m curious about it all.

i’m interested in seeing what’s possible.

i do have love in there too, and perhaps what’s scarier than talking about choosing to live is what it’s like to melt the walls i’ve spent years building.

but grace is in going ahead anyway. i don’t like stagnancy and can’t do Netflix right now, so melting my walls has become kind of a necessary form of play.

maybe instead of doing the same things i’ve done before, i give myself grace by exploring what i am capable of.

i want to know truth; the information that helps me find a pathway forward.

time in silence cleared away everything extraneous and in a conversation with the universe or my guides or maybe angels or an ancestor, i was told:

the choice is mine.

i looked at them like, what?

(there were other things i was told, but i gotta keep some stuff secret.)

i would never be given a way forward. i don’t have a life that looks like what other people have.

i will never be given a reason to live or any reason at all because it’s not about reason.

it’s about choice.

·

bloom: creating a process

i started to ask a lot of questions, and by that, commit to being curious, to the point where i could entertain different ways of thinking and doing.

some people would say this is what it means to connect to my inner child.

i questioned and questioned and questioned like a kid, and what came back was knowing for sure that i Wanted Things.

wanting your wants

my old thinking was to immediately feel despair, but i got curious again and started to wonder if those wants were more valuable than i understood.

maybe your wants are like gold.

maybe your wants are like diamonds.

maybe your wants are like little mental lottery tickets.

how could your wants be all of these things? b, i don’t know! but having wants are definitely evidence of… ✨something✨.

·

i. fire + air + water + earth + spirit

at this point i’d done a bunch of reading and watching about magic, meditation, ATR, yoga, manifestation, on and on.

one concept that kept showing up was the perspective that life is made up of five elements: fire, air, water, earth + spirit.

in nearly every tradition i looked at, there was some representation of four-plus-one major energies.

·

cue captain planet theme song

Fire represents will. It’s passion, drive. It can burn things up and clear away everything, but it’s also pretty dangerous.

Air represents thoughts. Imagination. Intellect. How we figure things out and come to conclusions.

Water represents emotions. Feelings. The dream world. The ability for humans to have compassion.

Earth is the physical. When we’re trying to manifest something, what we’re really doing is looking to bring things ‘down to’ earth.

Then there’s Spirit. Love. Hope. If the first four elements are all part of the human experience, Spirit is what brings it all together.

~end song~

·

ii. fire + air

desires represent fire energy, and is considered the first element. everything starts with desire.

thought of in this way, i wondered if desires could be used to keep me warm.

or burn away old ways of thinking and sharpen my focus.

the second element, air, fuels fire.

intense desires are fuelled by thinking. we think about what we want all the time. wanting coffee, wanting to go outside, wanting space. all of these wants are like little fires within us.

when it came to certain wants (and here i’m referring to small stuff like love and lots of money) my brain already had automatic responses for why i couldn’t have them, which led to me thinking life was horrible and not worth living.

i wondered if desires could help me align, use my imagination and whatever smarts God gave me in a way that helped rather than messed.

my thinking already sounded like: “too old”, “it’s too hard”, “it won’t work”, “i don’t have what it takes”, blah blah blah.

but if i continued to want The Thing,

maybe my desires were stronger than these thoughts.

so i could choose to say:

‘i don’t believe you’, in response,

and forge ahead.

… yah, it’s not easy.

this is where meditation, therapy, writing, yoga, prayer, and all the other tools we constantly hear about come in.

their purpose is to build awareness so we can disconnect from the thinking that gets in the way of pursuing what we truly want.

·

close: redefining ‘good’

it feels dishonest to tell people that ‘i’m fine’ or ‘i’m good’ these days.

someone asked me this evening and i told them i am good, but not in the way i’m used to.

that’s what it has been to choose to live: a willingness to redefine.

i’m sorry if this post felt kind of heavy. or triggering. that is exactly what i was afraid of, i’ll say again.

but i kind of like things that scare me. i wanna see it. and i have to write about what i see.

that, dear friend reading this, is what you need to know. <3

1. astrology folks talkin’ about how March 2023 is gonna ‘change everything’. oooh, we will see!

2. started using workflowy to organize my to do lists and it’s super helpful for capturing quick ideas. shout out to a good friend for introducing this to me years ago.

3. i’m looking for a full-time job in communications / PR / customer service. some people might call me a ‘community manager’ (a digital community, if there is such a thing). find my resume and portfolio here.