Last year, on my birthday, I promised myself to my writing. And though the path was winding, this is the year that I wrote. I learned to show up and write. I learned to flow without editing, and to finish pieces. To express and share even when it made me sweat.
This year, I am renouncing. I am letting go of a piece of my identity, and that piece is struggle.
I am no longer one who struggles.
And so it is.
All my life, I've struggled. I've struggled with work. I struggled with money. I struggled with relationship. This isn't to say I'm unhappy---on the contrary, I experience a deep connection with my sisters, with my new home, with Source and my guides. My life has high highs and low lows, and that's okay. It is the nature of being a highly emotional creature. Emotions run through me faster and faster all the time.
Still, the nature of my mind has always been to chew. To investigate. To question. To criticize. The constantly churning mind turns on itself often.
Struggle is a paradox. It is a constant focus and a way to keep occupied, to keep entertained--- it's almost like busywork. Oddly, it keeps me on the surface. It keeps me from myself. It's like comfort food. It's not good for me, yet it's so easy, almost mindless to indulge in.
There's something I'm trying to say here that is such a shadow for me. It pops into my brain and ghosts immediately. It's slippery, almost intangible.
I'm steeped in the personal development world and it's a given, an early realization that reaching for what's external doesn't get you anywhere. Yet the unconscious is crafty. The drive to get out is intense. I have found so many things to focus on that are external, while tricking myself into thinking I'm hunkered down, doing my inner work.
I have been so focused on money and scarcity for the past nine months.
How to heal the money story I've inherited from the culture and my ancestors, how to move from scarcity into a space of thriving. I have felt so stuck in my patterns. So stuck in the worry about money, so stuck in the obsession and the frustration that there isn't more flow.
And now, it has finally settled. Finally clicked. The scarcity is within.
The scarcity is within.
The fear is within.
The scarcity within can only be sated by the nurturing adult I'm cultivating, the one who coos, holds, and cheerleads when I make a perceived mistake. The scarcity within can only be soothed by the part of me who trusts---who knows---that all of my needs will be provided for. The scarcity and fear can only be loved away.
It doesn't matter how much money I acquire or circulate. This is the only path to feeling internally abundant---deep, constant self-love and forgiveness---a reorienting again and again, back to true North.
What else could this life possibly be about?
There has always been this deep fear in me, if I don't make enough money, I'll die.
But when I'm out in nature, with just my pack---that is absolute heaven. There's nothing else I want, nothing else I need.
Why is money the external thing I've decided will save me? How is it I think I can steward it when it flows to me, when I basically lose my shit in its presence, throwing it at all the things that will "heal" me, and make me be "who I'm supposed to be?"
It's when I come back to my computer, come back to this digital career I've fallen into, come back to the 10,000 courses I'd like to take in shamanism, coaching, and tantra, come back to the pressing urge of "What's next for me? When will I have a career I love? When will I easily attract abundance? How come I'm not clear enough yet? What's wrong with me?"
--- this is the noise. This is the fucking noise, in the way of the me who would be happy to live in a cabin in the woods.
Even these realizations, the vows, this understanding that I will now leave the identify of struggle behind---my brain immediately wants to chew on it. "How? How? How?" ask the little elves that run the show. "Shh," the nurturing part of me says. "We don't have to do that anymore."
I've learned enough to know the how doesn't matter. This is the next evolution around the sun. This is the intention. The how will come. "Figuring it out" is a struggle that is no longer mine. And there's a wise part of me that is proud and serene as she watches me release my grip, and lets that old part of me flow from my hands like sand into a river.
Til next year.