Hello again

Hello again. I can't believe this page still exists but I'm so so glad that it does. I feel as if I've been practicing with all of the messages, all of the emails, all of the lives, all of the posts, all of the PR for the salon and more for the last 10 years. And here I am now - practicing again. I am here to practice, every day, for at least 15 minutes. A fifteen minute timer where my fingers don't stop moving. I can do this. It's only fifteen minutes. I've begun thinking about my next work. Or rather, I feel like my next work is flirting with me - fluttering into my mind at the oddest times, with the oddesst phrases. For example - I had the phrase "But I didn't break" pop in and suddenly felt as if that had to be the work's title. Because I have felt a near-constant state of bending and manipulating my body, mind, and heart under the forces of circumstances, chaos, upheavals from both loved ones, enemies, strangers and friends. Covid and Ukraine and all the rest of it. It feels so heavy to be human. It feels so heavy to be ME. Anyone else would have given up by now. Thrown in the towel. Cried UNCLE. Not me. No. I didn't break. I kept going. I protected the soft part within me. I hope I have anyway. Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I fear I don't have it. But then I look at Clementine sleeping. I walk and notice the clouds. I remember Roxy and her sweet face and smile when I'd walk in the door. Goddamnit I miss her. Anyway. I've been through some shit. And I feel like the time is coming when I need to tell that story. I need to share all of the moutains I've climbed and moved and dug under and burrowed through. I feel like the time is coming. I feel it as deeply as I feel I'll own another business again. And I know I'll be able to figure it out. I'll be able to refine it and rework it and mold it into something beautiful. Because I have such a talent for shifting perspectives for others. For painting their situations into something beautiful and redeemable. I have a talent for that. And this is turning into a journal entry - but that's ok. I'm getting my fingers to feel these keys again. I'm getting myself to a place and being comfortable looking at this blinking cursor and adding words and words and words until its filled with my thoughts and dreams and reflections. My intent is to put in the reps again. I've gotten very very far away from it. But here I am again. I didn't break. And I wasn't lost. Maybe that's the bigger piece. The continuing to be found. To remain here - and present. And here and present FOR the lessons. I have learned so much. I have been led time and again to a door that opens to a wall of fire, and a hand presenting the way in, and another pressing firmly on my back - no choice to go back, no choice to stand still. Just the certainty that I had to get through it. I had to push forward and hope to not be swallowed up by the flames. I wish I could have been like a fish - brought from one place to another, swimming in the water I was living in, and then placed gently in my new surroundings, still in that old water, but the temperature of the new water slowly becoming my new reality. Instead - I was grabbed, gasping for air for th eternity between the place I left and the place I now will live and plunged in - thrown really - and expected to just keep swimming. And some-fucking-how I do. I kept swimming. I gulped that new air or water or however this metaphor is going at this point and I made a new home. Until the next hand came in and grabbed me. But oh good god there has been magic too. There has been so much good. There is no denying I have absolutely made the best possible outcome from every situation. I have co-created with the Universe. Forever trusting that I can survive anything because "Look look! Can you see where I came from? Do you see who I was surrounded by? Do you know what they did to me? This is cake." And it has been. I have had the ability to prove again and again I cannot be sunk. I cannot be extinguished. Not in this lifetime anyway. Not by those circumstances. I will not say I've survived, but I have come out victorious. I have found my feet again so fast it unsettles those who tried to knock me down. I need to remember that power here. I need to return to my ability to take the dark and disgusting shit and create a new life. I need to take this wild ride and mold it into a new form - mold that love and make it into something palatable and edible and digestable. I will create something out of all of these experiences. Just like I already have. It's just now a new format. It will be the words that have always lived in me and made me up. It just needs to be birthed. It needs to and will be created on white paper with black ink. The blood and damage I have lost and sustained will be so beautiful. It will inspire and devastate. It will be so raw and real I'll cry through it just like I had before. Here I am. Hello again. And now - 17 seconds to go - I will end by saying - I'll see you again. I'll return again. I'll be back to continue and create that new way of living my life - now on the page.