how I got here

It's a funny thing that happens once the internal ball of anxious energy unravels and you start living in the present moment.  Beautiful things. And I'll get to the rest of my adventure in Ireland very soon.  But first let's go back to what had brought me to this point in my life in the first place.

For almost four decades of my life I pretty much had all the answers.  And the important things I didn't know were left to be decided by an unknown entity in the universe that never reveals itself, so out of my hands.  And I trusted and had faith in all of this without question.  Being raised in a very black and white, dogmatic religion provided security for me.  It brought me comfort and "knowledge".  It gave me answers to deal with things that were scary, painful and hard to reconcile about being a human.

I should mention that this life was a wonderful life.  I was raised in a kind and loving family.  Although rather modest, my upbringing provided for my needs and all the safety and security and love a child should receive growing up.  The ground and soil of my youth was a fertile one.  It grew for me very strong roots of love, compassion, and charity.  It grew branches of morals and community and strength through adversity.  It grew leaves of kindness and hard work and selflessness.

But there were other things I learned in this world.  I learned that thinking for myself would take me off the right path towards pain and transgression.  I learned not to trust anything or anyone outside of the bubble of influence in this church.  Questioning things was not encouraged or acceptable.  The roles of women and men were laid out quite clearly--mine was the ultimate goal of wife and mother as the highest to aspire to.  I learned that there was an "us" and there was a "them" and all of the "them's" were wrong and scary and not to be trusted.  I learned that perfection was the goal but that I would never reach it in this life.  That meant constantly striving towards this goal with endless lists and requirements that measured my progress and my worth.  I learned that this life was only here to prepare me for the next one; that the future was always the better place to be focused, not the now.  I learned that some people had more value than others based on how they were living their life according to what we knew was TRUTH.   As Tara Westover says in her book, Educated, “My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute.'

It was a rude awakening for me when I realized, at 37 years old, that so many of the things I had believed all of my life were not what I thought they were.  It took many years to unravel all of those beliefs.  It's like at the end of the movie Fight Club when you realize the entire existence of Tyler Durden was only happening in the mind of the nameless first person narrator played by Edward Norton.  What?!!!!  And then you want to immediately replay the entire movie through new eyes and see what was really happening.  (The chemical burn on his hand tho? Yikes) That's what I did in my new life.  I went back and rebuilt each belief from the ground up, reexamining what those really meant to me now and how I was going to choose to believe.  For example, what did EMILY think about drinking alcohol?  Was it really something that made you a sinner and/or ended in nothing but alcoholism?  Turns out neither are true in case you were wondering.

The ability to think for myself and decide what was really important to me was very freeing.  It was exciting and new.  Like a child experiencing the world through brand new eyes.  (Imagine Boo in Monsters Inc all sparky eyed and giggly and barely keeping her eyes open at the end of the day, but with blonde hair and big ears).  But it was also terrifying and overwhelming. I no longer had the answers to how scary, painful and confusing being a human on this planet could be. How was I to know what was right or wrong when it had always been laid out for me neatly and clearly by others?  How would I know if I was doing it right?  And as you can imagine this took loads of time and lots of hard work.  It required stepping out into the abyss not knowing if I would fall to my demise or fly.

It appeared to me that the dust had slowly settled on my "new life" and I was fairly proud of myself.  I had figured it out!  Success!  Such a comfort to think I had wrapped that part of my life up with a bow and set it up on the shelf to glance at occasionally.  I'm adorable like that.  Yet as I mentioned before there was a trifecta of circumstances for me resulting in an existential mid life crisis that shed light on some things I had yet to deal with.  Whoopsie!  It wasn't until quite recently I've realized that the way that I view the world and move through it has been directly impacted by the one I lived in for so long.  It's in my bones.  My brain has been wired in many ways that I was just now acknowledging and becoming aware of.  Even though I had most definitely let go of the religious portions of those concepts the framework they were built on were actually still swimming around in my life in many other ways.

I was restless.  I was searching for purpose and meaning in my life beyond my relationships with my husband and children.   I was full of angst and frenetic energy, unfulfilled.  I was in a state of flux (a word I learned while watching Natalie on The Facts of Life.  See TV teaches you stuff).   Surely a few sessions with a therapist would reveal my next step in life and then I could move on to getting it done. Certainly a trained professional who knew the human mind well could help me figure this out.  Plus, most of my favorite podcasters revealed it was considered unusual NOT to have a therapist these days so I was doing what other smart people do. ::pats self on back::

The first session turned out to be a little more unmasking than I anticipated....