How to Build a Heart: Carrying My Father

Father-Lover proved to be a surprisingly easy task.

When I first realized that I would need to still do work with his remnants, I was daunted. I expected to be overwhelmed by the emotions and trauma of our past, of his past. I spent weeks avoiding putting his stone into the heart jar where it needed to go. And then I spent weeks ignoring the fact that I needed to pull it out again. And then I spent days doing everything I could not to touch said stone, for fear of what would come rushing forth. Each step seemed to inch me ever closer to resolving the situation at hand, but each step also evoked the deep-seated fear I ultimately have of the man that I once called father.

It was early morning, and we were having tea at the table. I found myself staring at Father-Lover’s stone as it rested on the table. There was a pull in me, a desire to touch it, but the desire was always tempered by fear. But because I had enough substances rolling through my veins, I guess I was in enough of a mind space to ignore my baser fears, and I found myself flipping the stone between my fingers, rolling through black fabric in my mind’s eye as I floated forward towards some unforeseen ending to the tunnel that the stone was pulling me down.

This was the first time in years since the stone had anything active in it. While it had always continued to carry its feeling with it, touching it up and to this point hadn’t rendered anything of note. But now? Now I was going somewhere.

I sat there for a while, waiting to reach my destination, and when my feet finally hit the closest thing I can consider ground, I saw that someone was sitting there waiting for me. I’m sure everyone can infer that it was Father-Lover sitting there in the backlit darkness, waiting for me to find him. However, he felt nothing like the versions I had been forced to interact with all of these years. In this crystallized moment, he was so close to who I had always been told he was, but had never gotten to witness on my own.

With his form as I knew it removed, it barely felt like Father-Lover. For a brief moment, I could look past the trauma, the hell we had been through together. For a moment, there was the tiniest possibility of healing. You could see it in his eyes, the sorrow, the unfairness of it all. In this section, he was neither Father-Lover, nor his predecessor. He was somewhere in between.

Of course, this place was not to last. Like so many other healings I have worked on, once the person in question gets what they need, the blockage is removed and everything starts to flow again. The problem being that flow usually means a lack of direct access like this, and so I was no longer able to find him again. All in all, I had less than an hour to soak in the emotions before I had to let go again.

But at least I could handle the stone freely, and I was no longer afraid of its contents. Though the trauma of Father-Lover still exists, I no longer seemed to fear that he would show up and wreck my life again.

And as soon as I had finished that bit of work, the next bit rolled in. And this time, it was my old pendant that I used to wear to represent Set and O as a sort of singular unit. My Ptah pendant that has skeeved me out so badly that I’ve barely touched it in years. It’s spent a lot of its time living in my heart jar, where I could forget that it exists. Every time when I would go to check the contents of said jar, a small part of me would be like, “Oh yes, this is a thing that exists, I forgot.” but I never felt inclined to pull it out or wear it. And as the years have progressed and my love of the religion and its gods has waned, my desire to wear the pendant has diminished greatly.

By the time that Someone was trying to convince me to bring it out and work with it, I didn’t want to touch it at all.

I have toyed for months now as to whether I should be opening up about it or not. Truth be told, most of the times I mentioned my growing issues or complications with the NTRW, I ended up with people either telling me its my fault for things being as they are, or to quit complaining, and so I’ve mostly been keeping it to myself. But when they made me pull the pendant out, and then made me wear the thing, it became much harder to ignore, and has since been very hard to ignore.

For whatever reason, I was inclined to hang it on two different strands of yarn, which you may recognize from this old post. And then I wore it for a few days until the feelings about the pendant itself started to float away. So I can touch it now without feeling completely put off, but I still don’t want to wear it.

Throughout this time, I received a handful of visions or experiences, and one of the most notable things that occurred during this time is that  the nerve damage that is present in my physical body began to show up as a sort of scarring on my skin in the astral. It’s not something I’ve had happen very often, and I’m not sure what working on these two items might have done to cause it to occur, but here we are.

Slowly, I’ve also noticed that I am sorta being dragged away from using my heart jar shrine as a sort of living shrine, and have instead been encouraged to co-opt a pre-existing setup that was in another part of my room. It’s left me wondering if the jar is meant to be temporary and not permanent, and honestly, I’ve always had this nagging question in the back of my head as to whether a heart jar would be a permanent fixture in a person’s self care, or if its something you only need during times of healing.

As this progressed, I began to question if maybe I should scrap my entire heart jar heka idea all together (though I am still using aspects of the shrine, albeit, sparsely), not to mention the slowly-rising anxiety about how I’d even begin to put into words what I was experiencing. It can’t be ignored that this series is now six posts deep, and I have no clue how much closer I even am to finishing this project, much less if this will ever reach any sort of logical conclusion. It has led me to feeling like the work will never be done, or that the hope of being healed is some sort of unattainable dream. It’s why I don’t usually write about a project until after its done, because if I can’t wrap it up in a pretty, edible package for everyone, then it usually never sees the light of day. But now that this is out in the daylight, it also feels weird to not write about its progress.

I guess if it does say anything about rebuilding your heart, its that the process is long, messy, and rarely feels productive.

Previous posts in this series, for those who lost count:

• The curious case of Father-Lover
• Building a Base
• The Maze
• The Void
• Devo Adultmenz

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How to Build a Heart: Devo Adultmenz

Late in the summer of 2018, everything started to slowly flood back into my head. I could feel my menz more. I got more visions. I had heard from O out of the blue. I found myself wandering back into this space. Like spring thawing the earth out after winter, its as if everything started to wake up all at once.

But things were not the same.

Instead of going over to an astral location and being able to see people separate from me, I found that most of my menz were… inside of myself? I have no clue if it’s close to what it’s like to be in a multiple situation, but around that time I began to joke that I was three people in a trench coat because I could feel two of my menz always hanging around in my periphery, as though they were stuck in my body. Ever since I more or less left the void, the astral has largely been this way. Where I sense what is going on inside of myself, but I don’t really exist Over There in any real way, and I can’t interact with anything Over There in any real way. Its as though I am stuck out here fully, can’t really see or sense anything around my astral self (if that even exists), and everyone has to seemingly center onto my physical location to really communicate with me.

The gods aren’t quite the same as my menz, in that they aren’t fully in my form when they talk to me. But at the same time, I also can’t seem to separate from myself enough to see who is talking to me or what things look like where said god is at. It’s like they leave a memo to the back of my head, and that’s all I can ever discern of what they’re wanting or what is going on.

There have been some exceptions to this, where I can travel in the same way that I used to, but its been limited. Very limited.

To reflect this, I changed out the jar that I was using for my heart shrine. I picked a donabe that I had around the house as my main vessel to replace my old jar. I chose a donabe because it felt like it would incorporate room for more people — the same way that my body seems to have. Eating a meal from a donabe is usually done with multiple people, and since I was no longer “riding solo” anymore, I felt like it was fitting to try it out.

I found a wooden base hidden in my grandma’s stuff, and I placed everything on top of it — thereby giving my heart a “firm base” to rest upon. I also cleaned out a lot of the stuff from the inside of my old jar. And as it turns out, I had hit more of my goals than I had realized. I guess I had made more progress than I expected.

Most of my focus from there has been on my own body. Watching different menz roll in and out. Watching them work on things, how their behaviours effect my own, how we overlap and how we don’t. The assets they have that I could fold into my own behaviours vs. the things that we could all do without. Bringing the experience to my body like this helped me to understand a different side of my menz, and it helped me to see how we all fit together as an entity.

In this time, all of the fragments and stories and experiences I had collected from the astral slowly began to fall into place. Holes were filled, and suddenly the story began to make a lot more sense. As I began to fold people into myself, the gaps began to disappear.

In many ways, this reminds me of the work that therapists often assign people who have experienced trauma. When we are young, we have no concept of ourself as being separate from the world around us. As we develop, we will start to explore ourself, and in the process, you begin the process of separation from those around you (mainly, your caregivers/parents.) When the process is done correctly, you are supported and loved while slowly branching out from your caregivers, and eventually, you are able to fully explore your entire self and become whoever you want to be.

But for those of us who were told directly or indirectly that our genuine selves were bad, we are inherently taught to reject parts of ourself. When you’re a toddler and your parents consistently shun things that you do, you’re taught that some part of you is inherently bad or wrong. This will ultimately lead to you rejecting parts of, or even all of, yourself.

One of the ways to heal this sort of splintering of the self is to slowly learn to love and embrace each of the parts of yourself that you’ve been taught to reject. There are many ways to do this, but it generally seems to follow a trend where you will find a part of yourself that you have been told to reject (and you’ll know it because this behaviour, desire, or action will usually feel weird or wrong somehow, and often will bring up feelings of discomfort.) And when you find this part of yourself, you should do your best to fully embrace what you feel and experience, without judgement. Accept it for what it is, and don’t criticize what you experience. Doing this will often heal the judgement we have for ourself, and allow us to reincorporate all of our traits back into our person. Ultimately, it allows us to continue the growth process that was interrupted as a child. It allows us to fully explore all of ourself, and to become whoever we want to be.

And this is what the past year has mostly consisted of for me. As I and my menz share a physical space (my body,) we are allowed to experience all of our emotions (because they can feel mine, too) and as we work to embrace and accept these hard truths about ourselves, we’re more able to merge into one cohesive entity.

Which is not where I expected this to go. At least, not really. I expected that some of us would merge over on the astral plane, but I never expected this to manifest so strongly within my own body.

Of course, it begs to ask, why would I be trying to merge with these people? Wouldn’t that erase them? Doesn’t that mean that my astral family is now gone entirely because I gobbled them up and meshed with them? For most of my time doing this work, my answer for this felt like a resounding yes. That by bringing these parts of myself that I have lost back into the fold that is my personhood, that I would be losing them. But now that I’m halfway through the process, I don’t know that I feel the same way about it. Of course it’s scary, of course I worry that I’m ultimately going to end up closing myself off from the astral by doing this. Of course I worry that this is all just some weird psychology thing where menz are aspects of myself and that this is all “not real.” Of course I worry.

But the process of coming together happened so naturally that it couldn’t fully be stopped. Or stopping it felt wrong.

Some of my menz blended with me very easily. Some of them didn’t need any work at all. But some of them took a long time to make any progress. Before they could come to do their work with me, they had to iron out the kinks between themselves. It turns out that when you’re doing deep-level bonding, you absolutely have to work out the finer details between people if you want the bonds to be strong. One of the many reasons we had issues perfecting this healing earlier on is because small discrepancies between people kept eroding at connections we’d make.

It’s a lot like working with a coworker you can’t stand. Eventually, the tiniest minutia become obnoxious, and we needed to find a way to heal or harmonize those issues out in order to finish the work at hand.

Slowly, one by one, each of us managed to fix our connections. Slowly, we were able to seamlessly shift together. Slowly, I felt less and less differentiation between those of us who had come forward.

But there was still one left. Father-Lover.

 

How to Make a Heart: The Void

The void is, by far, the longest, most awful part of this entire “journey” that I have been on these past few years (though March 2019 gives this a run for its money.) I call it the void because it was, for all intents and purposes, the closest to being cut off from everything that I could have ever imagined. It was the absence of all that was familiar, and it was devoid of what felt like any true growth, change, or improvement.

It is, for all intents and purposes, what it’s like to be inert.

I’ve mentioned being inert several times now since trying to scrape my life back together, and I sort of feel silly every time I bring it up, because I feel like I’m constantly bringing it up without ever really being able to grapple with what this inertia actually means for my journey. It’s a thing that I notice, but I never know what to do about it, or with it. And I think that that is partially because I feel that, even now, I am just as inert here in 2019 as I was back at the end of 2016. Even though I know that this isn’t true (read a post from 2015 or 2014 and tell me that the cadence even sounds the same,) it still feels true. It feels as though I’m in exactly the same place I was then, and it feels awful.

Nobody likes to be inert. As humans, its antithetical to what we need to thrive. We’re not meant to stop, to be stagnant, to remain static. It’s not good for our mental health, and yet many of us are stuck throughout our entire lives being effectively stuck in our past. Ideally, you want to be cognizant to your ever-changing surroundings, and remaining open to new possibilities until the day you die.

However, I have come to believe that sometimes you need to be inert. The same way that we need to rest a broken limb, or sleep in after being sick, sometimes we need to slow down and stop what we’re doing. Because if we don’t, we’ll eventually be forced to stop. Or as I liked to call it, being curb checked. My time spent in “the void” was life’s curb check for me. Every post so far in this series contains a number of subtle warnings about what was going to eventually happen. I wanted to try to prevent it from happening, but the bottom fell out anyways. What started as a steady decline ultimately turned into a complete nose dive towards the ground.

And that’s when the screaming began.

One morning I woke up, and I could hear a part of myself screaming and wailing from somewhere. Nonstop. I’d get up and get dressed and go to work and be trying to pay attention all while this consistent, constant AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH went through the background.

I had issues with crying almost all of the time anymore. The tears would just flow and wouldn’t stop. It was as if it was beyond my control. I forgot what time of year it was, why I walked into rooms, where I left things. I dealt with heavy depersonalization combined with dysphoria and derealization. I looked in the mirror and felt this vague sense of “who is this person I’m staring back at” with side elements of “I am a man in a dress” (which is new for me, I’ve never felt this before.) All of my clothes quit fitting because my body ballooned from whatever was going on with it. It became hard to get up. Hard to move around. Hard to walk.

It was as if everything had finally decided to shut down. All the while AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH just kept playing in the background. Is this a bad time to mention that screaming can border on being triggering for me?

One of the strangest things that happened during this time was that I would frequently get visions of being drowned. I could never tell who it was that was doing it, as the distortion from the water I was submerged in masked too much. But I knew that they were familiar, and that it wasn’t right, but I could never seem to stop it.

I lost contact with everything. Religion, astral, myself. At the end of it all, the only thing I could find any solace from while in this darkness was my art. More specifically, my traditional art. Even though I was a designer by trade, I hadn’t touched traditional artwork since college. This is largely because it costs money and supplies to be able to do traditional art, and that was a luxury I didn’t want to afford until I had nothing else to do with my time. Can’t walk? No worries, you can take a drawing pad with you wherever you want. Paint all of the pretty colors you want to ignore the fact that everything in your life feels a shade of grey or black.

Slowly, things began to leak out. Experiences from the astral suddenly spilled out on the page in front of me. My therapist would later tell me that art therapy would be ideal for me (it is,) but it turns out that I had been trying to come to grips with everything that had happened long before I even realized it was a “thing.”

The largest thing I took away from my time in the void was my art. Because I was forced to stop doing everything, I finally made enough space for art to exist within my life again. And even though I can do much more now, I still make time for art because I feel its an ideal processing method for me. I also think it makes for great heka — which is something I’ve been toying with as I (hopefully) move in the final phases of this heart building that I’ve been trudging through.

The second thing I learned from my time in the void is that there is a real raw grittiness that comes with reaching the bottom of your depth as it currently exists. When you’re being drug along the bottom of your life and you can barely tell where you’re at or why you’re even bothering to continue to draw breath, your priorities shift massively. You learn to accept the help that you’re given because its impossible to do everything by yourself anymore. You learn to accept that things will not be to any sort of preferable ideal because you’re so short on energy that you truly have to accept that “what you can do” is better than not at all. Something I tell people all the time, but never really wanted to tell myself.

The third thing that I learned is that the void is sometimes unavoidable. To some extent, if you don’t stop, you will be forced to stop. Even if you feel you can’t stop, or shouldn’t stop, we all have our limits. We need to pay attention to those limits before we hit them.

The screaming did not stop until after I got into therapy, almost a full year after it had started. When I was finally desperate enough to try an SSRI, I found that the ocean that I had been drowning in for a full year suddenly dried up, and that I could no longer access the water anymore. In a lot of ways, the SSRI cut me off from my emotions too much (a sign that it’s not the right medication for me, but alas, I’ve not been stable enough in the past year to wean myself off of it…), but at the same time, I was desperate for any reprieve I could find, and so I relished it.

The void is an awful place to be. It’s a place I’ve spent various phases of my life in, and this particular session pushed me to my limits in every capacity. If there is anything I could tell anyone about their own time in the void, it’s this: don’t give up. As uncle Iroh said:

“Sometimes life is like this dark tunnel. You can’t always see the light at the end of the tunnel, but if you just keep moving… you will come to a better place.”

I can’t say that where I’ve ended up is currently better, but the place I arrived at the beginning of 2017, after ages in my own void, felt amazing. It was a beautiful place where I was even capable of feeling happiness — something I have woefully little experience with. Sometimes life is absolute shit, but if you can remain curious about what the future holds, you will always find reasons to keep going.

I am glad I kept going. Even as I sit in a new void, hoping that I will eventually find a way out again, I am glad that I kept trying.

 

How to Build a Heart: The Maze

The last post that I released in this series is the last bit that I had written back in 2016. Which is to say that everything you read moving forward was written in the here-and-now in 2018.

I bring this up because when I first started this project in April 2016, I had some weird idea that this would all wrap up and be finished around the same time I celebrated Wep Ronpet (early August.) It was an ideal goal because it would be finished around the same time that my astral work would be finished (late July.) A death and a rebirth that coincided on both planes. If timed out well, it’d synchronize perfectly… right?

The problem being that rebuilding yourself is not something that can be rushed. It’s not something you can really control or hold onto tightly. It’s a process that largely is passive and occurs to you — until it doesn’t anymore (see my late 2017-era posts.) And while I felt a burning desire to process what I was going through (hence the tiny bit of writing from 2016,) I quickly realized a few months in that there was no way that this process would be over soon enough to draw any conclusions on what I was experiencing. I usually like to wait until a sequence as complex as this is finished before I write about it, because my perspective and understanding of things often changes as I am, by effect, changed. And once I realized that I wasn’t going to be finishing anytime soon, I stopped trying to write about it all together.

I often question if I did myself in by not writing throughout the entire process. On one hand, I feel like something was gained by completely immersing myself in the process and losing touch with the world around me (this blog included,) but I find myself questioning if I would have saved myself some hell if I had been letting everyone else know what was going on while it happened…. as opposed to two years after things got started.

And I suppose the answer doesn’t matter anymore, since that time has come and gone and my decisions have already been made. However, two years later, I decided that writing about this process was more important than waiting for it to finish — and that’s if writing about it doesn’t turn out to be completely vital for the work to be able to be finished at all. And so here we are — with me trying to remember and make some sense of what all transpired during the past two years of murky transformation.

__

When I first started this project, I decided to use a physical representation of myself wading through this mess. I had a copy of the maze used in Westworld, and I moved a small marker representing myself each day through this physical copy of the maze, hoping that somehow it’d help me figure this mess out. I remember being told which ways I could move my marker, in that I wasn’t allowed to cheat and just head for the center. Whoever or whatever was directing me initially made me go the longest route we could find. So I feel like on some level, doing this accomplished something, but ultimately I couldn’t really tell you what exactly it accomplished. If anything, I could only come to assume that perhaps I was teaching myself a path, a way out, that would play out in the here and now over the next few years.

Each time I came to the center I spent a few days there, trying to figure out what to do. And when nothing happened and I couldn’t figure out if I had done something wrong, I started the maze over again, but decided to run it as fast as I could. I reached the center at a much faster rate this time, and once again, I sat in the middle and waited for something to happen.

And eventually, something did. Was it due to being in the maze? Probably not, but I feel like sitting in the epicenter was probably the best place I could have been when it happened.

I feel like I’ve only mentioned it in vague references and passings, but my astral work over the past 5 or so years has been specifically to reach a particular goal. And in the summer of 2016, in the midst of me trying to figure out how to secure a solid state of existence after doing myself in a fit of spite, this goal finally reached its climax.

And it was a messy one.

I’ve found that you can have the best-laid plans, but sometimes things don’t pan out well. I mean, it was well in that we were successful. But if we were going to get a grade for the level of success achieved by our endeavor, I feel the grade would be pretty low. C level if we’re lucky.

In the process of securing my goals, I managed to get myself done in again. This time, it was a complete reset, which is good, but it wasn’t done with an anchor, which makes it risky. I got lucky in that I came back with most of myself intact, and for about a week or so, things were amazing. I felt like I could connect in a way I hadn’t in months. I could see my family, I could be with everyone.

But then everything cut off again, and I was back in the same old darkness I had spent the previous seasons in. I was sent notes about how things unraveled, and I was being assured that everyone was doing as much as they could to speed things along, but ultimately we all knew that this was going to be a long ride.

Eventually, I decided to move the maze under my heart jar. I felt like I was showing that I had conquered that which sought to conquer me. That I would build a better version of myself on the ruins of what I had been through, and that maze was the base of my heart until I moved in 2018.

But as summer faded and I realized that this process was not going to be triggered by completing my astral goal, and that my ability to rebirth myself was in jeopardy for reasons that I didn’t fully understand. Fall finally settled in and the world slowly started to get darker.

And it was about that time that the screaming started.

 

How to Build a Heart: Creating a Base

If there’s one thing I can say about this entire process that I’ve gone through, it’s that you can’t and shouldn’t underestimate the power that physical items can have on the Unseen. I usually felt like a lot of physical items were there to mainly help myself visually make connections with what I was doing. But that ultimately, a lot of the power was coming entirely from me. However, as I’ve gone through the process of trying to heal Father-Lover, and upon failing that, pushing Father-Lover out of my life, I’ve found that items can definitely do a lot more than I had originally given them credit.

The more I looked through comparisons between what was going on astrally and the items that laid around my house that were connected to astral people, I found that moving items in the house could have an effect on what was going on Over There. So as I began to move forward with rebuilding myself, I knew that I needed to be particularly careful about what I did with the items that I was attaching to myself and to my purpose/goal. To treat the items carelessly could very well undo a lot of the work we were undertaking.

When I first decided that I was going to rebuild my heart, I was pretty excited. I thought the notion of being able to rebuild myself into whoever or whatever I wanted to be was pretty cool, and I looked forward to tailoring who I was into someone more like what I wanted to be. However, I found very fast that this is an incredibly daunting task, and once my health tanked a month after starting this project, I found myself bitterly hating even coming up with this thing.

The first thing that I did was work to establish my ib jar in some capacity. Since it still smelled of weird cherries, I decided that the scent was the first part I needed to work on. Smells are important in Kemeticism, after all. The fine scent of incense is what draws the gods close to us, and I felt that having a nice-smelling heart might help to attract my inner divinity back in.

So first I placed a bunch of coffee beans in the bottom. I was hopeful that they would help to neutralize any remaining cherry smell that was in the jar. I then ground up several flavors of incense and placed them in the bottom of the jar as my base. On top of that, I added some salt for purity purposes, and some of my MMJ tea to help keep myself calm on all levels. I let this steep for a week or so and eventually added another kind of tea that reminds me of my family and considered the scent portion good.

I also added a ma’at feather, to keep myself balanced, and I placed my Ptah pendant in the bottom. I felt that both of these items could help to keep myself more balanced, and to help drive myself to become better at handling my various moods and emotions.

But then I was stuck.

On the astral, we had run into hiccups with my healing. There were several reasons for this, most of which are irrelevant, but the main takeaway was that I should have either woken up and “resurfaced” into my body by this point. Or I should have been able to create an interior space for myself where I could begin to heal. I was still sitting in a black void, though, which meant something wasn’t quite right.

I was urged to embody myself in some capacity. Take a form (whatever I’d like!); create a space to call my own (it can look like whatever you want!); or make some sort of item that reminded me of myself (any shape! any size!). But in every attempt to do these things, I found that I couldn’t. The more I tried to figure out who or what I was “supposed” to be, the more upset I got. The notion of trying to create a space that was all to myself sent me into a panicked frenzy, and it got to a point that even bringing it up made my chest tighten. For someone who knows themself so well on the physical, I apparently don’t know much about myself on the astral. Trying to recreate myself after eons of being merged with someone else was causing me a lot of mental hell.

And I stayed in that hell until the middle of May.

I got so frustrated with my project that I had to put my ib jar away for a while. The simple act of looking at it would make me so upset that I couldn’t stand it. So I thought that some space would be helpful. I still couldn’t see anyone in the Unseen, either, and that was not helping. Usually when I get stuck, I go and talk with the gods or converse with one of my menz or contacts to see what they’d suggest on the matter. But I was still locked in the darkness with everything cut off from me. I would have to figure it out on my own somehow.

Some how.

I would love to tell you that I pushed myself until I really got a deep understanding of who I was or what I wanted to be, but that’s not really how everything went down. It happened very suddenly one day without a whole lot of explanation, when I was kicking around ideas about how to proceed with all of this. At first, I was telling myself that creating my own space wasn’t really that bad, and that I should look at it like being moved from a cubicle jungle to my own office. It’s really not that scary, and nothing says that I have to spend the rest of my time alone because I’ve made my own space (a huge fear I seemed to carry was that I’d be all alone). So think of it like a new office! I just need to figure out what I want my desk to look like.

I continued to kick this idea around until I could suddenly find myself standing in the darkness. Once there, I almost forced myself to envision what I thought my core might look like, and I fine tuned it until I could at least tolerate what I was looking at. And when I finished, I was pulled into that item into an interior space. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

I also got very lucky while out shopping one day, in that I found a piece of jewelry that screamed “this is it” to me. And by this is it, I mean: this is the piece that will represent yourself. I wasn’t sure if it was correct, and I worried and stressed that I was picking up the wrong thing. However, I was pushed to get it anyways, and so I did. While I still wasn’t sure what exactly I was doing, I at least had enough to get going.

And so the building actually began.

For this project, I decided to take a multi-pronged approach to rebuilding myself. First was to create a sort of “trap” jar that would capture anything harmful that was coming after me. I was in a period of instability, and I wanted to make sure that I protected myself during this time. This involved taking a black jar and filling it with grounding materials and a magnet, and then placing an item inside of the jar that is “like me, but isn’t me”. I then placed it in a safe spot to attract all of the negativity away from me. This way, I wouldn’t have to worry about dodging punches while I healed.

I then made another container that allowed me to let go of some of the negative stuff that was happening around me and stressing me out. I used some of the basic ideas in the post that I got the idea from, but modified it a bit. I chose to use salt and rice as my base, as I consider both to be soothing. This would hopefully allow me to stay calm while I worked on letting go. I used hematite beads that I had laying around in a craft bin, and then I wrote things that I wanted to let go of on paper strips. This included things like the names of people whose negative words needed to leave my mind, bad anon-hate, negative things I tell myself, doubts I had, etc. I left this out in an open place so that I could shake it whenever I felt these things taking hold of me.

Through making both of these items, I felt like I had made a level base to get started on the real work at hand.

I took out my ib jar and added several more things to my scent and ma’at base. I added in pieces of paper that had phrases and sayings on them that I wanted to keep in mind as I moved forward. Things like “You exist beyond someone’s perception of you” or “I am able to connect with myself and those around me”. Things that I felt would help keep the negative self-talk down, and allow me to better exist in the world around me. I also added origami stars to my jar that had dreams and things I’d like to achieve written on them. And for a final touch, I added in a small (fake) fish to eat any negativity that happened to slip in.

I then created a shrine for the jar to rest upon. Everyone needs a place to rest and to recover, and that’s what the shrine was meant to embody. As such, I was careful in what I chose to place in the area, trying to keep in mind that everything here could have some sort of unforeseen effect on the work I was doing.

And with that, the first phase of recreating my heart had begun. But how far would it actually carry me?

 

In a World Full of Yes

Deciding to finally live for myself couldn’t have been more timely. I knew within a matter of days that the situation I found myself in earlier this year would have done 2016-era me in completely. This is largely because I was suddenly finding myself dealing with my family on a daily basis in ways that I hadn’t had to in the past. I never had to get into it with an aunt about finances or with an uncle about caring for their elderly father.

As the weeks dragged on, I found that most of my family hadn’t changed much from my youth, and that most of them were just as shifty in their behavior as they had always been. With each new round of drama that would crop up, I found myself having to choose between keeping the peace and actually protecting myself. In my youth all I had ever done was work to keep the peace. I chose to make myself smaller so that I might not get ousted from the group, and what I didn’t realize when I decided I was going to go “all in” with life is that you can’t really take the path of least resistance when you’re actually trying to take care of yourself.

With each new experience where I felt like someone was taking advantage of me or trying to hurt me, I could suddenly see my younger self looking back at me, asking me why I was allowing this person to hurt us, to hurt them. I noticed that I was always more willing to put myself in the line of fire for others, but not for myself; a well-known trait for those of us with anxiety. Which meant that if I wanted to walk the walk and not just talk the talk, I’d have to start sticking up for myself in the same way that I would for others, and drawing boundaries in the sand as to how I would allow people to treat me.

For someone like me, this is actually quite terrifying.

Of course, when I talked with my therapist about boundaries, some part of me knew that this was going to happen eventually. She told me that I wasn’t very good at drawing boundaries to keep myself safe. She said that this was partially what caused the violent emotional responses that I was prone to. Because I couldn’t separate myself from everyone around me, I couldn’t help but feel their feelings as though they were mine. I almost felt like I wasn’t being a good person if I wasn’t flinging myself headlong into everyone else’s issues so that I’d know what it felt like to be them in that moment.

And in those moments, I seemed to imagine that drawing boundaries would be empowering. That I’d basically be learning how to cordon myself off from things that would hurt me. That I’d make sure I was safe. I think that my initial concepts of drawing boundaries banked on the notion that I’d be able to actually disengage with anything I didn’t want near me. Which, in its own way, means I was planning on drawing my boundaries by running away.

But what if running away isn’t possible? As is the case when you’re being a caretaker for someone who still has living family that they want in their life. I hadn’t thought about this until I was already in it. You see, for all of the years of being labeled as being aggressive, mean, bitchy, overbearing, etc. I actually do not get off on telling people what to do. I feel uncomfortable asking for simple, basic things, and when I have to do so regularly, it can cause me to have anxiety attacks. But in order to actually protect what I had managed to cultivate, I had to find a way to tell people — family — no.

And so I tried. At first I often would try to soften anything I said. “Could you maybe, possibly think about how that might have come across. It was kind of mean.” or “I’m not really comfortable with that, would it be possible to maybe do something else?” And you know what happened?

People got mad anyways.

[[image of quote that says “If I say no to someone and they get angry, it does NOT mean I should’ve said yes”]]

If there is anything that 2018 has taught me, it’s that you can be as accommodating as humanly possible. As nice as humanly possible. As non-intrusive as you can possibly be. And people who are committed to not meeting you halfway will still call you Too Much, Extra, and my personal favorite, Bitchy. People who are not interested in developing healthy relationships with you will never acknowledge or respect your boundaries without a fight, and that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have set those boundaries.

Above all, I’ve learned that setting boundaries feels less like taking care of yourself and more like fighting a war against people who won’t take no for an answer. The problem being that as awful as fighting a war everyday is, fighting this war is necessary, if not mandatory in order to be healthy. The more I found myself not defining what was okay in terms of how people treated me, the more I found myself not saying no, not standing up and speaking my needs, the more miserable I became.

So it begs to ask — which is worse? A slow death by suffocation via those around me because I was too scared to stand up and say no? Or a slowly-fought battle where I potentially lose people, but can ultimately breathe?

[[image of a quote “It is crucial for deeper level recovery that we learn that feelings of fear, shame and guilt are sometimes signs that we have said or done the right thing.They are emotional flashbacks to how we were traumatized for trying to claim normal human privileges.”Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Pete walker, pg 78”]]

In Kemeticism, we talk about how isfet has to be battled back every day. The gods have no choice but to engage in this daily battle, or be destroyed by the thing they fight. Every time I’ve talked to the NTRW about fighting back isfet, they don’t seem to be too distraught over it. It’s just a thing that they Have To Do if they want to live a certain quality of life, and there is very little baggage tied to it at this point.

As I continue to work on drawing boundaries for myself, I begin to think more about this comparison, and how if I allow other people to constantly take advantage of me, how my life will be overrun with isfet. How I can’t, in good conscience, tell myself that I’m trying to live in ma’at while not actively trying to dispel the isfet I’ve inadvertently let in my life. I remind myself that anything worth having is worth fighting for, and if I’m not worth fighting for, then what is?

And so the battle continues. May it get easier to do, and feel less like a battle in time. For all of us.

How do boundaries play a role in your life? How do you create boundaries in your life?

Resources for developing boundaries:

• Boundary Myths
• Kaleidoscopes of Chaos
• Normalizing No
• You Must Validate Yourself
• Boundary Reminders
• Befriending Yourself
• https://satsekhem.wordpress.com/?s=boundar&submit=Search

 

Inch by Inch

One of the things that marked my two years of hell was an overwhelming sorrow that I almost always felt. I mean, the sorrow wasn’t new — I knew it was there. But when my brain finally gave up the ghost, the floor that had separated me from that sorrow seemingly disappeared and I was dragged into the sorrow-filled depths below. I have no clue if its accurate, but I feel as though I’d been stuffing all of my sadness into this big ol’ hole in my head, and then disassociating myself away from it as not to let it effect me. Likely, this is due to the fact that my family doesn’t deal well with emotions. Crying is just not something you’re really allowed to do, and so I did everything in my power to never cry and never show any emotion that could be used against me.

But when the floor disappears and you’re drowning in it 24/7, there is no real way to escape it. It becomes an all-consuming totality that is your waking existence.

As such, we tried to address this in therapy. We didn’t talk about the Ocean of sorrow very often, but whenever I’d brush up against it, I’d tell her that my sadness was too large to handle or figure out what to do with. And whenever I got too close to it, it became too overwhelming and Too Much for me to even maintain any semblance of control or ability to even do anything with the feelings that were consuming me.

During one of our last sessions together, I went into a place that existed astrally, but had seemingly been inaccessible to me since 2016. I navigated through these dark hallways and came to a large sphere where my ocean of sadness was seemingly held (don’t ask me, that’s just how it goes with this stuff.) I told me therapist that it hurt to look at it, hurt to touch it. That there was no way I could do anything with such a large sphere. It was too big and too precarious to move, and any attempts to make it smaller were not producing anything.

But because in EMDR-styled therapy we’re bypassing a lot of your conscious brain and letting the subconscious bits do the work, my mind showed me that we could poke a bunch of small holes into the sphere. And that slowly the water would drain, making it more manageable for me to handle. I remember the therapist asking me why I didn’t do these smaller things that would help with the sadness, and I told her that I didn’t fee like it was actually doing anything. She reminded me that Rome wasn’t built in a day and that each journey is made of a bunch of small individual steps. That if I wanted to make progress, sometimes that progress has to be made one tiny little inch at a time. But reminded me that it’s still progress.

I spent years not handling the sadness, partially because I didn’t know how and partially because I didn’t want to, and by the time it came to a point where I needed to do something about it, lest it end me, I found myself expecting to be able to do one or two “somethings” that would make huge dents in this sorrow, and therefore bring me relief.

If there is something that I think many of us do that ultimately hinders our progress in life, it’s that so many of us seem to walk around with the idea that we just need to perform one or two Big Actions to make a Thing happen for us. We lose track of the fact that all of our decisions matter. Every single one of them. And if we want to make the most progress, we shouldn’t only place an importance or emphasis on one or two choices, but on each and every choice we make.

Not to make my segue too harsh, but I saw a couple of posts a few weeks back that were spawned from a series of tweets that Ed Butler had put out into the world. For those who don’t want to click on the link, here is a copy of the tweets in question:

Someone says they want a relationship with the Gods. Tell them to wander out into the desert and nearly die, or to take an entheogen that will have them puking and hallucinating for hours, and they will do it. Tell them to put a little food in front of an icon and they will not. This is because the former, as hard as they are, are easier insofar as they support the person’s vanity, whereas the simple acknowledgment of the reality of the God embodied in the offering of food to an image is like a mortification. One could say that this is because the sinfulness of idolatry has been peculiarly thoroughly indoctrinated into people, but I think that the strangely stubborn aversion in those otherwise nominally inclined points instead to a resistance based in narcissism. Or perhaps a person feels too self-conscious making offerings to an icon; after all, one can hardly feel self-conscious while dying of thirst in the desert or imagining insects swarming over one’s body. But how interesting it is that they fear the one more than the others.

When I read these tweets, I had so many thoughts as to why someone might choose to do something big and grandiose but not something simple and basic or mundane. And while I do think that Butler is correct in that there is a percentage of us who only want to do things that don’t make us uncomfortable or speak to our vanity (or are, for all intents and purposes, performative), as sat talked about in their post, I think another factor of it comes down to the notion I was talking about above (which is similar to the take that this post over here took.)

Which is that so many of us seem to think that one or two Big Things is better than regular/daily smaller inane “useless” things.

I can give you countless examples where I’ve seen this play out in so many different ways across various communities. Where people discount things that appear to be too simple, too small, too mundane. We’re waiting for the One Important Thing that we have to do that will kick off the middle-of-the-movie montage that will rocket us towards our future Selves that we were always supposed to be.

And in that context, I feel its less about appealing to vanity, and more that we’re waiting for one or two major decisions to balance out all of the smaller decisions that we neglected to own or make–for a multitude of reasons (giving up power is another post.) Just like my younger self choosing to tuck those emotions away instead of handling them, I gave up the chance to work through that sadness while it was still small and manageable, up until I had no choice but to face it in its overwhelming totality. And even then, I thought that the idea of letting out a little bit of sadness here or a little bit there was never going to amount to anything of note. I wasn’t trying to turn it into a big production for my ego, I was simply underestimating how much power can be found in these smaller bouts of release.

Now, I want to add a caveat for all of my spoonie readers out there — please keep in mind that this isn’t a post about running yourself into the ground. This isn’t about doing all of the things all the time, nor is it about bludgeoning people in the head with ideas about how gods won’t ever possibly like people don’t do “enough work” in their religious lives or anything like that.

If anything, I am urging everyone reading to remember that every decision has weight. That we can all accomplish more in our lives if we do the tiny things that seem insignificant now, but will ultimately bear fruit later on. That there is no shame in making a practice or life of small, simple things, because those things may lead to amazing places if you let them.

I have found that handling my sorrow a little bit at a time, scratching out some notes here or there, drawing a picture or two, writing a blog post… that these little things slowly allow me to let my sadness out, and allow me to heal a little bit at a time. I don’t feel healed or 100% better yet, but I can tell that it’s getting easier because I keep working at it little by little.

Even if it seems too simple, remember that there is power in simple things. Just because its small doesn’t mean its insignificant.

What role does simple acts play in your practice or life? How often do you consider the weight of these simple acts?

 

Aimless

This post was originally a part of last week’s post, but because of length, I decided to break the post into two with last week focusing more on my mundane life, and this week focusing more on re-entering Kemeticism. If this post seems somewhat repetitive, that is why.

_

One of the most interesting and oh-so-fun side effects of my health degrading is my complete and utter lack of memory. I honestly can’t remember most of 2015, 2016… and to some extent, 2017. When I went to start writing posts in August, I realized that I had forgotten that I had posted in April. A lot of what I used to know about Kemeticism still rattles in my head, but I don’t really have access to it anymore.

Because of this side effect, all I could really remember thinking about Kemeticism since my health tanked in 2016 was lukewarm “eh” ness. I mean, when I moved, my shrine sat on a shelf for weeks and collected dust with its doors taped shut while I lukewarmly looked for a place to put it. I couldn’t care less about the gods or the community, and for all I could remember, this had been the case since my “A Good Horse” era.

But recently I found a planner from 2016 that I stored all of my little tidbits in. As it turns out, early 2016 me was very much still jonesing for Kemeticism. I have pages of notes for my book. Pages of notes for how I wanted to release it. Topics that I wanted to write about on WP. Tagging phrases I wanted to use over on tumblr to make resources more searchable. Initiation tidbits that O had pinged for me while I was still able to read (another fun side effect — I can’t read or write very well anymore.)

But between the gap of what was and what is, I lost something. I lost a lot of somethings. And part of that was my original love affair for the NTRW. I don’t know when it happened exactly, but I’m pretty sure it started in the fall of 2016, when I was told through a third party that I should step back on all fronts related to Kemeticism, for my own health, and co-signed it with Set’s name. Regardless of what I wanted or what I felt was the proper handling of such a situation, the writing was pretty apparent on the wall, and it said to gtfo.

I had to be dragged and kicked away from my work. Within a month or two of fully walking away, you couldn’t drag me back to it. I began to find absolute liberty and freedom in being able to see that drama was occurring, and not feel obligated to do anything about it. It was amazing to not have to deal with writing schedules, constantly checking social media platforms, having to field drama or requests to handle drama, etc. I loved being able to just… exist without worrying about this religious community.

But even as I drifted away from Kemeticism, I found that I was often still going back to it. As I began to study permaculture and learn more about the processes that occur in nature, I found myself comparing them to ma’at, to the NTRW, to Kemeticism. Even if I never wanted to see Kemeticism ever again, I couldn’t seem to break free of it, either. It was built so heavily into my worldview that I had nothing else to put in its place to compare new concepts to.

As I began to play with the idea of writing again, I found myself mulling more and more about how I actually felt under the surface about my religion. I knew that I still liked the religion itself, but that my strongest emotions were towards the gods and the community specifically. In many ways, I was content to keep ma’at and pitch the rest–other Kemetics included.

So when grandma died and everything was thrown onto the floor, I really had to figure out why I should even bother to come back to writing at all. Because of the need to be present and offline while handling all of the aspects of cleaning her house, moving in, caring for grandpa, etc. I really got the chance to 100% forget and remove myself from the trappings that used to be my daily life. My shrine was packed away. All of my books were out of sight, and I went months without checking WP and days without checking Tumblr. I completely and totally fell of the map.

And I liked it.

I’m sure this is leading a few of you to ask yourself “well why are you even here, then, if you liked it so much?” And my answer to you is

 

To some extent I can’t justify entirely walking away from what I’ve helped to build, but on the other hand, I’m not as committed to the sparkle motion as I used to be. Or at least, I’m not as committed to the sparkle motion that the gods seemed to want for this community. Part of why I am here is also spite — spite at the gods for their treatment of myself and others, spite at the people who wish I’d just disappear.

So far, the only thing I can really say with any certainty is that becoming more active on discord is probably the main reason I decided it was worth coming back. Being able to talk with other people was what really sold me on doing this work many years ago, and to some extent, its what’s bringing me back now (and frankly, I’m not the only one.) Time and time again, love it or hate it, its those pesky human interactions that seem to bring a lot of us back.

That and spite.

The more I get to interact with people again, the more I remember that it used to be this way before I lost a lot of my friends, and before I became too ill to really bother with talking to anyone anymore. I have no clue how widely-known it is, but when my health tanked and I suddenly stopped posting or doing anything online… almost no one came to check on me, and I know for a fact that that has weighed heavily on me since 2015. When you’re trying to hard just to scrape by, and no one even seems to notice you’re gone, it makes it hard to convince yourself its worth going back to. I’ve realized since that it’s not necessarily that people don’t care, but it’s that people don’t know what they don’t know. And many of us (myself included) really suck at letting people know that we’re thinking of them, or checking in on people.

As I slowly sifted back through the posts that I forgot I wrote, I began to realize that ultimately, I’m in the same position that I’ve always been in. My love for the gods is about a lukewarm as it’s seemingly always been. It’s the people that have always brought me back around and kept me here.

And I think I’m okay with that.

 

The Problem is the Solution

They say that recovery isn’t a straight line.

They’re not wrong.

Back when I was in therapy, I often found myself back in a portion of my past, somewhere starting in 4th grade, spanning through to the end of 5th grade. During this time in my life, I had experienced a lot of changes resulting in a loss of stability, structure, and trust btwn me and, well, everyone around me. While everything that was going on seemed doable from the perspective of an adult, the younger parts of myself felt as though I had experienced the end of a way of living. To elementary school me, it was almost like I was living through an apocalypse, and trying to find a way to continue on despite the fact that only a husk seemed to remain of my former life.

I think about this part of myself often. I think because I can relate to it in a whole new way than I could before. It’s not that I haven’t had to shift my way of living regularly as new health issues or losses of resources have occurred… its that I’ve never actually achieved any level of stability since my youth to actually lose. Until now.

People may have noticed that at the end of last year, it seemed like I might start posting regularly again. If this was you, then congratulations, you were correct. That is, until my grandmother died. For those of you who have been hanging around for a hot minute, you’ll know that our past was checkered in both amazing and equally awful ways. Our relationship was complicated, though it had mostly worked itself out as I became an adult.

With her death, everything about life changed. I had to move into her old house so that someone could keep an eye on my grandfather, except to do that I needed to clear out enough of her belongings to actually be able to move in (can you say “hoarding”?.) In the process I had to break my lease and pay for that. I had to give up job opportunities and accept the fact that holding down a full-time job again was no longer in my future, for better or worse. I had just gotten my diet, and to some extent, my health, under control only to have that blown apart because I now have to provide meals for another person whose eating habits are completely antithetical to what I need to be ingesting.

So in short, everything has more or less changed in the past 6 months. My living situation has changed. I’m no longer living in town with my SO, but instead in the sticks with my SO, grandfather and all of my grandmother’s hoarded animals. I’ve got to not only take care of myself, but the house, the animals, and my grandfather. And while my family had originally made it sound like they were going to be helpful, the truth has shown to be quite the opposite.

As such, in a matter of a few weeks, nearly all of the progress that I had made in improving my health has completely been sunk. Symptoms that had left have slowly started to return, and I’ve noticed that my lack of being able to maintain all of my specialists and dietary needs has taken a toll. And I’m likely only just getting started. In so many ways, I feel so much like my younger self, standing in a wasteland of what used to be my life. Unlike 4th grade me, I at least have more tools now to get myself back to where I want to be, but it doesn’t change the fact that it really sucks to have your recovery shot in both of its kneecaps and left for dead.

Everything that has happened in the past few years has left me with conflicting emotions, and this final turn of events has been the cherry on top. I titled this post “the problem is the solution” in an attempt to remind myself that even though things are challenging, they are ultimately what I need in order to get where I want to be. And that while I may feel several ways about something, that I am still heading in the direction that I ultimately want to go.

While the timing of being forced out onto this property is not ideal, I know that it will ultimately be better for me to be here sooner over later. This will allow me to start moving forward on my long-term future plans sooner over later, and it allows me to stop my future house-to-be from becoming completely unlivable, as my grandparents weren’t doing any of the major maintenance needed to keep things running well. While the existence I’m eking out right now isn’t great, I know that I ultimately have the capacity to turn my situation into a boon if I play my cards right.

But it also means the passing of an era. I know that I’ll never be able to go back to how things were, and while I know that that ultimately isn’t a bad thing, it still makes me a little sad. Especially because it means that getting my health back on track is going to now be that much more difficult and challenging, and that while I know opportunity exists at some point in the future, I still have to get there from where I’m at.

Of course, I am also changed from this experience. The person I was three years ago really kinda no longer exists. Running the gauntlet of having someone die, becoming a caretaker, and dealing with the drama and fallout that occurs with that sort of process all while trying not to die on the daily has changed me, for better or worse. As you will likely see in the coming posts that I’ve got scheduled, I’ve lost parts of myself, cast parts of myself aside, and am still not entirely sure where I’m at or what I’m doing–especially when it comes to Kemeticism. And while things are still up in the air, I’m certain that it’s only a matter of time before those changes affect how I look at Kemeticism, or handle my community work, as well.

Everything I did with this blog before I left was mainly aimed at obtaining Set’s objectives for the community. I no longer have to adhere to that, so I guess let’s see where it leads us, shall we?

 

To Sustain Yourself on Hearts

Everywhere around me, I see death.

I don’t necessarily mean death as in, there are dead bodies around all the time (though there is a lot of literal death on this planet, too), but a death that is a bit more metaphorical: people who are living, yet very much dead inside. You know the call signs: you hate your job, you hate being alive, you live to escape into a book or tv, you drag through the motions of life without engaging with those motions. I think we’ve all been there. I think it’s impossible to live a full life and not spend some time there, but it’s not healthy when you stay there for too long.

After my last post, Sat talked to me about how it reminded her of her Inert Ones post, saying that “Maybe that’s part of why there were Inert Ones in hour 2. They had eaten their hearts to the point where there was nothing left to move on.” This hit several notes for me including a mixture of my own experiences with being inert for extended years of my life, combined with my experiences through the spirit work I’ve done with Osiris — a person who also spent a fair amount of time being inert. Shortly after Osiris is felled, he is said to lay on his side, inert, and unaware of everything going on around him. When O walked me through Rosetjau a few years ago, he reminded me that when you die, your energy becomes still and the energy around you (loved ones, people you knew, people who process your body, etc.) becomes active as if transferred from one party to another. He told me that this is how the dead are supported — the energy shifts to those around you, and they take care of everything while you adjust to your new existence.

Ideally, it’d be that way in real life, too. That every time one of us falls off the radar, we’d have people to help up find our legs again, to help us slowly move back into Being. However, that’s not how things work. Instead, we often left on our sides, left in the stillness of death. Eventually you’re gonna get hungry in that place, and you’re likely going to eat your heart.

In my experience, being among the living dead makes you hate yourself. You see all of these people who are Actually Living, and you feel bitter and angry. Sometimes you’re angry because you can’t feel what they feel. Sometimes you’re angry because no one will help lift you up so that you could attempt to achieve what they have. Sometimes you’re angry because it feels Too Much, and you’re certain you will never ever move from that space.

I have lived my entire life with one foot in that space. I determined at a very young age that happiness was not a thing for me. That I was not put on this planet to be happy, and so I shouldn’t even bother to seek it out. I felt that I was put here to help others, to build and create and work for others. To help others find what I could not. If you remember in my last post, a lack of perceived options often keeps us stuck, and I was very stuck.

This was further complicated by the years of neglect I had endured with my family. I was made to believe that I was unimportant, unworthy of love, and since my family didn’t love me, I didn’t love me either. I think a lot of us struggle with both of these thoughts — that we can’t achieve happiness, so it’s not worth seeking out; and that we aren’t worthy of the happiness, even if we could obtain it.

Despite living like this for many years, my inertia reached its climax, starting in late 2015. Which shows you that it can always get worse (lesson 1.)

Picture it: it’s the eve of the month of Halloween. The air outside is still in the triple digits. You’re freshly widowed, and you’ve taken on about $30k in debt over the course of a month (not even an exaggeration) on top of everything else you’ve still got to pay for. Your job is pretty awful and you’ve been working 60 hour weeks since the beginning of the year. You’re about to get surgery on your face, and it’s supposed to be painful. There is the double-digit possibility that your surgery could go south, meaning you will have wasted about $25k of your time and money. Surgery is fast, but when you come out of it, you’re in level 8 pain and it stays there for about a month. You don’t sleep at all for the first week and a bit and you can’t eat anything solid for the next three months. And about three weeks in, you realize that you can’t really remember anything from the past 6 months. That’s how 2015 ran into it’s final quarter for me.

Meanwhile, I had been locked in a dark space for months on the astral. I was kept there with a man who was hellbent on keeping me there, using my dulled senses to his advantage and making everything going on in the physical realm infinitely worse. I felt like I had no resources, that no one was really there (except my SO) to catch me. I was as inert as humanly could be — both here and on the astral. I could barely care for myself, and I looked for the light at the end of the tunnel… because surely there was an end to this, right?

I continued to drag myself along as best as I could. I was able to break free of the astral abuse I was suffering in April of 2016, and I thought that for sure I was going to be able to make headway now, right? But the damage had already been done, and by May my health completely bottomed out. Or so I thought.

Then I was able to get a new job in the summer. So now I’ll totally get better, right? Yeah, no. The new job ended up being about as bad as the previous one, and when I was finally laid off in 2017, I was thankful for it, because that’s how much I hated it there.

At each stage in my journey, I seemed to expect that with each arrival of something new, that I’d get better. There always seemed to be this overlaying notion that if I just get this one thing fixed, I will be pulled out of my mire, and things will go back to how they used to be. But the way it used to be honestly never came for me, and I’m now in a place where I can be thankful as I say that, because I don’t want to go back to how I was living before.

At the worst parts of my inertia, I felt like I was drowning. I used to describe depression as being in a room that is slowly filling with water. That some days you wake up and the water is to your ankles. Other days, it’s around your waist and you have to stack up the furniture to try and stay dry. But when my health really began to run out, it was like being thrown into the middle of the ocean, and being held underwater by about 30 feet. I went through each day with constant screaming in the back of my head. I was always on the brink of tears, and there were many days when I would lock myself in my office and cry behind my desk because I couldn’t figure out what else to do about it.

To hearken back to the scene from My Heart My Mother in Hour 2 of your trip through the Duat: I wasn’t just inert in the mud. I had been fully consumed by the mud. I had been completely encased in mud, and after 4 different doctors, I was beginning to think that this was all I could ever hope to achieve in my life. I felt devastated. That this was all I had to look forward to — endless suffering while I tried to survive in a capitalist nightmare. I had to give up everything I loved — writing, religion, the gods, most of my astral work, most of my day job, exercising, going places, independence, doing things, eating stuff. I felt like everything had been taken. And with the current events that have happened in our country in the past year, with every passing day I felt surer and surer that I would rather be dead than alive.

To the point that when I did get laid off, we were genuinely concerned about leaving me alone by myself all day. Both my SO and I feared that I’d get so distraught from being alone in the house that I might take matters into my own hands. So when I say it was dark, I mean dark. The darkest I’ve ever been through.

Being stuck in a place like that is awful. Downright. Awful. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I tried to get out, only to slide right back into my mud cavern. I’d muster up the strength to try a new doctor and come home devastated as they ignored my problems. I’d muster up enough energy to try and do something social, only to be bed ridden the next day. I’d work so hard only to end right back up where I had started. Eventually, you get tired of that. You get tired of gathering up the last of your resources for “one more go” only to end right back where you were.

After a point, when you can’t get out, you turn your anger inwards. You begin to hate yourself, and hate the world for putting you there. You get mad that no one can seemingly help you, and you question if they are even willing to help you. You get mad at yourself for not being able to pull yourself out of it, and with each failure, that hatred grows. You begin to eat at yourself until each tiny morsel is gone. In many ways, it reminds me of a wild animal that’s caught in a trap. You’ll lash out in fear at anything and anyone that comes around you, and you’ll get so desperate that you’ll eat your own limbs to get free (except you won’t get free because the limbs seem to grow back.)

In the worst of this, only O would come to mind. I hadn’t heard from my gods in months (last contact was… sometime in 2016,) and I felt abandoned. The reason Osiris ever popped up in my mind was because he himself had been through death. He was the only one I knew that had been inert like this and lived to tell the tale (though for those of you keeping track, Ihy is the deity par excellence for this sort of situation.) I questioned what he would do, how he would handle this. I was reminded of how he was kept in a safe space by a snake, and when O finally reached a point where he wanted to move on, to pick up his limbs and more forward, the snake wouldn’t let him. He would ultimately have to force his way out of the snake, cutting through that barrier to get free. And as much as I hate to say it, it’s technically the answer to all of this: you have to keep trying.

And for those of you who are in this state, I can’t urge enough how important it is that you keep trying (lesson 2.)

You’re not going to want to. It’s not going to feel good, and it’s probably going to be messy. My recovery has taken three specialists, which took about a year and a half of searching to really find. It’s cost me hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars and lots of my time and patience to get there. And I know that I’m one of the lucky ones because I had the ability and resources to even attempt to get to where I am now. For those with less income, time and resources to work with, it’s even harder to find your way out. But what I am trying to say is that there is a way out, and it’s worth it to keep looking for it.

For me, the major headway was made when I added my final specialist to my team of physicians. She has me on 48395746 different supplements, and has forced me to change my diet significantly to combat the inflammation and histamine overload that is happening in my brain. It’s not perfect, but I can keep my head above water and most days are better than not. Arguably, it’s the first time I’ve felt what happiness might even feel like (which shows you how important the right diet and supplementation can be for depression.)

Working with my therapist has allowed me to process a fair amount of issues. It’s given me more space to react to triggers and has allowed me to be more objective with my emotions. It’s also allowed me to take a lot of what I’ve learned and apply it to my SO so that they can begin to move forward too (because we can’t afford to have both of us at the therapist right now.)

And working with my DO has allowed me to finally fit into my body better. I actually feel like I live in my form now, as opposed to being only a fraction of the way in. It’s also because of him that I found the therapist, and because of the therapist that I found the doctor.

In Egyptian funerary texts, you often see passages that urge the deceased to pick up their limbs, gather their pieces, and to ultimately pull themselves back together so that they can move forward. I think it’s useful advice for those of us who are stuck in the mire. It’s hard to keep yourself together when you’re strewn about on the ground, but what is important is that you try, and that you keep trying. Finding a fire and motivation to keep doing what you can. Grabbing what limbs you can, attempting to find little ways to improve your situation, to gain some headway with yourself, and to ultimately stop eating yourself alive. Finding the right people who can help bring your limbs closer and help you to find other sources of food that aren’t your heart makes this process easier, and I’d argue that to some extent having that external support is necessary to getting out, but at the end of the day you have to want to get out.

To sum up this hodge-podge of a post, I give you this, a quote from Hathor Rising by Roberts:

To “become Ihy”, a person must be prepared to experience the raw materiality of existence- blood, feces, and bodily fluids- all the messy substances and liquids which are there when life is pushed forth from the womb.

To tread this path to new life a person must also be prepared to seize and take possession of Ihy, for he eludes those who wait passively, afraid to summon up his zestful powers: ‘I show the paths of Khepri, the Netherworld dwellers follow me, this Osiris N takes possession of Ihy, this Osiris N captures Ihy for eternity’

His zest for life drives out all fear […] has an ability to entice others into making difficult journeys.

And to bring it home with what O told me all those years ago as I was thrown head-first into Rosetjau: you can be passive in your death, but you can’t be passive in your rebirth.