It is whatever you want it to be

I always imagined my first blog post being about “my story” or how I got to where I am. The truth is, the older I get, the more I realize I’m still in the midst of “my story.” It’s evolving and changing with each season. Each year passing lifts another veil of what I thought I understood.

If you asked me just one year ago, my story would be about how I got into herbalism because during my last semester of college I wrote my final thesis in Feminist Thought about my outrage at the medical system. I was outraged at what I identified as “the pathologizing of our idiosyncracies” and the limiting containers these diagnoses create for the spectrum of human expression in response to lived experience, informed by cultural expectations and the American way of life. I was outraged at the overprescription of medication and how specifically women have been targeted with SSRIs, birth control, and other pharmaceuticals that alienate us from our bodies. It was Feminist Thought and I was twenty-one, after all. I had my own personal traumatic experiences with the western medical system and those medications, and writing that paper opened my mind to something different. Somehow, I ended up finding my way back to my roots (my childhood obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I really wanted to be Wiccan like her friend Willow) in Green Witchcraft.

The overlap was coincidence. I got into herbalism because I wanted to take control of my health and my body. I saw herbalism as a traditional women’s sphere — a place of midwives, healers, and witches. Herbalism was a balm for my anger, a channel for healing. I spent the next decade slowly unraveling, journeying to my heart, and studying as much about herbalism, holistic health, and alternate healing modalities as possible. I discovered the deep healing power of fostering a connection to the earth. I discovered my purpose was to help guide others in reclaiming their sovereignty through earth based medicine. In a nutshell.

My story has radically shifted this year. Though I am still angry at the system and the ways it fails us, I have been busy seeing my whole world shattered by death and grief. Everything I thought I knew about myself and the world around me has been irrevocably altered. No longer is it even in me to be outraged, though there is the ghost of that girl still in there, mad at the many failures and injustices of “the system.” I could insert a tangent here about the issues (how it all started with the industrial revolution and the shift away from agrarian living, and how now we are expected to be “productive” to the extent that we burn ourselves out completely, selling our precious time, our lives, our souls, in order to make a living (which still isn’t enough) and have actually fooled ourselves into believing “rest” is a form of laziness although our bodies are begging us to slow down and remember what it feels like to be, just be, in a body with blood, and to feel our hearts pulsing alongside the rhythm of the earth, which ultimately speaks to how far away we’ve gotten from that earth, and how even those of us devoted to its path must survive through some form of commodification of what is most sacred to us, trapping us in a vicious cycle in which we’ve been complicit in exploiting ourselves. Don’t even get me started on colonialism and its erasure of earth-based-spirit-centered medicine), but I’ll save that for another time.

I have learned a big lesson this year about anger and outrage, and blame, and how those qualities can be somewhat regressive. That’s a big lesson for me, a choleric (borderline sanguine). I used to be so attached to my anger. I saw it as fuel. But I’ve experienced a Big Change. This life is so precious and fleeting. Sure, I can blame the system. I can be angry at the countless ways it is blatantly failing its people. I can be outraged that life is so unfair. But the rage, the anger, and the blame all keep me stuck in a negative feedback loop. And frankly, that’s the last thing I need right now. I used to quote a bumper sticker (maybe it was a fortune cookie): “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.” Honey, I’m paying attention. And I’m tired. I’ve beyond burned out. It’s been costing me my peace.

When I entered my saturn return a few years ago, I set an intention to find inner peace. I was telling people, “I have the cord, I just haven’t plugged it in yet.” It seemed like every time I’d go to plug it in, the circuit board would blow off. A large part of my herbal practice has focused on nervous system support. Plant magic for burnout. Let’s talk about milky oats, how sweet beautiful milky oats repair the myelin sheath (a milkbath for the nervous system). Let’s talk about trauma that gets stuck in the body, how energetic remedies like arnica can help release trauma on a cellular level. Let’s talk about how we can’t even begin to repair the nervous system when we are holding the trauma in our fascia, in our cells, in our etheric field. Let’s talk about all the layers.

The layers require deep work, which I’ve been attempting. I recognize that we are never “healed.” We are in process, “healing.” Outside of herbalism, I have opened up to many avenues to peel back my layers: therapy, reiki, sound healing, body work, functional medicine, naturopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, bioenergetics, quantum healing, astrology, shamanic journeying. I set intentions. I have a strong will. I stick to my regiments: movement, nourishment, play, rest. I value creativity and community. I spend time with the earth. I’m determined to change my wiring and heal the wounds of my matriarchal Irish-Catholic lineage, to unlearn shame, to loosen up and be less stern. There it is, the word that stops me. That’s one thing he loved about me - how stern I am.

That’s the Big Change. He. Him. Who? Stephen. My soulmate. The man so perfect for me I could have sworn I invented him. One moment he was here cooking beef stew with me and having a double feature movie night (I fell asleep during North by Northwest) and then so suddenly, he was gone gone gone. The absolute love of my life now ashes and dust and a little lock of hair. The One I could see beside me with certainty in all visions of the future. The One with his sweet heart, his tenderness, his long eyelashes, his curious spirit, his laughter, his hand in my hand — my love! how I could go on and on about the love (but of course, where could such life-shattering grief come from but the wellspring of pure love?) — no longer in this physical realm. His death has changed everything. Everything as in, Every Single Thing. Whatever it was I thought I knew, it turns out, I don’t know. I don’t know anything at all.

My story took the turn nobody wants. The turn most dreaded, most feared. I anticipated the turning page to say, “marriage,” and “baby,” and “happily ever after.” We were the most lucky, rare kind of love. It was beyond a blessing that we were certain to have those things. But those pages were torn out. Crumpled. Destroyed. Black ink spilled all over the rest. Of course, me, I blot it out. Damage control. I do all I know how. I try to keep healing.

The Big Change is he was here, he was mine and I was his, and now he is gone. The change is that I lost my edge. What made me Me? I try to remember to be stern, because that’s how Stephen liked me. He liked the stern talking-to I gave him in 2013, outside the bar, drunkenly, about how he should treat women (I have never known a man who has treated me better). He liked my fire, that I spoke my mind. Spicy. But now? My edge is gone. I’m soft. I’m the petals falling off a peony all over the tablecloth when you didn’t even touch the vase. You didn’t even look at it. I’ve got nothing to hold onto. I’ve shifted into melancholy.

That’s not who I am. I’m fire. I keep waiting for a spark to light me back up, but I think Teddy Roosevelt said it best with the death of his wife, “the Light has gone out of my life.” He lit me up. That mind/body/spirit concept is felt so deeply. And it is so exhausting to grieve. It is so exhausting to exist without the man I love. It’s exhausting to imagine the rest of my life now. There are things grief does to the body, to mind, and the spirit, which I will write about eventually (maybe). I’m tending to those places still. I’m trying my best to remember who I am and why I’m here. That’s what he’d want me to do. It’s what the plants have been helping me do. Only the plants. I turn to them over and over. Only the earth has allowed me to lay down upon it and breathe in its scent as it holds me with its soft lush arms of remembering again and again.

I will share something I wrote when I was first coming back into my body after the loss. I had hardly just met the grief. The shock took months to soften enough for me to understand that the grief was going to be a new, totally separate experience. I wrote my first blog post in hopes that maybe it could help someone going through something similar. Then I second guessed myself. “What right do I have, when I don’t even know who I am?” I clicked “Save Draft” for a time when I might start to remember.