Surround yourself with the tools that work for you

I had a dream early one recent morning.

I walked into my psychic's home, in tears. I said nothing. She looked at me and tsked at me.

She was unhappy. "You removed the water I surrounded you with? Why?"

I have no idea, and that's my thought about everything surrounding that dream - I have no idea what it means, why she'd say that to me, why she would have surrounded me with water in the first place. I am totally clueless.

Or, I was.

When I first met with her about two years ago, things for me were rocky at best. I couldn't control my anger, I couldn't control my hurt and I was having a lot of trouble controlling the hurt I inflicted on others. Throughout the course of my time with her and undergoing what we chose to call "spiritual therapy," there were a lot of exercises based on the elements. More particularly, looking back, they each in some way involved water.

Boil a pot of water with cinnamon in it. Breathe that in.
Take a bath with olive oil in it; coat yourself in cocoa butter. Revel in it.
Listen to recordings of wind; listen to recordings of rain; listen to thunder. Wash away the bad with it.
Here are 21 juniper berries, blessed by others during a drum circle. Count each of them every time you're gripped by anger.
Open your palm, here are wood chips from the Andes that have been blessed. Smell them. Hold them. Connect with the earth.

One of the first exercises she had me complete was to write - I had to light incense she had given me and let it flow. At that point, I had hardly done any writing specifically for me in such a long time I sat there staring at the blank sheet of paper and begged myself to just release something. Anything. A word. A sentence. Anything.

What came out of me was a page of hurt and hope and "please, someone fix me, because I am broken."

But it got better. I got better.

Until that dream.

It's bugged me daily since I woke up from it. I've questioned myself every single night, "What could it mean?" Dream interpretation websites didn't help me, Facebook didn't help me, I didn't even bother to tell my husband about it because ... well, you get the idea.

It didn't make sense until Wednesday when I woke up to a cool breeze, rain and lots of wind. I hadn't realized how overwhelmed I'd let myself become by things I can't control, or things I can control but have been taken over by others rendering me useless. I hate feeling useless. I despise when I let others make me feel that way.

Instead of dwelling on the things I can't change, and the things I can't get done outside because the weather is soggy, I let the kids have grapes and bananas for breakfast, watch however much TV they wanted, opened the windows a little bit wider and sat down to write.

It's taken me almost four years to write because every time before now, when I'd sit down, the words wouldn't flow. A blank page in a notebook or a blank Word document would stare back at me, taunting. Looking back, I think it's because I was too invested in journalism to create anything wonderful or amazing unless it was based solely on quotes and actions and truth.

But painting a fictional picture with words is like journalism on a high I can't come down from. I can sit down and when the words come, I create and it's magical. I wish I had a nanny so I could devote more hours each day to doing it. As it is, because of constant interruption, this is the fifth day I've worked on this blog post, but I digress.

I've shared bits and pieces of what I'm working on on my Facebook page, but that's all. There's literally one person who has read almost the entire thing (I'm sitting on the last 800 or so words because they aren't perfect yet and I'm a bloody perfectionist) and I like that I have that one single point of light who has seen everything and I trust to give me an honest opinion. And when I get down on myself or question my ability as a writer, she can put those pieces back in place easily because she knows that feeling, too.

I still don't have an answer to the dream, but I think it's a jumping off point. It's that clue I needed, one that says to reach back into my brain and remember what worked before to ground me.

We're on day three of rain. And it's going to wash the metaphorical dirt right off my soul and the dust off my boots. And I'm going to attempt to take life one thing at a time until I have to remind myself again to be surrounded with water.