How We Got Here
Imagine we’re sitting across the table from one another, drinking hot beverages. I’ll be having a coffee, with just enough organic dairy creamer (that’s an important note I’ll circle back to in a future post) to turn the color from brown to tan. I used to drink coffee straight black, until one cold morning at one unnamed place of employment someone asked me why I didn’t love myself. That’s not the moment the story changed for me, but maybe it is. Maybe my love affair with myself began over a simple carton of coffee creamer. I won’t be presumptuous and assume what you’re drinking, but if you want some you are more than welcome to my self love coffee cream.
This isn’t a post about coffee. It’s not even a post about self love. It is a post about how we got here.
Maybe you’ve been around for the years of adventures, trying times and various attempts at creative self expression, or maybe you’re new around here, peeking your head in for a glimpse at the new offerings I’m putting out into the world. Either way, the site is new and your viewing of it will also be. It’s about dang time this girl invested in herself and decided to act like the grown adult, professional woman she is, and that’s what she did. I’ve spent hours adjusting behind the scenes, tinkering with final details, making this website a place that truly expresses me (with a little help from my friend Jess at wildcraft studios). I’m investing in myself, from my choice in coffee creamer to my choice in website design.
Another investment I made in myself? My liver transplant. 3.5 years ago (ish) I sat in a doctors office and listened as my specialist, who had consulted other specialists and convened a panel of specialists, told me I was out of options. I was 22, my husband and I were talking about growing our family again after an unexpected pregnancy loss a year ago that ended due to maternal health complications, I was working a new job I loved that I thought would be the gateway to all my wildest dreams, and if anybody had suffered enough on this planet it was me, dammnit. I thought I was entitled to something good happening. And so, if you care to indulge me, imagine for just a minute you’re in your early 20s, ready to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and for life to begin again, only to be told you’re dying. If you can imagine that, you might be able to imagine a fraction of what I felt that day. As only my most naive 20 something self could do, after telling my doctor I wasn’t going to keep trying things that weren’t guarenteed to work and I certainly wasn’t planning on dying any time soon so put me on the transplant list please and thank you, I went home and expected my life to carry on just as it had before. We’d still somehow manage an international adoption, I would still work, and life would be the same as it always was aside from the fact I had a cellphone glued to my hip waiting for a call that would create a tiny deviation from the plan, only long enough for me to have surgery.
I’ll spare you the details, but you guessed right if you thought this was absolutely, by far the most hilarious joke I’ve ever made. Our adoption plans were put on hold just for now, then indefinately. It became harder and harder to keep up with a consistent work schedule when I was driving back and forth to medical appointments, and the building symptoms made it hard to maintain any kind of life unconsumed by pain and fatigue. My entire life was changing and I was an unwilling participant.
There’s a lot more details and things to fill in in this story, but I recieved my transplant in 2020. In the middle of a pandemic. And it changed everything. And as I lay in that hospital bed, wondering what the hell had happened to my plan, strung out on pain meds and still in so much pain I didn’t want to be alive, something in me knew what was true. I could spend my second life fighting against my reality, trying to fit my currenly round peg into the square hole of my former life, or I could give in. I could surrender, and just hold on for the ride. Which is what I did. I didn’t know where I’d wash up, or if I would, but somehow I ended up here.
Here, across the virtual table from you.
All those years being sick, so sick it cost me the life of my child, being told I was dying, actually almost dying more than once, and recieving another person’s organ into my own body, I used all those opportunities as a catalyst to go deeper. I learned from wise teachers, the wisest of all being my own body, and I learned something worth sharing. Nobody else had my answers. Only I did. When I kept outsourcing my power, I kept staying chained to this survival response of constantly being in high stress thinking my world was ending.
My world wasn’t ending. It was just changing. Maybe yours is too. And hear me, friend, when I say the answers you’re looking for aren’t out there but in here. You have them. You’ve had them all along. I want to help you uncover them, to dig through the bullshit to find them and bring them home. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be here the whole way.
