Soul Mosaic

Today’s Gift Quote:

There can be a certain perverse pleasure, as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish.

Sharon Blackie

The explanation for this, from the previous posting:

A celebration of life in the present

I have been sharing many deep and painful things. And it is helpful for me to speak openly and feel “worthy.” But I also do this process while staying grounded in the present and celebrating life’s current gifts.

A current gift is that this month is my 70th birthday. I will be taking the coming week off to share time with my family and savor the joys of each other’s company. AND celebrate that I have my wonderful family.

As important as this writing process is, it needs to be paced well for my health, and it needs to be connected to the joy of my present life, filled with love.

My “gift posts”

While I am away from my desk, I will leave “daily gift posts” for all.

The gift post will include this post’s text (for context to anyone new). But at the top of each new day’s post will also be a quote — one of the many I keep handy to feed my soul as I write. That will be my gift to all while I am celebrating.

The painting is also part of the gift posts. While I worked at the museum, there was a small puffer fish in one of the aquariums. When I needed a moment’s break from things, I would stand by the tank. The puffer fish would always come right up to the window and hover there. I don’t know what it was thinking, but I hope it was happy. He seemed to linger longest whenever there was a group of happy children waving at him. So one day I took his picture and painted him. So, as part of this gift, I leave you with the puffer fish.

When I return, I will resume my memoir posts.

In the meantime, a reminder of the purpose of this blog:

This blog is my way of honoring what I lived through and had to do to reach “today” in as healthy a way as possible.

Today’s Gift Quote:

You are not lazy, unmotivated or stuck. After years of living in survival mode, you are exhausted. There is a difference.

Nakeia Homer

The explanation for this, from the previous posting:

A celebration of life in the present

I have been sharing many deep and painful things. And it is helpful for me to speak openly and feel “worthy.” But I also do this process while staying grounded in the present and celebrating life’s current gifts.

A current gift is that this month is my 70th birthday. I will be taking the coming week off to share time with my family and savor the joys of each other’s company. AND celebrate that I have my wonderful family.

As important as this writing process is, it needs to be paced well for my health, and it needs to be connected to the joy of my present life, filled with love.

My “gift posts”

While I am away from my desk, I will leave “daily gift posts” for all.

The gift post will include this post’s text (for context to anyone new). But at the top of each new day’s post will also be a quote — one of the many I keep handy to feed my soul as I write. That will be my gift to all while I am celebrating.

The painting is also part of the gift posts. While I worked at the museum, there was a small puffer fish in one of the aquariums. When I needed a moment’s break from things, I would stand by the tank. The puffer fish would always come right up to the window and hover there. I don’t know what it was thinking, but I hope it was happy. He seemed to linger longest whenever there was a group of happy children waving at him. So one day I took his picture and painted him. So, as part of this gift, I leave you with the puffer fish.

When I return, I will resume my memoir posts.

In the meantime, a reminder of the purpose of this blog:

This blog is my way of honoring what I lived through and had to do to reach “today” in as healthy a way as possible.

Today’s Gift Quote:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

The Talmud

The explanation for this, from the previous posting:

A celebration of life in the present

I have been sharing many deep and painful things. And it is helpful for me to speak openly and feel “worthy.” But I also do this process while staying grounded in the present and celebrating life’s current gifts.

A current gift is that this month is my 70th birthday. I will be taking the coming week off to share time with my family and savor the joys of each other’s company. AND celebrate that I have my wonderful family.

As important as this writing process is, it needs to be paced well for my health, and it needs to be connected to the joy of my present life, filled with love.

My “gift posts”

While I am away from my desk, I will leave “daily gift posts” for all.

The gift post will include this post’s text (for context to anyone new). But at the top of each new day’s post will also be a quote — one of the many I keep handy to feed my soul as I write. That will be my gift to all while I am celebrating.

The painting is also part of the gift posts. While I worked at the museum, there was a small puffer fish in one of the aquariums. When I needed a moment’s break from things, I would stand by the tank. The puffer fish would always come right up to the window and hover there. I don’t know what it was thinking, but I hope it was happy. He seemed to linger longest whenever there was a group of happy children waving at him. So one day I took his picture and painted him. So, as part of this gift, I leave you with the puffer fish.

When I return, I will resume my memoir posts.

In the meantime, a reminder of the purpose of this blog:

This blog is my way of honoring what I lived through and had to do to reach “today” in as healthy a way as possible.

Thinking is difficult. That’s why most people judge.

Carl Jung

Today’s Gift Quote:

The explanation for this, from the previous posting:

A celebration of life in the present

I have been sharing many deep and painful things. And it is helpful for me to speak openly and feel “worthy.” But I also do this process while staying grounded in the present and celebrating life’s current gifts.

A current gift is that this month is my 70th birthday. I will be taking the coming week off to share time with my family and savor the joys of each other’s company. AND celebrate that I have my wonderful family.

As important as this writing process is, it needs to be paced well for my health, and it needs to be connected to the joy of my present life, filled with love.

My “gift posts”

While I am away from my desk, I will leave “daily gift posts” for all.

The gift post will include this post’s text (for context to anyone new). But at the top of each new day’s post will also be a quote — one of the many I keep handy to feed my soul as I write. That will be my gift to all while I am celebrating.

The painting is also part of the gift posts. While I worked at the museum, there was a small puffer fish in one of the aquariums. When I needed a moment’s break from things, I would stand by the tank. The puffer fish would always come right up to the window and hover there. I don’t know what it was thinking, but I hope it was happy. He seemed to linger longest whenever there was a group of happy children waving at him. So one day I took his picture and painted him. So, as part of this gift, I leave you with the puffer fish.

When I return, I will resume my memoir posts.

In the meantime, a reminder of the purpose of this blog:

This blog is my way of honoring what I lived through and had to do to reach “today” in as healthy a way as possible.

Today’s Gift Quote:

In the end, only three things matter: How much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. The Buddha

The explanation for this, from the previous posting:

A celebration of life in the present

I have been sharing many deep and painful things. And it is helpful for me to speak openly and feel “worthy.” But I also do this process while staying grounded in the present and celebrating life’s current gifts.

A current gift is that this month is my 70th birthday. I will be taking the coming week off to share time with my family and savor the joys of each other’s company. AND celebrate that I have my wonderful family.

As important as this writing process is, it needs to be paced well for my health, and it needs to be connected to the joy of my present life, filled with love.

My “gift posts”

While I am away from my desk, I will leave “daily gift posts” for all.

The gift post will include this post’s text (for context to anyone new). But at the top of each new day’s post will also be a quote — one of the many I keep handy to feed my soul as I write. That will be my gift to all while I am celebrating.

The painting is also part of the gift posts. While I worked at the museum, there was a small puffer fish in one of the aquariums. When I needed a moment’s break from things, I would stand by the tank. The puffer fish would always come right up to the window and hover there. I don’t know what it was thinking, but I hope it was happy. He seemed to linger longest whenever there was a group of happy children waving at him. So one day I took his picture and painted him. So, as part of this gift, I leave you with the puffer fish.

When I return, I will resume my memoir posts.

In the meantime, a reminder of the purpose of this blog:

This blog is my way of honoring what I lived through and had to do to reach “today” in as healthy a way as possible.

So it is time to begin sharing the story of my young adult. And every fiber in my body both recoils from that task and welcomes it with relief. Unlike looking back at my childhood, looking back at this part of my life hurt too much.

Drenched in self-judgment, self-rejection, loathing, and shame, I not only couldn’t look back there…I WOULDN’T. And so for a lifetime, I remained “split off” from a part that deserved so much better.

I’d “lost” a whole section of my life. I had taken my young adult and thrown her in a box, and abandoned her in the back of the closet. I’d had the ability to revisit her anytime — the journals, timelines, paintings, and maps — but I had brushed it off as unnecessary. No. Unworthy.

Now, I was driven to it even as I wasn’t sure anymore what was even in that box. Who had I been? What was I feeling and thinking? What REALLY happened during those years?

I finally understood that despite all the healing and progress I’d made over the years, I was still not whole. If I wanted to go forward in my life, I had to take the time to go back…to ALL the places. ESPECIALLY the despised ones. It hurt too much not to. If I wanted to be whole, I had to open that box. But when I did, I encountered another dilemma…confusion. Again, I had no words, and I wasn’t sure why. I felt blocked from understanding it.

So, I went back to what I know best when I can’t find words or untangle the emotions. Art.

I started sketching what I felt.

It was starting to come clear, so I zeroed in on that desk and painted it.

I realize now that my loss for words was because that part of me was just shattered fragments. And that is what trauma is – broken pieces of you. It leaves you with the splintered shards of what was once whole. And that’s why you get stuck and don’t know what to say.

When that’s what you have to work with, how do you heal and find understanding?

I realized from my painting that the only way through this is to empty out all the pieces and look at each one. One at a time. See what the shapes are. What truths they contain. Only then will the patterns start to form. And from patterns, truth eventually emerges.

So, there is no rushing this part. There is only one piece at a time, get re-acquainted with “younger me.” Sit with each journal entry. Feel it. Look at the photos, think about why I painted what I did. And gradually, start to write the rest of the story.

The mess of life

“You want everything in life to be neat and orderly…But it can’t be…Sometimes, life just gets messy.”

I’d been studying at a friend’s house that afternoon, preparing for an upcoming test in our clinical chemistry class. We were well into our yearlong lab internship at the Bridgeport hospital, reviewing, of all things “neat and orderly,” the intricate calculations for serial dilutions. It was a topic so exacting, out of necessity, because it involved immensely small concentrations of a substance in each test tube. That meant if there was one tiny error at the beginning, it would grow to be a huge one over the course of the dilutions, and that would destroy the accuracy of any test result. Since these tests involved human lives, there was no room for mistakes.

After hours of hammering away at sample problems, we both felt ready. Her mom invited me to stay for supper, and I gladly accepted. My friend lived at home during her internship, since it was right near the hospital, and I loved going over there. Her mom was such a joy to be around, and I always felt cared for by my friend and her whole family.

As we prepared for supper, we were discussing something about life and how unpredictable things could be. Given the chaos I lived in at home, my approach at that point was to try and control everything in my power…which wasn’t much. But still, anything I could tightly control the outcome of was one less stressor, given the anxiety of dealing with my father.

I don’t remember what it was I wished I could control at that moment. But I clearly still remember her response. She shook her head at me incredulously and said, “You want everything in life to be neat and orderly…But it can’t be…Sometimes, life just gets messy.”

Doesn’t it.

Grandma and Grandpa

I’d been living with my father’s parents for the last several months. An interesting “full circle” if I thought about it. My father escaped that house in his youth. Now I was back there. It was an eye-opening revelation into the world my father grew up in. His one piece of advice to me before I moved there was, “Whatever you do, pick the routine you need for your day, and stick to it. Don’t let her tell you what to do.”

While they really did mean well, and while I am sure it wasn’t easy for two older people to suddenly host their adult grandchild five days a week, it wasn’t easy on me either.

The dilemma

There was no question, this was going to be a long year. Aside from the issues with Dad’s molestations, there was also that whole “get-a-job-after-school” plan that ran into major issues shortly after I got to the main campus.

I had identified my path to a job — hospital laboratory work — particularly in clinical microbiology. My connection with the lab at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington offered a strong job possibility when I was done with college. So all I needed was to switch my major from biology to Medical Laboratory Technology. But that ran into a major roadblock in the form of the dean of that school. She didn’t want to hear it.

One of the downsides of having been at the Torrington branch of the University of Connecticut was that they were not really up to date on the logistics of making that program switch. For one, there were some courses I needed that I’d not been aware of. But even more problematic was that the number of slots in the program was limited.

At that point in time, you spent three years on campus getting all your sciences and distributed requirements, then for the last year of your degree, you actually spent twelve months at one of the hospitals in the state that worked with the UCONN program to train you. It meant twelve months of classes and actual hands-on laboratory work at that hospital. Each of the hospitals that collaborated with UCONN had a set number of slots. Since there were already other students in the program who were vying for those slots, I presented a problem for them.

I was already a junior, which meant that they would have to fit me into a slot the very next year, something that might be hard. And it was something the dean didn’t want to even consider.

The “double-no”

I argued that I’d been poorly advised at the branch, but was willing to do what I needed to make up those classes. Also, I had a recommendation letter from the Health Center in Farmington about my work there. And I explained I had no money for an extra year. But she wasn’t willing to hear anything. Her answer was a flat-out, “No.”

When I told this to my father, his answer was also “No.” No, he didn’t have money he could give me for an extra year, and no, he wasn’t willing to co-sign for an extra year of school loans, which was the only way I was able to afford that year. His answer was to go back and MAKE them put me in the program.