I am as I should be….. I am……
It’s time for the end of my last and longest adult relationship. The one that I have struggled the most with internally and has left the deepest marks. It’s the one which has pushed me to seeking another and left me vulnerable and different as a result.
We seem to think the only thing we can have a relationship with is a person. I would disagree. My relationship with my work life is just as real. It’s the place where I spent more time as an adult than with the people that I love. it is the place that exposed me to experiences I was never prepared for in any other sphere of my life. It’s the one which asked the most of me.
I have had a relationship with working as a teacher since I was 21…. well really some time before that because I chose it. I studied it and I wrestled with it for most of my adult life. Like all relationships employment as a teacher brought me blessing and hardship. Those hardships left marks for a life time. Those blessings did too.
So in a few weeks I will be properly resigned. Like all good breakups the hardest part was the separation. It was emotional and transformational. The separation was freeing. In the same way I experienced my X-husband telling me he was divorcing me, like a car crash…. (I was in a car spinning out so it’s true)…. the nano-seconds become minutes and everything is imprinted and all is experienced and felt. That first separation I felt total inner peace in the car crash then in the real moment I understood it would take time to get there.
It is that experience that has past and transformed my now. In a few weeks I will be unemployed because I can’t remain employed there any more. I am choosing the divorce from work. I have complex PTSD as a result of a particular set of experiences some year back in that place, and it places a barrier between me and the environment which triggers my body to hyper-vigilance and interferes with life as it can be lived for me. Fault is irrelevant like all good break ups it is only that it is necessary.
I will be unemployed and I don’t know what that means. I have dreams and loose plans but this is really a life I was never patterned mentally and ethically for. I am about to create a whole new set of neural pathways that allow me a different life and for me as my story-teller to shape new ways for provision to come to me.
I was broken and yet I was whole enough to hold my light and shine. I was considered unwell because I could not keep doing what hurt me so I would say I was never so unwell that I would continue in that path of self-abuse. It’s big this relationship ending. That said it is still the easiest thing I have had to do as an adult. I am as I can be.
Now that I read the words: I am as I should be…. I want to go back and edit should to can or choose or allow… all are true. The easiest decision took a long time but it will allow a new creation to unfold in my life.
Doing the same thing over and over became repetition. It allowed for tuning out to the effects of the one problem being all problems. It allowed the numbness internally and did not require me to speak my truth. I wish everyone could understand what those words mean for themselves…. whole rather than broken, healthy rather than unwell…. as I should be. If we can apply it to ourselves then we begin to allow it to be possible in the lives of all the people around us.
So now is THE time in my life for me. I once chose safe and responsible. A change the world with kindness drove my heart to the notion of serving humanity. Ah the path of a heart newly born to religion. A right choice for that time in my life. It’s still a good choice. It is just the how I go about it.
It is THE time in my life for experimenting and freedom. My decisions no longer effect the lives of other people up close. I can be anything I want to be. It is thrilling and terrifying all at the same time. A great combination for the PTSD pathways within. But time and breath work and allowing a new vocabulary to arrive makes it all possible. It is time.
So to all the people I have worked with since 1983 and all the people I have met in so many moves only my mother can tally, I want to say thank you. The comfortable and the uncomfortable of you all, thank you. All have contributed wisdom and pushed me toward hope and peace and the now that is the only thing I can know. Creating a life without an old routine means walking with faith that the path is there. Finding the tiniest hopes in the hardest times and remembering trust and gratitude when it all goes well is all that can be. New pathways for the life yet to be lived.
I’m not starting life over, I have always believed it is all part of one life, I’m editing and putting away in the basement that which is getting in the way of the balcony view and the coffee place down the road where the next great conversation will begin.
Right now I would like to work as a life coach. I’ve lived enough of it to compassionately walk with others in theirs. I’d like to sell paintings for the great investment I have put into them not the paper they are created on. I’d like to allow whatever else might come….. that is after all what would be doing if I was 21 again.
So I am finishing with a picture of the tiniest flower I saw out of the corner of my eye this week. A freesia a plant group on Facebook told me. Flowering grass. It looks like any other grass until it blooms. It’s then you can tell what kind of sensation it is, blooming from a tiny plan at the base of a rangy plant on the block next to mine. No bigger than a 10 cent piece this flower is evidence of the predisposition of the bulb which it came from to become and to bloom.
I always trust that in the end I will be as I should be and in the mean time I will become because I am. For those of my friends who love their relationship with their educational institution I wish you blessings. For those who do not: I will wish you likewise. May we all find we are living lives of purpose without ever seeing the outcome for anyone else but ourselves…. teaching after all is the greatest teacher of faith for all who feel ‘called’, ‘led’, ‘inspired’ to go there.
happy day
Sandy
P.S. please buy a book: Towards, or Journey to Beautiful, or both. In Australia from this website and if overseas from any online book seller.
It’s time for my new life part to begin but first I want to say good-bye with respect to the last one.
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