My journey into the Unknown started long before I ever heard the Siren’s Call. I was a child that listened for the faeries to whisper songs in my grandmother’s garden, would lay awake at night attempting astral projection, and wake to journal my dreams. As I grew into a teen I knew no limits and stretched all my boundaries. I had amazing adventures that defy most imaginations. I believed with all of my being that I was going to one day be a professional singer, speaker, change-maker…. then that thing happened. That thing that fundamentally changed my being. I was raped.
No charges were filed. No help was provided. I was a 15 year old left to figure it out on my own. My physical needs were met but my emotional, spiritual self floundered. I was a 15 year old child processing an act that changed me, angered me, confused me. I was a product of the 1980’s Just Say No movement and the message of the day was, “Once your virginity is gone, you can’t get it back. No good man wants a girl or woman who gave her virginity to another man.” Well, what if I didn’t give it away? What if it was taken? Unfortunately, there was a narrative for that too. And, while women were telling stories in hopes of changing that narrative, like Jody Foster in the 1988 film The Accused, the narrative remained. Somehow, if it was taken, it must have been your fault. That film release the same year as my rape and it only validated for me in my 15 year old mind, that not reporting it, not letting people know… was the right decision. It was far better to hide it from everyone. The only problem was that I had scars.
The year following was an all out act of rebellion. If I was already damaged goods, why not enjoy it? Why not claim it as my own? Why not let it give me power rather than to become a victim to it? I was quiet in my rebellion. It was my own. I did not want it taken from me. I did not act out at school or at home. I just took control in a quiet and controlled, “Fuck you world. Watch this.” But it felt bad in my soul. I was unhappy. I was alone in my rebellion. I had no followers. I had no platform. I had a deep internal sadness. Then I was introduced to God.
The problem with God was that he too wanted a virgin. He would forgive me, but he desired me to accept that the reason it happened to me was that I was a sinner. He did not forsake me when I was raped. See, the thing was, he wasn’t there at all. I was alone because I had not asked him yet to walk with me. Again, I was to blame. And worse yet, I could be forgiven by God, yes. But, I was still damaged and this meant that good Christian men were less likely to want a damaged partner/wife. Compounding this, I knew that there was a very probable chance I would never be able to conceive children. My pickings were going to be slim. And while I did not know it then, I was crippled with what British writer and YouTube personality, Matthew Hussey, refers to today as a Scarcity Mentality.
I was merely a 16 year old child and I latched on to the first good, Christian guy who saw my value. I was not attracted to him. As a matter of fact, I even told him that. I recall it all like it was yesterday. I wanted so badly to find a good person and have a fresh start. I was sitting in the high school choir room when I overheard a group of girls talking about a new boy who had moved to town and was going to be in the choir and attend their youth group. I thought to myself that this was my chance. I prayed. I made a deal with God. After all, what could I lose? If God gave me this new guy then I would give him my life. I would change and become all that He asked of me. Just let me too have a chance at love. Let this guy see me, and not my damage. But then the new guy walked through the door and in one look I recanted. Deal was off. No go.
But time passed. We became friends through music classes and I started to attend youth group. I shared my “Deal with God” and my struggles with a few of the youth group leadership as I tried to navigate all my feelings. The sentiment was that God doesn’t really accept recanting on deals. If a deal was struck, God will see it through and so must I. I needed to get closer to God and in doing so, my relationship with this boy would grow too. God is love. If love was missing, or not whole, then it was because I was lacking in my relationship with God and I had work to do to fix it. I set out to do a lot of work.
I worked hard. I worked really, really hard to remove all traces of who I was so that I could replace her with who the Church and God demanded me to be. I did this because I desperately wanted to love and be loved in a passionate and meaningful way. I did love this man. But I loved him in the way you love your very best friend. I loved him for not making me feel less. Fo seeing me as a smart, beautiful, kind, ambitious and driven woman. He was good to me. Very good to me. It was just that we had a platonic and beautiful friendship, and I had lost all of myself in the pursuit of something I was never going to find.
Infertility took this already struggling relationship and added an impossible complication. Being infertile was hell on earth. The words of contempt uttered over the years were at times wholly unbearable. In a conversation with my then Mother-In-Law and Sister-In-Law, I once stated that I was not sure I was cut out to be an at-home-mom and likely would want to both work and have children. My then Mother-In-Law literally said to me, “Well it is no wonder that God will not give you children!” It was a stigma I was never able to overcome. Even after over 15 years of fertility treatments, more money that I wish to ever calculate, and the resulting 3 children, I was not blame free. My daughter was born with Down syndrome and this too was my fault…
One of the final blows, that caused me to begin to question my place in this world, was dealt on a Sunday morning listening to my then Father-in-Law delivering a sermon on prayer. His message was that prayers are only as good as the weakest of those among us. My toddler daughter was an example. Had I not lacked in faith, she would not have been born with Down syndrome. Of course, I knew even in that moment it was not truth. But the blow I felt was more real than anyone can imagine. I knew in that instant I was not going to live this way any longer. I just did not know what that meant. Faint, and yet at a distance I began to hear the Siren’s Call.
I was fully aware that change had to happen. I began to see just how far from who I was, I had wandered. Over several years I made change, after change, after change to begin to find myself again. I was trying to find myself but looking in all the same places. A new church. A new job. A new State. A new town. A new home. None of the new fixed what was broken. I was not actually looking for me. I was not really lost. I was still where I had left myself. I was in a box. I was just relocating the box. And I was scared to look inside. I was scared of what would happen if I actually acknowledged her and let her out of that box.
Then, finally, I decided to let her out. I was going to let the genie out of her bottle. I decided I was going to go to the gym, get my hair styled for me, get my nails done, and I even got eyelash extensions. I was beginning to resemble a women in the midst of a mid-life crisis. And then I decided that perhaps that is exactly what this is, and I was okay with that. After all, what is a mid-life-crisis? A crisis, according to Miriam-Webster Dictionary is a situation that has reached a critical phase. I was most certainly in a situation that had reached a critical phase and I was in my mid-life. This was not a bad thing. It was simply that the situation needed to be resolved, and it was time to do that.
Just as I was finding comfort in the idea of rediscovering myself and accepting this mid-life-crisis I was having, another dimension of change took shape. Out of nowhere, men were making their attraction to me known. What was this? Why was this happening? What changed? And if these men were attracted, why still was there no change or attraction where my platonic marriage was concerned? And I will shamelessly admit, I liked feeling attractive and desired. I knew this was potentially dangerous, but also knew I had been missing this, and maybe even had a fundamental need for it.
Thus enters an innocent trip to the movies and an encounter with Elsa of Disney’s Frozen II answering her call into the unknown. I sat in that movie and literally wept. As tears rolled down my face, I knew my life was about to be shaken at the core. Over the next few days I recalled a psychic reading that I had been given many years earlier. I had grown up visiting psychics despite it being frowned upon by some in the church and I continued to do so on occasion over the years. It had been a sense of comfort for me, and a time of bonding with my family roots. This reading that I was recalling had been an insignificant one at the time. I felt it did not really have any clear meaning to me, and I had dismissed it. I resolved that I must not have needed to be shown anything of importance. But that changed dramatically in the days following the movie.
In recalling that reading, so many things now made sense. The message was crystal clear. When given a reading it may be relevant in that immediate moment, but with some readings it may not yet be relevant and at a later time be revealed. Most psychics will tell you this. At the time, I thought I understood it and that it was just nominally helpful. Upon recalling it, at this specific time in my life, all the imagery, all the messages, made sense to me. But I was not ready to accept it without further confirmation. I decided I would visit a new psychic and the sole purpose was to discover if my inclinations were correct. Was that prior message indeed for me now, at this crossroads in my life?
I’ll take a moment to help those of you who may find this foreign. I know from having spent years indoctrinated in the Church, that visiting a psychic is not only something that seems odd, it may even seem evil or bad. I want to provide a sense of context. I am not going to debate nor try to convince anyone to walk away from their personal convictions. I have nothing to prove and do not seek anyone’s permission. I do not need to feel right nor to make anyone else feel wrong. You do you. I do, however, want to help you understand me. I want to help you gain clarity around what I was experiencing. The practice of having a reading done is not unlike seeking guidance from a spiritual mentor and reading from a devotional. A message is given and you apply that message to your life with assurance that it is speaking directly to your heart and contains wisdom within to help guide you along the path for which you need to tread.
Without disclosing the crisis I was facing, I sought the gifts of a local psychic and asked for a reading. I explained that I had a reading done several years earlier and that I now felt I understood the message. I wanted to understand if I was correct in my newly discovered clarity, and what I now needed to know to move toward that which I was meant to be. The message was unexpected and a lot more that I had anticipated I would be hearing. She was clear. Yes, what I thought the earlier reading was informing me, was accurate. I had a choice to make… either I stay on the trajectory I was on (which was fine, better than most even, but only a shell of the self I was intended to be) or I accept a path that would burn all I knew to the ground resulting in my rising into the very person I was intended to be. She likened the choice to my already being a mystical Pegasus, and I have the option to remain that beautiful creature. But, she said, I was not created to be that. I was meant to be a Phoenix. The path of remaining a Pegasus was simple. I just stay a Pegasus. That meant, however, that spiritually and emotionally I would stay stagnant. In this current form, I would not grow or evolve much further. However, should I choose the path of the Phoenix, I must accept that in order to transform, all would be reduced to ashes so that from those ashes, I could rise.
Well, shit! That sounded scary…. I did not want to reduce my life to ashes. But, I also did not want to remain something I was not intended to be. I wanted to be all I was meant to be. I honestly felt there was not a choice. I had to change. I knew that I was unhappy. I was struggling. I was not fulfilled. I felt out of place. I knew, despite how scary it sounded, I must walk the path of the Phoenix. I was ready to face whatever it was that I needed to face, so that I could be what I was intended to be.
I knew my marriage was an area that was fully on fire. I did not know what it meant to other areas of my life just yet, but this area was engulfed in flames already. Not a soul was aware of this, however. As a matter of fact, I was pretty sure that this was going to blind side everyone. I had been holding it all together for so long, that even my then husband was going to be sucker punched. Not that I had not been pushing for change. I had. Over and over, I would tell him that I was not happy and that we desperately needed to fix things. The problem was that I just kept on hiding it and pretending I was fine.
Addressing the marriage with my then husband involved marriage counseling and a lot of tears and anguish that resulted in a Separation. I moved out of our home January of 2020…. That is when I began to see just what it meant for my world to be reduced to ashes…. As we all know in March of 2020 the world changed for everyone. Coronavirus was being discussed as a Pandemic. What? I was living in an apartment for the first time in my entire life, my kids were only with me part-time, I was told to work from home and I no longer had the partner I had been living with for the past 28 years. Yup, this was feeling a lot like ashes.
It got a bit messy that first year. The pandemic created obstacles that we did our best to navigate, but there were no real rules by which we knew to play by. For several months I did not see my kids other than via FaceTime. My then husband was extremely fearful of the virus and as I lived in an apartment building, he felt the risk was far too great so he kept my kids quarantined from me and any potential exposure. My apartment was just a two bedroom open floor plan, so even when I did finally have the kids, it was nothing like the environment they were accustomed to. They were used to living in a 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath home with a family room, play room, kitchen and dining room situated on the perfect cul-de-sac and complete with a backyard firepit. It was a very difficult period of time for me as it related to my kids. Ashes.
The pandemic meant it was hard to find my new self as well. I had been in this box and placed upon the shelf in a platonic marriage for years. I had made the decision to date. I spoke to my therapist that I had started seeing while going through marriage counseling. She agreed that dating would be healthy for me. I needed to get out there and experience what I had been missing in my life for so long. And, it felt amazing to be courted and desired. I did not know how I had let myself go so long without passion in my life. What I did know, with certainty, is that I would not be without it again. But then the unimaginable happened… And how? How could it happen to me… again? I had met someone through an app and made the decision to meet. I felt that I was doing everything right. Safe. I had followed the rules. And yet, I was raped. I was so ashamed. I did not tell anyone at all. Not even my therapist for months. Eventually, I did find the strength to talk about it and I came to terms with it. But I was absolutely knee deep in ashes.
Not even a year out of the house, completely on my own, and I got the call that no one wants to get. I had come to terms with the rape, but I wanted a thorough screening to ensure I was healthy. Unfortunately, test results from my pap smear came back and they wanted me to come in for more tests. I cried. I was devastated. I could not believe that this was happening to me. It was not even what I had feared, it was worse… They were talking about cancer cells. At this point, I feel fortunate. As of the writing of this account things are looking fine. It was indeed a roller coaster ride, but we found all of this early, and we are able to take all the necessary steps to manage and to monitor my health. But damn! I was choking on those ashes.
Life post-pandemic eventually began to find a norm and as the hustle and bustle started to resume, I decided to move closer to my job and purchase a home for me and the kids. I chose an adorable little home on a cul-de-sac on a channel of a lake. It had a huge willow tree and when I saw it I knew it was meant to be mine. I had always wanted to live on the water and to have summers under the shade of a willow tree. It was perfect. The kids were excited and I felt myself in the midst of rising into myself. That was when things at work began to shift. It was a complete overhaul of the department. From the VP down my world was turned on its head. New bosses, new visions, new co-managers, new initiatives. Thankfully, while all of this was on fire around me, I remained standing among the ashes.
Marriage, Family, Home, Health, Career… all of this had been set asunder. Yet, I still stand. I did rise up, time, and time, and time again. Is the struggle over? Surely not. And, I would do it all again. I have found myself and she is strong. I have found myself and she is resilient. I have found myself and she is pretty damn badass. She is indeed a Phoenix. This is not a story about how I am living a life of Happily Ever After. The End. No, that is not my story. But I can tell you that I am whole. I have three thriving children. I have a wonderful home. I have my health. I have a successful career. And I have a sisterhood of women who love me and who I love in return. I am happy. I am fulfilled. And I will sing chords of gratitude unto all who will listen so they feel the freedom to find themselves as I did. Do not be afraid. For fear is not something that should not hinder us. Instead,
Face Everything And Rise.
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