Heartbreak is tiring. Exhausting. Consuming. Deeply confusing. It is hard to understand. You will often wonder why certain things have to happen. Especially if you are a good person going about your day, expecting the best and doing your best. It will be the most heartbreaking for the good hearted ones. The lovers. The givers. I am easily heart broken. I live in a constant invisible fragile state, especially when I am with other humans. It feels like walking through a battlefield with bombs ready to detonate. When my heart breaks it screams. It rolls in the mud. It throws itself into the big ocean. It becomes a tsunami that doesn’t end. An immortal fire. It screams like a newborn. I really don’t know anything anymore. Life will surprise you and then it will change you. It will kick you and then it will teach you how to tend to your wound. It will hang you upside down and drop you on your head. It will shock you and then make you forget. It will put you to bed only to wake you up with the loudest alarm. And all of this will come at you from every part of your life. Even the safe parts. The parts you didn’t expect to hurt you. Those parts will break you the most. Because you could have never seen it coming. You would have bet your life on its loyalty to you. But loyalty is a very rare value. Almost an endangered species. Because of that, I have built inner worlds with resting spaces. I have replaced loneliness with solitude. Venting with writing. And loyalty loss, with personal integrity. The more time on the battlefield, the more certain I am about myself. As you are reading this, I am on the long flight to Athens where my sister picks me up to drive me to my parents home. It is time for me to go back for a while. To close my eyes. I will also take a three week pause from writing Friday’s letter. So I can be immersed in the experience of my one and only family. Where unconditional love and everlasting loyalty is still there. I hope you spend the last few days of summer with the people who love you and if that is not available, may you build worlds inside yourself that are safe, loving and loyal to you. Being loyal to ourselves may be the hardest thing of all. See you back here in 3 weeks. With a beautiful breeze on my hair and a knowing about who I am that can never be shaken. Christina P.S If you haven’t read all the past letters, they live here. P.P.S If you are not subscribed to this letter go here.
Read MoreWhen you inject life in your world it bounces off on multiple surfaces at first. Remember if you are still in the Waiting Room and you invited life to come back, it will try to find you in the confined space. Sometimes we step out of the Waiting Room in quick bursts. On our way back inside, life comes in through the door with you. Now imagine if you have been reentering for a few weeks, the life you are creating requires time for a new job, new friends, new home. Dating. Clothes. Self care. Time to yourself. Meditation. Life’s friends are many and the Waiting Room is too small for them. It is also why it feels overwhelming at first. Why you will want to kick her out. Don’t. Just start moving out of the Waiting Room slowly. Spend more time letting go of the old schedules and routines. Don’t let the survivor self convince you that you still need that friend who is rude to you but always apologizes. Just because you have known her all your life it doesn’t mean she gets a pass. Don’t be fooled with any thoughts in regards to your missing out on your old life. One thing I know for sure is that when we say goodbye to an old identity we also say goodbye initially to the comfort of the familiarity of that self. It hurts to change. It makes you want to run back to yourself, back to that Waiting Room, back to the familiarity of those walls and the non living existence. Life is painful and why we avoid it. I have been reentering so much lately that it is a little scary at times. My survivor self is keeping me up at night. It is questioning me. Can you really live out loud Christina? You won’t be able to keep up. You will break. I responded back the other day and said ‘If I break myself from living so loudly then let me break. Let me break inside a firework. Let me exhale inside a big canvas. On my way to the beach. Inside the words of my new book. In the midst of helping the homeless, the grieving, and living in the most unapologetic way.’ Now you know why I need a strong body, why I am training, why I drink all that water. At 2 am last night I submitted my last homework for my first semester of my MFA. I was listening to opera and witnessing myself showing up outside of that Waiting Room. I will be working while traveling a lot in the next month and my mind is pushing back, but here is what I think. My life could end at any moment. It could leave me not just by my heart stopping but from any type of illness or injury. One day I may not be able to draw, write, speak, help, live, sing, move. But what I do know about that day is that I will have no regrets. I am walking myself to my 50th year of life and I will skip, and skateboard, fly and live like my life depends on it. Because it really does. I hope you let life break you and end this journey one day inside a big and loud firework. With life bursting at the seams Christina PS. I hope you had the chance to listen to the conversation with my daughters about grief. PPS. I speak in length about the Waiting Room in my book SECOND FIRSTS. I hope you have it.
Read MoreIn the last few months I experienced one of my most significant Life Reentries to date. I taught myself self care for the first time. It started with exercise, then it moved to food choices, to my work, my routine, and it landed me on my childhood dream. This journey had many blind spots and I could only see a couple of days ahead. I was patient with the not knowing, patient with the slowness of this type of reentry especially when my body was changing. There was no deprivation. No rules or diets. Just nourishment. There were no hard core workouts, just fun ones. And that is when the deeper reentry started to take place. Once I prioritized myself consistently for a few weeks something prompted me to question other parts of my life. I realized that I always overworked, over pleased, over delivered. But not to myself. I did as a mother to my children, as a caregiver to my first husband, as a teacher to my community, as a writer to my readers, as a human to other humans. I wondered, what would it look like if I gave to myself the kind of giving I had given to others. So I started doing just that. The first thing I had to give to myself was time. Once I did that all of a sudden I gave myself a whole list of things. I gave myself an orange a day. I love oranges, and I had stopped eating them because I was so worried about the sugar in them. I gave myself pizza. If my family was having pizza I had pizza too. Before, I would be the one not eating the delicious pizza that everyone else was having. I gave myself fried eggs. Oh my world, why did I not have fried eggs before. I now eat them every day with two slices of toast. While giving myself permission to eat all the things I loved I also got smaller. Much smaller. I gave myself a brand new shampoo. The kind that smells like you are getting your hair done at a hair salon. I gave myself a pair of shorts. The kind that I hadn’t worn in years. A two piece bathing suit. Dare I say a bikini? I gave myself time to read fiction. Time to go and sleep under the stars in the middle of nowhere. I gave myself the outdoors. And then one day I gave myself time to study art. Late in the evenings. Where I forget it is 2:00am and I have been sitting there for hours drawing myself inside another life. I want you to know that oranges and fried eggs have magical powers. They ignite reentries and can make your dreams come true. They can start a revolution. They can give you your life back. But you have to be willing to give yourself the time to start. To move. To taste. To indulge. To not deprive yourself. To not abandon your own comfort and care. And then get ready for the ride of your life. With no regrets, Christina
Read MoreIt is a deliverance of self to break free from serving a life that doesn’t give us an inner autonomy. I recently experienced such a thing. I delivered myself to myself, finally. What that entails cannot be explained in simple terms. It is a form of redemption that can only reign after we overstay our old worlds. In pain. In deep sorrow. Deep relentless inner captivity and outer servitude. Oh friend, the hardest thing to know is that we can’t let ourselves out because most of us don’t know we are in captivity. Until we feel a type of anguish that has no specific ache but comes over routinely and not triggered by actual events. A constant nag. At first you can prolong your life in captivity without it getting in the way of your servitude. But the longer the anguish takes place the more you start to look for the open windows. You start to question some of your long term decisions about your life. I learned that starting with those may feel like torture but they do provide a shortcut to your freedom deliverance. In the beginning, your life will darken. The room you occupied starts to appear for what it really is; a waiting room in disguise. You will consider unlocking the doors but that thought may as well look like a wild bear as it is frightening to even consider. Unlocking the doors comes with a loudness that rings through the halls of your world. When you start the unlocking, it won’t be undisclosed or concealed from everyone else. Freeing yourself from the outdated choices of your life feels like running naked in front of everyone you know. That very thought takes you from unlocking the covert operation to forgetting where the door even is. You go through a period of denying the truth of your servitude. Going back to the subterranean life is better than what this feels like. And for what, you think? What are you really fighting for? Your haven is a non local place with no form at this point. You can’t point at it and go there. It is a formless thought and a repetitive anguish in your heart that comes out of nowhere and stays until you fall asleep. While at the same time your outdated world calls on you with all the responsibilities of the life that was built under different times, and different yous. A very different you built the world you occupy today. Right about now you start to realize why it doesn’t feel good anymore. The daily torment comes from living in someone else’s house, with someone else’s wishes and dreams. Unlocking the front door and leaving means the whole town will wake up to see you run out without any of your belongings. No clothes. No money. No respect. No understanding. No empathy. No validation. No cheering. No nodding. Nothing. It is you and your new naked self, like a fugitive. A drifter. With no place to go. When you start to consider this option, know that you are getting ready for your escape. At this stage you are approaching your breaking point. You start to chew over the two options, obsessively. Stay in perpetual anguish or become a naked drifter. When the naked drifter option starts to feel like not such a bad choice, you are probably in the worst emotional shape. But one unexpected night, as if you were born to do this you unlock that loud door. You wake everyone up with it as you step out of your old world ready for the life of a drifter. Ready to sacrifice everything for your redemption. But that’s it right here, the sacrifice is never as big as you think it will be. There is a kind of bliss that your bones, your flesh, your being, your mind starts to feel pretty soon after the first mile or two in your journey. You rejoice. You go from a prisoner, to a drifter, to a divergent, to a place that has no locks. Until it is time again for your next reentry. Your next habitat. But now you know, when that first daily anguish starts to set in, you are already late. Your old world has given birth to a new one, and the longer you stay back, the harder it is to run naked in the streets. With many lives and even more reentries, Christina PS. We are taking a short break from recording new podcast episodes for the month of August. But I highly recommend that you listen to the conversations you missed. Especially if you need help with unlocking that loud front door. LINK: http://www.dearlifepodcast.com/episodes
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