Write Yourself Down

November 19, 2021 | IN CHRISTINA'S BLOG/POSTS | BY christina

Do you know who you are? 

Like really know. 

And do you show that real self to others? 

So much so that everyone would feel like they knew you forever. 

Realer than the chairs, the tables, the roads. 

More real than anything else real. 

I have been asking myself lately if I know who I am. 

And not the kind of question that leads to the purpose of my life. None of that. 

Just the basic aspect of the question. 

Who am I. 

Beyond the kind of food I like to eat. 

Beyond what my family and friends think of me. 

Beyond the filters of prejudice from preconceived notions, stereotypes. 

If I was to sit down right here and write all the things that I am, will you do the same? 

Will you just sit down and write yourself on paper? 

I mean the real truth of you. 

And then would you take that paper and make it real, as real as the table it is resting on. 

As real as the DNA of you?

When you write yourself down, look for the details of you. 

I will do the same. So here goes nothing. 

I am a good person. 

I love to hear people’s stories. 

What troubles them. What wins them over. 

What impossible things they have done. 

The unthinkable things they had to endure too. 

I don’t want to die even if it means that I will be reborn. 

I want to travel all around Earth. 

Stand on the Moon. 

See the Milky Way up close. 

I love to paint. So much it hurts not to. 

I love my children as if I had already loved them before this life. 

I grieve the people I love even when they are alive. 

I just grieve the day I may lose them. 

I started writing because of the strange grief thoughts in my head. 

I wrote so I would not lose my mind. 

I think I am funny. I love karaoke. Even though I am a terrible singer. 

I never lie. I don’t like people who do. 

I am quirky. For better or worse. 

I wish I had realized it sooner, everything would have made a lot more sense.  

I don’t like to shop. 

I wish I only needed two pairs of jeans and a couple of t-shirts. 

I love short hair. 

I am a small person inside my head. 

I don’t think about my age much. 

I will write and paint my way to the last day of my life. 

I have not enjoyed the public aspects of my work. 

That surprised the heck out of me. 

The longer I am on this journey the more I enjoy giving it all away. All of it. 

Inside my head, I live outside of time. 

As if I am not here. Even though I know I am. 

I feel free. Maybe for the first time.

To live the life of my choosing. 

And that is the hardest thing I will ever have to do. 

Aside from saying goodbye to the people I have loved. 

Now it’s your turn. 

Write yourself down. 

Remember who you are. 

 

With me, myself, and I 

Christina

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.

In 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

It 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

Imagine that you had a bike with no brakes. You just used your feet when you had to slow it down. You never even questioned why your bike came without brakes, you just rode it. Figuring out along the way how to keep yourself safe.

You lived your whole life with this bike and one day someone asked you to take theirs down the street for them.

You would do them a favor. Without a thought in the world, you got on the bike and rode it.

When it was time to slow down and stop, your hands naturally held on to the brakes feeling an unfamiliar ease, a kind of sudden freedom. You may even go as far as to say, you encountered the kind of slow motion, time standing still type of slowing down that feels like you are on a movie set. The wind blowing on your hair the right amount of air.

You finally arrive at the spot your friend told you about and, as you are about to step off the bike, you sob. Right there on the street. Your friend sees you from afar and is rushing towards you, thinking that you fell and hurt yourself. ‘What is wrong?’ she asks. You don’t even know how to tell her you have never used brakes before in your life. How you scraped your feet on the asphalt every day for as long as you can remember. How you did not know how it felt to not have to. 

You just realized that you lived life in a way that was harder than everyone else’s and you didn’t even know it. You thought everyone struggled the way you did, you thought everyone rode the bike the way you did, and that those handle brakes were just there for show.

You did not know it was so that you could rest your feet on the pedals. So that you could keep safe when a car jumped in front of you. So that you could slow down without having to scrape every sole you ever owned.

You gave the bike to your friend and just turned to walk back to yours.

Thoughts swimming as if they are drowning in your head. You look at your feet and they are full of small sneaky rocks and sticky dust. You never had shiny shoes on them. As you approach the bike, you know what you have to do. But before you do, you tell yourself that it will take time to forgive the part of you who just survived without asking if there was a better way.

The part of you that never wondered if everyone endured that same daily hardship. How you didn’t notice the shiny shoes everyone else had on but you. The day will come when forgiveness will set in. While you are finally riding the bike, you should have had all along. Your shoes are glimmering in the sunlight and you are enjoying the turns and twists of the road. You notice the wind in your hair. And you don’t have to carry wash clothes in your bag to care for the shoes. Sometimes there are parts in our lives that are really hard, but we never question them. We just find a way to get through them, never indulging in the possibility that we don’t have to work so hard, or live this way. Without questioning what is and what has always been, we miss the fancy handle brakes and the chance to have nice shoes. It may not be everything, but when we just get by in life with parts that don’t have to be so hard, then the things that do, feel even worse. 

Recently, I realized that a hard part of my life didn’t need to be that hard. I was furious at myself for not knowing this sooner. For not knowing that I didn’t have to scrape the soles of my shoes.

Oh my friend, what a lesson that was. It had me sitting staring out my backyard for a while. Remembering all the times I was scraping down the streets with a brakeless bike that I didn’t have to have.

As I was staring, I knew that this moment of knowing was immeasurable. It felt like art. Like a Picasso showing up at my front door. I may have had scrapes at my feet and no shoes that looked decent, but I had learned a big lesson.

It won’t be long now, you’ll see me strolling down the street with my brand new bike. I will be looking out for you. So we can ride together, with the perfect wind on our hair, and with the most shiniest pairs of shoes the world has ever seen.

With bike rides for miles,

Christina

P.S.

If you know someone who would benefit from Friday’s letter you can send them this link to subscribe: www.christinarasmussen.com/miab

A few weeks ago, I had a dream that when we die; we return to experience the exact life again. 

We meet the same people, make the same mistakes, occupy the same story.

I put it aside, reflecting that it was a strange dream. Further attaching to my belief that If we do return, we live a different life than the one we just had.

I let it be.

But a few days ago, I stumbled upon a book called Einstein Dreams by Alan Lightman. As soon as I opened to the first few pages, it was as if he was describing the dream I had.

It was kind of eerie for me to read it. The novel was first published in 1992.

It started out like this.

“Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

For the most part, people do not know they will live their lives over.

In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word will be repeated precisely.”

Sitting at the kitchen counter shaking my head, remembering my dream and re-reading the words in the novel. Do you suppose there is a world where we relive everything a million times?

In the Einstein Dreams Novel, every chapter imagines a new conception of time. People existing in different worlds experiencing time in ways unfathomable to us. 

“There is a place where time stands still. Raindrops hang motionless in air. Pendulums of clocks float mid swing… As a traveler approaches this place from any direction, he moves more and more slowly. His heartbeats grow farther apart, his breathing slackens, his temperature drops, his thoughts diminish, until he reaches dead center and stops. For this is the center of time… The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey far from his lover, will never place himself in danger in self-sacrifice, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant time.”

Are you breathing?

I forgot to breathe for a few seconds when I was reading this paragraph.

He then continues this unparalleled writing journey with these words. “Those not quite at dead center do indeed move, but at the pace of glaciers. A brush of the hair might take a year, a kiss might take a thousand.

While a smile is returned, seasons pass in the outer world. While a child is hugged, bridges rise.

While a goodbye is said, cities crumble and forgotten.”

This is what happens when we remember someone we lost a long time ago.

We freeze time. Even though that is not what Alan meant with his breathless book, this is the only thing we can do inside the linear time world we are living in.

The only way to freeze an embrace is by remembering it. The only way to stop time is by stepping into it with your mind and climbing inside the memory. 

I can only imagine the liberties that people who have not visited the province of death make, about time standing still inside the realm of grief. 

Here is how time stands in mine. On July 21st, it will be 15 years since the father of my children and my first husband left our linear time world.

As I approach July 21st each year, I go on a walk. 

The walk is invisible, and it happens simultaneously in everyday life. I may be doing the dishes, talking to a friend, writing to you, but the walk continues. 

I am wandering towards the last few days of his life and I freeze time. During the walk I see my house, the kids young. I see him ageless and not noticing I had arrived from the future. He smiles. He nods. 15 years have passed.

I am weathered. I have a perpetual silence that seeks me everywhere. 

He is running around with the girls. He doesn’t know that in a few days, it will all be over. Nobody knows. Even though we were instructed to prepare. We never did. He stops at the grocery store during his last regular day. He does the mundane tasks that we perform when life appears as if it will go on endlessly. I now realize the air was a little thinner that day in the parking lot as we walked out to take that last ride home.

My walk goes from there to him giving the kids a bath, and reading them a story in Danish. They sing together. Then I make it to the earlier years. It seems like I am running when I am there. It is a faster pace. But I can still remember everything. The birth of the girls. Our youth. The travels. The notion of assuming we could live forever. That is when I walk back to today, 15 years later.

I didn’t know then how long the future was. How much life he was going to miss out on. Here time is linear, 15 years seems like a really long time, but for you, I expect for you it is like in Alan’s book. Time is experienced in every way, slow, frozen, circular, and you get to visit us whenever you want. For that, I am sure.

When I take my walks to find you, I bet you visit with my future self while I visit with your past self.

We meet there. Don’t we? In the intersection of time.

One last thing before I go.

The girls are doing well. You would be proud.

Thank you for sending Eric. He is as you said he would be. 

With many more unseen walks ahead,

Christina

I have been changing things up in my life lately and I was reminded of the extreme discomfort change brings along with it. 

It feels like you are standing in the middle of a field with high winds coming at you from all directions. The winds are like loud voices screaming at you to get off the field. 

Expectations. Beliefs. Doubts. Old self. 

The Past. The Future.  

Everything is coming at you. 

You are scared you will blow away. 

And as you are holding on for dear life you wished you never made it to the field. 

No wonder change is so hard to choose. 

The moment you start changing things it brings in a storm to keep you inside. 

But did you notice something? 

Someone is missing from the wind blowers. 

Look at your feet. I’ll give you one guess. 

Who do you think is keeping you standing there, holding your feet in place in the midst of 75 mph wind? 

The present. 

The only reason why you even went to the field.

You wanted to give yourself a happier present. 

But you see the past and the future are strong wind blowers and why the present always struggles. The past has done it for so long that it can create quite the hurricane. 

The future is temperamental and unpredictable, you never quite see it coming. 

The present is always younger than the past and too slow for the future. 

Now you see where the wind picks up speed, and why it feels impossible to stand on that field long enough so your present changes. 

But I am writing this letter to you today to remind you of something you may have forgotten.

The present does have something the others don’t.

It is the only real thing on that field of winds. 

The past is gone and the future hasn’t arrived yet.

The longer you make it out there, the stronger the present becomes. 

The longer you stand inside the wind, the wind lessens. 

The present starts to grow in all directions, past and future. 

The past gets added to, and the future is being rewritten. 

By now the wind is more of a strong breeze which lets you enjoy the present a little more. 

I don’t know why it took me so long to take care of my today more than my tomorrow. 

Why I considered the past to be more important than the present. 

As you can imagine I have a lot of explaining to do, but my present and I have been having a lot of great conversations lately and I am making amends and righting all the wrongs. 

I hope you take a chance on that field of ghostly winds too, you and your present are stronger than you think. 

 

With a breeze,

Christina

Everyone says that love is the most important emotion of all. 

It has been documented forever. 

After all, literature and poetry over centuries captured the feeling of love. 

Like the most famous celebrity. 

The Queen of all emotions. 

But what if the most profound feeling of our existence is not love, but loss. 

And it never got the fame love did.

It has been hidden. Shamed. Forbidden. 

Cut short. 

‘They’ took away its words, and expression of it. 

We had to adjust our behavior to mimic its invisibility. 

We learned that communicating loss externally meant weakness. 

We were supposed to keep on working, caregiving, functioning regardless of what we felt internally. I believe this has been a type of human suffocation. 

It is easier to discuss and fight for an outer form of human suppression than demand validation for inner suffering that lasts longer than 6 months. It is nearly unheard of. 

It is hard to command a revolution for something that is invisible to the naked eye. 

You see, loss is not famous. 

But love, well love has been expressed a million times, in a million ways. 

If only loss had that same luxury. 

And I don’t just mean the loss of another person. 

I am bringing forth the loss that has not yet been defined, expressed and shown in all its parts, because it has been deleted from our rights by shaming us for ever expressing it. 

Even as I am writing this, I am thinking that maybe I should not be so dramatic. 

Maybe not everyone is feeling loss. 

Because even I have been brainwashed to believe that talking about it in the extremes, is an exaggeration. 

What a lie. What a false sense of existing that has been forced upon us. 

It is as if we get scratched every day and everyone around us is pretending not to see the scratch. Well, it is just a scratch right? 

Then every day, a new scratch happens. 

Some of the new scratches happen at the same location. 

After a while the scratch is a deep wound, but you can’t tell anyone because after all, it is a scratch. So we deny the wounds that did not start out deep. 

We deny them, because we are taught to believe that what we feel, what hurts, what looks like a deep wound is just a scratch. 

For some people, especially the ones who are really good at enduring the daily scratch, and even better at ignoring the becoming of the wound, one day they wake up preparing for another scratch and they don’t make it. 

The wound was so deep from the thousands of daily scratches that it took over them. 

Now imagine, if only that first day when the first scratch took place, someone taught us how to tend to it. Care for it. Talk about it. 

Imagine how things could have been. 

Since we can’t change the past. And my next book on this won’t be here until 2023, can you try and tend to your scratches daily? 

Can you witness and validate every seemingly insignificant moment that caused you to sigh. Made you lose sleep. 

And if you are not ready to share it with others, or there is no other to share it with. 

Write it down for yourself, and give yourself permission to look at your scratch as the big deal it can be. 

May your weekend be filled with a knowing that someone, somewhere knows how painful those scratches ended up being. 

And just like that, we start the journey to making loss as famous as love. After all, we know it better than we know anything else. 

Maybe even better than love. 

 

With scratches, 

Christina 

P.S. This week’s Dear Life Podcast was 9 minutes with just me, talking to you. I hope you listen here

Today I decided to share a little more about my life. 

There are so many new readers who joined the Friday Letter Subscription that I think it’s important to tell you about my journey here. 

My name is Christina Rasmussen and 49 years ago I was born in Greece in a small town called Volos. When I was growing up, there was definitely an inner guide that lived within myself but it was a very quiet one. 

I was me but there was the essence of another me, witnessing my life. 

I also believe this is true for everyone, you just have to look for that other you. 

In my early years I didn’t like to eat much.

I had a lot of anxiety and it often took away my appetite. 

I did not know this about myself, or that I struggled from anxiety growing up until my 40s. 

I also felt very nauseous every morning before I had to go to school. 

I deeply disliked school. 

The only good memory I have from those early education years was in Kindergarden. Everything after that first year was like a loss experienced every single day having to wake up and go to school. 

My grades in school were never good. I never studied. 

I never wanted to do homework. 

When it came to math, I nearly failed year after year. 

One time, the school nearly kept me back a year. 

My math teacher told me how I nearly didn’t make it. 

I have dreams about failing math to this day. 

Never underestimate your early schooling experience. 

When I finally graduated from high school, my parents sent me to England to study. 

I went to live with my two great aunts for the first three years.

I honestly never thought in a million years I would be able to go to college. 

After all, I nearly failed at everything. But I did go. 

I spent 5 years in a very old and historic town called Durham where England’s third oldest University is, and where some of Harry Potter was filmed also. 

I had a boyfriend during those years, we dated for 5 years. Until I found out that he cheated on me multiple times and I had no idea. 

I experienced my first traditional loss then. 

One of the invisible losses that stemmed from that experience was that I had no idea that he was cheating. He seemed so dedicated to our relationship. 

He spent every summer visiting my parents home in Greece, he even learned Greek. 

How did I miss this? How was I fooled like that? 

I did my Masters in Counseling two years after. 

I also went to Denmark for a study abroad program and where I met my first husband Bjarne. Sometimes life is very strange. I was planning on going to Spain for my study abroad but one afternoon, I ran into one of my professors in the coffee room and she said to me, don’t go to Spain, go to Denmark you will love it there. So I went. 

Denmark was wonderful, and one night at a 70s party with some new Danish friends I met Bjarne. He moved to England to be with me.

We then decided to go on an adventure and move to the US. 

He asked his company to transfer us to their Houston office. 

And this is how I found my way to the country that I would call home for over 20 years now. Just before we moved here, we gave birth to our first daughter early as her lungs did not mature and her heart was not functioning properly. She passed the day she was born, on December 18th 1998. On her 20 year anniversary my book Where Did You Go? was released. Talk about timing. 

We moved to Houston on February 14th, 1999. 

That is when I volunteered at the Houston Hospice. I spent a few months there, sitting with the dying, running support groups, visiting people in their homes after they lost someone they loved. 

Until my daughter Elina was born in Houston. We were off again. This time in California. 

Our daughter Isabel was born there. And we then moved to Boston, where he was immediately diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. 

He was 31 at the time. I was 30 and our daughters, 9 months and 2 years. 

We did everything to keep him alive. 

We even went to the Philippines for an experimental drug. 

He nearly died there. I lied to his doctors, I told them I was going to bring him to the hospital to be admitted but I knew he was never going to make it out. I did not want him to die there. So I lied and got him on a plane back home. 

I remember at the time thinking, this cannot be my real life. 

It must be some kind of movie. 

We made it home, he lived for another few months. 

This July 21st, it will be 15 years since the day he passed. 

At first, it was as if the nightmare was never going to end. 

Being a single mom, and working full time at a corporate job while at the same time grieving the loss of my husband was not for the faint of heart. 

You enter the most unloving, uncaring and cold world. 

Where nobody wants to know about the widow who is sitting at the cubicle. 

It felt like I walked inside a zombie world. 

That is how the corporate world felt to me at the time. 

I spent 3 years there. It did get better. Or, I did adapt. 

After all, we are made to adapt to anything. 

In 2010 I remarried.

I met my second husband at a support group for the kids. 

Eric had lost his 35 year old wife and he was raising two young daughters also. 

During our first dates, I would sit across from him and not let him anywhere near me. I called those early months with Eric, my frozen months. 

We finally started our lives together, blending two families, and four children. 

I never talk about the blending. 

As part of that story is not mine to tell. 

But it was a very hard experience for many reasons. 

And I will leave it at that for now. 

Sometimes, life is so surprising that it feels like someone is playing a prank on you. 

I know you know this feeling. 

After three years at the job I decided to resign and do something on my own. 

That is when I started this letter, you are reading. 

It was just a paragraph at first. 

Thinking who would want to read anything from me. 

But it grew and grew and now tens of thousands of people read it every week. 

I did a lot of other things too, but today’s letter is not about the books I wrote, or the classes I taught, or the mission of the work. That is not the story. It feels like it is, but the story is written by memories. I am now living in Austin, both of my kids are in college, writing my next book and I just recently signed up for my MFA in Painting. Making my oldest dream come true. 

Someone asked me the other day, why has it taken you so long to say yes to this dream? 

I think the answer is in the story. 

It is inside the invisible parts of the story. It always is. 

Otherwise we would all be doing only the things that feed our soul. 

If this is your first letter, I apologize for the length. It normally is very short. 

So don’t unsubscribe yet. This is a rare version of it. 

A personal letter that hopefully can also help you to look at your whole story. 

And connect some of the dots. I write to you every week so we can understand our lives, our days and our weeks. Maybe in ways that are not often discussed with our families and friends. I started writing this letter in 2010 talking about traditional loss, but it transitioned to the invisible losses, the kind that hide under everyday life. 

Under the bigger losses. 

Under our most important relationships. Under our breath. 

When that boyfriend cheated, it never was about losing him but about not trusting myself to know other people. 

Look for what is lurking underneath your big losses. 

The knowing and the healing of ourselves lives there. 

 

With trust,

Christina 

Sometimes the new life is hiding behind a tiny moment.

Behind just one thought. 

If you could look inside your mind you would see two words connecting the old chapter with the new one. 

These words can be missed completely if we are not paying attention to our inner experience. 

It is almost like a lottery win. 

Rare. Unexpected. 

Invisible to the naked eye and inaudible to our ears. 

But then how could we hear it or see it? 

How can we find something that is not seen or heard? 

Well, let me show you. 

Imagine you are going about your day, and wondering the same things, thinking the same thoughts. 

And just like that, a question pops up and it starts with the words… what if. 

Just… what if? 

When this happens, complete the sentence and answer the question. 

When you answer it, add, and then what? 

And then, what would happen if I did this? 

Keep going. 

Don’t stop the trail of the thread. 

That is how you jump from one chapter to the next. 

How you change your life. 

I was on a road trip from Austin to Los Angeles last week and in between Albuquerque and Sedona the what if question popped in while I was thinking about something and I stayed with it. 

I answered it. 

All the way until it became a decision which I acted upon. 

What if you did the same thing. 

Answered your what ifs? 

Then, the what would happen if you did this?

If you dared yourself, with the answer. 

We take life so seriously. 

We agonize over big decisions. 

We wait. 

We let time pass by these words, unanswered. 

When I finished the answering of my what if, I stopped at a rest area where a jewelry shop was magically there, in the middle of the desert. 

I walked in and bought a beautiful cross to signify the moment of the answering. 

You can never let your brain forget the seeing, the hearing of the unseen, and the unheard. 

May you listen in, find your what if, answer the question and make it a memorable experience. 

Will you dare? 

With many what ifs, and a few… then whats,

Christina 

P.S. I hope you find your way to this week’s podcast with one of the greatest teachers I have ever met. Listen here.


Sign up to receive Christina’s Message in a bottle every Friday