Life, Call Me By Your Name

March 23, 2018

Oh life. You give. You take. You teach. You scold. You love. You are harder than easier. Tougher than gentler. Stranger than logical. Routine is just an illusion isn’t it? There is no normal. No certain. No guarantees. Just gruesome harshness in between extraordinary beauty. Dreams amongst nightmares. Day and night. Love and loss. I know you know. You have always known. And you are here to teach me to not pity myself. You are here to make me strong. So I can see in the dark. Learn to live inside my losses. Find all the strangeness in my day humorous. And life, I have laughed a lot lately. Thank you. I am also calm in the storm. Quiet inside the noise. And less afraid of loss. Oh yes, I am surprised of that. I know. You thought I couldn’t get there. Yeah. While you threw me inside the nightmares. [bctt tweet="I got skilled in losing myself. And finding a new version of me every morning." username="secondfirsts"] I discovered so many ways to look at you, life. I painted your storms into rainfalls. I drew out the nightmares from every dream. And changed your name and gave you mine. I know that was a bit unexpected. But you taught me well. Here’s to the many versions of me and all the names of you.   With lots of life after loss, Christina P.S. Order the Where Did You Go? book here: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Did-You-Go-Life-Changing/dp/0062689622

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What’s Your Song?

March 16, 2018

You have to be willing to break into a song while in your worst day. That’s right. Start singing while you are on the floor sobbing.  (Click to Tweet!) It’s ugly looking. It feels messy. It might even make you feel nauseous. You may feel like you are out of control. But something will happen in that moment. The breaking into a song while you are sobbing is you taking the controls back. That is you saying, I am going to show you who is in charge grief. I am going to sing my heart out while you are breaking it. You want a contest grief? You got it. You make me cry. And I will make you hear my song. See who makes it. See who lasts longer. See who comes back. I bet you didn’t expect the singing. I bet you thought a heart so broken can’t break into a song while breaking itself. You thought wrong. Here it is. My song. Fight Song by Rachel Platten What is yours?   With lots of singing, Christina P.S. Order the Where Did You Go? book here: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Did-You-Go-Life-Changing/dp/0062689622

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Find the Code

March 8, 2018

Emotional pain is not all the same. Not measured in a simple scale of easy, hard, very hard. It has many directions. It moves across your chest. And then digs in as if your physical body is endless. There is the throwing up kind of pain. Where its movement causes you to feel nausea. Then there is the sobbing uncontrollably type. When that happens your whole body is crying. I have also seen pain that is completely quiet. No nausea, no crying, nothing. It looks like everyone you see on the train to work, or inside the cars on the highway. I call that pain the empty pain. I have seen the very scary pain too. The pain of fear. That kind of pain makes you feel like you can’t breathe. It takes your air out of your lungs. And you stop breathing for long periods of time. The pain of fear gets us very close to not wanting to live. It makes us drink alcohol. Eat junk. And self destruct. Emotional pain then goes from an invisible non physical state to the physical. It looks like illness. Sickness. Back pain. Headaches. Weight gain or loss. Skin changes. And even cancer. Then the pain of fear gets the upper hand. And it rules all the other pain. It shuts us down. The pain of fear is the biggest liar of all. In order to graduate from the non physical to the physical it has to find a way to control our mind. Because when it does, it takes control of our bodies too. Pain goes viral and systemic. It owns our lives. We can’t have that. So here is what I am going to ask you to do. I am going to ask you to do a grief cleanse for 7 days. Every day you grab your pen, you write about all the scary things. Inside your stream of consciousness you will find the lies the pain of fear is telling you so it can control your mind. Here is how you will spot them. You will start noticing that in the midst of all the writing there is one fear that is being repeated, over and over again. That is the code. The code, the pain of fear is writing for you so it can take over your mind. We will rewrite that code. So for example, if what you are repeating over and over again is “I am afraid that nobody will love me again.” You will re write that sentence. “I look forward to the new love in my life.” You will take the new code and add it to your written stream of consciousness when you are writing. Even if you think it sounds like you are lying to yourself. You are not the liar here. The pain of fear is. (Click to Tweet!) And when we take the new code and plug it in to our life the only type of pain that remains is the pain of loss. Which is a pain that I know we can coexist with. I know it. You and I know how to do that and still find our way to a really good life. So start today, write your cleanse, find the fear code, rewrite it. And live your life from there. From the person you can become with this new code. My new code is: You are unstoppable. What’s yours?   With code finding skills, Christina   P.S. This week, we were able to feature new guest contributors.  Be sure to read "Keep Going" by Cyndi Francois, "Put Your Oxygen Mask Back On" by Naomi Whittel, and "What's Next...Again...and Again" by Tracey Yeager Blackburn. Also, please welcome back our returning guest contributor, Karina Vidal.  This week, we published part two of her article titled "A Year of Grief: Part Two".

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Change Does Not Feel Like Breaking Bread

March 2, 2018

Change does not feel like breaking bread. Nope. It does not feel like chopping wood either. It is not like swimming. Or running. Or even climbing. Nope none of these. However hard some of them are. Change is so much harder. It feels like learning to walk on water. Learning to fly without wings. It feels like being scared to go out in the dark and having to go out regardless. It’s like having to walk into a haunted house and there is nobody walking in with you. Should I go on? I think you get the feeling. Even though the word change is not a synonym of darkness or haunting, or even flying without wings, it might as well be. At least if someone had told us what change really is, we would not have put it under the self help category. It would have been the 8th wonder of the world. Rare. Miraculous. Almost inhuman. Like the Great Pyramid at Giza and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Because if we knew how hard change is we would prepare accordingly. We would train for it. We would find a way to invent wings. Expecting it to be scary and impossible would have prepared us for the trip. So since it is never too late. Here it is. Change is the hardest thing you will ever have to experience. It is like being reborn without getting a new body. (Click to Tweet!) Having to use the same brain doing something new with the old commands. It is like asking ourselves to speak a new language without anyone teaching it to us. So enough with the world talking about change as if we are breaking bread. We are not. We are going into the battlefield. The jungle. The darkness. But here is what I am proposing to take with us. Night vision glasses or in other words, wisdom from before the loss. Also some people who have been there before. They know the stakes, and the ghosts that live in the haunted house. Photo reminders of ourselves as kids. Diving in the ocean water without holding our breath. And above all, well, above all the skill of falling down and getting back up again. You also did that as a kid. When you got your new body and learned to walk. You never considered giving up then. Life is made of moments of change stemming from very difficult losses. You are born to learn how to change. And fine, sure, you can also break bread. But not before you grab those night vision glasses. My dear friend, I have been writing to you for 7 years and my responsibility has always been to tell you the truth. I am not a self help author, I am a battlefield warrior with many bodies all in one. And I am here to walk inside all the haunted houses in your life….with you. With night vision and breaking bread, Christina P.S. Make sure you check out our new authors for this week: Meghan Clukey, Karin Hedetniemi, and Karina Vidal. Also check out blogs by some of our returning authors: Confessions of a Widower and Threesome.

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