Thursday, April 26, 2018

Re-dedication of this Blog, and Redirection of its work

I'm going to be moving away from my own personal past and trauma to working with Ancestors.
I figured I'd re-use this blog rather than take my devotional and ranting main blog off on a tangent.  My personal trauma and issues are connected to my ancestors through patterns of behavior, abuse, inherited wealth and inherited education.  All these things we pass down to our children are what have been poured into me from my ancestors.

And I have to account for my genetic inheritance as well as my adopted inheritance. I believe I have covered most of the foundations given to me by my adopted family. Much of it is negative but there are some positives. I hope that my improvement in my mental health will enable me to focus on the positives this time so I can appreciate the advantages being adopted by that family may have given me.

And I have to deal with the ghosts, the energies, and gifts passed down to me from my bloodline even though I have no scientific basis for this. I can't prove or disprove anything I see in meditation or visions or dreams. My biological work will be totally UPG until something happens that connects me to facts of my bloodline. I have ordered an Ancestry.com kit. If any of my blood relatives are working on that website and have done DNA tests, I may be connected to them through that. But that is a long shot.

The 20andme.com website connected me to people who could be 3rd and 4th cousins but that won't give me any ancestral information that I could use to understand inherited karma. At least not enough yet. I may be called to do more work and even contact those people to see if they have done Ancestry.com family trees. It would help me narrow down genetic ancestors.

Erika

3rd grade to 2011

(I meant to write this up in January 2014. Something must have happened and I just never got to it again. But here is what I have in my mind now after the past 4 years of processing and grieving and rebuilding.)

Erika was my best friend from third grade. She knew things about me I told no one, not even Stacy my other best friend who I think I might have been a little in love with.

Erika was a rival for the affections of my first real crush.  We never really talked about it after he moved away. She saw what was actually happening in my house and was the first to point out it was abusive. I asked her if what my bro and my father were doing was abuse and she looked at me in shock like she couldn't believe I had to ask. We were in her upstairs bedroom doing our hair with those crimping curling irons. Then she said, Yes it definitely was.  It was the moment I started looking at my childhood from a completely different perspective.  I started no only to see things as what they were, and that they were not normal or healthy, but I also started to see what I needed to do to survive it.  I started to think about my future as escaping from it, and less about what other people wanted from me.  I think I took a turn in my path that I wouldn't have taken if she hadn't pointed this out to me.

She was also the first person I told when I found my father's porn stash. It was not a stash of naked women. I stole the Playgirl book and took it to her house. She ended up pasting some of the pics on her wall. We kinda laughed about it. I figured dad was a closet gay man and that explained so much of his relationship with my mother. It was totally asexual as far as I could tell. I don't think he ever really was attracted to her sexually. Maybe at one time because she did get pregnant when I was really young, around 4.  She lost the baby. She told me later because of endometriosis.  It could have also been because of alcoholism, or if she wasn't drinking yet, maybe it contributed.  Unexpressed grief really fucks a person up.

Erika and I spent a lot of time together in 7th and 8th grade over in her neighborhood. A lot of time around water. We waded in the Grasse river and found rock bass, baby pike, crawfish.  There was a part of a concrete damn, only about 10 feet tall, that had a break in it.  We used to jump off this big boulder in front of it and ride the current down the river.  Obviously we worse full clothes and shoes.  It was a lost of fun.  There was also a place called 'the foot bridge' near Center St that ran parallel to a railroad tracks.

I remember once year we met a couple of boys when I was with her and another girl. I decided to play a prank on them because on of them was in my homeroom and obviously didn't recognize me. I whispered to her to tell them I was deaf and mute. She pretended to use sign language and talk for me. They totally fell for it. The following day on Monday I told Tammy to tell this kid that I was joking and not mute. He was so mad at me. But he never forgot who I was. lol

I loved her family. Her mother used to sit with me at the kitchen table when she was home and tell me stories about her family, the farm she grew up on, and her early life before Erika was born. She was the best source of sex ed I had growing up. Better even then the school lessons from a former RN because she was so frank, and not afraid to talk about homosexuality, or other messy relationship stuff that teachers weren't supposed to talk about.

Erika and I talked about ghosts and magick a lot too. She told me about the ghosts that were in her house. The house was below a steep hill. I used to climb down a steep trail that led behind the library and parking lot and down into her back yard. Apparently the parking lot behind the corner building was once a graveyard because when they paved it over they missed two of the gravestones that were in the trees and right on the edge of the hill. Both dated around 1850 or so. She saw strange lights, heard rapid talking and whispering. We used a OUIJA board a couple of times. It actually scared us and we stopped.

I felt safe at her house and tried to hang out with her as much as I could. My mother started to discourage this in 8th grade. She didn't like the people Erika hung out with. I found out later that some of those kids were drug dealers. And at least once was a rapist. He messed with a friend of hers while she was drunk. Erika witnessed another incident with a different guy when she was at a party.  8th grade was really messed up for some of her friends and herself. That was when she dated that jerk that left bruises on her.  I told her to dump him. She did eventually.

I lost touch with her in 9th grade. I was in after school programs and building my resume for college cuz that was my ticket out of Massena. I wanted to be gone so bad and I knew that getting into a school out of state, or as far away as possible was my chance. I got accepted to Mt Holyoke but didn't get to go because Mom said she didn't have the money to send me. Found out later that was a lie, but can't do anything about that now. My suspicion was not only did she want to control me so she had to keep me close, but my bro didn't want my parents spending too much money on me. He had way more control over my life behind the scenes than I realized at the time until much later.

I found out later that she had cancer.  She got addicted to pain meds and in her late teens-early 20s, she developed a meth addiction.  She told me a lot of these things later. Including the abortion. She was really in a messed up place. But she managed to pull herself out of it. This would have been around the time that I was dating Dave, and changing my major to Journalism after my identity crises at SBU.

We started writing to each other in Post Office mail around this time too. I have kept all of the letters. There were times when I didn't write her thinking I would let the association die out and I feel guilty about that. I needed her letters as much as she needed mine. 

She last called me on the phone about 2 months or a little less before she died. We talked about the holidays. I was pregnant with Bri and she sent me a blanket in the mail with blue lace on the edges and covered in zoo animals. I still have it.  I don't think I'll give it up even when Bri grows out of it. Some of her last words were Take care of that little baby.

She overdosed in January 2011. I had Bri in February. She would have been born on Erika's birthday if my labor had progressed normally. I went into labor on the 14th and should have given birth on the 15th or 16th. Erika's birthday was the 16th.  Bri was also three weeks early, and blond with blue eyes.  Sometimes I wonder if she isn't hanging around Bri and checking in on her. Some of the similarities are uncanny.

A few months ago I pulled Laguz in one of my meditations and I was reminded of Erika and her connection to rivers and our time together as kids.  She appeared in the meditation as if to comfort me and say hi.  I cried because I had forgotten, and I should honor her as one of my ancestors, one of my spiritual family. We had the kind of relationship where if I was depressed or she was depressed we could feel each other even from 5 states away. She was in Indiana.

I re-read all of her letters and it reminded me about aspects of myself that I had forgotten. In one letter written around the time we both had just turned 30, she wanted us to promise to travel somewhere like New Orleans and do something nuts when we turned 40. I had just turned 41 when I was reading these letters again. A lot of crying followed.  I remembered my own strength, the optimism and hope I had had as a kid. She reminded me of my strength of will, my ability to just decide to do something and then just go ahead and do it. It's an aspect of myself I haven't explicitly acknowledge in a while, and even forgot I even had.  I have been so passive in my teaching career, in letting other people's wills and opinions push me around.  I settled for less than I was capable of and less than I deserved.

I wonder if that's part of what Loki is also trying to help me with. I wouldn't be surprised if the two were working parallel goals for me. And Erika definitely had that trickster sense of humor. God, she was funny.


Erika is one of those people who helped shape the trajectory of my life. She once told me that I was good for her to have around. She wanted to keep me away from the abusers and the drugs and by doing so kept herself clean. I had a horrible desire to destroy myself. A tremendous level of self-hatred and suicidal thoughts since I was maybe around 5th grade. She kept me from jumping off the cliff until I was older and developed enough to come up with a plan for escaping my abusers.

I guess I didn't quite function the same way for her.  But maybe it was beyond my abilities. I don't know.








Healing Ancestral Trauma blog post

https://ailimhazel.blogspot.com/2018/04/healing-ancestral-trauma.html

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Psych Meds update

I never did come back to this blog and update on the progress. It's been a few crazy years.

I've been busy and distracted and started another blog on Runes and continued my old blog just devotional poetry and thoughts and ideas.

I was only on Xanax and the anxiety med for a year. I weaned off of it around Christmas 2015.  I'm really glad it is gone. There is some truth to that Stepford Wife thing some people describe.
I was all passive, disturbingly calm, and felt like I was in a bubble.  It doesn't just water down the anxiety, it waters down all of the emotions. Everything was stunted.

The Xanax did something to my head.  My brain works differently now. I used to be really verbal, with a Master's in English and a Master's in English Education. I was all words and stories.  Now I am more pictures and visual.  I've stopped writing fiction like I used to. Not that I was any good at it really anyway, but I used to write constantly. I was always working on a novel, 300 pages and multiple chapters.   I work with glass now and make stained glass panels.  I enjoy it and it helps calm me.  Destruction really seems to be my element.

I can't park my car straight. I used to be able to perfectly center my car in any space and thread through tight spaces. Now I am always too far to the right. Guess that explains that weird earthquake shift I felt the first time I took it.

It shouldn't be surprising. It's a psych med that messes with your brain chemistry and synapses.  I do have less problems with rage than I used to. Although I am feeling a bit more out of control with some returns of my old rage this passed year. Probably has a lot to do with the massive relapse I had after the election. Seeing someone as abusive as the males in my family get elected to office really messed me up.  I can't look at him without seeing my father or my brother's manipulative behavior

Every press conference is a flashback.

I'm working on taking Vitamin D every day, getting enough sleep, doing exercise, and trying to slow myself down so I think before I speak or act. I think I am managing my issues much better than before. I was in pure crisis mode in 2014. Totally the worst I have ever been in my life.  I'm glad I did what I did. It saved my life. It's kinda weird not having suicidal thoughts anymore. They haven't come back so that's a first since grade school.

I just have to deal with the neurological fall out now. My brain cells are not in the same places I left them.

Although the phone call was 6 months ago. . .

I am done, motherfucker!
Done!

Now all I have left is the damage to my psyche I need to figure out how to heal.
Panic attacks, insomnia, anxiety, depression, PTSD symptoms.

And a complete loss of an understanding as to what to do with my ancestors.
Do I revere biological only, or do I include the adopted ones since a legal adoption often
binds us to each other?

Depends on who you ask.  I met a shaman who said it didn't count at all. Your adopted ancestors would not follow you or count you as their own. At least in his visions with clients that's how it worked.

Then there are others who regard legal adoption as spiritually binding.  It was to our European ancestors in some cases.

I have no clue.
Fuck it!
I'm done!

Thursday, August 3, 2017

So I Thought it was Over

We got our final checks this summer and set to work on an investment property.

Then I went into a conference call with the estate lawyer and there are a couple of brokerage accounts that haven't been closed out.

They are doing "research" and have been for years.  I know we requested a full transaction accounting of those accounts two years ago.  We never get statements or phone calls back.

More money, yay!

More work, boo!

I am so sick of this shit.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

The estate keeps Going

My brother is so screwed and I'm enjoying the pain.He's blown through his inheritance, no one in the family will talk to him, his one enabler left has died (old age), and no one else in town will take his side unless he pays for their beer and drugs. He's screaming at the estate lawyer again about the Camarro, and money still owed. Like he can milk anymore out of our dead parents.
The Camarro was in mom's name. She bought the car so he could drive it but she had to put it and the insurance in her name because the dealership refused to sell him a car and the insurance companies refused to insure him due to his arrest, car crashes, and ticket history. As such, when mom went into the hospital, I had a right to sell it as Power of Attorney and use the money to help pay for her nursing home costs back in 2013. He has no claim to it but he's still harping on it like it's his.
I have to sit in a conference call with the lawyer to confirm all estate accounts are closed and paid out. Get proof of that. Then go over the chain of events about the car. The attorney has all of the paperwork on file. I sent him everything. It's just it was 4 years ago so the memory on his side is fuzzy. That should do it, unless the dickhead tries to come after me. I'll have to go over the estate attorney about that. I want to make sure it is clear that I want no contact from my brother for the rest of my life. And I will teach Bri not to have any contact with that side of the family. I'm sure she'll have questions when family tree time comes. I'll be honest about why too. *********************************************************************
Things have been good though. The meds helped tremendously. I only needed them for a year and weened off of them. I swear they saved me. The business is picking up. I make really good glass sales at pagan and celtic fairs. Not so much at art festivals. I think they might be a little too upper class for me. I thought that would be good, like they have money so I should sell a lot. But the upper middle class want lighthouses, and boats, and hummingbirds.I like to do unique things that aren't sold by the thousands on Ebay and Etsy. Hence the dragons with gemstones in their wings and fairies of unique lines.
I've been really good with sketching my own patterns. I have a few adjustments to make sometimes. I think the Huginn and Muninn panel once it has the kinks worked out could go for 1500. I've priced this one at 700. It has a weak spot that I have to go back to the design and work out.
We finally sold the old house. It was too painful to rent out. We had one renter who was a total jerk and barricaded the doors, covered the windows with black curtains, and didn't pay us. I evicted him. Then I had a family in there who did pay but never told us when things broke, like a running toilet that cost us 650 in a water bill. Or the leaking roof from the satellite dish they installed without our knowledge. The neighbor lost her shit when I tried to get the driveway done, just our half. She called the cops on me and everything. Ventry refused the work cuz they didn't want to get sued by her. After waiting two years for them to finally make good on the contract I signed in 2015, they fled. The new owner is a contractor and owns his own business. LOL He'll know she's trying to price gauge him.
Gauge your eyes out.Guage your interest.It's pronounced differently depending on the context?WTF English?!