The Anniversary Effect

Old wounds are aching.

February marks a time in my life I’d rather not remember. But every year, whether I actively acknowledge it or not, I find myself in the essence of the past. Feelings come back, memories resurface, I’m visited in dreams by old ghosts, and just the other day, a person’s name came into my social media that brought me to a place I’d rather not return to.

But this year I’m feeling a little less avoidant and a little more curious about that which is resurfacing and instead of trying to forget, I’m asking myself, what is begging to be remembered? What needs to be felt? Time to dig in a little bit, I think.

February 2017 was my rock bottom. Five months prior, my doctor told me that my Endometriosis had spread and I’d graduated from stage II to stage IV in less than five years, in spite of the extreme elimination dieting I had restricted myself to in attempt to control my estrogen levels. He told me I was so loaded up with scar tissue that I needed to start trying for kids now, which might have been fine had I not just called off an engagement to someone I had spent nearly the last seven years with. I had also just gotten out of treatment for an eating disorder, which I’d used as my attempt to feel some level of control when everything else was falling apart. I was supposed to be in my last year working toward my BA at the University of Minnesota, but I had to drop all my classes after the first few weeks of fall semester because the recovery from surgery was taking too much out of me and my health was declining rapidly from malnutrition.

I remember the moment when I realized my relationship was over. I remember the moment when I packed away my wedding dress and stuffed it in the back of the closet. I remember the moment where I sat on my parents’ deck after moving everything I owned into a storage unit because I had nowhere else to go, looking at the moon and saying defeatedly, “What the f*** do I do now?”

In that moment something moved in me, I felt a voice in my body whisper, “Now you have space.” I almost couldn’t tell where the words came from, they were so spontaneous that it was like they came from somewhere deeper than my mind. It’s hard to explain, but if you know, you know. And I know there are some of you out there that know… ;)

I realized in that moment that I already knew this time would come. I knew my eating disorder would one day lead me to treatment, either that or death. I realized that I always knew something wasn’t quite right in that relationship, as if my body had told me all along there was an expiration date stamped on this whole thing. I fought these notions and clung to my delusions for as long as I could, to keep my life the way I wanted, it, the way I thought was best for me. Every night I went to sleep cozied up with my own ignorance.

I had betrayed my intuition for years. That inner wisdom, highest self, gut instinct, whatever you want to call it, was tugging at me, asking me to move in a different direction. In that moment, sitting on the deck at my parents house, I recognized it. Right then and there, I made a promise to myself that I’d never ignore that voice again.

And that my friends, is when things really started to MOVE in my life. I stopped second-guessing myself. If something felt right, I did it. I stopped overthinking, I decided I was going to believe what felt right for me, not what I was told or taught to believe. I finally stopped trying to make everything so damn perfect all the time and I just sort of did a free-fall into life.

Throughout this journey of learning to listen to my inner wisdom, I learned that intuition speaks in ways of the body. Through Homeopathy and a LOT of self-reflection, I made the connection between my self-betrayal and endometriosis. It hit me like a ton of bricks at one point that my body had been screaming at me for years to make changes in my life instead of desperately clinging to dead branches that needed to drop.

Ultimately, tuning into my body and listening for intuitive messages brought me to realize I was meant to study Homeopathy. I was called. One random day in the living room of the apartment I just knew that was the path I was meant to follow. One week later I was enrolled at the Northwestern Academy of Homeopathy.

Homeopathy has become the lens through which I view the world around me. Through an awakening to my own connection to nature, I awoke to what trees could teach me about allowing things to die, and that death is beautiful. I felt what the moon had to say about womanhood, I embarked upon the journey of healing the feminine wounds inside of me and could finally see, accept, and stand in awe of how I embody the Divine feminine because she is me. I learned what it meant to be held by swimming in a lake, and what wildlife could teach me about humanity. I plunged into the wonderful world of astrology to learn about how the celestial bodies influence our planet and our people. I learned about energy, the field, and through this, that my own sensitivity was not a weakness as I’d always felt, but rather a tool I could use to tune in and understand the world around me. What a gift it was to harness that and channel it, rather than falling victim to it

Most of all, I’ve learned that those old, deep wounds have a lot to teach me. In reflecting on the most painful points of my life, I am filled with gratitude for a deeper connection to my spiritual self, and wisdom I never expected to receive by the ways of pain and healing.

So I guess for this while, when the old ghosts come back to visit, I’ll hold them with gentleness and love and be ever so grateful for all the blessings this road has brought.