How my heart breaks when I think of it. The moment I was curled up on the hospital bed, weeping in my husbands arms, just absolutely sobbing with fear as the two doctors stood by, helpless to my tears.
Only moments earlier the male doctor had told me I was fine.
An hour or so earlier the female doctor had done the same thing.
And yet I wasn’t fine, my body was alive with movement. And in that moment, on that bed, all I could do was cry for the absolute terror of it. The absolute helplessness I felt in the face of what, to me, was one of the most frightening moments of my life.
I have experienced heart palpitations on and off for as long as I remember, they are not foreign to me. I know the blips. I know the sort of big, and a little scary ones.
But none of them have been like this. I called the ambulance. For myself. None of them had been like this.
They tell me: this is what anxiety does. Anxiety causes heart palpitations, and panic attacks. Apparently it was one of those.
But still, it frightened me.
It frightened me into an awareness that I wasn’t aware of before.
I am afraid of dying. If you’d asked me if I was afraid of dying three weeks ago I would have said, no, absolutely not.
But when my heart went to loopy land and energy shot straight from my heart up my throat, things changed. I have seen that fear, now, and there is nothing for me to do but honour it as best as I can.
I’ve cleaned up my diet, entirely.
I’ll need to look into ways of removing as much stress from my life as possible.
And also, I’m really quite open to believing that this episode has a great deal to do with where my energy healing journey is at. Trying to explain to Western doctors that energy moves within my body, though, is like trying to explain the housing market to a fish.
And so I’m on my own, largely, on this journey.
They tell me my heart is well. They tell me my health is perfect.
This is good.
Now, all that is left to do is live my best life, and hold my beautiful fear in the palm of my hand.
I could say they are noisy, but they are not really noisy. They are only noisy if I think of them in relation to my world.
On their own, they are just who and what they are.
Birds.
Chirping, squawking birds.
I’ve deleted another of my posts (those of you who have been around for a while will know I have done this, from time to time) because the energy of the post didn’t feel like my truth.
It felt like the underside of my world. It felt like the dark parts of me, not my sunshine.
I choose only to shine on this world, when I can help it.
In the post I deleted, I spoke of scammers and manipulation, and where I have felt victimised as a woman in the past. These pains, I know, are real, and they will live within me and walk beside me in everything I do.
But they are not who I am. And the ways I have been victimised are not the people who have hurt me, either.
I see those who have bullied me, taken advantage of me, used or abused me, but I see the pain within them more. They have been small children, hurt by something in life, desperate to cover that pain with a bandaid.
Who am I to blame them when I am the bearer of the very same wounds that scar them?
She sits alone (you could not get any more alone) at her husband’s funeral and we all just sit here and shake our heads, because what else is there to do?
I’m speaking of the image of the Queen at prince Philip’s funeral, but you already knew that. You must have. Who could un see that quiet ache, just another handed to us by the raging depths of humanity.
***
I have hidden from life.
Strike that. I am hiding from life.
Because it wasn’t the Queen sitting there alone that day, it was me. I feel the pain that deeply.
It wasn’t someone else’s little boy sitting in the back of a war zone ambulance, parentless; it was mine. That one slices my heart.
I can’t hide from that darkness, though I want to.
I have to see it.
I have to say it: I am torn to shreds.
***
I cried in my husband’s arms the other night.
I mean I really cried, remembering a time in childhood where I was chosen last of all the children in my class to join the netball team.
I cried, at first, for the poor and beautiful little girl whose heart broke that day. But the depth of my tears came from the realisation that that very moment in time made me the person who will always go in to bat for anyone who needs me. That girl will try her very best to lift others, so that no one else has to feel the pain of being unloved, unworthy, unchosen.
Born is the true beauty of aching life.
And born is the paradox. The knowledge that the other needs to feel that very same empathy-birthing pain, in order to truly see. Even though I’d give anything to protect them from it.
***
You see it, don’t you?
This ache, this wide open ache of humanity, has birthed the very best of us. It has grown our hearts and gifted us the ultimate; the chance to hold and love others from the very core of our being.