24 Nov Unravel

Do you know the mess of yarn from at least 20 skeins or balls in a basket? Cats have played in there and slept in there and now all those colors and ends are completely twisted, knotted, will never be the same?

I tried to think of an analogy for the last year and a half of my life that would not be dark, foreboding, scary, and make you want to put this down and stop reading. A picture that was warmer, more inviting, and possibly easier to want to hear. I thought about lying on the bottom of a swimming pool, or buried in the sand or even drifting out in space.

This is what my life has become, teasing the pieces out gradually and dividing the colors one by one, moving them to places where they can be managed and cared for. And I have asked others to help me with the job. I have invited others into join me in the unraveling.

You see when I think back to the day, and you may know this feeling, the day when everything changed for you. The phone call…….The text message…….The glance……..You feel the squeeze in your chest. You feel the life leave your body. You feel your body leaves the room. Your reach for anyone, anything solid nearby, but feel nothing, actually, feels nothing for a long while. This can be death-divorce-job-child-baby-house-pet-boyfriend-dream-school-any hope or dream that dies. For some, this is waking and living every day with anxiety and depression, PTSD.

Regardless of the mess that you are dealing with in your basket/pool/sand/vast area of space. We all have very scary stuff that we are dealing with every day. We separate, unravel, and work through the mess of life, and many times we are doing this alone and struggling with pain and tears and fear that we can just not make it another day.

I have learned that when I began to pull things apart and ask for help and get further away from the tangled mess and sort the colors out, my perspective changed. I moved away from the basket. I moved the skeins out of the basket. I began to pull the pieces out and asked for help. I found people that shared my vision. People that understood my pain and supported my story. I found people that could stand to see me cry. I needed to find people that we’re ok with chaos and were ok with helping me do the unraveling. What I found when I looked around that basket were a village and a project. There was a team of women that were creative and had not only helped me unravel the yarn and sort the colors but had begun to help me fashion a plan for what I would do with the yarn now. What would I make with this yarn now that it was sorted and rolled? I have a village. I have love. I have a purpose.  The pain and the loss are part of my story and always will be, but I have found new friends and hope.