The Unraveling

I read somewhere that the midlife crisis should be called the unraveling and now it will be nothing else for me.  I find myself there right now. In my mind, this conjures up the moment in the Highlander movie where Christopher Lambert’s character, Connor MacLeod, feels the lightning bolts throughout his body and ascends into the ether.  Pretty cool, huh?! I see my life in segments of about 20 years.  From 0 to 20, those were my formative years.  I got the chance to be a child and also deal with very adult emotions and situations and realize that I had to go to work to support myself, college just wasn’t in the cards for me.  I found my spirit and really enjoyed doing energy work and discussing metaphysical ideas and surrounding myself with the occult.  From 20-40, I helped get my handicapped sister out of my mom’s house and into a stable life away from our mom’s craziness.  I met my husband and began the domesticated life.  I chose not to have children because I had been taking care of everyone around me for my whole life.  I was done with the rearing of children and adults.  Luckily, I met a man that didn’t want children either.  His childhood was traumatic and he didn’t want to pass that poison onto another generation of human.  So we settled in and our domesticated life sped forward.  During those years, I slowly dwindled down my connection with my spirit and the friends I had made through that journey.  Not for any specific reason, other than life happens. Folks move away and things change and I didn’t really try to make new magickal friends.  As I drew toward 40, I started to feel overwhelmed and stuck.  I started feeling like I wasn’t being true to myself.  My self.  I started seeing a therapist to talk about my problems with work and home and how I couldn’t cope with the way things were in my life.  I’ve come to realize that I was pushing all the emotions I felt into my body, all the emotions and feelings that I didn’t have time or want to process over the 40 years of my life thus far.  They sat there and festered and started to affect my physical and mental health.  I developed more allergies and eczema.  I couldn’t feel anything anymore.  I had kept my emotions turned off for so long, that I didn’t know how to turn them back on.  I couldn’t access them, but they were bubbling up through my skin, just trying to get out of me.  Did you know the actual root of the word emotion comes from the French word emouvoir meaning “to stir up, to touch, to move”.  Funny huh?  

Okay, back to the unraveling.  We all go through times of great excitement and energy and things just seem to click into place.  I think that’s the time that you are being true to your self.  See the separation of the word there?  I see the self as being the soul of a person.  It’s where all the creativity and wonder and magic is.  It’s what gives life meaning and purpose and just the beauty of being. The self is the part that we are full of when we are born.  Then as time goes on, the self has to be protected from outside influences like pain, trauma, unjust life, etc.  That’s when the ego comes in and takes over.  I see the ego as being a suit of armor that a person has on when they go into battle.  As a kid, everything is the first time and through those events, little cuts show up on the self and the ego jumps in and covers those cuts with a layer of something.  It doesn’t heal the small wound, the ego just covers over it.  I get this perspective from don Miguel Ruiz in his books, The Four Agreements.  I’ve written about his books in a prior blog post, https://www.talesfromthetarheelstate.com/blog-1/just-waiting-on-the-bus.    The ego protects the self from further harm, but it also blocks the self from further growth.  Each time we get hurt, the ego puts a thicker layer of stuff on us.  Now, 40 years later, I found myself carrying around a lot of heavy protective armor that was dragging me down.  It stopped me from feeling anything and I was so tired of the weight of my ego.  It had served me well at times in my life, but I felt it was getting time to shed that armor and let my self shine again.  My self needed to feel the light of the sun and see the beauty of the universe.  In the words of the late and great Bill Hicks:

I’m choosing to let my self free and continue to shed the armor of the ego.  What say you?  Are you going through the unraveling too?  How are you dealing with it?  What magic is your self going to create?  Much love to you on your journey and I’d love to hear from you.