Is it possible to love to much?  I have always loved people deeply.  When I fall in love I fall hard and when it is over I mourn for months.  Does this make me crazy? weird? I have been told both of those things when I did not just walk away and get over it quickly.    This has been an issue my whole life.  I know that in some cases I have been in love with a person who is either disconnected or does not love themselves.  Those always end badly because when we do not love ourselves we push away people who love us because we think there must be something wrong with them.

So I am still hurting.  I have been punishing myself over this.  I thought I was ok and then it all came rushing back.  The thing is I know that I was not completely happy in my relationship.  I will not go into why or what could have changed that because it is over and I cannot go back.  I think the thing that tortures me the most is that I seem to be the only one hurting over it….so I question myself…is something wrong with me?  I see others who end relationships just jump into something else and I have done that as well.  I cannot do that again.  I have to figure out how to be Rauncie right now.  The squirrels have been super busy telling me how to end the pain and it is always over the top and life ending stuff.  That is not what I want.  I want to live.  I want to do all the things I have been pushing aside.  I am just feeling overwhelmed with emotion right now and I sometimes just want to curl up and forget it all.

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

I have received several boxes of darkness in my life from people I have loved.  Every time I have wanted to hurl it from me as far as I could and stomp the fuck out of it.  This time after beating it up quite a bit I have been going through it to see what the lessons are I need to learn.  It is not an easy task and I sometimes get sucked into the darkness and find it hard to climb out.  One of the items in that box is a book A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield.  A book I was told I should read over a year ago that I said I would but never did.  This morning I picked it up and read the first chapter.   At the end of the chapter I was sobbing.  I knew after reading it that I was not listening to my heart.  I knew that I had been spending many hours of my time wishing the pain I am feeling on someone else who I felt had a part in what happened.  What a terrible thing to wish for someone.  I would not wish this kind of pain on anyone.   I have to let it go.  If I look from a different perspective I know that someday I will thank this person for being the straw that broke a very tired camels back.  So I spent some time this morning asking the universe to help me to let go of this hatred and hurt I have felt.  It is not going to just disappear.  I know it will take time.  What I have to focus on is moving on and not thinking about what is going on in other peoples lives because it is keeping me from living mine in today.   I have things I need to do in this life.  I believe that if I share my experiences I may be able to help others who are struggling.  It is hard to believe on this beautiful Sunday morning that just yesterday I had serious thoughts of ending my life.  In fact almost every day this past week I struggled with those kinds of thoughts.  Not because I lost a boyfriend.  I lost him many months before the breakup.  But I lost myself first.  My heart had closed up in self defense and I was no longer connecting on a level that was satisfying to me.  I did not communicate that in a way that was understood.  I take responsibility for my part in the demise of the relationship but I will not take it all.   More importantly I need to take responsibility for the healing of my heart and that means kicking out the squatters who are taking up rent space in my brain.

So what am I learning from all this?  that is something that is a work in progress and I am learning every single day.   My lesson today is that my life is right here, right now and it is wonderful.  I will strive to no longer live in the past or in my fantasies of the future.  This morning I was in the kitchen and the squirrels made a sneak attack.  I jumped like a ninja and said “Back Squirrels!”  I need to do that more often.  The movement and the words scared them away for now.  It is a ritual I will repeat.

If you are interested in the book I am reading you can find it here:

https://jackkornfield.com/a-path-with-heart/

“You always knew that one day you would stand up for yourself…That one day you would raise the standard of your life….That one day you would say to yourself “Enough with this bullshit”…You might as well make today that day.   ~  Steve Maraboli

I said enough with this bullshit over 8 months ago in one area of my life and then on December 15th I said it again.   I know that in both cases I made the right choice.  So why do I struggle now?  I am struggling with an issue that has been with me since I was a young woman.  I think I have figured something about about myself that I never saw before.  I do not do well in captivity.  I am my brightest and most brilliant when I am not with someone.  As soon as I am with someone I quickly set about doing everything to make them happy and in the process I lose myself.  I lose the dancing queen who loves to dress in costumes.  I lose the ability to go onto the dance floor and dance till I am spent and then leave like a bat in the night…alone.  I lose the ability to just be spontaneous because I am afraid that the person I am with will not approve.   I pull away from my friends and I don’t trust other women so I keep away from them.  I try to protect what I see as mine.  I worry about losing them and in doing that I lose myself and eventually what attracted them to me is just gone.   I know where the roots are for this issue and they are from very long ago.  Love hunger is a terrible thing and when you finally feel you have it holding onto it becomes your main focus.  This is a major revelation for me.   I have caught glimpses of this issue before but never so clearly as I see it now.

I am stuck at the moment.  I need to do some serious thinking.  Do I resign myself to being without a partner for the rest of my life?  I think there must be a way to have balance.  I think I can have a lover or lovers who value me and who I could feel comfortable with as long as they never live with me or we don’t get too comfortable.  I have had self harm thoughts lately because I was punishing myself for the failure of my most recent relationship.   I cared for him deeply, so much that I was numbing myself to keep from feeling the pain it was causing me.  It is hard to care for someone who does not care as much about you.  So one day I did have to say enough of this bullshit and I stood up for myself knowing I would lose him.  I had to do it or die.  Though I am still puzzling over why I still feel like dying sometimes.  It is a process…I will just keep working at it.

I have had issues with depression for as long as I can remember.  I have learned over my life to hide it as much as I can but sometimes I just cannot.  I found this article that I felt explained how my life is much of the time.  People find it hard to believe that I suffer with depression or say things like “you have so much to be happy about.”  I do have so much to be grateful for and I am grateful but it does not stop me from having depression at times that is so deep that I have intrusive thoughts about ending my life.  It is not because of circumstances most of the time.  It is just something I cannot control.  I am even on medication for once in my life but I am having a deep valley experience right now.   I am working with my therapist and my doctor but something has to give.  I cannot go on like this.

https://drmargaretrutherford.com/the-ten-characteristics-of-perfectly-hidden-depression/

Maybe there is some kind of treatment or breakthrough that can help me.  I am willing to try anything.

I really hate Mondays.  I always have.  I have tried to love them.  I have done the fake it till you make it, dressed as best as I could, sang in the shower and smiled so I would feel better and none of it works.  I can remember a time when I loved Mondays.  I know why I feel this way.  I am not doing anything to change the world in the job I do.  I am grateful for my job and I love the place I work for the most part but I keep asking with every single thing I am tasked with “Why are we doing this?”.   I want to really help people.  I do not feel like I am doing that.  I spend 40 hours at a job that is sucking the life out of me.  It was not always that way.  At one time I was very busy on campus doing things for students and I even won an award for my work with students.  But one day a couple of years ago that all changed and I was oppressed and stopped from doing things because it was not something directly for my office.  I stopped caring after that.  Why do people feel they have to put your light out in order to shine?  Can’t we all shine together?  I want to feel that joy for my job again.  For now I am counting the days till I can retire.

I am having a hard time today.  I was having a hard time yesterday.  I cried myself to sleep last night and I woke up feeling like I just did not want to go another day.   I know it will get better.  It has to get better.

I have a story to tell.  I have wanted to write it for many years.  I think the reason it has not been written yet was the fact that a major chapter with some lessons that I needed to learn before I wrote it had to happen.  That chapter has just ended.  It is time to write my story.  I am going to be using this blog to tell the story of my life and to just open myself up.  If you have been a part of my life or are a part of my life you may see yourself here.  If you are one of my x’s there will be some stories about that time of my life.  I do not intend to focus on the bad behavior of other people though in some cases it is warranted and I will not hold back.  (Please read my about section if you have concerns about this https://rauncie.com/about/ )I intend to focus on my lessons and how I moved on each time I learned something.  Sometimes that moving on was not something I wanted to do.  Those times left me miserable and sad for months and sometimes years.  My most recent lesson was focused on learning to say no and have boundaries.  I needed to learn that if someone does not respect me then losing them is not a loss that will affect me negatively in the long term.   Most recently I was holding myself back, not doing what makes my heart sing and lost my joy for things that I loved like music, dancing and art.  The screaming voice inside of me had been sounding months before I went to the hospital at the end of May and ended up in intensive therapy.  I stopped drinking that weekend.  I began to focus on me but I was still trying to hold on to something that was wounding me.   I was living the 10 of swords.  I was close to the end of a cycle but I was trapped and surrounded by danger.  I could not move and I felt doom hanging over me all the time.  I constantly questioned myself and whether I was truly cared for.  That is a heavy load to carry.  I found this tarot card which is part of the Tarot of the Silicon Dawn which you can order on amazon.  I ordered the deck today to add to my collection.  It is very interesting and different than any deck I have and I feel I can use this with some of my alternative tarot clients.  Visit egypt.urnash.com to find out more about the artist Margaret Trauth if you like this card. 

So if you are interested in reading more about my journey I hope you will stick around.  I will be talking about tarot and magic in addition to my journey.

Thanks for reading and being a witness to my journey.

How quickly we lose memories.  I was looking for a picture for something this evening and realized a couple of things.  There were way more pictures of me alone than with him and I cannot remember his laugh.  I always loved his laugh.  How has this been lost already?  It was one good memory I wanted to keep.

Like a snake shedding its skin I am transforming.  I feel like I am at that point where the skin is covering my eyes and I am itchy and cranky.  I want this old shit off of me so I can shine again.  I sometimes still struggle with thoughts of why and what if?.  I had a really hard day yesterday and put my hand in that damn monkey box again.  I carried it for a few hours and then put it down when I went for the blue moon ritual.  At the ritual I came face to face with some past pain.  It reminded me that I would never want to go back to what I had because what I had was painful and had been for a long time.  I knew I had to apologize to this person for resentment I had carried.  It made me face something that I have experienced many times.  I get angry at the other woman and not the man I am in a relationship with when things happen.  At least that is my first instinct.  Once I step back and process it I realize that I have no reason to be angry at them.  It is the person who I am involved with, that has broken my trust that I should be focused on.  My question to myself is this “Why anger?”  This is a human being who probably does not have the capacity to be honest for whatever reason in situations like this.  It is my responsibility to decide if I want to be with someone like that.  I do not want to be with someone like that.  I require honesty even if it hurts me.  That is part of my transformation.

I cannot be involved with lost boys anymore.  Lost boys are my weakness and though I hope they will grow up and love me they will always fly away just like Peter Pan and I will just keep getting older.   Because I am like Wendy they always seem to carry a spot for me in their hearts and we tend to remain friends on some level because I feel the same…most of the time.   I am sick of being Wendy and I am going to strive to be  more like Tiger Lily in the story.   I want to be wild and free and not become attached so easily.   Even as I write this I realize that I am not just Wendy, I am Peter and Tiger Lily as well.  I am many faceted and when I fall into the role of Wendy I tend to stay there trying to keep things as they are by loving as much as I can and mothering a lost boy.  But there is another lost boy I am trying to heal.  It is the reflection that I see in my own mirror.  By loving them and trying to help them I am also trying to help myself.  It never works that way.  I only end up with new wounds and spiraling back into depression and self loathing.  But now I see it…now I can work on shedding that old way of living and stand up for what is right for me.

I read the book Tiger Lily and at the end Peter writes a letter to her that ends like this…

“I like to think that one day after I die, at least one small particle of me – of all the particles that will spread everywhere – will float all the way to Neverland, and be part of a flower or something like that, like that poet said, the one that your Tik Tok loved. I like to think that nothing’s final, and that everyone gets to be together even when it looks like they don’t, that it all works out even when all the evidence seems to say something else, that you and I are always young in the woods, and that I’ll see you sometime again, even if it’s not with any kind of eyes I know of or understand. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the way things go after all – that all things end happy. Even for you and Tik Tok. and for you and me.”   ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

I love the idea of never forgetting the good things and always staying young in the woods….that all things in some way end happy.   I will never forget the good and I am leaving behind the bad.  I am shedding my skin and being born anew.  It is painful right now but oh how glorious it will be when the old is gone and I am shining once again.