Here I am

Many of you know what happened. And some perhaps not. 

I have just opened my website up for the first time after almost three years. Tears are rolling down my cheeks as I read my blog entries from 2020. How things changed. 

I like reading who I was then, seeing who I was then. I look younger for sure (note to self – must update pictures to reflect my 40 year old self – grey hairs, wrinkles and all!)

There was an innocence to my words then, to my worldview.

Even though the tears keep rolling, this isn’t sadness I am feeling. 

It is curiosity and a sense of bittersweetness. 

And awe. 

I read each of the posts from early 2020. I hover on the photos remembering that time…

I read the post I wrote called ‘foreboding joy’ about that feeling where you stare at your kid/dog/lover asleep in bed and you feel so overwhelmed with love for them that you could burst and then the next thought is “oh shit, what if something bad happens to them.

It feels like some kind of premonition. I don’t even recall having written it. 

How things then changed in that summer of 2020.

My last post was in August that year. I remember sitting in my sister’s old four poster bed at my parents farm in the UK and writing the one about Stuart and I and our Relationship Check In’s.

My jaw drops and I laugh reading one of the relationship appreciation examples being: “I appreciate how well you packed one hold bag for our entire family.”

Thank god I did pack that hold bag so damn well! Little did I know that 22kg bag contained everything that our family of four would have for over the next 5 months until we had a box of clothes sent over. 

I posted that before shit got really really hard. Before mine and Stuart’s marriage was really put to the test. 

I posted that 8 days before Mum’s diagnosis. 12 days before Dad’s diagnosis. 

And before I fell almost entirely off the radar for 3 years.

I sit here now, listening to Beautiful Chorus (Faith’s Hymn) and look at the gold tray to the right of my laptop – it has a picture of Mum, semi-precious stones encircling a candle burning, shells, rocks, two small fircones. Her purple and gold silk scarf from India is draped over the corner of my desk. I run my fingers over it. I feel peace. 

I have found a way to honour my Mum everyday and to keep my connection with her strong. 

These years have truly taken me to my edges and yet I am here. Deeper, wiser, different. 

I smile at the images of myself on my website – the happy, shiny version. Pre-kids. Pre-really meeting my shadow. Pre-sitting with deep pain. I like that version. It seems playful. And yet it feels two dimensional.

I like this version of me more. It is so much more real. Katie 2.0 as my husband now calls me. 

I think of all of the personal development tools I obsessed over for years, the training after training I attended, all the courses I facilitated, those deep transformational processes. I think of how I rejected almost all of these tools when life turned upside down. Almost all, but not quite. 

I still practiced daily meditation, journaling, and my daily check ins.

That period of time wasn’t about me ‘living my best life’, caring for my Mum became my number one priority, sometimes even at the cost of our own little family of four. I remember telling Stuart I have folded away my dreams, perhaps quietly knowing at some point I would shift my focus back to them. 

Despite my inability to comprehend how I could possibly ‘create a life I love’ while caring for my mother who had been given months to live with Motor Neurone Disease, my father with dementia, two kids under 2, having lost our home in Spain, and having to unexpectedly relocate entirely with only our 22kg hold bag in the middle of the pandemic and never even going ‘home’ to close that chapter of our lives… somehow I was able to be in the shit of it all and at the same time have moments of deep gratitude and wonder during those long 22 months. More on that soon.

Life is messy. 

I am called to share my experience. 

I am called to support people reconnect with themselves, their essence, their true nature. Shadows and all.

I am called to sit with people in their pain, ​​”without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it” (quoted from the incredible poem “The Invitation” by Oriah Mountain Dreamer). 

Rather than wait ‘until I have all my shit together’, I thought I may as well start here – right from where I left off. Just as I am. 

Hello again.