There are two things I know for sure in this world: God exists and so does the devil.  How am I so sure of this you ask?  Well, I have had experiences with some very powerful angels and some experiences with some not very nice demons.  Both changed me.  And I’d take the demonic a million times over because that’s how I got to experience the presence of a very powerful angel.  I’ve actually had three angel encounters, but two of them left me with a feeling I can’t even describe and it stayed with me for days.  The only thing I can tell you is that there is nothing, no drug, no nothing on this planet that can compete with that feeling and I have to think if Heaven is even a smidgeon of what I felt well then, Heaven must be HEAVEN.  Like I said there are no words to describe, that feeling.  None.

I feel privileged, lucky, and sometimes fated to have felt these powerful beings and to have been the witness to a miracle in one of those instances.  I got to see prayer work in real time and I was the only one, in a large room full of people, who knew that an actual angel came as a response to a prayer.  I say fated because I am one of those wandering souls.  I am always wandering.  I am intellectual, spiritual, creative, and curious and my heart always wanders, but as a result of my experiences I always take one person with me: Jesus.  I have no doubt in His power.  These experiences have provided an anchor in my life.  No matter how far I wander I will always have Him with me.  I can’t not, actually.  I still have experiences of the negative kind and I have to call on His name often and He always answers with an Angel. Every single time.

I guess I needed this grounding, this protection, this boundary for I have quite a wild and wandering heart even if my life reflects the opposite.  I have always said I am quite the conundrum.  I live my life conservatively, but I am quite liberal in thought and creed. I honestly don’t know what would have happened to me without these experiences, without this knowledge and experience of Jesus really being the name above all names, the power above all powers.  Yes, I could have done without the negative, the demonic, the oppression and depression and aggression and addiction, but I wouldn’t have the Angel and trust me that one Angel made all of the difference.  That one Angel encounter, the first one, made everything I have ever been through worth it.  They say you are changed through grace, but not in the way you might think.  I am currently walking down my own yellow brick road and jotting some things down as I walk my own temple path.  If you’d like to follow along, keep coming back.

It never fails that every time I get sober, around year two or three, my life starts getting interesting.  I start knowing things, hearing things, seeing things… to be blunt, I start having what one might call paranormal experiences.

I’m clair-everything just not all the time.  More like sporadically.  I remember the first time I had a clairvoyant experience.  I was driving down the road and I had a flash of some pictures in my mind.  The pictures were of a row of yellow flowers in front of an iron fence with brick along the bottom and a golden retriever was walking by.  I drove on down the road for a bit, turned right onto a street and about half way down was the exact fence, flowers, and golden retriever I had seen in my mind.  I was like “wow”, “What was that?”.

Every time I get sober, these things begin to happen and sometimes I lean into them and sometimes I do not.  I recall doing a walk through in a friend’s new house and telling her I keep hearing kids playing.  I told her, “I think you’re going to have a lot of kids in this house.”  This was a LONG time ago and my friend got really mad at me and stopped taking to me.  Much later, I found out the reason she got mad was because she and her husband had been secretly trying to get pregnant and she thought I maybe knew or something.  Well, she did end up getting pregnant and having twins in that house!

I’ve also had experiences that I cannot explain.  Like a specific spirit (helpful one) that would always interrupt me when I was in a mental tail spin.  He would always do something crazy to interrupt my train of thought  and completely derail it.  One day I was in my bathroom and my neti pot was on my counter, against the wall and upside down with the top sitting on top.  Well, that top shot across the bathroom with such force that it bounced back across to the wall it came from and shot back across and fell on the floor.  And you know what?  I had zero recollection of what I was thinking about before this happened.  I should also mention this spirit was always kind enough to flash the jester poker card non-stop in the television in my mind so I knew it was him.  Another time he tossed my keys up in the air and had them land in front of me (they were deep inside my purse at the time) and again, I had no recollection of what I was worried about prior to the key throwing.  I actually miss having him around.  When things started happening again, (I have two years and two months) I hoped he would come back, but I have been told I don’t need him anymore and it is true.  I pre-empt my own thoughts now.  I literally cannot go down any rabbit holes, get too down on myself, my circumstances, or life.  I guess he did his job.  And trust me other things are taking his place.  My life is not boring right now.  I have multiple experiences a week, including what I perceive to be a ghost dog that walks across my bed some mornings!

This is my life, well, my paranormal life. And I figure it is time to seriously explore this part of me that just keeps popping back up and waving every time I am sober. Plus I have to admit that I enjoy it too.  The things that spook others don’t spook me at all, at least not any more.

I don’t know why I always forget this, but intentions are my magic.  They are my way of manifesting or creating something new.  I have the hardest time remembering this, but if I look back on my life, the times where I was very intentional and using intentions in a very purposeful way - these are the times worth remembering.  These are the times where things fell into place, good connections were made, and life felt like it was happening for me, instead of against me.

This year has been beyond tough on me.  I am at the end of my rope so to speak mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.  I’m more tired than I have ever been.  I feel like I operate on 3% battery all of the time.  I need some things to change, but those things cannot really change until some other things are taken care of and those things will not be taken care of until sometime next year and even then it will be a stretch for me to do what I feel like I must do to make things better for myself.  Did I mention I also seemingly live my life in a catch 22 all of the time?

Since I know I need change, but am not able to create that change at this moment, it dawned on me that my magic has always come from my intentions.  And so I wrote out a set of intentions for God and the Universe to work on, a set that God and the Universe can work on, a set that leaves the details up to the Creator of the Universe instead of me.


Intention 1 - Find My Purpose

Intention 2 - Find My Passion

Intention 3 - Find My Person


I feel like if I am going to keep existing, I need a reason to at this point and these three things are the missing ingredients in a life well lived and well loved.  Every night before I go to sleep I say these intentions aloud and every morning when I get up I say these intentions aloud.  I wrap these intentions around me.  And what has started occurring is 1000% what was never on my bingo card.  I’m reawakening. Synchronicities are everywhere around me.  1111 and 555 are all I see all day every day.  I’m waking up, but this time around I am not scared of it, quite the contrary, it feels like this is how it is supposed to be.  I want to rush forward, but I am told to be patient, and to continue walking down the yellow brick road.  There are things I need to learn and people I need to meet before the real change comes my way.

I am in a transition, an unfolding, a reawakening and this is only after the first month of determining my intentions and purposefully integrating them into my affirmations, prayers, and thought life.  I don’t know what else is in store, but I am definitely sticking with the yellow brick road this time.  I want to know where it leads and who I become in the process.

What do I want to write about?  I don’t know.  I got nada in my head.  Nada.  I got nada in my life right now too.  Nada.  I feel like I am slowly going insane with all of the nada happening right now.  There is too much nada, but this is how it has to be right now.

The weather is so hot and humid and thick and gross and I have been staying indoors.  Interesting thing is I’ve only had one migraine this summer and one vertigo attack this summer.  I am assuming it is due to the fact that I am staying inside and losing my mind.  My outdoors time rejuvenates my mind and my soul.  It also provides social time and has always been a way for me to make friends.

I am definitely struggling this summer.  Work is absolutely insane right now and I don’t make enough money to be putting up with this shit. It is partly par for the course in higher education.  Summer is always the time of year everyone jumps ship so to speak.  Throw in a restructuring and a lay off and well you have insanity.  I have had to basically recruit, interview, and hire for the entire Athletics department, a quarter of faculty across campus, and many staff for departments that are rebuilding, plus I have all those other day to day things I do that are just not getting done.  Good news is by middle of August everything should calm down.  Bad news is I have to continue this sprint until middle of August.

I really need my nature time, my social time, my go on a little trip time, but I don’t have any of that right now.  I am having to keep in mind that in 6 - 8 months I will be ready to blow this popsicle stand and hopefully enjoy a new little adventure both in career and in everything else.  I’m in the home stretch!  I keep screaming at myself.  The wait is going to be worth it I keep telling myself.  I mean I must have some good Karma coming my way, right?.

The movies lie don’t they?  So do books.  You always see characters hit the home stretch and BAM! Second Wind!  Renewed Strength!  Renewed Determination!  Of course you hear runners say this too and I was never that kind of runner either.  Maybe its just not in my blood to fight so hard.  Maybe I am more of a float on down the river and discover what I discover kind of person.  Nevertheless, I am staying the course and losing my mind in the process.

I’m really hoping for an early winter this year.  Or maybe I should say an early fall.  Here in the mid-south, it will be ugly, humid, and hot until middle of October.  I am really hoping that Old Man Winter pisses everyone else off and comes in early.  I need him!  I need to be back out on a trail, a path, a waterway…. And to do that I need the frying pan turned down a bit.

I don’t know.  This is probably why I have never really tackled all of my debt because to do so means this right here: doing nothing but work.  I need to change my scenery often.  I need to explore a city, a park, go see a show, go be a show…I need to live life and I will do so again… in 6 - 8 months.

​Well, when I post this publicly, it will be my other birthday, some call it the non-belly-button birthday.  Mine used to be in August, but now it is June 10th.  Everything I am going through right now is because I lost my August date.  However, had I not lost my August date,  I wouldn’t have the peace I have around my own sobriety.  I guess I was one of those people who needed to relapse, which is weird to say since it is the one thing you are not supposed to do, but I needed it.  I bare knuckled it for 10 years and now I understand why it was so hard for me - I wasn’t done yet.  I hadn’t really proven it to myself.  I’m a Taurus with an Aries moon to say I am stubborn is an understatement.  I had to really prove to myself why I just can’t with alcohol or any other mood altering substance and I finally allowed myself to do just that.

It is weird to be in such a good place mentally and emotionally and such a bad place personally and financially.  On the one hand life is so much easier and on the other life is so much harder.  I am working on tackling the spending spree I went on for almost four years and wouldn’t you know that right as I was starting to buckle at the knee something happened!  By the end of this year I will have over 75% of the debt paid off.  That’s insane.  Especially if you consider my current salary.  I literally do nothing outside of work.  Thank God for NWSL on ION and LPGA!  But the light is starting to shine and the end of the tunnel is coming into view just when I needed it to!  These are the kinds of things they talk about in the rooms.  You keep doing you and keeping your side of the street clean and God will keep being God and things will start happening for your continued growth and development.

My timeline and God’s timeline are apparently about a year apart, but I am getting excited about my next adventure.  It is still a little ways off because I am getting to 80% debt paid prior to considering a move, but I am coming into that home stretch over the next 6 - 10 months.  Besides the last 20% will be a breeze.  I can’t believe what I’ve done thus far!

I also think I am adulting late in life.  I’m adulting in my 40’s.  I’m just thinking about everything very differently.  I can’t really explain it, I just have different priorities and I am wholly based in reality at this juncture. It’s not a bad thing.  I’m evolving a lot right now.  I am a healthier version with straight up boundaries and I am at peace with things I have never been at peace with before.  I don’t know what is coming, I don’t know what my next move will entail, but I am excited to learn and grow some more and I am excited for what I can’t see coming for the first time in a long time.  One thing I have learned this past year is that sometimes surprises are really good!