It has been so busy that I forgot about my blog and my sober birthday.  Summer in my current position is always super busy and hectic.  The president is always making a lot of moves meaning some people are coming in and others are leaving.  On top of his moves we also have the regular higher education shuffle that happens in the Spring/Summer.  Everyone makes their moves while school is out.  This means I am very busy and what should be a catch up time or a time to work on some much needed projects turns into a hectic race to the start of the Fall semester.  We also have Fridays off in the summer, which I do love, but it makes the four days left a master sprint and I feel like a nurse getting off from a 4-10 or a 3-12.  I am exhausted and I just want to chill.

It’s also really hot here in the mid south.  I am sensitive to heat and it is just brutal outside.  I have probably done my last hike until October.  I will still try to do some walking like at 6 or 7 AM, but most of my outdoor life is reserved for patios from June thru September.  I would really like to live somewhere that allows for year round walking and hiking.  But, since I don’t - I ballet instead.

It’s also been difficult at work lately.  There are a lot of changes happening and I have been working directly with the President and trying to get a feel for how to work with someone that never shows his cards.  Not ever.  Unless he blows a fuse, and that is rare.  I really feel for his cabinet.  I don’t think I could work like that.  I need to know if I am near the mark, hitting the mark or out in left field.  I also have some people that just don’t like to listen to anything I have to say and even some who think I don’t have a right to speak.  I work in human resources, but HR at this school does not have the same authority that HR has at other schools.  It’s annoying and belittling sometimes and that is how I feel after finishing this week.  I am over talent acquisition and I have two female managers who don’t want me to be involved in their hiring process, but I have to be and they are resentful of this fact and treating me as such.  They are really giving “rude ass bitch” vibes and that does make me question both of their abilities to be effective people managers.  And I am not afraid to speak to their VP either.  I would just rather not have to have the conversation.  I would rather work somewhere where following policy and procedure is more of the norm.  And I have been trying to leave, it just hasn’t worked out yet.

I had a carrot dangled in front of me and that was really disappointing.  It was a salary above what I am shooting for and came with flexible hours. In this position, I would be over recruiting, onboarding, off boarding and people engagement. The interview went great, but I did not make the second round.  Interviews have been very hard to come by.  I had some luck at the beginning of my search and had another amazing opportunity, but it was grant funded and it scared me to relocate for a position that was grant funded so I declined.  After that it was months before I got two more interviews, one being the carrot.  It’s starting to feel like I am trapped and I am sure other people are feeling this way too.  The job market is tough right now and there is nothing in my current city except manufacturing opportunities.

And yes, my sober birthday came and went and I didn’t even think about it.  I don’t do the meetings anymore.  It has worked much better for me this time around to not do meetings.  I think I just needed to actually be done. And I am.  Having said that, I am very much an energy person and I don’t like to be around people who have the energy of needing to have a substance.  This time around in sobriety I am much more picky about who I spend time with.  Anyone in my life is either sober for their own reasons or drinks very little - like a drink and nothing else.  It has to do with the energy.  And I am happy living life this way.

I guess my goal for this summer, is to get through this summer and I am still holding out hope that I will find and land a new opportunity before faculty and students return in August.  What about you?  Do you have any summer goals this year?  And how do you handle the busy season in your respective field?

I am a May Baby.  My birthday is always around Mother’s Day and quite often the same weekend.  Perhaps that is why I am not big on celebrating it.  There’s something bigger happening.  When I do celebrate, it is usually later in the month when people are actually available.

This year’s birthday is hitting a little harder this year.  It’s been a tough year with a lot of ups and downs and bad surprises so I am a little tired.  I am also going through a lot of bad surprises and sharp turns at work, which adds to the stress of it all.  Like much of my life, I am stuck between a rock and a hard place and it complicates things.  I have been looking for a new opportunity for what feels like forever with not much luck.  It has me wondering if I need to change what I am searching for.

This afternoon I used a deck of oracle cards I have and asked a simple question: What should I manifest (or focus on) right now?  I pulled the following cards:

Free Your Creativity
Embrace Your Inner Guidance
Let Go
Pivot - answer

I have been trying to do more of what I like.  I find I often trap myself in a whole bunch of “shoulds” to achieve ends I don’t end up achieving so why not just do what I want instead?  I have a lot of stressors right now (stubborn weight, health of myself and a family member, a new new boss I don’t trust, budget cuts, my own financial crisis)  And I haven’t been able to make headway on any of my goals for this year.  I do, indeed need to Pivot and probably in more areas and in more ways than I am currently thinking.  The picture on the card has a woman who appears to be dancing or frolicking on a mountain road.  All of the cards together invoke a sense of play so maybe I need to play a little more in life and play a little more with life and see where all the play takes me.

Have I mentioned that in the past I did a little rock climbing?  Back when I was much lighter and in much better shape.  A friend in LA got me into it.  Between my fear of heights and my lack of any grip at all - it was a challenge I was willing to take on and I loved it.  I don’t know - the whole rock in a hard place got me thinking of my rock climbing days and that perhaps there is an answer there.  I went on a hike yesterday and it was one of those looks super easy, but as you venture down the trail you realize there is quite a bit of delicate foot placement.  I actually had someone apologize for having so much trouble and wished she could effortlessly flow over all of the tricky spots like I did.  I brought up my rock climbing days and boulder field days and explained that in rock climbing you are always surveying the terrain to find the next spot that a toe, heel, thumb, or finger can go and I do the same on the trail - it just comes naturally to me.  I explained it is just a different way of seeing the terrain that comes with trail experience and that she had nothing to apologize for.

I have always said I wanted to take who I am on the trail and make it who I am in everyday life and maybe that ’s the pivot.  It sounds crazy, but I’ve never connected that particular dot until right now.

Daylight is back!  But it came with unseasonably warm temperatures and I don’t know how I feel about it.  I’m conflicted, which is my usual state of affairs.  Summer and Winter are very different seasons with very different activities for me.  And I am, I guess, grieving the sudden loss of some of my winter activities.

I love summer.  I really do.  I need the sunlight and I love the sunlight.  I am a sunlight fein.  Unfortunately, I am also a melanoma survivor which means I have to be careful in the sunlight.  I have to wear hats, use UV Shampoo and Conditioner, wear SPF skin tints and lip balms, and put SPF on every square inch of my body that might get some sunlight.  I also have a predisposition to easily overheating which can cause migraines and episodes of vertigo.  So you see even though I love the sunlight and need the sunlight, I actually stay indoors more in the warm summer sunshine months.  If I do hike, play golf, or go for walks it is usually early in the mornings.  I tend to shift to doing more dance and barre and pilates since they are indoor activities.  My outside time is usually sitting on a patio in the shade or walking around town with friends in a cute dress.

Winter is my true outdoor time.  I will hike, climb, and explore anything and everything when it is cold outside.  I still have to wear SPF, but not as much of me is exposed.  I can go much longer and farther since overheating is not a concern.  I just throw on some gear and go.  Winter has always been my favorite time of the year until I started getting Seasonal Affective Disorder.  I had a little bit of it this year, but I made a concerted effort to mentally and emotionally enjoy winter since it is my time to explore the outdoors.  I have always wanted to live in the pacific northwest - it has always been a dream destination of mine.  I just don’t know if I would survive now, but I am determined to take back my love of winter.

I have always thought we have the time change backwards.  Don’t we need less light in the summer time to help cool off the insanely hot temperatures and more light in the winter to help us survive the crazy cold temperatures and overcast skies?  I just think it makes more sense to flip the whole daylight savings thing.

Daylight savings and Spring is about new - new blooms, new life, new everything.  And I am hoping this spring brings some much needed new in my life.  Specifically, a new opportunity, some new friends, and while I am not looking for a man,  I would’t be bent out of shape if one showed up, probably more surprised and caught off guard than anything. I honestly wouldn’t know what to do with one.   I am just more focused on fixing my finances, and fixing my body at the moment.  It seems I am part squirrel and put on weight every winter and get it all back off by every fall.  I need to figure out how to not be a marshmallow in the summer months.  One could also deduce, that my putting on weight as soon as I start to look like a snack could also be a form of self protection.  It is true I feel safer if I think I ‘m not attractive and less safe if I am looking like a snack.  But this is a story for another day.

I hope everyone is enjoying the new light, the new blooms and all the new that finds each one of you!

I had a very negative attachment that I had to deal with for a few months.  It was insane, had many layers, and involved Zak Bagans.  I also had a side attachment during this time that also involved Zak Bagans.  Is it crazy that I am still curious about going to his museum (if I’m ever in it’s vicinity, of course).  Bottom line is I think people can be manipulated on mental and emotional levels far easier and far more frequently than I ever realized by demonic forces.  It kind of scares me to be honest. I am very in tune with my own energy and the energy of others.  People who are not tuned in (which is a lot of people) may not ever even realize they are being manipulated.

One of the good things that came out of this experience is I learned how to better protect myself.  I use a couple of different visualizations on a daily basis that involves me putting myself and my surroundings in a golden box and surrounding that fortified steel box with purple light on the outside and white and gold light on the inside.  I have also started working with St. Michael, the Archangel on a frequent basis to assist in my protection. 

I have been told by several seers that I have something with me that has been with me since birth.  I don’t know for sure, but it would make sense and it would also make my life make sense.  I died when I was one years old and just always thought that something came back with me, and there is a story that backs that up, but I don’t really want to get into that right now.

While the spiritual stuff has calmed down, life, itself has ramped up.  Between the snow and ice storms, some medical procedures, and my car acting a fool, I have had to put out a lot of cash.  It seems like every time I start to make progress on my financial goals, something happens to just wipe me back out to where I began.  I am working on not taking any of it personally.  Life is life and it will throw you curve balls, fast balls, and foul balls, and you just have to deal with it.  I am trying to be in the mental state of what can I learn and what can I do to prepare for the next round instead of taking it personally and getting emotional about it.

This is something else that I feel has come out of the negative attachment situation.  I feel much more clear headed than I have possibly ever felt.  I am very clear on my goals, and I feel I am very rooted in reality, which has not always been the case with me.  I can see clearly and I didn’t understand how unclear my “vision” has been until I could really “see”.  It reminds me of when I was younger.  In elementary school I had to do these hearing and vision tests every year at school and in one of those tests they found that I could not see shit. Everyone was dumbfounded and asked me why I didn’t say anything.  Well, if you’ve never really been able to see, you wouldn’t know unless someone fixed your sight, right?  I just thought it was really cool that other kids could see the chalkboard, much less what was on it.  I didn’t know.  I didn’t have a reference point.  But once I put on contacts for the first time, my mind was blown.  I could see the chalkboard, I could see down the hall at school, I could see the soccer ball - my whole world changed for the better.

And I feel like this right now.  Whatever that negative attachment was, whatever it was doing, whether it was the same one from the physical attacks I endured about 15 years ago or whether it was another entity sent to plague me - it is like the song says, “The enemy did everything that he could do, Oh, but look what You’ve done”.  I am more clear than ever, more stable than ever, and more capable than ever.  And even more committed than ever to following my own yellow brick road...

I talked last month about being at peace in the midst of the storms and the unknowns life was throwing at me.  And I still have a lot of that peace, but I am finding that as changes come closer the more I lose my peace because my mind starts to swirl creating narratives that aren’t even real.  Maybe they once were, but they are not right now!  So why worry and stress myself out?

These days I find myself bouncing back and forth between peace and too stressed out to think, pray, or care about anything.  I find myself worrying about what’s going to happen when either I or my best friend gets a new job and departs.  I don’t want to be alone again without any friends to enjoy my weekends with.  The truth is myself and my bestie are looking for new jobs and both of us will depart on a new adventure sometime this year.  Yes, it would be fantastic if we both landed jobs in the same area, but I am not sure that we will.  She has her sights set on a very specific and expensive area and she has the means and some other characters to assist on her journey, whereas, I do not.  The entire time I have lived in Memphis I have done nothing but say goodbye to friends who move here and then depart a few years later (often the first chance they get). No one wants to stay.  I mean Memphis is even more transient than Los Angeles was!  In reality, I don’t want to stay either, but my story is more complicated.

This is something else that worries me.  Part of me thinks I should stay here and help my mom and the other part of me says if the right opportunity comes, I need to take it and make it work, wherever it is, because getting solid on my feet is the best thing I can do for myself and my family even if it means leaving an elderly parent.  The job market here is not good either.  There simply isn’t much here.

I also struggle with seasonal affective disorder.  This is a new thing.  I have never had it before in my life.  The last few years have been torture when it comes to winter with the worst being the year before last - I got so depressed I was suicidal and thank God we had an early spring that year and I mean I did a 180 as soon the days started getting longer and warmer.  Whew!  That was horrific. Last year and this year have not been as bad, more mild symptoms, I guess I can say, but still I have symptoms and I’d rather not.

I just don’t know.  It seems like the closer the changes come, the more anxious I become and the peace I have been enjoying is flying out the window.  Any performer, dancer, athlete, speaker… they all know that sometimes you just have to shut your mind off and go, get moving, do the thing and then your mind catches up and calms down.  But in this situation there is no get up and go so I have to work hard to just shut down the thoughts that cause me stress, turn the channel in my brain so to speak. I guess I have to let go a little more…