This Blog is Not Dead ....

This post will remain as a holding place and thank you note for following A Journey and on twitter - Zebdot :) I have enjoyed your notes, comments and emails over the past years. Please join me at my newest blog Empowering Solutions here as I spread my own wings and live my passion to help others who felt hopeless and powerless to find their hope by finding their power. Thank you for sharing this journey with me and I hope to see you there and perhaps back here one day. Susan

This Blog is not dead - not by a long shot. 

Although - it may seem that it is to the readers and followers who haven't seen me here in some time and that posts have been long in coming - when they do come.

The thing is....

Life changes - and as it does....we need to be ready to change with it or risk getting lost in it. 

This blog began in 2009 when I was still experiencing the early aftermath of being lost in the mental health system that told me my life "issues" were really an "illness". You can read more about that here. If you are interested to read more about the journey I experienced when I came off the drugs that I was told I would need "for life" you can read about how I realized it was the drugs that were causing the "illness" and how my journey to freedom from them started in 2007 here at Beyond Meds. And here you can read about how I found myself on an adventure of making sense of this paradigm of "illness" and how I discovered truths that "set me free".

2009 was a year where I was trying to find my voice - literally. After a lifetime of being told by others that I held no value of my own - only what they gave me - I literally had no "voice"; I was shaking in my boots. I had no sense of "self"; I had no opinions of my own. I was a true "chameleon".

I struggled with knowing who I was, what I wanted, what I liked or disliked. This Blog became part of my journey of self-discovery; along the way I separated myself from those who needed me to be "less" so they could be "more". I made the decision to exist. 

The calendar turned and 2010 rolled around. I had given much to doing the "hard work" of healing myself and my life from an early life of physical, emotional, psychological and sexual abuse that spanned my entire childhood. I understood the meaning of the poem by Patrick Overton and wrote my own version of it here. The photo on that page tells the story well; I knew I could not NOT move forward - yet that was the only option I had at the time; I could live or die trying.

I was willing to "go through" the pain and struggle in order to "get out of it" in order to get to my "best life". I also realized that there was no one to "blame"and as much as I wanted "justice" I had remind myself that while I was not responsible for what others did to me - I am solely responsible for what I do with what they did to me .  Here I also wrote a blog post about how I learned to find my own courage to do this. I learned a lot about Compassion and learning to let go of the need for justice that I would never get. 

I shared my story publicly for the first time in April of 2010 when Michele Rosenthal of Heal My PTSD invited me to do a radio interview. This in turn led to my own Blog Talk Radio series with Heal My PTSD and then in 2011 my own Blog Talk Radio channel - Empowering Solutions and a Facebook page here. 

The year 2012 continued to be part of this amazing journey. My private Facebook posts had become a community page; people who were in pain and struggling continued to reach out to me as I continued to post all the while wondering just what it was that I had that they found themselves drawn to. And what I kept hearing over and over was "thank you. I have never heard this before", "Your post today hit home with me".

And I realized that it was true - this journey is NOT about "fixing" something that is "broken" but about LEARNING how to do life differently; how to "be" and be separate from those who tell us we don't exist or exist only to serve their purposes, what they give us "permission" for.

 As 2012 came to a close I realized that a lot of what I had written in the past 4 years was about the story we tell ourselves and how in changing the story - we could change our lives.  My posting schedule began to wax and wane. 2012 closed with less than 40 posts - all year and 2013 has left me wondering: "What is it that I am supposed to be doing?". 

So here we are. 

2013 is slowly coming to a close and I do not feel that this is the "end" - but rather the beginning of a new adventure. An adventure that I'd like to invite you to join me on as we continue to explore the bigger world beyond our pain and struggle, finding our hope for a better future for ourselves and our families by finding that, like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ, we had the power all along:

Dorothy: Oh, will you help me? Can you help me?
Glinda, the Good Witch: You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.
Dorothy: I have?
Scarecrow: Then why didn’t you tell her before?
Glinda, the Good Witch: Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.

I hope you'll join me here at the Facebook Community page. 

2014 is going to be a very good year - for all of us. :)

Namaste, bells, whistles and a little bit of Glinda's glitter.....:)

Susan

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!™