In Letters

I changed my Mudra today to a centering and strenghtening one. Why? Because the one I was previously doing worked so well it's almost spooky, and also because I have anxiety resurfacing strongly this week. Here are the things that I learned.

I think I can start to describe different types, different layers of anxiety. Like the sediment crusts of archeology, some textures and flavours of anxiety may stem from this or that period in my development, who knows.

This week's flavour is high schoolish. Like i'm not at my place, not good or pretty enough, about to be shot down by the cool girls and expulsed. There are actually two beautiful young women in my team who just came back from break. They cause my anxiety, specially my new boss. She is almost an archetype in her perfection in brains, expression and looks. I don't envy her, but I feel small and disintegrated, in contrast. I think that likewise she feels awkward with me. Easier for me to leave than stay at it.

On Saturday at 5am I was up because I couldn't sleep, that's not so unusual. I went everywhere in my home searching from my school documents, because somewhere along the previous 48 hours I had decided to apply to university in translation!!

In my red file I found old tax reports and outdated stuff from when I had an apartment on the Plateau and a cat. In my filing cabinet I found stacks of bills from old credit cards and phone lines. Where could my school documents be...

In two storage chests I found old drapes, books, art supplies, a lot of photos and negatives from my college stunt in photograpy, and some paintings I made. Still no school report to be found.

In the fireproof storage box that I was given at 13, where many eras of journalling. I sat and read through the first pages of each book. I visited a time in my twenties when I escaped to Scotland to rekindle my previous experience there and found a lover. My teens where I talked about boys and sleeping with them like I knew what I was doing. Trying to impress someone (me?) and hide behind a camp maturity.

I read beautiful poems too, of my time in uni. I found letters from papy zen, a man in France met on the internet, who used to correspond in long letters with me and help me out of my distress. I found notes on a forgotten therapy I held with a social worker for a while.

I found notes during my period of struggle to find myself in my later twenties, when there seemed to be no one, no job, no money, no prospect, no friends, no lover. I still regard that period as an marathon of suffering in an apparent bottomless pit. But I know how I got out of that, and I am equally pleased by that fact.

And always, at every epoch, repetitive expression of distress and anxiety and trying to figure out what was happening, analyzing, discovering, encouraging, confiding. It could be disturbing to find so much text like this if I wasn't sane throughout. Today I am here again but it is better.

I found my school reports in my portfolio from my stint in photography college. I filled out the application for a certificate in Translation and by 10am, the course of my life that I had just revisited completely was officially starting to change again.

I can feel the streams of that future flowing, this idea of becoming the translator was the key and I just took it and jumped. This realization came so fast, that's why I say it's spooky, but it's not really.

I have always been in letters, I have always written, I am the facto a translator. I am soothed by the thought of returning to school. I am studying avidly for my admission test of french and english. I am unafraid of losing my current job, and raising children, while my work will be spent in letters.

This is a humble path. I'm glad.

And now I'm off to the doctor's, to find out when i get the IVF which should be in the next 10 days if the ultrasound agrees. Then I will be pregnant... hard to believe it!

Amourx.