The hidden corners of our mind.
I'm going easy on myself these days, nourishing mind, body, and soul. Dealing with my second bladder infection in just weeks, this latest one left me in such pain, I had no choice but to slow down - get into bed, take antibiotics, and allow proper healing. It doesn't surprise me that my health is manifesting issues in that area, where we tend to store grief, shame, and fear.
The past five weeks have been absolute cosmic fuckery.
I lost two of my best friends within days of each other. Two people who meant everything at different points, now gone. I can't believe I'm putting those words down, but it's true.
Lara battled cancer for years, and I grieved her long before her death. She defined who I was in my twenties - my dance partner, the closest human I've ever had. A true angel - nothing and no one compares.
Caryn, on the other hand, was my soul friend in a new city at the turn of the century. We bonded instantly, our friendship spanning our marriages, pregnancies, babies, and every other high and low life threw our way. She held my hand in the ICU, and the thought was she's the one I'd want by my side, the friend to hold me as I slipped away. Our relationship was complicated by her mental health struggles, drug addictions for self-soothing, mood swings that left me confused, erratic decisions I couldn't understand.
Our friendship ended in 2014, harder for me than any romantic breakup. It took years to get over losing that bond, so much so that I can say I'm still not fully over it even now. I grieved Caryn a decade before she actually chose to leave this earth. She tried reconciling in 2018, but I couldn't - I don't regret honouring my boundaries, even though I missed our friendship immensely. I followed her life on social media, but we know that's never the full picture. I only found out about her passing when I saw she'd already been gone for 7 days.
Her death hit me so damn hard, left me reeling in shock. But still, I didn't allow myself space to truly grieve her and Lara.
It's what I do as an ultra-independent - aware of the pain, but carrying it until it finally brings me to my knees before sitting with it, feeling it, letting it go.
And as this latest cosmic fuckery would have it, the emotions from losing Caryn sparked a deep retrospective on my life when we were besties, spanning those 12 friendship years. Letting myself sit in that space, feeling it all while this bladder infection had me writhing, I felt the other pain too - the one I'd blocked out for so long, shoved away with another story so I wouldn't have to feel or think about it. But it came up anyway, and I found myself crying in the dark, because feeling their loss reminded me to love myself too, to let some things go. Rummaging those cobwebbed corners of my mind, I pulled out something that defined me for 12 years - the exact span of my friendship with Caryn, but a different story entirely. Back to when I wasn't so gentle, when I was groomed and sexually abused in a workplace where I should have felt safe. My safety torn, then left alone trying to understand I wasn't to blame. Manipulated by someone with power over my livelihood, job, salary, status. In those dark moments, I felt the weight of how much I've carried this pain, this experience, let it stifle my growth, belief in myself, understanding of consent. I cried for how I tried protecting myself after, avoiding romance and fearing being seen as attractive because I was so afraid. I wept realizing that for over a decade, even without fully acknowledging it, I've stifled myself, made myself smaller, stopped standing in my true potential - all out of fear that being seen means I might be abused again.
I'm going easy on myself with these memories now, gently releasing them from where they're stored in my body. A slow process, a slow uncovering of everything I felt during that time. I'm grieving my two best friends, but also the version of myself before, and the version I became to protect myself after.
I'll be writing more about what happened 12 years ago in these posts, but slowly and gently, allowing myself space and time to articulate and truly understand what happened back then - underneath the facade of what I thought it was, to the real raw truth of what happened and how it has shaped me this past decade.
The good news is mercury retrograde is over and so is the eclipse season. Now is the time to embrace what we have been shown and integrate this into the new versions of ourselves.
With love always,
Gail x