Hi everybody. How are you doing? You people have been quiet this week. Too busy reading Devil’s Advocate instead of me, eh? That’s okay. I forgive you for that.

There are times in your life when you don’t want to be alone for even a second. You’re kind of afraid of yourself, afraid of what you might think about if you stand still even for a second. I had a mood like that once that was inspired by a break-up a while back, a particular kind of break-up that had me confused, betrayed, upset, and angry like you wouldn’t believe. I kept busy as long as my eyes were open. You hope to just ignore it – everything happening to you, and you think that maybe if you just erase it from your mind, you’ll end up over the whole thing without ever having to look at it directly. It doesn’t work that way, and we all know it, but for survival purposes, you do whatever the fuck you can to avoid serious pain, and heartache and anger like that, well – that’s a quite a hefty dosage of pain.

I don’t feel like being around people for the most part these days. I just want to be alone all the time. Work is hard – very people-oriented job, which is normally great, but I haven’t been in the mood to be around anyone. I’m in this phase where I don’t feel remotely okay unless I’m hiding inside my apartment with the windows shut and the door locked. In fact, any human-interaction whatsoever is taxing. Sometimes, you just need silence because everything truly feels wrong. And I sit around with nothing but me and my memories. Let’s just hope my apartment serves more as a chrysalis than a coffin, but right now, a coffin would suffice.

I didn’t talk much about this before, but I’ve recently read Silvia Brown’s book Life on the Other Side. I really believed a lot of what I read, and most of whatever I didn’t fully accept I’m still willing to think about and consider as truth. I really felt comforted by what I read, and it just seemed to make perfect sense. Sure, it can be a little discomforting to read some definitive answer to questions that feel meant to be little more than a mystery, but still, it was all so beautiful. However, there was an element to it that I really loved most, and that was how we truly are in control, and our growth, maturity, and development lies in our own decisions. I just hadn’t realized how far our free will extended – that it reaches into the afterlife and then some. I realized that fate doesn’t play as strong of a role as I thought. Sometimes we experience things and meet people, and it feels right. Sometimes someone wonderful can come into your life and then go right back out, and it doesn’t feel like a waste of time, and the relationship doesn’t feel as though it was in vain. It feels absolutely significant, even when it’s totally over, and you feel so unbelievably grateful to have experienced it – to have experienced that person. And according to Silvia Brown, it wasn’t just in the stars, it wasn’t just some force that is intangible and astrological, it was a decision we had made ourselves before we were born. It was a decision we had made OURSELVES in Heaven before we came to this earth again, and the reason it feels so RIGHT is because we had intended it to happen – our souls had written each other into our paths, and we were waiting for that experience to take us to a new level of love and understanding. It feels right because two souls had made a deal to come together one day and spend time together for one reason or another, and for that, you know that it was good. Everything in our lives is part of a story we wrote for ourselves all with a specific goal in mind – a major life lesson we are trying to tackle so we can understand truth and happiness. It’s beautiful. Our lives have a purpose and WE choose it! What unbelievable inspiration!

This doesn’t really sound much like me, huh? I don’t often write about this topic even though I absolutely love and believe in anything to do with the supernatural, afterlife, psychics/mediums, ghosts, and what have you. It sounds very religious, but it actually has nothing to do with organized religion. In fact, Silvia Brown’s perspective isn’t even that of one religion. It’s just about humanity. If this topic is remotely interesting, please pick up that book and give it a try. There will be some stuff that’s hard to deal with. There were a few topics I downright disagreed with, but it’s all amazing, and it’s comforting. You learn to trust yourself, and you learn to look at everything in your life and have faith that you chose this and so it IS good.

But when the bad hits, even if you know there is a reason, it doesn’t necessarily alleviate the pain. I mean, the pain is what teaches you, and that can be scary – knowing that the pain IS in fact inevitable and necessary. It’s like a series of waves while you’re in the center of the ocean. As soon as you get your head above water, as soon as you’re feeling afloat, and just when you’ve gained some strength -- out of nowhere, the feeling washes over you, and you feel yourself slip back below the surface. And it’s dark and confusing under there. You don’t know which way is up, and your chest feels like it’s caving in from the pressure, the loneliness, the coldness. When you’re like this, you can actually sense the other dimensions. You look around your world – your workspace, your apartment – and it doesn’t feel real. It feels like a shell and you’re no longer actually in it, just looking at it from another place, wondering how it all felt so…normal before, but now it feels…I guess, trivial. Your heart and your head battle it out. Inside is a war, but everyone looks at you having no idea the thoughts that taunt you, the loss you’re experiencing. You seem normal in a normal world, put-together, functioning. But you’re not even there. You’re somewhere else suffering slowly, painfully, and hating the goddamn charade you are forced to play because you still have those bills to pay, you still have some sort of life to live. Then all of a sudden, what seems right feels terribly wrong, and you’re not sure what it even means to “trust yourself,” to “follow your heart.” And the thing is, you don’t WANT to think about how there’s a reason, that things will get better, that you’ll soon forget. You don’t want to get out of the water. You don’t want to hear a sound. So you tread, you just keep treading until you’re tired, and even then, you fight like hell to stay in that water. You might drown, but you don’t care. It wouldn’t be right to get out. Not yet.