November 2011 -- 5; The Hierophant
You don't choose your medicine. It chooses you.
November started (on its second day) with one of those how are you doing posts on a rockier than normal day. For the most part early November is, also, full of 40 Days of Gratitude posts. And Yuletide Nominations talk. Li sent me the first package of baked goods for tea, and Adecco told me I would not be keeping my RST job at USAA.
The next some nine-ten days are nearly just twitter. There's one poem, and one meme, and one swap write-up. I wrote, just barely again, when I began training my replacement. It was an incredibly hard week, and month, but there is barely anything written, and I spent all my days counting down to one specific thing: Kansas Con Thanksgiving.
Which I, also, wrote absolutely nothing about.
~*~
Closing Thoughts
If October was arduous and like walking on broken glass, even to make the right reasons and understand the right rhymes, then November ripped the Band-Aid right off to prove to me I had no idea what pain or temptation was in October. November when I look back, when I tell people about it now, comes down to one image.
To walking right up to the line in the sand I drew. Every morning. Every afternoon. Every evening. To placing my hands on the glass wall of that line, that sliver of air between what I wanted, so much it made my heart feel like it was bleeding to even think of certain subjects, and what I chose and making myself remember one thing every time --
No matter how much it hurts now, it is still better than how bad it was six weeks previously. Better with days of ever coming and going laughing and smiling, than days from before where the only time I had been truly 'okay' were the seconds between asleep and awake when I couldn't yet remember where and who I was.
The Hierophant is the other side of the Hermit. We sat talking about him earlier this year. The Hermit pulls away from the world and hides from it for himself, or herself, while the Hierophant goes within, goes into the silence, and the others realms, for or because of others. The Hierophant was my first double card for the year. It had happened the first time in February, when I was deep inside due to Mini-Christmas. It was when my safety and trust had been broken.
And November. November was walking still, through the valleys of my own soul, the places I carved into myself through all my actions and inactions. It was not hiding from all the emotion, ever, but it was rising above it, to make better decisions. It was looking at myself in the mirror, and saying things like, yes, twenty-eight is old enough not to make the mistakes of my early and mid-twenties again. Old enough to make the right choices finally.
November was a hard place. A place where I continued to write fic and game and counted down to the best Thanksgiving week in a very long time. Which involved my parents, Earl, Earl's parents, and then an amazing trip to Kansas for Family-of-my-heart Thanksgiving with Li & Debi (& Ana!). That trip was the first four days I felt relaxed in so long I couldn't even come up with a comparative date, and I tried not to feel ashamed about realizing it.
There were a lot one foot in front of the other days in it, but that Thanksgiving weekend I felt home. For the first time in nearly a whole year I felt safe. Safe enough to sit on counters and laugh, and just tell people I could or couldn't be touched, to be hugged or petted, or just to play music, or just to hold someone's hand while a car drove on and on and on. The people (and, specifically, person) who had seen me through all of it for the last four months.