Confessions of a witch girl: burn baby burn

There’s a calmness to this life that can only come from a deep place of surrender.

I sit here today after a busy morning of recording, creating, lifting, cardio, and refuelling, and I feel at rest.

I do not feel the need to do anything, to be anything. I truly feel an ease within my body that is hard to understand.

For most of my life I have lived in a body riddled with anxiety and turmoil. Even from a very young age (maybe 5 or even younger) I remember this sense of panic within my body’s system. I felt afraid. Of everything. Even moving in bed in the night frightened me, I developed extreme OCD behaviours as a coping tool that I struggled with on and off, until last year. Counting, repeating, affirmations in my mind- anything to feel a sense of control in a body that felt out of control.

When I was 19 years old I developed a severe panic disorder. I couldn’t go to school, just walking through the hallways of my university felt like the biggest challenge of my life.

I would wash dishes in the sink and have intrusive thoughts about hurting myself or others. I was terrified. Where were these thoughts coming from? Surely they weren’t mine. They frightened me so much that I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was losing my mind.

It wasn’t until my 30’s that I learned such events are simply symptoms of a dis-regulated and frightened nervous system.

I was stuck in flight mode.

I could not feel safe within my own skin, and my brain was desperately trying to compensate for that by creating fearful fake scenarios to make sense of the constant state of panic I felt.

I know now that my constant calorie restrictions, alcohol and substance use, and lack of boundaries with others, especially male partners- was contributing to this delicate system that just wanted rest, that just needed someone to tell it it would be okay. It just needed me.

I look back at those years and I send love through time to that struggling girl. The girl trying to keep it all together. The girl so scared of loving herself that she desperately searched for it everywhere else, within anyone else. But she never could find it.

I believe the moments of peace I did have during that time came from my future self, my now current self, as waves of love and peace sent from the integrated, self-loving me that now sits here and writes this.

I believe the pangs of hope and peace and excitement that seem to arise out of nowhere now, are sent to me from the next version of myself. She is also sitting in a quiet room, looking back at this moment of herself- loving the woman she had started to become and excited for the woman she now is.

I don’t want to say I am healed because that seems too final. I don’t want to ever be fully healed, because that feels like a period at the end of a sentence.

I plan to flow in to constant transformation for the remainder of my life time, shifting and burning and breaking and growing, multiple times in to multiple versions of myself.

I believe I am the phoenix, and I believe I am in a current time of rising. But the Phoenix knows that one day she will be called back in to the ashes, and she will allow herself to burn. She does not fear it, for she knows it is in her nature. She knows It is her destiny.

So I will enjoy my current rise, just as I will enjoy my burn when it comes.

To the girl I once was, I bless you where you stand, in that kitchen full of fear, and I thank you for your strength. You didn’t know it then but you were just burning, and now it’s your time to rise.