Reflections of a year gone by
Towards the end of 2021 – and the end of my 2nd health relapse in as many years - I felt that 2022 was going to be the best year of my life.
So, nothing prepared me for how it started.
On the eve of winter solstice on 21st December 2021, I experienced a dark night of the soul.
Everyone experiences them differently. But for me, it feels like what I imagine it to feel like when withdrawing from heroin (think Renton in Trainspotting as he’s climbing the walls locked in a room at his parents going cold turkey).
An entire night awake, laid in my bed wanting to scream, was enough to trigger an extra migraine attack. Then I tested positive for Covid on Christmas day, ruining a few Christmas days and not just my own.
Did I mention I’d already felt pretty depressed all of December as it was? This continued into January.
Not the start to the best year of my life that I was expecting.
It took a girl’s weekend away at the bleakest (also the cheapest) time of year to bring me round.
Then a friend invited me to their new home for a change in scenery and took me to a spa for the day, out for a meal in the evening, (which felt like the first time I’d dined out in an awfully long time) and a walk to Knaresborough the next day – all filled with deep, open and soul nourishing conversation. I’m getting used to these vulnerable conversations, they have become an important part of my life and friendships.
In often typical Amber style, I’d had my word of the year lined up the year before, HEARTFELT.
it’s only the second year I’ve been working with one word for the year, but I’ve come to find them so incredibly anchoring, it’s a practice that serves me super well and I can see what all the fuss is about.
Have you tried working with one?
When it comes to my treatments, they are always heartfelt. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing one, you’ll know what I mean.
However, I do struggle to keep my heart fully open outside of these. Sometimes it’s open and sometimes it’s closed. At least it’s no longer fully closed like it used to be.
Come spring I was ready to move home, which happened on the outside to appear almost immediately. Though on the inside, I’d known since Christmas a move was on the cards - I’d dreamt about it and started to receive quite a few signs this was to be the case – I’d known for nearly 2 years I would wind up living by water with swans on it, I just had no idea where. What I didn’t see coming is that it would be to a holiday home on 200 acres of land.
Nor that my mantra/affirmation of 2021 “I do what I want, I love what I do and I live everyday like I’m on holiday” would come true in quite such a way!
Moving one carload triggered an agonising attack, which then set off anxiety and was swiftly followed by a severe attack, seeing me spiral down again into a further bout of depression.
What’s the difference in the pain level of severe and agonising pain you say?
There isn’t one. They’re just 2 different types of attack over my period – both are to an unimaginable and unprecedented, extremely high level of pain.
I had, just, for the first time, been getting used to grading attacks at a high level of pain (not severe or agonising). So, to shoot back up left me wondering WTF exactly was I still doing alive.
The fact that I can now see and connect to a deeper purpose and meaning as to why I’ve been living through what I have helped ease these dark thoughts somewhat.
It was to be sometime later in the year in the year I discovered this hiccup – as I preferred to call such health challenges this year – was due to a childhood wound. The feeling or the sense that “nobody wants me”. Ingrained on me when I left home at 18 and nobody came out to see me off, meet the person I was moving in with who had come to collect me (and my one binbag of belongings) - much to their horror - or ever come to visit me until my dad did 5 years later. It’s 25 years on and my mum still hasn’t been.
Turns out, this wound has been triggered every time I’ve moved house since me and ex split up over 7 years ago. This being the 5th time I’d moved in that time. I’d been wondering why moving had become such a massive struggle for me yet had no idea until I was in my 5th year of healing. Still, now I know.
This is the year I’ve realised it’s not true, I am wanted. I want me. All my friends and family want me around.
It was to be at my brother’s birthday BBQ that I found out through my mum that she was angry I was leaving home back then and my dad was too upset to speak. You know that crazy world we live in where it’s not lady-like to show anger and big boys don’t cry. Here is just one example of the consequence of that.
2022 was also the year it dawned on me, that not receiving emotional support throughout my life, has been the biggest of all my hardships. Not receiving emotional support throughout my childhood has led to the most disastrous consequences including a near suicide and complete disability by illness.
What would my life have been like if I’d had parents who were able to emotionally regulate themselves and in turn, emotionally support me so that I could go on to learn how to do the same? I can’t help but wonder what a life like that would be like. Not just for me, but for us all.
That reminds me. 2022 was the year I learnt to emotionally regulate myself. In addition to all the (by now) hundreds of other changes I’d made and all the regular/daily yoga, breathwork, journaling and other practices I’d imbedded in my life. Something I’ve done slowly but surely and now to the point that these habits, routines and practices have become the foundation of my life, I sat with my feelings each and every day. Understanding exactly what I was feeling, how it felt in my body and how best to support how and what I was feeling. Observing my thoughts and practicing using a loving voice which was so knew to me, the first time I ever did in Yoga Teacher Training, I cried. Well, I choked it down of course. Heaven forbid we show emotion in front of one another.
Being so dysregulated as I am/was – oh by the way, were you aware that according to Dr Wijeratne (interviewed at the Migraine World Summit 2021), one of the two root causes to migraine disease is the inability to regulate our emotions? The other being abnormality to the brain. By this point in time, I’d already received loads of healing to my brain when I spent a lot of the first lockdown meditating at home on my own.
Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, sometimes this new exercise and part of my day took me allllllll day to process in 2022. On multiple occasions.
Whilst everyone else was at work, earning a living to pay for their mortgage and bills, I was sat in a holiday home with no central heating learning how to regulate my emotions.
So determined am I to fully heal myself and prove that it can be done when we go to the root cause of a disease.
I know we’re still living in such times as we are told by the majority of healthcare specialists that root cause is unknown, but when you’ve done as much research as I have you find the odd one out there who’s nailed it and if not in the medical profession, there’s tons on the holistic side to explore (thank fluff for Louise Hay) with even a meeting of the two in the middle now coming in thanks to such changemakers and shapeshifters as The Holistic Psychologist and phenomenal hormones expert Dr Claudia Welch.
If this last year has done anything for me, it’s only that I am more believing and confident in my place of ‘knowing’ that this is possible than I ever have been before.
This year, I have gone to even greater lengths than in the previous 4 to find my way to achieving this. Though I guess you could say I’ve also had more energy and freedom to do this with, thanks to all I’ve been beavering away at (doing what I can when I can and making some almighty big decisions) in the years before.
Whilst I may never know what an emotionally supported childhood would have been like for me, I guess I'll spend the rest of my life finding out what the benefits of an emotionally supported adult life will bring.
Summer in a holiday home was busy – so many guests and visitors. Each one of them booking in treatments and me fully in the flow of doing what I want, loving what I do and living everyday like I’m on holiday.
As I adopted and fully embraced this way of being, I met new clients this way too – in the café, out walking, connecting on socials.
I even managed to manifest the raw milk farm and fresh free range egg place that I flung out to the universe the year before.
A message in a dream “tulip trajectory” told me that an upward trajectory was coming. And came it did, in the form of this new platform, later followed by my podcast here on Warrior Within too.
Around the time of my first and most unexpected solo holiday (not something the younger version of me would’ve ever done), I switched my word of the year to “receive”. A word I’d earmarked for 2023, however, it dawned on me that I couldn’t bring in all that I really wanted, hoped for, dreamed of if I had no place for it to land. No space within me to receive it! So, I opened up to receive.
I started with a card I received from my mum one year that said “daughter, you were born to sparkle”. It’s only one of a handful of cards she’s ever got me. Compliments were not something served up to us as children. Nor were meals (the cupboards were always full to help ourselves though - something mum was always proud of). There were no gifts (we didn’t celebrate birthdays and Christmas or any other special occasion). Definitely no I love you’s.
So, when my mum got me this card, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was bullshit.
Autumn came and the visits dwindled, making the way for a few little hiccups attack wise. Only that I’d experienced a few more than I was now used to. Mainly, I can function through them – something I have not been able to do in such a long time, I actually think we’re talking decades. Whilst I continued to ride the ups and downs of the deeply complex and misunderstood disease, the wins were there only when I looked for them. And, fuck me, sometimes that was hard.
When I asked my mum if she fancied going to Manchester to see Bryan Ferry and we immediately booked tickets without hesitation, the worry of what I had signed myself up for hit me like a steam train.
But with me being me, it has become important to me that when the inevitable happens and my mum is no longer here, that there is peace in my heart and please, god, at least one or two good memories. In addition, I’ve also read that when a woman heals herself, she heals her mum and her daughter too and you all know what I’m like when I get the bit between my teeth.
I’m also determined to learn how to keep my heart open fully and not fear getting hurt quite so much (not everyone is out to hurt me), all so I can receive the very best that life has to offer. Health, energy, abundance. Now that I know what it’s like not to have these things, it’s made me value them all the more.
I also firmly believe that we are living in times where we can really thrive in life – each and every one of us. And this, for me, is part of opening that up as a possibility. And of course, the full health and vibrant energy that I reckon this way of living and this way of being will afford me.
The trip was a success. We even went shopping together. We have never done anything like this before, this was the first time we had done anything at all together, never mind gone away – overnight!
I had dreamed of such mum and daughter time, in my late teens. Though that was until I decided to stop being the only one to make the effort to see her only for me to leave each time feeling like a sack of shit.
As we enjoyed some deep conversations, I realised even those with a good, healthy relationship with their mums may never experience this. I also gained some much-needed insight into my childhood. What had happened, how I came to feel the way I did and how I could navigate my way through this as adult Amber.
Just like this year, this trip away did not come without its hiccups. Only for the first time I was better able to manage and protect my energy. Keeping some of it in reserves just for me.
The end of the year came friends were telling me to get realistic about meeting a man. To think logically. Time is ticking and all that. But I just always had this strong feeling that I didn’t need to go out looking. That it didn’t matter that I spent my nights at home in my pj’s, as far away from dating apps, speed dating and being on the lookout as I could get, whilst now living in the middle of nowhere.
Then, true to form, I was sat at home one Friday night in my onesie when a friend messaged me a picture of her friend, someone she’d known most of her life telling me he’d recently moved back to Howden. He’s an amazing man, she said, and he’d be up for meeting for a walk or a coffee. Also, that he’s big into his health and wellbeing and “eats organic”, which made me smile.
After getting a good vibe from the energy around his picture, eyes and smile, I went straight into panic mode!
Aside from fear, what else do I feel? I asked myself. Excitement. I breathed, knowing that I best go with it and not shut this one down and with that I sent him a message.
We met the next day for a walk then date number 2 Christmas Eve, which was magical.
It’s early days, of course, but the connection is there (physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually). I feel a secure attachment for the first time in my life. Previously I can see I was avoidant on an emotional level and co-dependent as a result.
This type of relationship is new territory for us both. We are finding the process of getting to know one another on a deeper level exciting and are very much enjoying being in the present moment with one another.
I think the dates were in double digits by New Year’s Eve and it sure was a most memorable way to bring in 2023!
A beautiful insight to you and your journey. For those who have known you a long time it will explain unanswered questions. For others it will give them hope for the future. Thank you