Incredible misalignment was saturating my life at the beginning of 2023. As a girl I was taught that I should please others before myself, and prioritize everyone else’s peace before my own. I was taught this through the actions of the strong but programmed women who came before me, and it was validated by the wounded men in my life that couldn’t meet depth and emotion. There is no judgment here, because we’re all at different levels of remembering how empowered we already are. But there is discernment and compassion; discernment which means that what works for me might not work for you and that is okay, and compassion which I started to look at my reality through.
At the beginning of 2023, I recognized how unaligned my reality was with my soul’s essence; love, freedom, joy, creativity, expression, expansion, exploring. I stood grounded on the Earth with my bare feet in the grass and admired it, challenging myself to stop looking for greener grass in the future and ruminating on all of the hard places I’ve walked in the past. I asked myself, “If this right now is all my life will ever be, how can I make it the best life ever?” It wasn’t an immediate shift, and it wasn’t without action, but it did cause a ripple effect that started with recognition of misalignment and journeyed through meeting the love of my life, being diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, and embracing feeling it all. The final destination isn’t here yet, but I no longer am searching for that place. I have found that the journey is much more magical than the greenest grass.
I took my life into my hands, after many attempts of the same thing for years. This is to say that it’s not easy, but it is worth it. My body has always been very communicative with me. When I found myself in partnerships that weren’t supportive or aligned, I was always sick. When I left a soul-sucking bartending shift, my body would break out in a rash. It was at the beginning of 2023 that I started honoring these messages from my body more decidedly. I stopped going to the places that felt like a “no”, like bars filled with surface level interactions, and started leaning into the things that felt like a “yes”: yoga classes, walking in the woods everyday, prioritizing meaningful relationships, etc. Life wanted to shift for me. These doors were open, but it was my responsibility to walk through.
In an attempt to signal to the Universe that I am open to an aligned community, I found a few uplifting accounts on Instagram that resonated with me. One of which was a page for masculine people helping other masculine people to heal. I followed sixty people that followed that page, with no intention other than energetically calling in a like-minded community through this simple reach. Out of the sixty accounts I followed, only one followed me back, but that was never the goal so I thought little of this new mutual follower in the beginning of 2023. A few months later, I began to feel worried about a lump the size of a golf ball that had been long standing on my shin. I had bumped my leg on my bedrail, and the swelling hadn’t gone down for months. At the same time, Johannes, the only one who followed me back at the beginning of the year, directly messaged me, instigating the greatest love story of my life. Our conversation began with text, then audio, then video calls, and finally transcended and evolved to him flying from Germany to the United States to meet me. We knew it was love before he arrived. We spent two weeks in that bliss. When he left, I visited the doctor’s office to have the bump on my leg examined. They knew it was cancer before the scans confirmed it.
Unfortunately, it was rare and the outcome was uncertain. Fortunately, I was fast-tracked through examinations to get to the bottom of it, and held by a team of medical professionals, family, friends, and my German partner. Contrary to what you likely think when you hear about an experience with cancer, because we’ve all been touched by it in terrible ways, the cancer for me felt like a gift. In the tarot card deck, The Tower card is about unavoidable death for the sake of beautiful rebirth. Intuitively, I knew I would survive the cancer, and metaphorically, I knew death was unavoidable.
The version of me that wanted to die was one who believed herself unworthy to the bone. People pleasing since the jump will do that to someone. The many masks required of a people pleaser become so disorienting, it’s hard to see clearly once you’re in deep. When I sat with myself at the beginning of 2023, compassionately and honestly, I had no idea how my intention to release anything aligned would spur the greatest transformation of my life. I had no idea that cancer would become such a blessing in my mind, considering the way it hurt me by taking my grandparents and a childhood friend. Looking back at that time, cancer was the destruction for the sake of rebirth. This death, tower moment, cancer was pivotal, and left no room for small living on the other side of it. It was a reality check, a threshold, a bridge that transported me toward feeling things more deeply and expressing myself more authentically. On the other side of it, my reality is one of alignment with my soul’s truth. Honest and thoughtful partnership that prioritizes healing and understanding. Friendships that prioritize connection, creativity, and intimacy. A career that prioritizes integrity and passion. An environment that prioritizes safety and expansion. A girl turned woman by the alchemy of death, who prioritizes alignment, truth, and love.
In the middle of 2024, I’m now married, living in Germany, cancer-free, pursuing a career as an author that tells stories of fear through a lens of love, and living in the greatest alignment I’ve ever known. Death promised me rebirth, and here I am. Rebirth promises that this is just the beginning, and it is.
