MY LIFE

My parents grew up in strict households. Their parents, both sets having been born into an era of having to work hard to succeed and believing in the importance of social status and conformity to get ahead in the world, held their children up to high standards. Encouragement was rare, criticism was considered an expression of love and support, and breaking any rules set by their social circles was seriously frowned upon.

My parents were young, naive, and still in college when they decided to rebel. They did what college kids do: challenged their parents' belief systems, made friends with people who widened their views of the world, did things they weren't allowed to do at home, and dated whomever they felt like. They met during a social event and began a romance meant to expand their horizons. The expansion changed their lives forever.

Before they graduated, they learned about me. My mother was one year away from graduation; my father was only two years in. At the time, they didn't know they were trendsetters — it was the decade of the puritanical 1950s, after all — so they panicked a little. They decided to quit school to get married, find jobs, and raise their new family the way they were taught to do: the respectable way. Never having lived without the guidance of their own parents, I don't believe they were ready for the responsibility.

From the moment I was discovered in utero, I was bombarded with doubt, fear, regret, and uncertainty. I carried the weight of that unplanned pregnancy for decades, unknowingly shouldering the responsibility for bringing our family together so fast and furiously. My mother was married and had three kids before she was twenty-five; my father was a year younger than her. In my mind, they were still kids themselves and could've used a few more years to mature into family life. It's no wonder I thought being born into this world was a bad idea and looking forward to a long life was next to impossible. Even though my parents loved me and thought they were ready for me, I arrived as a cute, cuddly, forever burden to a couple of overwhelmed, deeply worried college students.

They worked very hard after my birth to provide for my future unplanned brothers and me. My parents did without so we could eat decent meals and stay warm in the winter. They relied on friends and family to help raise us and watch over us as they each took any job that would bring in an income. They practiced the parenting skills their own parents had ingrained in them, had to stop thinking of themselves, never got enough sleep, and worried constantly about our future.

The exhaustion of parenthood morphed my parents' love story from excitement and strong attraction into a struggle of surviving a difficult life. They both felt unappreciated by us kids and each other and fought to keep their love for each other alive. As the years progressed, my mother and father recognized how unhappy they actually were and took their frustrations out on each other, engaging in battles that tore each other down instead of lifting them up. It never occurred to them that they were carrying on in their parents' footsteps. Criticism was still an expression of love, rules were rules, and social conformity was necessary to succeed. Eventually, they both lost sight of their strengths and talents, and they didn't know how to express their true value to each other.

Though separation was tempting and divorce was an easy solution to their predicament, they stayed together because, in their eyes, the rocky marriage was a commitment built on raising a family that they took very seriously.

Their love for their family keeps us all together to this day.

While I was growing up, from childhood to my early twenties, those years that were supposed to be my best and easiest, I'd wake up most mornings and wonder why it was so hard to look forward to living through the day. "Why," I asked myself, "do we force ourselves to wake up with an alarm to do something we really don't want to do all day, just because someone said we had to do it?" I felt ancient and tired and couldn't wait to grow up and get my life over with. I wasn't hoping to end my life early; I just wanted to live it as quickly and easily as I could, do what needed to be done, and move on.

For years, I found myself lying in bed after waking and willing myself to get up, eat breakfast, go to school or work to make a living, come home to do homework or clean the house, make dinner, prepare for the next day, and go back to bed, exhausted and unfulfilled, every single day. I found myself wondering, Do I really have to do this for the next sixty or seventy years? Did I really want to do it? If my parents were that unhappy with life, what did I have to look forward to?

You couldn't convince me even on my best days that it was good to be alive.

But I did it. I powered on, hoping I'd figure out the whys some day. My basic instinctual inner child kept whispering in my inner adult ear that it was important for me to figure it out. I learned to depend on my will to live and my intuition to get me through my days, weeks, and years. For some weird reason, I did have a strong will to live and a strong sense of curiosity about where my efforts would lead me. "Living may be hard," I kept telling myself, "but there must be a reason for it." My life was a mystery novel, a puzzle I was determined to solve.

I wanted to see what my future would be, and since I wasn't a fortuneteller, I had to live long enough to experience it. The funny thing about the future is that you never actually get there. Your future becomes the present and tomorrow becomes your future. It's a never-ending circle of living you have to do, for some reason, that gets you through your life. I depended on my curiosity to keep me going. It became my main life goal to discover why I did what I did when I did it, whatever it was, to solve the puzzle of my life. I was determined to see if all of my efforts would lead to something important enough to make life worth living through it.

I had parents who tried very hard to be good parents, brothers who found ways to make life an adventure, loving relatives, and a good education. I lived in homes with central air conditioning and plumbing and had access to anything I needed. Anyone would look at my life and call it fulfilling, but I took life so seriously that I couldn't enjoy it. When I was a kid, playing games seemed idiotic, and I spent the beginning of my adult years trying to understand lighthearted people. I felt like a stranger in a strange, incomprehensible world. The only emotions I could relate to were anger and frustration. Getting close enough to people to call them friends seemed impossible. I realized at a very young age that I really didn't like people that much. Being human was too damn hard. Love was an emotion I only read about in books.

It was pointed out to me recently that this sounded like clinical depression. It could've been, but I'm not sure it was. I don't know that there was anything wrong with me, only that life was not living up to all the hype I'd been hearing about since I could understand the spoken word, and I was disappointed in it. And in me. And I didn't know why.

I explored the idea that I was mistreated or abused in some way but blocked the memory. I never discovered anything big but learned I was a quiet child who put up with some bullying. Big deal.

I took an interest in reincarnation, learning that we come into every new life to explore our potential and work out our problems. During my first life reading, I was told by an intuitive that I was an old soul who didn't have to come back again if I didn't want to. True or not, it was a great relief to know I didn't have to do it all again, that whatever mistakes I made in this life didn't have to be worked out in another. I learned that day that I didn't have to get everything right, that I didn't have to work so hard to be perfect. I felt the first of many psychic knots in my stomach release and relax, allowing me to take my first really deep breath.

I wondered if I was a misplaced alien from another planet. There have been lots of science-fiction television shows, books, and movies featuring that storyline, and I was so attracted to that concept I became a science-fiction fan. It was comforting to know that other people related to feeling out of place. We want to "go home," whether it's another planet, a different dimension, or a higher plane. I felt drawn to the concept that I could've been a misplaced soul.

I was not alone in my angst. I discovered that millions of people were and are dealing with the same conundrum. Humanity is a big disappointment to many humans and probably to a few animals too. Life is never as good as we think it should be. Our standards are very high. We judge each other as if we have proof that we are doing it all wrong.

We torture one another while competing for affection and validation. We get angry with one another because we don't meet our own expectations. We grow up to be imperfect perfectionists trying to gain control of a life we have little control over.

Why do we do it? I didn't know what compelled me to keep living and trying, but I was ready to figure it out. I wanted to know if life on this planet was really worth all the hard work.

So I powered on.

MY MIRACLE

When I turned eighteen, I was offered a job twenty six hundred miles away in Los Angeles and given two weeks to pack up and say good-bye to my parents. It wasn't a major career boost or a planned step to a grown-up life, but it was an opportunity to change things before I had a chance to think about it. It was my first major intuitive challenge, and I closed my eyes and jumped. I didn't seem to have a choice; my inner voice demanded I take the clerk typist job and go without regret. So I did.

It was the beginning of my awakening.

Until then, I still hadn't figured out what to do with myself. I had no career plans, no extracurricular interests outside of school and work, and I drifted with the whims of the windy universe like a loose piece of paper. Skipping a college education, mainly because I couldn't bring myself to waste time and money on an education when I was so undecided about my future, I took whatever job would have me just because it seemed like the thing to do. I went through life in a fog, completely overwhelmed by my changing responsibilities. The whim at the time was a government job as a clerk typist. I'd only had that job because I'd taken a typing class in high school and working for the government was what you did when you lived in the Washington, DC, area, as I did at the time. I had no idea that the wind would carry me two thousand miles away from home. It was just something else I had to accept because that was my life.

I settled in LA pretty easily. I found I was born to live on my own and adjusted to my new adult life quickly. I enjoyed going to work, rising to new challenges, and exploring me-without-my-family. But though I was happy with my freedom, I wasn't happy with my job. I knew there was something else to do, so when I grew tired of trying to be a good typist (because I never became one), I found myself going to a technical school for television broadcasting. Within months, I was working at a TV station as a broadcast technician, giving up a life of secretarial service. It had never before occurred to me there were careers in television, and I'd never shown any technical talent before in my life, so it was a surprise to me to end up there. It was where my intuition and curiosity led me, and it happened so fast I didn't have time to think about what I was doing. I just did it. I knew I was where I was supposed to be, loading two-inch videotapes on giant machines, recording shows and commercials, loading film and slide projectors, watching the clock to make sure things ran on time, and performing quick repairs on machines that locked up when we needed them most. I worked with unconventional people during unconventional hours in an unconventional business. I never dreamed I could be this person living this life.

I could barely believe I was living on my own in a rent-controlled apartment in Beverly Hills, working odd hours of the day and night, totally self-sufficient by the time I turned nineteen, and very comfortable with being alone. It all seemed like a hoax or a mistake, like I was living someone else's life, but I rolled with it.

Eventually, I moved back to DC. It turned out I was homesick, not for my family, but for the natural sounds and greener landscape that surrounded the DC area. I was a nature lover and didn't know it until I'd moved to the concrete landscape of Los Angeles. I found a job at a local television station, corralled a couple of old classmates to share a townhouse with me, and adopted a couple of dogs. By the time I reached twenty-five, I'd lost the roommates and found a boyfriend to move in with my canine family and me. It was an interesting time for us all.

Letting go of my single life had been another intuitive jump for me. I saw it as an opportunity to discover love and learn what being part of a couple was like. I hoped to grow into the type of person that liked family life, sharing everything with a significant other, and someday becoming a parent.

I thought I was doing pretty well for a while, but I soon learned I would never be that type of person.

While with my boyfriend, I realized how low my self-esteem was when I accepted his demeaning and cruel taunts as something I had to endure because I didn't deserve better. I couldn't live up to his expectations, and he was really good at making me feel like there was something wrong with me. He was a master at pushing all of my self- deprecating buttons, but I dealt with it as best I could. As bad as things got between us, I felt I'd never have a better relationship and didn't want to ruin my one chance at being someone's girlfriend, even when I started to recognize that I had flawed personal-image issues that affected me in a negative way. So I kept trying to work out our problems. It kept me miserable and feeling unloved, even as I devoted myself to trying to make my relationship work.

After the initial glow of the new romance wore off, though, my instincts took over to show me that things were not good, and by the end of the relationship, I remembered I had total control over my life. I set about changing my self-image, reading self-help books, improving my diet, exercising, and speaking up for myself — all of which inevitably led to a painful breakup. I was tired of trying so hard to keep someone else happy, so I had to let my torturer go. I moved out, scraped up enough cash for a down payment on a duplex, and got back to being me.

It was a growth spurt that led me to explore new-age energy healing methods, a subject rarely considered or talked about in my conservative town at the time. I found myself alone in my education, so it was slow growing for a while, but because I was alone, I could follow my intuition without interference. I was still curious about where I was heading and what living was all about, so I embraced every opportunity for personal growth.

I made it through my twenties employed, single, and intact and a homeowner, a gardener, a good credit risk, and a pet parent. I had no idea where life would lead me next. I was ready for my next growth spurt.

Which came in my thirties.

After working at the television station in DC for over a decade, there was a major company-wide downsizing. My inner voice told me to volunteer for layoff and I did it, letting go of a secure paycheck and a chaotic work life that sucked up my personal time. I was given the opportunity to stay working at the station part time and took it with the intent to eventually move on. With this decision, I'd created the time to explore my spiritual beliefs, life purpose, employment options, and natural skills. I made a list of things I wanted to try and learn about and then found a way to make it happen. I took art classes, went to energy-healing seminars, and tried to improve my job skills with adult-learning courses with the intent of finding a new career. Every time I traveled, I looked for employment opportunities, but I never left the station or DC. I stuck like glue to it for some reason and continued to work there part time for decades after the layoff. I couldn't really complain about it. I was making decent money and had lots of free time.

The whim of the universe was keeping me put.

When things were flowing nicely, I found myself feeling optimistic, but when they weren't, I struggled to keep trying. My low self-esteem threatened to keep me down, and there were times when I found myself questioning my purpose. Surely there was more to life than just living it.