I continue to find myself struggling to find words for writing, to bring you content on the blog and instead my focus has been on a hurdle that seemed to increase in size overtime. So here I am contemplating the journey, the hurdle, fate or Wyrd and wishing to share those thoughts with you all. This is a bit more personal of a blog and maybe not as practical or uplifting, so if you aren’t interested in reading any of that, just skip this one for now.
As an aside, I did start a blog on Mundane Magic / handcraft in March that I just cannot finish currently, but know it will be coming soon in the meantime.
Hurdles, challenges and roadblocks.
We’re all familiar in one shape or form with the various ways our life’s seem to come to a stop. Sometimes to show us this is not the way forward, sometimes to show us we need to explore different methods and hear new voices to continue moving and sometimes because we’re running towards things and life demands we slow down as if we may not be ready or something big will happen (and big isn’t always nice/fun/pleasant).
In some of these cases you feel a conversation with a friend or one between yourself and the prompts of a tarot reading will be enough to get you through the fatigue of the situation. Sometimes they are complex enough to require us to check in with professional help, such as for example a doctor or therapist. Some leave a bigger or more permanent impression on us than others increasing the complexity of the path forward.
I doubt I needed to briefly remind you of these various forms and methods to try help us through them, but what do you do when even with the help you sought you don’t seem to make progress or even seem to “get worse”? Or are simply left waiting for the help you request to arrive?
In July/August 2021 I realized I needed more professional help with my gender-transition if I wanted to be happier with myself and work to increase the overall quality of my life. Simply accepting my nonbinary identity and coming out the year prior didn’t prove to be enough to me. I went to the doctor to request a referral to a gender-team to aid my transition, already feeling like my life had been on pause for a year. I also started Voice therapy a month later, as it was something I could start without an official diagnosis.
Now, June 2022, me and my voice therapist confirmed I’m at wall. I’m still waiting for the therapy with the gender-team, as wait-lists are inhumanely long (as they are for many things since Covid) and I should theoretically start somewhere between now and August. This wall, is my inability to push myself over some sense of fear to do my exercises with my therapist, as if I’m afraid of her judgement. I completely block off, my throat tenses up and I start crying. After months of trying to find a way to get past it we’re just not making progress and keep hitting the same wall, leading to my own increasing frustration worsening my internal blockage, that we feel I need to wait till I’m helped by a psychologist to break through it and progress again. Knowing this was the “only thing” I could do prior to the treatment as I waited felt like a dagger in my chest of hopelessness. So what now? This is not a thing I can solve with a simple tarot reading.
Wyrd, oh, fate of woven threads.
In Heathenry there’s a concept of Wyrd, also referred to as fate or destiny. It’s the idea of how our lives are predetermined by the Nornir. Orlog is the correlation between cause and effect, of our own or others making, that influences Wyrd, and can even be linked back to previous generations. The past shapes the current, and therefore the future. There’s some variation to these concepts in interpretation but that’s my impression of it in my explorations so far. They say Frigg was capable of reading the web of wyrd through spinning or weaving in myth, and for this reason I chose to work with her to hopefully better understand and accept my own journey through Wyrd.
So, do I believe that my life as it is now, was predetermined to feel so hopeless, by the Norn that weaves my fate? No, or at least not entirely. My own view is that fate determines events on the path, not my actions to get to these events, nor how I get through them and decide to move past them. The events themselves are determined to occur, including my eventual death.
With that in mind I can think of it various ways. The point of my realization of my identity was likely predetermined (and likely the start of a series of events), not how I came to the realization, how I chose to deal with it or how I decided to move forward with it. My initial choice was observe, then later came a choice of action. So is my stagnation a sign of a wrong choice? I hardly believe there were wrong choices to be made, just different choices with a variety of complex outcomes that would shape me up for my choices in future events. I still stand behind the choice of observation followed by action, even if at a future point I realize they were poorly executed. What I do know, is that my current state makes me unhappy and I want to move into a more fulfilling life, that this identity thing is at the center of variety of roadblocks I can see, and I know that it won’t improve without action, without change of some kind, I’m just still looking for the tools and pathways to bring me to that point.
Me in the moment
Now, there is one other point on this path that I’m slowly figuring out what it means. When I came out I also got into a relationship with someone who struggled to see me as my identity and more so my appearance, and while we’re good friends now I realized after we broke up I was willing to compromise my own identity and believes for this person, which sounds insane to me now. It made me slowly slip out of my spiritual practice, my work with my gods and made me continue to deny part of myself that I’m still picking up wanting to fit into their picture of me.
The last few months I slowly waned back into my practice, which never completely went away but it had grown dormant, and I am still incapable of getting back into my trance meditations or journeying to do some the work I used to do. I found my way back into spiritual communities and started speaking to my gods again, finding small remnants of a part of me I had been missing.
Around that same time, I asked for a sign, thinking one of the Norse gods I frequently keep in mind would make them known to me, and clear as day it was a sign of the Morrigan, without question. If you know me, I don’t like mixing cultural practices for myself, I find comfort in the framework I have for myself in Heathenry and while I don’t think it impossible to work an eclectic practice it never was something I wished to explore. I’m not very familiar with the Celtic practices or gods, even though I have had “signs” of Celtic deities in the past, which I acknowledged and then left for what they were. The Morrigan, though, has a certain reputation that made me pause and want to look into it. I kept asking myself “why?”, friends who were more familiar wondering who had slighted me and needed punishing, which didn’t make sense to me. I read, or rather listened, to a book recommended to me by a follower of the Morrigan and at several points in the book I got the shivers that made it make sense to me. I still struggle to put it into words but I believe the essence of it is that this is a sign I cannot continue to repress who I am out of fear, and frankly I find the air of confidence of her being in myth inspiring, something I’d like to aspire to for myself having always been shy or held back. This is a thing much bigger than I can explain in this blog, and likely too personal, but it was significant. In short, I found a lot of meaning in a place I would’ve never considered looking before.
That said, patience isn’t my strong suit when it comes to points of stagnation, and that may well be my lesson. I keep looking for things I can do, and I keep feeling exhausted even when doing next to nothing. The mental fatigue is catching up with me and I think all I can do till I got the help present around me is wait and try to find myself within myself and the things that drive me that I’ve repressed.
So, if you’ve come this far, thank you for reading my mind-dump. I crave more and more to share thought, contemplation and for some reason especially those thoughts that live on the edge of being poetic, but I’m figuring out how that really works and this is simply an attempt to share some of that.
If you wish to sit with me in thought, here’s a question I think I will be asking my tarot next time I sit down in silence:
What have I been neglecting?
What can I do for myself in this moment?
Path of Ashes 