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Learning the Tarot: The Fool
Choose your own adventure Life is full of journeys. Mini—and sometimes major—adventures that we find ourselves in. New jobs. Friendships. Vacations. Learning Mandarin. Training for a marathon. Finding the perfect local cheeseburger. Learning to love yourself more. Starting a business. Starting a family. Starting therapy. You get the idea. Tarot talks to us about our lives through the journeys that we’re on. The goal is to use the cards to look at our behaviors, actions, reactions (etc) from multiple perspectives. Our instincts will help us determine what exactly the cards are talking to us about, so practicing the tarot also helps us build and strengthen our relationships with ourselves. In…
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Learning The Tarot
Add art and ritual to your self-care practice Have you ever wanted to learn tarot? It’s a wonderful way to focus on the different aspects of your life from a perspective you otherwise might not have considered. I like to think of it as a form of guided meditation. It’s a truly lovely self-care practice that allows you to put yourself first in a mindful and positive way with the goal being one of creating a more fulfilling life for ourselves. The cards present you with ideas and ask you to see how these ideas may fit into your life. They ask us to look at the areas of our…
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Dearest
A Letter to Myself Dearest, How does one start a letter like this? With an apology? No. I’m fairly certain that isn’t what I’m supposed to do. Maybe, in fact, the opposite. Maybe, that’s been the real trouble all along. Taking responsibility for something that wasn’t my doing. And maybe when we spend our energy blaming ourselves for things that weren’t our fault, we miss taking the blame for the things that are. Or maybe that’s just me playing The Blame Game, again. Now this, of course, is where we both imagine a set from a 1970s game show, like a Match Game or a Password. Lots of big, round…
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I Just Want to be Okay
Mental Health and Me “I’m fine.” This is my mantra. It’s become almost a joke between my husband and I. The louder I say it, the less likely it’s true. The fact of the matter is, I just want to be okay. I’ve been with my therapist now for a couple of years and she’s been incredibly helpful. I have a psychiatrist and I take medication. I’m not embarrassed by it. I used to be. I really wish that I thought I was cool for being on it—for caring about myself enough to say “fuck the stigma!” and to put my own health and well-being first but I don’t. This…
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Dealing with PTSD
This blog post isn’t for everyone and it isn’t for attention. The sole purpose of this blog is to reach anyone else who may be going through something similar and could benefit from knowing that they aren’t alone in this fight of theirs. I’ve been reliving a childhood trauma on a pretty consistent basis for a few months now. I’ve never properly dealt with this happening, having been encouraged at an early age to not talk about it. And before this, my conscious mind could handle burying my memory for about a decade at a time. Every ten years or so, I’d remember what happened and spiral a bit out…
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Acceptance
I’m beginning to realize that I’ve always let people mistreat me, even from my very first relationship in college. My mom once said to me during this time that she thought it was lucky I ended up with someone who treated me so well; she always figured my low self-esteem would lead me to finding someone who would misuse me. Thing is, and this was not some devil of a guy, he was a real dick sometimes. But I wasn’t strong enough at the time to even acknowledge that he was being a dick to me. I’d say that I spent at least the first twenty-five years in a total…
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Writing as Therapy
I care too much. My husband tells me that. He’s not wrong. It makes me sound so altruistic and holier than though but that’s honestly not how I mean it. Yes, I care about the lives of people I’ve never met and it hurts when I know people are being mistreated, especially in the country I call home. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t ever want to change that part of myself. For me, I have a problem where I put the health and well-being of others before my own and over the course of time, this starts to fuck me up. I feel guilty…
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My Truth
*trigger warning: suicide ideation* My anxiety has been worse lately. I’m not exactly sure why. My husband thinks it could be just a release of emotion. He says that because I’ve been operating in “emergency mode” for a while now that my brain was basically just shutting shit off. And now that things are returning to a bit of normalcy that my brain feels like it’s safe to stop ignoring some of its strongest impulses. That makes sense to me. Doesn’t change that things are sucking right now, though. I’ve had three panic attacks in four days and my “day off” wasn’t a trip to Disneyland. Some attacks…
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Life
Life almost never goes your way. There are people that will tell you that’s not true and those people are either naive, stupid or use the word “blessed” too often. Now there isn’t anything wrong with people who focus on the positives in life, other than we all want to strangle them most of the time. But for those people who understand that life can be an uphill struggle from start to finish but still be totally worth it and rewarding know differently. I don’t like to talk too personally about people other than myself on here so just for the sake of this blog, let’s just say that…
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I Am…
You know what’s a nice little challenge to set for yourself? Blog about panic attacks without having one. Cause, I’ll be honest, I don’t love telling strangers that I get panic attacks. Fuck, I don’t love telling anyone. Now, I could say that the reason for this is the stigma behind panic attacks. And that certainly doesn’t help — because despite the fact that people are becoming more aware of how they actually work and that everyone knows someone (probably more than one someone) who’s afflicted by them, society at-large doesn’t really take kindly to anything that effects your brain or your emotions, let alone both. But it’s…
