[~Tio~]

Оригинал статьи из этого замечательного поста в сообществе Голландская рулетка.

Пишет  Голландская рулетка:

15.06.2012 в 15:31

~Tio~, вот полный текст оригинала, Фэйсбук не позволяет дать прямую ссылку на запись со Стены:

"Magic and the Mundane

When I left the nine to five slog for housewifedom, I found myself losing myself even further. When I was working for others, my only reason for being was to perform a service and be paid for it. If I didn't perform the service adequately, I was yelled at. Don't get me wrong, I loved working with numbers, and creating order from chaos in my role as accounts clerk and 'fill in' personal assistant, but I have never really enjoyed working for others for there was always an element of subservience to my role. I was always required to defer to someone in a higher position to my own. I've never thrived in that kind of role.

When I left work to become a mother and housewife, I was given freedom, but had no real sense of self or purpose, and so I became good at my 'role' of mother and housewife. The house was always spotless. The yard and gardens were always spotless and well-maintained. My kids were allowed to get dirty, to laugh and to play, but when they were done they were washed and cleaned to the point where they sparkled and I had dinner in one hand and beer in the other for Peter when he came home.

Yes! I was a good housewife.

I was a damned good Stepford Wife.

But I was good, because I was bored, frustrated, and had nothing better to do. I cooked and did the gardening, because I didn't know what else to do to fill my day. I was a good little wifey, and, before that, accounts clerk, because I had no other choice. I had no other skills, and to not be good at the only things I could do, would have resulted in unhappiness, and back then, before I knew of my mood disorder, I carried enough unhappiness already.

But the simple truth of it is, that all of that mundane stuff bored me then as much as it bores me now. By age 28, when I was diagnosed with depression, I had spent nearly all of my life in service to others, or doing what others told me to do. I had been conditioned to be needed and to do what was expected of me, but even then, a part of me was screaming within and telling me to rebel, wanting to reject the mundane existance that everyone around me was living. I unconsciously knew that my life was so mundane and bereft of magical purpose that its absence was killing me both mentally and emotionally.

When I was prescribed art therapy to treat my emotional hurts, I grabbed onto the idea as if it were the only thing that kept me from drowning. Some days, it was the only thing that kept me afloat, but it took several years for me to turn therapy into something that would reintroduce magic to my life and day.

I think we each go through a phase when we recognise that we need to evolve and change, to live a purposeful life that is not just one of service and fulfilling other people's needs and demands. The big questions are, how do you start, and when do you begin?

It is a journey of many steps and turns. It could take you a million steps, or it could take you ten million steps. It begins, however, with one step at a time.

Me? Well I stumbled around for a while. It's been fifteen years since I was reintroduced to art, and introduced to writing, and at first, I did not know what I wanted to be. All I knew was that I wanted to create. However, I was at the time, also a mother of two young children - one in school, and one in preschool. Would they suffer if I was to do something for myself? Simple answer ... No.

So many times, I've heard others put aside their dreams, because 'their children still need them' or they are 'too tired after working all day', but if you want something enough, then nothing will stand in your way. My kid's and partner's needs were still looked after, but so were mine.

I took a writing course and began to fill my world with both words and art. I started to do things for myself. I began to do less for others. I drifted away from the 'housewife' and 'nine to five' set who would sit around, waiting for their kids at the school gate and gossip. I had better things to do than to talk about my child's development, discuss the family dramas, who was fucking whom, and who's boss or workmate was an asshole, and whose job made them feel so very important or better than others. These are subjects that have never interested me, which is probably why I initially turned my focus to having a clean house and garden.

There was resistance - just as I rejected people because their lives and interests were not shared, I had friends who rejected me because I was eccentric and weird. I had husbands of friends tell Peter that he needed to put me back in my place, and then tell me to get a real job or be a better wife. These men did not want me around their wives, because I was a bad influence.

The resistance did not sway me though, because I had become someone who was determined to be answerable only to myself. I had become someone who was going to put my needs not first or last, but instead, someone who saw her needs of being of equal importance.

Again, who I am now and what I do in the present did not manifest overnight. It took several more years of experimenting, succeeding and failing, and following opportunities for me to create a niche for myself. That is something which is very important too - you have to stop looking for a niche or stepping into another's niche, and instead CREATE a niche that is YOURS.

To do that, you have to stop thinking about others, be less caring of what other's opinions and what they may say about you. You have to be willing to make the hard choices, and invest a portion of the time and love and energy that you give to everyone else into yourself and your dreams.

You have to be willing to make magic, i.e. have a goal, focus on the goal, and ACT to make the goal a reality. It is in manifesting our dreams and goals as reality, that magic is made, and if your life is being lived in service to others, there comes a time when you must stop and ask - are your goals being limited and restricted by your service to the mundane at the expense of your happiness?

I respect that it is not an easy path for some to follow their dreams. I also respect that when you do, you often change in ways that demand that you walk your path alone. You change in ways that make it impossible to go back and that is scary. There are obstacles and fears that give birth to many a reason why you should not or cannot. Sometimes we get lost along the way, we take the wrong turn, we fall down, and we lose sight of our destination, but that too is part of the process of finding self and living both magically and purposefully. There also has to be room for the evolution of the idea and goal, and the acceptance that sometimes one goal and dream needs to be replaced by another.

The big question is though; do you want to live your life in service to others and your fears, or in service to yourself and the Divine? If you have a mundane role that fulfills you creatively and spiritually, then you are blessed. If you only have the former, and you want the latter, then do it.

There must be magic within our mundane lives, and when I speak of magic, I don't mean the magic of fairies, unicorns and the often ridiculous new age notions of what magic is. I mean magic in its purest alchemical form -- the taking of your ideas and dreams and making them part of your everyday world and life, making them manifest."

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@темы: Истории, Интересности