Hi Caroline

I don’t want to minimise what you’ve been through, because you have been through a lot. 🩵

In some way or other, we all change. The only way forward is to keep changing.

Do you ever feel glimmers? Little moments of happiness, where your senses focus on something?

In my experience, the main way to overcome trauma is to mindfully foster positive experiences, with others and whatever it is you want. If you don’t know, maybe try to find it?

A lot of my friends are in their 70s and 80s. So you are half way. Still a lot of life to live.

I am busy, tired and in pain. But things could be worse. I went to acupuncture and that helped. I have food, shelter and loved ones. I’m lucky. 🩵

Hi Caroline

I understand that these things are really hard. 🩵 I’ve been through it too.

After everything you’ve been through, I think you do deserve to feel happiness again and not just like you’re surviving. But really living. 🩵

You’re a strong person, just for being here and getting through the difficulties even though it’s taken a toll on you. 🩵

Hi Caroline,
Thank you for having the courage to express your experience so honestly, and for inviting us to share what we feel.

“I am not the person I used to be”… that is a phrase I’ve sat with many times myself, sometimes in grief and sometimes in quiet gratitude…

In my own life, when I feel like the landmarks I relied on are gone, I tend to panic, feeling as though the entire landscape beneath me has been destroyed. It has taken a lot of time (a lot) to realize that even when my old ways of navigating life messiness break down, the ground beneath my feet is still there… During that lasted experience wondering about the person I am I wrote in my journal: We are map-makers by nature. The Tao (Way) is the realization that the map-maker is also part of the territory. Every time we “return”, whether through a lifetime work or a moment of “seeing”, we are the Tao waking up to itself…. I’m not always able to lean into that, but sometimes…

Richard Wagamese wrote something about life’s friction that has meant a lot to me when things feel torn apart:

life is sometimes hard. There are challenges. there are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man, I sought to avoid pain and difficulty and only caused myself more of the same. These days, I choose to face life head-on and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the hard times are the friction that shaves off the worn and tired bits. The more I travel head-on, the more I am shaped, and the things that no longer work or are unnecessary drop away. It’s a good way to travel. I believe eventually I will wear away all resistance, until all that’s left of me is light. – Embers

“I arc across the sky of my life…” I love that image even though… well something to aim for… and I wonder if anything is really lost in that light…

I don’t have answers for the weight you’re carrying, but I really appreciate you sharing where you are at.

I’ve been reading Matt Haig – The Midnight Train – and reminded of this conversation. I feel he captures the grief of these moments…

There were many deaths in life…
A person, it seemed to the Ghost now, died in stages. And so it was particularly poignant to see himself at a young age. To come was the death of youth, of ideals. Of connection, friendships, principles, love. And these were often just choices. Choices that had seemed right at the time, in the moment, but when you got to the end, to the very last death, you looked back and realized all the lost versions that you left along the way. He missed, right than, the person he had once been. And the goodness that had existed inside him, as natural as the green in grass.

The forwardness of life was a problem, thought the Ghost.
If days could be scattered all over, so on Monday you were forty and on Thursday you were nine and on Wednesday you were eighty-one, that would be more helpful. You would know the fleeting nature of things, realize how many versions of ourselves a lifetime contained. It would make life’s beauty so abundantly clear. The way a sunset was so beguiling because it tells us that every day eventually sinks into night.

Latter in a dialog between Wilber and Charlie: “Reality is always moving,” said Charlie… “Everything is particles and particles aren’t still. They move around in a wave. The quantum wave function… This is physics.”
Wilber watched Charlie take a shilling from his pocket. “See this. When it’s in the air it could land either side up. So it is both heads and tails.” He flicked it and it landed on the stained purple carpet… Queen facing up. “Heads,” Wilber said… “Yeah, but listen, Wibo, with life the coin is always spinning in the air in the present and it has always landed in the past… We are the spinning coin… reality is a spinning coin… It contains many things… The existence of tragedy in your life does not mean that your whole life has to be that way. You’re the spinning coin…” — Matt Haig, The Midnight Train

I like that, the moment the coin lands and is labeled and so defined it becomes the past… and it is here we forget the present, and allow the either or to define us…

We are map-makers by nature. From early childhood, we attempt to chart the wilderness of human experience, drawing neat boundaries around raw emotion and labeling every event that meets us. Yet, in our impulse to categorize, we fall into a fundamental trap: as map-makers, we tend to live only at the exact moment the coin lands. We freeze the outcome, stamp it with a definitive label—Heads OR Tails, triumph OR tragedy—and then set up camp inside that frozen definition.

When we live this way, we inhabit memory rather than presence. We mistake our static maps for the living territory, forgetting that every line we draw is merely a historical record of where the coin used to be. We lock ourselves into past triumphs or past heartbreaks, convinced that a single outcome on the carpet defines the entire landscape of who we are.

The wisdom of the Tao lies in the realization that the map-maker is also part of the territory. We are not detached cartographers standing safely outside of life, observing a series of coin flips from a distance; we are the motion. We are the air, the spin, and the superposition of possibilities unfolding right now. To view life through this lens is to remember that the coin is perpetually in mid-air—always spinning, always active, and holding both Heads AND Tails simultaneously in the vivid present.

Every time we “return”… every time we let go of our rigid labels, step out of memory, and drop our insistence on fixed outcomes… we wake up to this truth. We stop defining ourselves by where the coin landed yesterday, and instead step into the dynamic rhythm of the now. In that moment of awakening, the map-maker becomes transparent to the territory, and we realize that we are the Tao itself, waking up to its own endless, spinning potential.