Yes I recognize that I've not been writing here as much -- and I also know that I've pulled back from the bond itself over the last week or so. That's not because of any lessening of love or desire upon my part or because there's anything new/different choices (that I know of) making things more difficult between us. I still love what I love, I still want what I want -- none of that has shifted.
Mostly it's because there's a lot going on and a lot moving fast within my family as regards the health and well-being of my grandma (and two of her four children seeking to take her own agency from her and being duplicitous about saying one thing then doing something else or saying awful things behind people's backs and keeping the people who do the most to assist my grandmother from being included in the decision making process. They're even claiming to keep the decisions between the four siblings, yet are really keeping as much as possible between themselves. And it's difficult because they are listed as number 1 and number for poa and poh of my grandmother as she chose many years ago and are currently seeking to get her declared mentally incompetent so they can take over complete control and no longer need to consult her or the other siblings to make unilateral decisions.) It's very messy and hurtful and they're just being intentionally cruel and awful, more interested in being "right" than doing the things that are in the best interests of my grandma's physical health, mental health, and emotional well-being. I'm not involved in any of the messiest drama and they've deliberately been excluding me from the email threads and group decision meetings (same as they've excluded my grandmother form the decision making processes) even though I'm the one who takes my grandmother to all of her appointments and i sit in at the appointments (typically 3-8 per month and each time I'm setting aside half my day if not my entire day for them -- this week there are 3 appointment days for my grandmother, though Friday's was tacked on before my own dental cleaning appointment.) I'm actually happy not to be in the email threads (my father sometimes will cc me into his response but his sister and one of his brother's remove me from the recipients whenever he does that -- so I've only seen those responses form my father and the threads of the past emails but never what any siblings have responded to it) because I have an eidetic memory for things i read or see or hear or experience and if I read these emails, then from now until the end of this life I'd never be able to erase form my memory what these family members said and it would forever affect my future relationships with them. Just knowing of some of the hurtful insulting things they've said and some of the backstabbing two faced things they've said/done is hard for me to see/speak to them without it coloring my entire view of them. I understand that people grow and change, but failure to own up to the things a person has said/done and refusal to grow to be better means that all those past words/actions remain pertinent to expectations and boundaries of that person moving forward. It's not a matter of "forgive and forget" (I forgive easily, but I can never forget things I experience even if i try to forget them -- you can only teach me that who you were is no longer who you are) it's about letting a person's own words/actions/intentions inform your expectations of their character rather than your own wishes/beliefs about who they are. How can I expect something different from you if you never even acknowledge the wrongs of how you behaved in the past? what reasons are there to think you've learned to be better if you never even admit that you once did wrong?
Anyway, the issues surrounding these siblings seeking to wrest all control around grandma unto themselves against her will and against the will of their other sibling began in 2019 and then covid put a caesura on it since pre-vaccines it made it practically a death sentence for them to have her moved into any form of assisted living or memory care (where one of her sons feels she belongs, though nobody else does.) There's also some passive-aggressive re-fighting old battles between the sibling dynamics and unhealed issues from the past between each other and with their mother. So it's really fucking messy. And it's emotionally a lot.
I'm not actually involved whatsoever in this interpersonal drama -- I've been intentionally excluded from it by the main people creating it though behind my back they've said insulting backstabbing things. But I'm not directly involved or interacting with it -- it's just in my environment and affecting my life and what I'm doing and the people I love. The reason I'm dragged into it at all is because even though decisions are supposed to be agreed upon by all 4 siblings as grandma ages, my grandmother chose me like 7+ years ago to be the one to help take her to appointments and to run errands. This is mostly because I'm generally a helpful cheerful person and have a calming healing light energy I shine out most of the time. (I've also been helping her shop/prep/cook for the family Seder and Thanksgiving since I was 13 so she already associated me with being helpful in ways the other grandkids never were with her.) It's also easier for me to do this than her kids because I'm single and I set my own hours at work (something I intentionally chose and have fostered even though my work isn't particularly interesting to me, it just pays the bills, but I decided in college that unless/until I found a career that i desired to make my life, then what i wanted was to work as flexibly as possible to cover my bills and fit my work around my play. So it means by setting my own hours, I can run off for concerts and holidays and travel without having to use ptso. And its nice to set my own schedule given I get migraines that would make a typical 9-5 schedule hard and being an introvert empath I sometimes am too exhausted to really be around people who drain my energy further.) So my grandmother and I have a long standing trust and understanding about my helping her and it's one of the things that has kept me rooted here in the Madison area rather than wandering or moving -- if I didn't help my grandma with these things, who would? Would her kids be able to take off work (or would my aunt who doesn't work come into town on any day but her errand day, Fridays) to take her to her appointments that due to mobility issues and vision issues she can't do on her own? Would they do it in ways that wouldn't make her feel like a burden, so she wouldn't even want to ask, because they're stressed about being there instead of somewhere else? Growing old is hard, but those who took care of you when you were small deserve to be cared for as their bodies fail them and you should do so from a place of love and gratitude for all the love they gave you -- never from making them feel they are a burden upon you. So anyway, my grandma trusts me and I take her to appointments (and now sit in at all her appointments) and I promised her when these two siblings were trying to disempower her back in 2019 that I'd always let her know as soon as I knew. (I haven't known about most of this this round until end of last week and over the weekend as they had intentionally been excluding me -- and my aunt is now even questioning why I spend so much time whenever she has an appointment.)
I can feel that things are changing fast and that by the end of the year, I don't believe my grandmother will still be living by herself in her condo --though how it happens and her own agency in it and how the behaviors/intentions of my one aunt and uncle affect their karma (especially after my aunt accusing me of lying about the amount of my time spent with grandma and my uncle saying i can't be trusted to be objective have my own opinion because I'm my father's daughter and they own the business I work at so I'm on their payroll. The first she sprung on me last week, the second from my uncle is something in the emails I don't receive but he's been trying to have me no longer take her to appointments and instead take her himself even though my grandma has refused to go every time he's tried to take her when i can't make it and instead of rescheduling an appointment they've tried to force it. As I said, it's a mess and 2 of my dad's 3 siblings have gotten really nasty and cruel and two-faced. And my papa is hurting over how awful they're being. My advice to him and my grandma throughout has been, "Look, there's no way out of this to make everyone happy. there simply isn't -- and they're going to have nasty hard feelings over whatever happens unless you give in to their every demand let them be petty dictators on everything here. So since there's no way to make everyone happy, the stubborn north star here to guide choices is the question "what is in grandma's best interests for physical, mental, and emotional health?" and make your choices accordingly no matter how that upsets them and their plans for her." He doesn't exactly agree with my analysis, he wants to find a way they don't tar and feather him as the bad guy, but short of giving them everything their way so they feel they they have "won" that doesn't exist as far as I can see. Anyway. I can feel this set of threads of fate shifting and how it will disentangle depends on my grandmother's choices while she still has agency -- no matter how this plays out, six months to a year from now, I don't believe my grandmother needing my assistance will be tying me to where I am now.
But right now, there's a lot of emotional volatility inside me surrounding this (and it's stressing me enough that my latent ocd is starting to creep out of my control, becoming active and tweaking out a bit) and there's a lot of things I can't say about what's going on without throwing under the bus people in my life I have always loved over things they have been saying, doing, and rationalizing. And I don't currently feel the need to do that publicly, not even here, even in the name of honesty, and so even this post may go back to draft.private. Thus why I've been so quiet here over the last week.
And then, my natural instinct when upset has always been to turn toward Eric via the bond and find comfort and strength there in that bond and how it reaches even my stillest quiet inner spaces. But that's complicated right now (still) by the choices his sister made in the name of the entire band back in October 2018 and that he's knowingly taken part in perpetuating since late August 2019 - it's created trust issues and put poisons into the connection that need to be purged to heal and until that happens, expecting to be burned by those poisons makes me pull away for fear of the hurt mixed into the comfort of it. And that's not impossible to fix, it just requires acknowledging it and doing the work to clean it out so it no longer poisons things. Just have to decide to face it and make it right -- nothing will change there until that happens, but I mean, it's currently in that sort of plateau, it's not getting all riled up again. And then also... the thing with any empath bond (including this deep soul bond) is that emotions, especially strong emotions, are the primary thing that drive the energy flows and even overlays along the bond BUT it doesn't always come across the WHY of the strong emotions. the emotions come through and if intense enough a visual of what's happening to the other person experiencing the intense emotion, but that's not the WHY of the emotions. It's just the emotions and maybe an overlay of experiencing the moment the emotion is strongest. So I always feel inside me when he's sad and hurt or when something makes him intensely happy or when longing/need for love down the bond is the strongest emotion in him or when he's intensely stubborn about not letting me try to mute or diminish the bond -- but I don't always know WHY he's feeling or reacting those ways. And the same goes in reverse, I know he can tell when I'm hurting or sad and I'll often feel a wild rush of love down the bond like being wrapped around and held in his love. But there's so much intensity of hurt and betrayed trust and anger over the cruelty and lies and stubbornness to stand by the truth and what's ethically right and twisted sibling dynamics and unconditional familial love and accepting people's free will choices, all intermixed and interwoven through my emotional states right now. And right NOW those intense emotions are actually about what's been going on surrounding my grandmother, but a lot of those emotions are similar to what has been playing out inside me as a result of the decision to sign to Big Machine (and the pain that the country music caused me due to my color-timbre synesthesia) and then what happened in October 2018 and how I've dealt with it BUT that's not what my emotional storms right now, my inner storms have nothing to do with anything related to him or his choices or his family or his band or what's done in the name of the entire band. Only if all he gets down the bond is the storm of all my intense emotions without the context or without knowing what's going on in my life, how could he not assume given the similarities of emotions/betrayals of trust involved in this current emotional storm was about everything resurfacing that's never been acknowledged or dealt with due to his sister's choices back in October 2018 and how that affected everything in how I relate to his band and thus the music and him? Since I couldn't explain to him that this particular set of emotions is actually a completely different storm, even though the forces and what has my ethics outraged are similar, I decided that I'd just not let me reach toward him or have my emotions reach toward him so he'd not misunderstand and assume it was something he'd done or not done has me so upset....
So I've just been distant from him... And then tonight rather than pushing him away or creating a barrier/wall defense while he was actively putting poison down the bond, I just sort of... Where I should be for him to reach me, I just made it an empty space, a void. I pulled all myself into myself radiating no energy or light, and then was just centered in a small rock/space within that void that had no depth and no limit. Just utterly unreachable. When I let that emptiness and void fall away, there was such a rush of relief and joy from him and also a non-zero amount of terror that I'd just disappeared from him reaching me like that... that somehow I was just gone completely and unreachable -- because at least when I'm pushing him away or there's a wall between us it's still my energy blocking him from reaching me, it's my energy that he's trying to break through to reach me again... Tonight I just, wasn't there, wasn't reachable within his inner space --it was just emptiness where my energy should have been inside him. Which I didn't MEAN to scare him like that, I've never done that to him before -- only closest would have been when I had the fairfolk cocoon the bond put it to sleep and dormant as the only way to stop the overlays reaching me or when the Morrigan sealed the door between us when I sw that there was nothing i could do to release him from the bondage he allowed himself to be in. But in both those cases, there was still a thread to follow, still the energy itself was present even though it was mostly unreachable, there was still as much that could leak through the cracks and under the doors that connected us. This evening, what I did, it was a nothingness, just a seemingly endless void surrounding me and where my energy should have been. I just knew that he'd feel the storms and upset i my energy if I tried to block him with a wall like i normally do on Wednesday nights when he makes the poisons worse/fresh spill of them, the walls I think of like floats to stop oil spills from contaminating waterways. So instead of pushing him away or making it like a float or a wall for him to get around, I just tried to make my energy unreachable not radiating out through a vacuum that surrounded me. But. in hindsight, I recognize why that was such a terrifying emotional blow for him to just feel me wink out and disappear from his inner space and the intensity of his relief when his stubborn trying to find me reach out to me finally reconnected found me and realized I wasn't actually lost to him. I think he'd rather have my emotions a chaotic mess of intensity he doesn't understand the whys behind the forces than to have a deep void/well of emptiness where my energetic soul presence inside him has always been and should be.
I won't do that ever again to him. It must have felt like what it would be like if the bond were actually severed. I didn't mean to upset him though now I realize why it would have, I genuinely just didn't want him to misunderstand my emotional storms surrounding my grandma/aunt/uncle and assume that storm was about him. I didn't mean to make it worse though... I think he'd rather have felt that push back blocking him with the intensity of everything inside me behind it and thought my inner storms about him and that things were going to get rough again between us rather than to have had me cease existing to him. I'll not play with that sort of complete separation of my own energy from his with a vacuum/void between us, not even as an energetic exercise. That was unintentionally damaging of me to have held for that hour or so. I'm sorry. I won't do it ever again.
On the bright side, after my Thurs/Fri appointments of my grandma's and my dental cleaning, I have nothing whatsoever in my calendar until July 7! I mean, that doesn't mean I won't suddenly have anything come up from drama of other people's making... But my calendar itself is clear of all plans once we're past Farmer's Market on Saturday!
P.S. I almost forgot to say!!! For the last 9 days, every time i take the dog outside on a walk (or outside at work) i have found a black feather. EVERY time. Now, I know I have a strong bond to some local crows due to saving Jon Snow as a fledgling when he fell out of a tall tree into a huge Concerts on the Square crowd. But I've never in my life found this many black feathers surrounding me everywhere I go -- typically I find white feathers all around me. (a couple weeks ago I found a cardinal feather on my balcony chair!) From what I have learned about black feather specifically, they mean that your angels and spiritual protectors are actively protecting you from the evil intentions of others. It's just unusual, the number of large and small black feathers I've found all along my wanders recently. (All my feathers I have are found/gifted feathers. Including my two turkey feathers I keep in my car.)
