For the First Time Since..

And as the narrator on Jane the Virgin would have said, “and in that very moment, Jane knew she had to write”.

Today I am very much so feeling like I am reliving the emotions Jane had felt moments before releasing the literature whirl-pooling in her mind.

It’s all so clear to me now.

Life is a constant struggle but the struggle is not what defines us, but more so how we cope with it.

I truely believe 2021 is an opportunity to reflect and improve on the misfortunes and lessons learnt throughout the previous 12 months.

Before I continue on the future that is nearing, I would like to back track to Christmas 2020.

I always like to write about the holiday experience, well this one in particular.

Each year the circle of loved ones and family members attending this glistening, annual treasure seemingly dropping in numbers each year. 

For many years as the Christmas holiday continued, depression became my dominant.

The inability to bare another Special day without the ones we once had, still wanted but could never see again, was unbearable.

For the first time in what felt like centuries, Christmas 2020 made me realise that the pain and the suffering, the demons that were bewildering me, had for once vanished (for what I’d hope to be forever). 

The love and happiness and acceptance, the abundance of hope and blessings fulfilled my veins and the air I had breathed.

For years, it had felt as though family were nothing but betrayers, incapable of understanding why I reacted the way that I was. At one point, I thought I lost them forever.

Once stranded in country grass to cities miles away and even suburbs further.

For the first time in years I remembered what it felt like to be a family. 

Although materialistically we had less, in my heart and soul, the one thing I never thought I’d have again, is an honest day with my family, letting the trauma from the past aside for the first time.

After visiting my father in my birth place of Ipswich and soaring the mountains, inhaling the country air as if i had taken a breath for the very first time, I continued my journey west.

The feeling of home surrounded me. Cloaked my skin, my soul and the little girl that was once I, appeared for the first time in a long while.

Stepping foot in the gravel, glazing over the water tower I used to sit on every other week. Wellie boots on, blanket in hand, embracing the livestock and freedom of the Lowood breeze.

How could I return to my home town without saying hello to the one we buried too soon? Seeing my father; mother and sister; and then the opportunity to surround myself with the spirit of my step father.

Placing a flower on his grave, a warmth conveyed the entirety of my body. Rising from my knees with the last bit of strength I had, the winds consumed me and in that moment that little Samara Ward appeared giving the woman That I am now, the strength and courage to let go of the past.

Bloggers,

I know first hand the power of neglect. How isolation and rejection can physically immobilise us. Pain became numbing and hope seemed unrealistic, impossible. 

Repeating to myself daily, “I am successful, I am beautiful and I am strong”. When I find myself drowning in the misery of my own thoughts, using my hands like a heroes cape, wiping away the tragedies falling from my face. Sitting up straight and reminding myself of what is at stake. My life is at stake, and so is yours.

You can not hold onto the past and you can not fear what you can not change.

The glory of life is finding your way back to those that never truely left you heart in the first place. 

To recreate a love, an infinite connection that you temporarily lost and ultimately suffered for it.

Power in life is not money, or quantity of friends or having control.

Power is having the ability to accept, to feel, to learn and to move on.