Part One: Manifestation

Me and my husband left Winter Park, Florida back in the summer of 2012 due to him making the decision to drop out of college. He wasn’t having fun in the film degree in Florida. With no money left, being that we were living off of his financial aid, we moved back to Houston, Texas with his mom. We were living in his old bedroom that was never meant to be a bedroom. It was built to be a dining room. So, we had curtains in the doorway between the kitchen and the bedroom and between the hallway and the bedroom. Before he was married to me, he never had any curtains in his bedroom for privacy.

After we had settled in her house, he got a job being a psychic over the phone making pennies. He really is that good at giving you a show that seems believable. I say that because I sense that he’s not actually spiritual, but he enjoyed trying to make me feel like I wasn’t good enough to be on the spiritual journey.

One afternoon we were practicing the act of listening to spirit. He said he could hear the spirit talking and that the spirit was trying to talk to me. He asked me why I wasn’t listening to the spirit. I told him that I didn’t know why. He pressed it and I said that I couldn’t hear what the spirit was saying. I asked him to tell me what spirit was saying. He told me that I had to be open enough to hear the spirit myself and he looked disappointed in me.

He wasn’t doing the psychic job for very long. He quit and I was looking for a full-time job in retail. I was rehired for a full time at Stein Mart for the position I used to secretly dream of having. I held the title Customer Service Lead thinking I would be setting up employee lunch schedules, coaching employees through their cashiering shifts, and making sure the front of the store was maintained.

I thought that would be the job because someone I knew did that under that title, but that’s not what they had me doing at all. They had me come in early every day to sneak me in the back office to count their money from the previous day, to cashier, to stock the front of the store, and to maintain the front of the store. I wasn’t coaching anyone; I just held a higher title. I didn’t feel good about counting their money. I’m fine with counting my own, but not for another business.

I would go home and express how uncomfortable my job was to my husband but then he told me to stop complaining because it's my job. He spent his time playing video games from what I gathered.

That Christmas my mother-in-law gave my husband a book to help him with manifestation. He never opened the book. I decided to use the book instead because I wasn’t happy and I needed a change in my life. I don’t think he felt the same way.

Every morning, lunch break, and coming home from work I journaled about my gratitude and that I KNEW that the universe was going to pour a miracle into my life. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I wanted something more than what I had. I held the vibe that the universe had MORE for me.

One Sunday evening, my husband and I were visiting my parents, and I received a message from a mutual friend between us on my cell phone. She was asking me if we wanted to move to Battle Creek, Michigan in February. I felt like I had received my miracle! It was the first time I felt like I manifested anything! (that’s not true though. We manifest EVERYTHING we receive based off of our inner beliefs)

After my husband and I left my parents' house that evening and were driving to his mom’s house I told him that I felt I manifested the move to Michigan. We agreed to move there when our room was ready for us.

After that I was feeling stressed because it took ME and MY money to get us there. I felt like I had NO idea what I was doing. I told him that the only money I was willing to spend was the gas to drive to work and back home because we needed the money to move to Michigan.

It felt strange planning that move. Not just because it meant everything was on ME, but I didn’t understand why it felt like I knew one of the roommates living in the house in Michigan. I just kept shrugging that feeling off because I knew I had never met him.

I felt strange asking the management for a transfer to Michigan because I hadn’t been working there for very long. I felt like I had to make up a story because there was no way someone was going to keep me from moving to Michigan. I told the management that my husband’s job was transferring him out to Michigan even though he didn’t have a job. So, the management transferred me to Michigan and said they were going to miss me. I think they were just going to miss having a body working for them and didn’t want to find someone else to hire.

During my last shift at Stein Mart, one of the ladies working a higher position than my position paged me and told me that I was doing a bad job in their audit office. She said I had to do a better job at the next Stein Mart so that no one would be upset with me for doing a bad job.

I learned from someone I trust later, who worked the Customer Service Lead position for years at Stein Mart, that working in the audit office was not part of the job description. They didn’t want to pay someone more money to do that job, so they snuck me in that position instead. In Michigan I had a part time job at Stein Mart just cashiering, stocking, making announcements, and maintaining the front of the store.

I felt really scared when we moved to Michigan because the reality hit me hard. It took ME to financially make sure we were living in Michigan. My husband wasn’t looking for work, he was playing video games. I really didn’t know how to help him feel like it was really important to help with the bills. Growing up my father made the money, and my mother was the homemaker. I guess my husband just liked that I wasn’t making him get a job. Both his parents made the money because his parents were divorced.

It was my trauma response to be the masculine in our marriage. I didn’t like it but that’s what it took for us to live in Michigan.