2021: The Year Of The Ox

The ox in Chinese culture represents the pinnacle of strength in the face of adversity, an animal of great importance due to it's role in agriculture. Oxes are fully capable of achieving their goals by relentless strives towards personal success. They are not easily mailable to the persuasion of others, nor their environment. They persist in doing things according to their ideals and capabilities, and are not afraid to power down the beat of their own drum.

Sure, the resurgence of zodiacs quickly rising from the grave of dead 90's trends, back into our collective culture once again has been fun for some. It has also induced eye rolls for the rest of us. Regardless of your stance on the validity of the stars dictating the underlying tone of who we are deep down, there is an important takeaway we can all understand from this symbolic animal. Their resilience when at the brink of failure. An attribute that is not easily developed, but rightfully earned when you have been fortunate to find yourself with absolutely nothing but your strength. The hardest lessons that seem insurmountable to conquer, bare the most fertile seeds beyond their rotted exterior. What is specifically unique about these times we are currently living in, is that there is not one single person alive today who has not been touched by the hands of 2020's relentless devastation. The course of each one of our lives has significantly changed in some fashion, big or small. We are all desperately struggling to cling to some form of normalcy. Myself included.

2020 in my own little world was a year comprised of countless upheavals, and loss of a life I had found myself despising every moment of. But could not muster the raw courage to take responsibility for, to actually fix. The isolation brought on by the pandemic stopped me dead in my tracks, grabbed me by the shoulders, and slowly turned me around to finally meet the eyes of my most personal demons. The tireless scramble I have ran for nearly a decade has finally ceased, and I looked down the trails of two paths which lied ahead. Do I continue my compliance to my addiction fueled by trauma to run me into the ground, or will I stand up on my two feet and grab this demon by the shoulders and show him the door once and for all? In reality, I only had one option. And that was to become the ox and stand my ground. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, so granted, the rest was history.

Winning my battle with addiction, losing my fiancé, revitalizing my relationship with my family after being the estranged daughter was nothing short of a miracle. I used every fiber of my being, day in and day out, to build an indestructible windmill that could withstand the most violent of winds for the time to come.

In retrospect, I commend my past self for taking those shaky steps in the direction of change. To at last, come to grips with the abuse I had grown sick of killing myself to drown out with copious substances. Through the guise of intensive therapy for a year was an unparalleled act of vulnerability, that opened up a world of pain I thought unimaginable. Yet the windmill I had built with my bare hands stood strong. It truly was a coming of age chapter unlike no other I could conjure up, only experience for myself. Trial and error was the name of the game, I had no idea what I was doing during the first quarter of my transformation. I tried my very best to simply just do, read, eat, sleep, think, speak, walk, and love with a sense of gratitude as if today was my last day on earth. I lived in the present. I subscribed my time to people and books that continued to help promote that sense of present-ness. The growing pains kept me up some nights, but over time did I level out. I found that it is already hard to love ourselves as is, but to forgive ourselves is a whole other beast. I lived a life absent of normalcy for as long as I could remember, but was abundant of abuse in every one of it's forms. But I was no longer a victim, I was a survivor.

Before my decision to walk down the path of sobriety, I had found myself slowly becoming the very person who had hurt me, I couldn't believe who was staring back at me in the mirror. That pain was not transformed, so it had transmitted onto those I loved. It transmitted like a disease, working it's way into the way I treated my friends, my family, my ex fiancé, myself. I had pushed them all away, had hurt them deeply in the process, and have even lost a few of them forever. Most importantly, I had lost touch with who I really was without the drugs. I had to take accountability for every inch of it right away. I had to wake up and smell the coffee before it was too late, before I truly fell off the deep end.

I commend my initial consistent efforts of meditation, studying Buddhist ideologies, the power of our breath, and a routine developed through said trial and error was my seeds to success that continue to grow tall to this day. These new facets of knowledge allowed me access to a fulfilling life I thought I would never see come to fruition in a million years. These shots in the dark aimed at teaching myself countless forms of self regulation, had at last allowed myself to sit with the grief of all I had lost. Unearthing and shaking hands with my deepest traumas, and accepting the death of who I once was. It gave me the courage to go back to school, when I had always convinced myself I was too old to do so. It gave me confidence to write again, when I had again, convinced myself I was too X, Y, Z to do so.

The person who I once was, that had finally died, had chose to breathe life back into this person I am today with her final breaths. Her final efforts will not be for nothing, quite the contrary. I will continue to breath life into better versions of myself, and die continuously until I truly die once and for all. I commend her raw courage to take the plunge, not knowing what was on the other side. I will honor her memory each day, until this version of myself I have built is ready to pass. And so on, and so forth.

There inevitably comes times we will look into the eyes of our biggest fears, I think to be as much of an ox as possible is our best bet. We may not know what is down that unbeaten path, or what we will do to truly bring about the winds of change. But what is for certain is that you will at least be walking in the opposite direction of who you once were, you will die, and become reborn into something even greater.

You will be building your very own windmill.