Nothing's Normal When You're Dead.

It's been a rough four-and-a-half months or so. And things just got rougher.

The Husband is rebuilding an old workshop on his grandmother's land into a home for us, though we've run into a major snag - our friend, J, just broke up with his wife in a fairly spectacular manner, and so will be leaving the state and taking his wealth of rebuilding knowledge with him.

This led to another round of "WHY IS THE UNIVERSE RAINING FIERY DIARRHEA ON MY HEAD" on my part,  which in turn led to me shooting a message to a friend who's a professional psychic about things going Wrong for a while now, and what I'm doing/not doing that may be causing this. Psychic friend's answer was that, off-the-cuff, his opinion is that the Wrong is due to a "deep blow to your self-esteem causing an almost self-induced self-punishment".

I talked to a newly-witchy friend about Psychic Friend's quick answer. "Is he saying you're doing this to yourself?" she asked. Yes and no, I told her. It's not that NewAge thing of "you're poor and suffering from AIDS in some impoverished nation because you didn't think hard enough about being the next Nobel Prize winner" crap. It's more like I'm attracting Icky Stuff the same way a person with chronic low self-esteem attracts partners who aren't generally very good for them, or how if you already have a cold, it's a bad idea to hang out with people who are sicker than you are, and -

I realized that I may not have taken proper steps to get the Bad Woo of my previous situation off of me. I also realized that I am an idiot for not realizing this sooner.

Whilst brooding over this, I went and read R.O.'s blog. He talked about a message he got about being reborn from the bones up, how "you have died, and are being remade". I thought about how I've been telling the Husband that Samhain wasn't "normal" this year, how Faire wasn't "normal" this year, and how I need something to be "normal" pretty damn soon. I thought about how I spent a good chunk of Saturday night relaying messages from a dear friend's dead mother, something I've never done before. I thought about the whole lot of it together, thought maybe I ought to celebrate Saturnalia this year, then pondered R.O.'s cautionary bits about Saturn energy being very, very dark and how Saturnalia looks like a comparatively lighthearted holiday.

As I was about to pester R.O. with this apparent paradox, Something or Someone said, "Nothing's normal when you're dead, girl."

I'm dead. This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable explanation. Nothing's been normal, I haven't been at the top of my game, it's been one-step-forward-two-steps-back for months because I'm dead. People have been saying things that have been really meaningful to me even though they didn't have me in mind at all when they said them because I am being called back, called forth.

I've been looking for answers. I got them. So now it's time to put the pennies over my own eyes, to wind myself in my own shroud, to say goodbye to myself. To send myself off with the proper rites.

Then it'll be time to rise, new as the sun at dawn.