Becoming the Queen of Wands-Introduction

The audio blog "Becoming the Queen of Wands" is about the author's unexpected journey, sparked by the grief of losing her father. This led to a spiritual and healing journey, and she believes that everyone has their own unique journey in life. The author discusses how significant events like COVID can prompt people to re-evaluate their lives and seek change. She emphasizes the importance of grounding oneself in reality while exploring spirituality. The author acknowledges that her audio blog may not be perfect due to her busy schedule, but she wants to share her message to help others. She plans to structure the blog based on her experiences with Tarot and divination, believing in the power of intuition and connecting to a higher power. So, Becoming the Queen of Wands is an audio blog about my journey into quite a few things that all sort of sparked off very unexpectedly, but following a pretty monumentous grief event in my life, which was the loss of my father. I had a host of other issues afoot at that time, which I will dive into here. And so, I think the grief of my father was really just a sort of a nudge that forced an issue that would have been there anyway, but it kicked off then this spiritual journey for me, healing journey, trauma healing, and a host of other things that became a very unique experience and a very, you know, what could be categorized as a quote-unquote spiritual journey, but it became so much more than that. And not only did it seem to sort of start from a particular time frame and move forward, the more I went forward with it, the more I realized that it was spanning back from well before this all sort of allegedly began for me in 2009. The point of this is, in many respects, the fact that I am a firm believer that what happened with me is not unique, and I believe that everybody has some type of journey that they embark upon in their lifetime. Some are more profound than others and can be more complicated and hard to understand. I believe in many respects that COVID has kicked off a huge change just globally because as we learn in anybody who's taken Psych 101, you learn that there's very few things that cause somebody to change, to truly change. You have to have an incredibly unique event in your life, a massive catalyst, so near-death experience, grief, loss, some type of huge health issue, something that causes a re-evaluation because I think most people have inertia taking place and they just continue to chug on in their lives. And I always say that most people don't change unless they really are forced to hit rock bottom, because as long as you can just skirt right above rock bottom, you're able to just survive. And that's very akin to people who are, for example, sort of quote-unquote functional alcoholics. Because they're able to still function, nothing really prompts dramatic change. And I think for most people, that does end up being grief, loss, or like COVID, as I was saying, a massive re-evaluation about our lives and people taking stock in what's important to them. I think when you have a global phenomenon such as that and you see such mass casualties and so many people, I think, especially with sort of the great resignation, so many people stop to think, what is my life really about? Am I happy in it? Because if it could end tomorrow, is this how I want to look back and think, did I get the best out of my life? Did I enjoy it? And I was pleased to see how many people really did take massive change, resigned, hit the road, did the quote-unquote van life thing. These are all things that I did back in 2009 because I had my own version of an awakening. I had the combination of many things sort of reaching ahead at once. And I'll give a quick debriefer now on that so I can lay it all out. I could sit here and be coy and sort of slowly draw that out, but I don't think, candidly, there's really any benefit to that. I think it's best for me to express out of the gate where I was, what was happening in my life, what prompted this change, because I think and I believe in my heart that I am not the only one that this has happened to and I think there are a lot of people out there going through what I went through 15 years ago who are now trying to navigate what ends up being an incredibly confusing process. And one that can really, in all candor, create a whole lot of borderline psychosis if you're not grounded well enough in it. Adding to that, if you have any type of trauma and dissociation is your go-to default mechanism to handle incredibly overwhelming emotions, particularly sort of grief emotions, trauma emotions, feeling out of control, et cetera, then the more you're prone to dissociate, it's one of your four Fs. So you've got fight, flight, freeze, and spawn. Flight is very much dissociation because you're sort of leaving your body, you're leaving your brain. So if flight is one of your core trauma responses, and most people have all four responses depending on the situation, but generally there's probably one or two default responses that most people have. And so if flight is one of your default responses and dissociation is a portion of that flight response or a component of it, then it's very easy when faced with the type of journey that I went through and which I believe most people are probably embarking upon in some form or fashion, then it's incredibly easy to lose touch with reality in many respects. And you can take a sort of a quote unquote spiritual path that ends up being very, very ungrounding. And the spirituality is accurate and what you're seeing and feeling is actually there. But if you're losing grasp with reality, then you can't tether the two. You can't tether your day-to-day life with the fact that there might be something bigger or greater than we are in this universe. Before I go much further, my ultimate disclaimer on this audio blog is I have a very aggressive full-time job as a lawyer. And so this is not my full-time job. And therefore, I don't have the luxury of time or ability to have a really well-produced audio blog. So my equipment is not as good as most people. I probably won't use the best software. I won't know how to use it. Interestingly, I think we all become our parents at some point. I used to be able to, you know, I could navigate a computer system incredibly well. Now I'm one of those parents that can't even program my VCR if I were to have a VCR. So I think some of that is at play here where other people might be able to do an incredibly well-produced audio blog much more readily than I can. But in weighing the pros and cons, this is something I've wanted to do for many years now. I've started and stopped. I've actually written this in book form multiple times now and just never got it to a place that I felt comfortable that it was where it needed to be to publish. I feel more comfortable in many respects doing the audio blog because I can sort of slowly pull information out. And as I continue to learn and grow, because my process is ongoing, as will be everybody's, and, you know, until we leave earth, our process is ongoing, it will always enable me to add on to what I started from. And so what I might be seeing today, six months from now, I might look back on and see, oh, you know what, I have a new perspective on this. And so I like the concept of an audio blog because it allows for that metamorphosis where the book is very much set in stone. But the point of this is that my level of perfection on this is not going to be where I otherwise would love for it to be, but I've come to the realization that this is something I've wanted to do and has been very important to me, but if I wait until I have the time or until it's perfect, it will never happen. And it's really important to me to get my message out there because I do believe that it can help people. I have pets, so they may make noise in the background now and again. I know that there are people on YouTube and others who I follow who have such good content that it doesn't bother me whatsoever that they have that background stuff that, you know, one of my favorite fitness instructors on YouTube has her cat now and again coming into her video or every now and again, she'll sort of stumble and lose her footing and she just keeps going. And I have utmost respect for that because I think a lot of people would stop, would edit that out, would start again. And I think it's good to have somebody who feels a little bit more real and where you do see those flaws. So I will have plenty of flaws. I will probably get emotional at times because as much healing as I've done and as much work I've done on myself, mind, body, spirit, grief counseling, you name it, I'll still cry in certain instances because I still have things that were so profoundly impactful for me in this process. And my hopes are that that actually helps connect with an audience versus being very robotic and unemotional about things. I think it'll help show a level of vulnerability and if others are going through similar grief and trauma, they might be able to connect to that. So I will try not to whitewash that and just have my days when it might seem like I'm just in mental breakdown mode because I'm talking about something that has me crying. Ideally, I'm going to plan to structure this in segments that's very aligned with my own experience. I have read Tarot and been involved with Tarot, quote, unquote, since I was a kid. My stepmother read it and I now have because she gave it to me. She had this 1970s Rider Waite Tarot deck that I loved. Rider Waite is sort of your traditional deck. She had that deck from the 70s and it's beautiful and she has it in this sort of velvet pouch and at dinnertime when I used to spend time with her and my dad, I would ask her if she wouldn't mind doing a reading for me after dinner and I always laugh and sort of make fun of myself because I was all of maybe like 11 or 12 years old when she first started doing this. And so I have no idea what on earth I would have been asking her about then other than I guarantee you some boy I had a crush on in school. But through the years, I've learned from her and then learned on my own and taught myself. And so I am a big believer in divination. I think there as part of a spiritual journey there. I think everybody has the ability to connect to a higher power than themselves to their higher self. So to their sixth sense where they're able to connect to a level of intuition and see something if they can get sort of a clear mind and get information and input and guidance. And as much as I say here you can become incredibly ungrounded, which you can, I still firmly believe in this. And so from a structural standpoint, I'm actually going to be breaking this into segments that aligns with tarot, with the major arcana in tarot. It's a way to sort of structure it because the way tarot works, the major arcana is set with the first card is the full card, which is zero. It ends with the world card, which is 21. And from zero to 21, the fool goes through this entire journey, the fool's journey, which is very, very aligned, nearly identically aligned with a hero's journey. And I think so much of our paths have that type of progression where you sort of start out very naively and unaware of what you're about to embark upon and then end it. It's your culmination. It's quote unquote the world where you've learned so much and been through so much. And it's not an easy journey. It's incredibly hard. And there are so many people who are inclined to give up, myself included, because it can get that hard. I'm sorry, I'm sitting here on a beanbag. So if you hear the beanbag in the background, that's me just getting settled a little bit. I have a bad back. So you might hear me shifting around from now and again. And my throat gets raspy as well. So apologies for all of the little idiosyncrasies that I have. I also find that now and again, I will do a recording and listen to it later and realize that I've like jumbled up words that I know how to say something like I'll just somehow grab the wrong word by accident. And I do that all the time. So that may happen as well. Just giving all these disclaimers. So with that in mind, I'm going to go into a little bit of detail about the Queen of Wands for those who are not familiar with tarot. The Queen of Wands is one of the tarot cards. So tarot is set up very much like a deck of cards. You've got four different suits. You've got your major arcana, the fool to the world, what I was talking about. And then your other cards are much like a deck of cards with four different suits. So you have wands, swords, cups, and pentacles, or some say pentacle, pentacle. But each of those have cards within them starting from an ace up to a king. So much like a deck of cards. I always try to align or you can very readily align the suits in a traditional card deck with the suits in tarot as well because there's similarities. So like diamonds, for example, in a traditional card deck would be pentacles in a tarot card deck. They have a financial aspect to it. So diamonds, financial, pentacles, money. Hearts are cups. Cups is always about hearts. And then you have spades with your wands and your swords. Wands are about energy in many respects. Thoughts and energy. Swords are very much. Swords and wands are somewhat similar in my mind in that it's thoughts and it's energy, but swords are sort of spoken word. Wands are more a mental word. Pentacles are very tangible earth, energy, finances. And then, of course, cups, hearts are very emotional, heartfelt things. So, for example, if there's a love reading, if you're asking about a love relationship and you get a lot of cups, that's going to be very aligned. But, for example, if you ask about a love relationship and you get a lot of pentacles, then there's this financial aspect that's coming to play that might be overriding the love. So there's all these elements to it. The Queen of Wands as background and why I call this blog or audio blog, Becoming the Queen of Wands, and why the book will be called that once I finally do launch it, is because in many respects, that was my journey. And I think everybody can encompass different aspects of the court cards. And within the Major Arcana, there are also cards that represent people. So you have an Empress card. She is somebody who's full of fertility, abundance, wealth, et cetera. You have the High Priestess card. She's very intuitive. So you have these Major Arcana cards that represent individuals. And then the court cards all have individuals as well. So you've got Queens. You have pages sort of like jacks. You have kings. So the Queens of each of the court cards have different aspects to them. The Queen of Wands has an aspect to her that I resonate with very much and that is very indicative of my journey because she has become, or she is, she embodies a sense of healing after going through a difficult time. So she's outspoken. She can have a wonderful heart to her, and she will protect those she cares about. But she also doesn't take any shit, so to speak. And just as background, I'm from Philadelphia. I swear all the time. I always blame Philly for that, but candidly, I'd probably swear regardless of where I were from. So I will try to keep this as clean as possible. But my apologies if I offend anybody because I do now and again swear a decent amount. I will try to be much more PG on this. So the Queen of Wands has been through it. She's been through hell and back. She's come out of it stronger and better and a fighter and has a sense of self. She has left behind, she's got a lot of scars from the journey, a lot of scars from the journey. But she's got a cognition of what it was for, and she now is in sort of her highest power and is basically sort of this kick-ass, evolved person. And that's why I really resonate with that card. It's interesting because I also resonate with the others, the Queen of Cups. So I love the Queen of Cups as well. The Queen of Cups is a much more emotional woman. She's a very intuitive woman. And so you can possess attributes of each of these. Queen of Swords. Queen of Swords is associated with air signs. So Gemini, Libra, Aquarius. Very verbal. You know, somebody who can sort of cut you like a knife with their words. Queen of Pents, earth energy, Capricorn, Taurus. Shoot, I'm forgetting my earth signs. Uh, what are they? Taurus, Capricorn. Hold on. I'm going to think of it, and then it's going to... Oh my gosh. It'll come to me in five seconds from now. So your earth signs align with your pentacles. And so your Queen of Pents is very sort of, quote unquote, earth motherly, but also financially very stable. So the two of the cards that I resonate with the most, despite my being an Aquarius and sort of, you know, having the Queen of Swords being the card that is aligned with my sun sign. Queen of Wands and Queen of Cups are the two that resonate with me the most because Queen of Cups has sort of the intuitive emotional aspect to her. The Queen of Wands, though, has that fiery... So wands are fire. So that's fire signs, Aries, Leo, Sagittarius. The Queen of Wands, to me, is somebody who's evolved. She's been through the spiritual journey, and she's come out on the other side. She's healed from the wounds. The other cards really don't have that element. The Queen of Wands has basically been through hell and back, and here she is on the other side of it, more learned, able to share what she's learned, to be that teacher for others, to still have that kindness and heart. And one of the reasons I like that card so much is because she does have some overlap with the Queen of Cups in that she's very caring about others. She will cut a bitch, not to be too blunt here, but if you mess with her, she will mess with you back, but she's not looking for trouble. And that's what I really like about her. Every tarot reader will tell you that they have certain cards that represent certain things to them that may not necessarily be traditional, and so there might be people out there that deviate from my perception of what the Queen of Wands is, but that's who I see her as. I see her as somebody who did not necessarily start out strong, or let me rephrase that, because I think she was always strong but didn't know it, then went through this challenging journey, learned, she's been through hell and back, she comes out on the other side, and now she's just in her power, so to speak, and embodies that strength of her knowledge and is now willing to use that knowledge and share with the world, so to speak. And so that's why this audio blog is called Becoming the Queen of Wands, because where I began versus where I am now are so dramatically different. And it's, of course, a progression, and I want to say first and foremost, and absolutely out of the gate, because one of the things that I found to be incredibly hard for me on this journey and that I think everybody needs to know and understand is it is anybody can make change in their lives, and I think the only way to make change is to envision where you want to be. I had a really unique experience at my job back in 2008, I think it was, so before my journey really kicked off, after my dad had died and after I had already been in a very spiritual mindset, but before my journey really kicked off, I was in this work seminar, and I worked for a company that oftentimes had these workshop team building type of events. This one event, interestingly, was geared towards, quote, unquote, diversity, but not diversity the way you would traditionally think, and not diversity as it is customarily now. It was, we had this psychologist come in and talk to us about the mindset of different generations and different generations in the workforce, and why certain generations, so you've got Gen X, you've got the boomers, you've got millennials, though at that time millennials were still pretty young, so they weren't really in that workforce yet, but you have all these different generations and how they approach work, how they approach their jobs, and how you can learn to understand what their drivers are and what their driving factors are, and the fact like Gen Z, for example, thrived in much more social environments, whereas Gen X, which is what I am, we were sort of the latchkey generation, which many will say. We were, quote, unquote, the forgotten generation. I think a lot of Gen X kids grew up at a time when, myself included, when parents were starting to get divorced and it was becoming more the norm. There were a lot more sort of single moms out there, single parents, mothers entering the workforce in the late 70s, early 80s. Kids became, quote, unquote, latchkey kids. They very much raised themselves, and so my generation, Generation X, at that time was really a huge component of the workforce because boomers were getting older and aging out. Gen Z was still pretty young, so this seminar was geared towards helping people understand the drivers of different generations. In the seminar, we had this exercise where we needed to break off into groups, and this background, at that time, I was absolutely falling apart, barely alive, just drowning, drowning in my life. High level, right now, I'll just give you a high level, and then I will go into much greater detail. But high level, my dad had died not long before that, and I was absolutely stuck in a grief wheel of extreme, like crying myself to sleep every night, almost crying myself in the shower, sobbing in the shower almost daily, not really understanding why that grief had struck me the way it did because I didn't have a good relationship with my dad. In fact, I had barely any relationship with him my entire life, so I was really confused as to why I had the level of grief that I had and what that represented and why that impacted me so badly. I was dealing with very, very serious autoimmune diseases that were creating a major issue in my life. I was working a job where I was doing all-nighters on a regular basis, 20-hour days regularly, 18-hour days regularly, an incredibly demanding boss. I was a people pleaser. I was codependent. I had no real sense of self, so the more I got accolades at work for being, you know, a quote-unquote machine and being the person who worked 24-7, the better I felt. But of course, all of my self-worth was coming from outside of me, and so I wasn't generating it alone within myself. I had no self-worth. I was anorexic, very anorexic, and riddled with sort of an eating disorder pattern for many years. It was the only way I felt I was under control of anything in my life. I would, at its worst, I'd get on the scale probably 20, 30 times in a morning before I went to work while I was exercising, so I'd be exercising, getting on the scale, exercising, getting on the scale. It's so interesting now because I can say that, and many people who experience trauma will have the same phenomenon as I'm explaining here, which is you can say that, and you know it's true, but it seems so real to you that it's sort of, it's so surreal that it's, that you almost question yourself and think, did that really happen? And the reality is, is yes, it absolutely happened. Because of the autoimmune diseases, which are really bad enough that they actually used me to teach students at a major hospital in New York City. So they were very bad, very sort of intertwined, complex, didn't necessarily make sense. But the medications they had me on shut down my immune system so badly I was in the hospital constantly with infections, viral infections, bacterial infections, bronchitis, shingles on a like regular basis. I had shingles because my immune system was nothing. And so I had, you know, old chickenpox virus in my system that was just continually getting triggered, cold sores, that type of thing, just this constant viral overload occurring. I had chronic Epstein-Barr. So I was barely alive at that point and struggling. And every night I used to walk to my car. I was oftentimes the last one to leave the office unless my boss and I were working late together, which we oftentimes did. And so it was very much my boss and me. And that then later became a dynamic that was profoundly impactful for me as that relationship began to disintegrate. So I would walk to my car at night saying to myself, I'm circling the drain. I'm circling the drain. Like, I can't keep doing this. I was taking a medication at the time called Provigil, which doctors will prescribe to people who have chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Epstein-Barr, lupus. All of these are things that I have. So to help them get a little bit of energy because you just getting up and showering in the morning is enough to make you need to crawl back to bed when you have trauma on top of that. And I'm a firm believer that autoimmune diseases and trauma, I'd say 80% of the time, maybe more, have an interplay. And I think it is a rare event that you have somebody who has trauma who probably doesn't have some type of autoimmune response to it. If you've ever read the book, The Body Keeps the Score, you'll learn why. I cannot recommend that book enough. It's fabulous. I prefer to do it in audio book, in part because I'm completely blind at this point, and none of my glasses are good enough, and the print in the book is pretty small. So I love the audio book because I can sort of listen and digest it as I'm doing other things, but I'm actually a visual learner. So in that instance, it's a little bit of a deviation from my norm. But the point of this tangent is that in 2008, I'm at this workshop. I am absolutely barely surviving at the time. I am such a mess. There are no words for it. I have virtually no friends whatsoever. The provisional made me borderline manic and have quasi sort of Tourette's type of responses to things where I would say things. They would come out of my mouth, and I don't want to be inconsiderate to people who have true Tourette's because obviously that's a medical condition, and it's very different. But it's the best way for me to explain what in many respects is also sort of a trauma response, that there's a lot of work out there, so to speak, written work, verbal work, blogs, et cetera, that speak about how people who've had trauma can have very neurodiverse approaches to things, so almost an autistic approach. I think the reality is that when you've had trauma, your brain gets so scrambled, and obviously they have so many studies of soldiers, for example. They do MRIs on their brains, and they can see where the PTSD has changed their brain and changed their neural pathways. So with me, and I think with quite a few people who've had trauma, you can have an almost sort of quasi-autistic, quasi-Tourette's type of unfiltered responses to things. So I would blurt things out that I knew weren't the right thing to say because I knew it was inappropriate, but I wouldn't have the censorship or ability to stop myself from doing that. So making friends was difficult for me. I didn't have a lot of them because I had a lot of trauma from childhood and other stuff, which I'll go into. I didn't trust people very much. I'm a very sensitive person and very empathic person, and anybody who's had trauma in their childhood learns very quickly to read the slightest signs in another person. So you can tell when a face changes, a tick on a face, an eye movement, you name it. You have such heightened hypersensitivity to other people's behavior that you're picking up on things at a level that becomes borderline intuitive. So you're now picking up stuff in a sick sense, and you are seeing in others what many people don't see, and you're already prepared for it. And if you see a facial change or anything that you know could potentially lead to a trauma issue. So, for example, somebody getting angry at you, then your 4Fs kick in, your fight, flight, fawn, freeze. So I had a lot of interpersonal issues. And as time went on, as a younger kid with this really outgoing, I'm not going to refer myself as popular necessarily because I think that sounds really arrogant, but I was bullied pretty badly. I think a lot of kids were. You know, every school has their mean girls, so to speak, and their mean boys. I think being, you know, I think mean girls are notorious. I thankfully grew up before social media. I have such respect for kids these days having to deal with bullying and cyberbullying with social media. You know, the worst that I had to deal with was, you know, people passing notes about me and talking trash about me in school and stealing my stuff and, you know, spreading rumors and that sort of thing. But at least it was contained within a smaller environment, whereas obviously with social media, the whole world can be privy to that. We didn't have smartphones when I was in school, thankfully. So I was bullied pretty badly by people. But in the grand scheme of things, it could have been so much worse. But I was generally social. I had a good group of friends. I did well in school. I was on sports teams and played well for those teams, you know, was captain of two of both field hockey and lacrosse teams and played varsity for four years. So you're pretty involved in that and had friendships through that. So I always had good friends. And then as time went on and some of that trauma from my younger years became more and more embedded in me, then making friends became more difficult. You get out of school, you get out of college. I got out of law school. Then you're in the real world. And I was finding it more and more difficult to make friends. I always seemed to thrive much better in a school type environment where you just where you really were forced to spend time together. I'm very introverted. So if that's not being thrust upon me, I then go retreat. So the point of this huge tangent and going back to this seminar that I did on diversity of different age groups was the facilitator was a psychologist and he had us go into these breakout groups for quote unquote team building. And I dreaded team building. I dreaded it because I hated that forced socializing. I was incredibly shy. I mean, in light of everything I just said, I simultaneously was one of the shyest kids. I remember my dad having a horrible accident with a chainsaw that he managed to just make an idiot move with a chainsaw and chop his head open. He was in the hospital and we were waiting in the waiting room at the hospital to see how he was doing. And I was starving or thirsty, one or the other, or maybe both. I was so shy at the time. I was probably 12 or 13 years old when this happened. I was so shy that I was afraid to ask a stranger for change to get something from the vending machine because this was like before this was when vending machines were exact change only. That's how shy I was. So despite the fact that I had, you know, good social aspects in some of my schooling, I was simultaneously incredibly shy and also that, you know, highly empathic, highly intuitive could pick up, you know, the slightest movement on somebody and then would retreat for self protection. So you get me into my corporate world and the forced socializing was just torture for me because I was such an introvert. I am an INFJ on Myers Briggs. You have to pull me out of my world to force me to socialize. And after socializing, I am so, I just pick up everything around me. So I am wired and then I crash because I feel like I've had the life stepped out of me. So these events at work were always really difficult. But what the facilitator asked us all to do was to sit down and envision what we wanted our life to be. If we could have a perfect life in 10 years, what would that life be? And I remember at the time, despite the fact that I was absolutely circling the drain and barely surviving, I remember when we had to go around the room and say what our life was. I had nothing. I basically said, well, I just want to be where I am now. I love my job. I want to, you know, do what I'm doing. Hopefully, you know, I'll be more accomplished and hopefully I'll be married with kids. That was the best I could come up with and being married with kids. So my whole life, because of what I grew up in, which I'll go into detail about in my next segment, all I ever cared about was love and happiness. They were the two things I wanted in my life, love and happiness, because they were the two things that had escaped me so dramatically my whole life. I was born into a really, really traumatic life without that. And so love and happiness, love and happiness. So getting married and having children and creating a family of my own where I could create that and have that love and have somebody love me, which I had not had growing up. That was really my biggest dream. When we went around the room and I heard other people's dreams, it was really jarring for me because I realized how little I ever thought about a future for myself. And all of these other people have these beautiful, elaborate dreams of where they wanted to be in 10 years. At the end of this exercise, the facilitator said to us, I work in mental institutions. That's part of my job as a psychologist. And I do this exercise with the inpatients to help the inpatient see a life outside of these walls of the institution that they're in. This is how they help get themselves out because they see something beyond it. That was so resonating to me and so jarring because I realized at the time, and this is before I first picked up The Secret or any books on manifestation, it was the first time I realized that if you can't see a future and you're just stuck in what you're in, circling around, then you're never going to get out of it. The only way you can get there is to envision it. And I firmly believe in this, and I have more examples than I can begin to go into, which I will go into during the course of this audio blog. I have more examples than I can count of times when if I set my intentions on something and put something in my mind of what I wanted to accomplish or do, I got there every single time, every darn time. So I'm a firm believer in the ability to, quote unquote, manifest change. There's a wonderful book called Manifesting Change that I cannot recommend it enough. It's so good. So I'm at the time, unaware how to get myself out of this horrible cycle that I'm in where I keep saying I'm circling the drain. And it's interesting because the vision of circling the drain, of course, has you in a circle. It's a cycle. It's something you can't break and you're just circling it. It was only in the summer of 2009 when everything reached ahead for me that that started to change and that I got, in many respects, sort of thrust out into this journey of change that I think, well, I know I wanted, I know I needed it and I know I wanted it. I can't tell chicken or egg. I can't tell if life, the universe, spirit, God, whatever nomenclature you want to use. I can't tell if life thrust me out or if there was this sort of inherent desire within me to thrust out already, which I think is probably the case, and that I finally put some traction on it. I finally was able to create that momentum because as I continued further in this journey and looked back, I realized that this journey had started ages before. It started as long back as law school for me or even earlier, despite the fact that it was, you know, I was 36 at the time and not 23, so 23 whole years of, or sorry, not 23, 13 years of life between law school and this moment when it was sort of all leading up to this massive change that then prompted huge, huge shifts in my life where I am now no longer the same person in any form or fashion. And I think I'm going to end this segment with the following, which is one of the most profound things that I've learned on this journey, and sadly it took me way, way too long to learn it. And so my goal here is hopefully to have others learn from what I've done and learn from my mistakes so that they don't repeat it because my journey took so much longer than I ever wanted it to. I was so naive thinking, oh, I'll just think a happy thought and everything's going to change immediately. And, you know, in three months, my whole world's going to change. If you have any fundamental trauma, illness, pain, grief, loss, you name it, it's going to take you a while to change it. And I hate saying that because I think if people think something's going to take a long time or it's going to be hard, then they don't want to do it. But I guess my goal here is to demonstrate that despite how hard it can get at times, it can be, not that it can't be, it will be the most rewarding thing. And you will look back on the hardest times and be grateful for them because 99% of those times, the hardest times are a catalyst for some type of learning or growth. If you just enable yourself to learn and grow from it. What I was starting to say is one of the things that I learned in this whole experience was you cannot manifest change in your life if you are in a trauma state. It cannot be done. What you're going to end up manifesting is your worst nightmares coming true because that's where your mindset is. And people who've had really, really bad trauma are used to that. I mean, it's that patterning. And it's why people, sadly, who've been abused get in abusive relationships. It's why, sadly, people who've had really bad trauma catastrophize because it's what they know. It's all they know. Then it's so sad and heartbreaking that they don't know anything other than that. Because if you don't know anything other than that, how are you going to climb yourself out of that? How are you going to see that future and get yourself towards there? Because you will get stuck in the catastrophizing, and you will get stuck. And the first time you have a setback, which you're going to have, it can knock you down so badly and make you want to give up. And it's only the most tenacious spirit that will get knocked down and say, nope, I'm going to keep going. I'm going to keep going. And then you get knocked down again. And it becomes very rocky, Balboa-esque. And being from Philly, I live for Rocky. Rocky is, and has been since I was a kid, my favorite movie. I still cry watching it. I own them all. I will watch them all now and again and cry to this day. I've seen them more times than I can count. I loved those movies before. I loved those movies as a young kid, before I even had all of the things that made me personally resonate with him as a person or as a character. But it's very much that Rocky theme of get knocked down, get back up, knock down, get back up. And you just have to be tenacious enough to keep getting back up and fighting back. In many respects, what I was hoping this audio blog to be, and I always used to say this about my book, was it was like a little bit of eat, pray, love, sprinkled with a little bit of sex in the city, sprinkled with a little bit of Rocky Balboa, all sort of tied into one. I will say, in addition to the fact that you can never manifest well, you can manifest, but you just manifest your worst nightmares. But in addition to saying you can't manifest your positive outcome if you're coming from a very trauma state, I also, as much as I have respect for Eat, Pray, Love and Liz Gilbert and her journey, I think even she would say nobody can heal in a year's time. So that book, of course, is the snapshot of one year of travel. If you truly have trauma and you truly have major things you need to heal, it's going to take longer than a year. There are certain things that you can fast track and you can go quickly, but there are other things that just simply take time. And so as I wrap this intro up, I will just, I'm going to give a snapshot of who I was, which I've already given to a degree, versus where I am now. So in 2009, when this really began, full force, despite the many year lead up, I was, as I said, workaholic. I was a binge drinker, though I had very few friends. So it's interesting. But when I did go out, I would binge drink to the point of causing myself near death because I was on medications that had shut down my immune system so badly. Autoimmune diseases, as I said, so complex that they used me to teach students at one of the major hospitals in New York. Metabolic bone disease, where if I go for a jog, for example, my hip just fractures on me, fully displaced fracture, go for a jog, my hip fractures, my foot fractures, you name it, just really, really difficult bone disease. The medications for the autoimmune diseases, one of which was an organ transplant anti-rejection drug, shut my immune system down so badly I then was getting cancer. I'm severe, severe, severe childhood trauma, severe childhood trauma, which only later was diagnosed as complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm probably going to forget stuff. That's a sad thing. I'll list 50 things here and still forget something. Sadly, I managed to get myself into domestic violence situations and was living with somebody who was a, I believe, a sociopath. That's my personal opinion, not diagnosed, but that's my personal opinion, especially from all of the training I've now done on cluster B personality disorders. I was sort of a, quote, unquote, survivor of domestic violence, but hardly a survivor because it impacted me so badly. I was petrified of having a relationship with anybody or allowing anybody to get close to me. That was compounded by the childhood trauma. The childhood trauma was, sadly, all different forms of abuse. The skin cancer that I had was creating an incredibly challenging decision that I had to make, which was, do I treat the diseases and potentially die of cancer, or do I stop treating the diseases and not die of cancer, but then I can't get out of bed and I don't have a relationship with my family and my dad was dead, so I had nobody to take care of me. Part of the reason why the loss of my dad was so profound to me was I knew, despite the fact that we didn't have a good relationship, I knew he was the one person who I could rely on, that if all hell broke loose, I'd have someplace to go because I had an ongoing, petrifying fear of being homeless, petrifying fear of being homeless, which was pervasive in everything that I did. I'm trying to think of what else. I mean, anorexia, as I noted, just trying to rack my brain for everything. I'm sure there's other things. Severe codependence. So as much as I feared love, I was so codependent. I would cling to anybody and everybody. CPTSD can exhibit itself in borderline personality type of traits where you overshare, you overblend, you overmorph, you meet people and you go from zero to 100 overnight because you sort of want somebody to be your rescuer or your savior. I had a horrible Cinderella complex just begging somebody to come save me because I didn't know how to manage my life. I would get triggered very badly by certain social situations where I could pick up negativity from certain people, and I would see it when others wouldn't see it, and that became incredibly difficult for me. My pets were my life. They were my everything because pets love you unconditionally. You have, you know, you can create such a bond with them. They don't hurt you. They don't screw you over. You know, they are your ideal when you're sort of a traumatized person. Pets are your ideal because they're safe. So my pets were everything, and they were everything in an unhealthy way where if something happened to one of them, I would spiral so badly. From the age of 12, when my mother threw everything my stepfather owned out the window, that was the beginning of me having suicidal ideations and just feeling so stuck in life and so overwhelmed that I saw no way out other than death. So that was something that had plagued me from age 12 on, which was always sort of prevalent in the background, that when I got, quote unquote, stuck or felt trapped in something bad, my default was I just want to die. So I was constantly living with that. I think these are the biggies. I guarantee you I've forgotten something, sadly, but that is what I was facing in 2009. Where I am now, it's 2023. It's been a long haul, but I'm in a new job. It's by and large, it's an aggressive job, and it's exhausting because I've got a lot of people pulling at me, but my hours are nowhere near what they used to be. I've done all alternative healing to heal the diseases and have successfully gotten off of all of that medication that I was on. There's a couple things, unfortunately, I still have to take for a long period, for many, many, many years, for almost 10 years at least, longer, I was taking no medications. But unfortunately, I've had a couple glitches of things that have happened where I'm currently taking medicine, but my hopes are that I can get off of it. So I did all alternative healing to get off that medication and to function as well or better as I had been doing. Those infections are gone. I've done trauma therapy, like nobody's business, but sporadically. I mean, admittedly, I had some sporadic elements with it where I tried other things that then I only realized later weren't working. I'm now trained in a host of energy healing and other types of modalities that are very sort of quote, unquote, spiritual new age. I believe there's a time and a place for everything. I've healed from that codependency. I've been through hell and back with relationships, which I'll be going into, but I'm stronger, wiser, more sound now than I was. I'm bruised and battered, as is the Queen of Wands, because my journey was hell at times, for sure. But the person I am now is so much stronger than you can ever imagine. I had been. I now have the luxury of having lived. I left Philly, and I love Philly more than anything. Philly is my absolute, my heart belongs to Philly, or my soul. I can never tell if it's my heart or my soul, but then the other part of me, so whether it's my heart in Philly or my soul in Philly, the counterpart to that loves Sedona, Arizona, which I didn't even know existed when I embarked upon this. In 2011, I stumbled upon Sedona when I was out west doing something, which I'll go into. Fell in love with it and was just never the same again. Came back every chance I can get and eventually bought a house in Sedona. So it had the luxury of all of these beautiful things. I lived in Denver for a while, owned a home there, which I'll go into. So I had all of these things happen, and my world got turned upside down in the midst of this, and it was absolute hell at times. I learned about what soulmates are versus twin flames, all of this stuff that's now these crazy buzzwords and becoming this popular thing, which I'll talk about. I have very strong opinions on all of that because I've had to live and breathe it. I've been around the world and back on spiritual aspects. I've been to Bali. I've actually stayed at this place where Liz Gilbert stayed. I've been to Egypt several times. I've done a lot of spiritual work in Egypt. All over the place, all different areas around the world. Glastonbury, which I absolutely love. Mount Shasta, which interestingly, the mountains, I have very, if for anybody who knows anything about that, Mount Shasta, and for those who don't, there's a Lemurian connection to Mount Shasta. I've learned about all of these ancient civilizations. I've learned about all of the spiritual New Age stuff. I've seen what works. I've seen what doesn't work. I've seen how spiritual gurus can become severely narcissistic and absolutely detrimental to the people who work with them. I've lived it, and I've breathed it, and I've made a million mistakes, and I've learned a lot and become a better person from all of it and have healed so much trauma. As I said, I still cry about certain things now and again, and there were certain things that if I tap back into the feelings at the time, that I will cry about. And so, again, my hopes are that that emotion being conveyed will not create a barrier between me and anybody listening to this, but actually will create a connection because they'll sort of feel and understand it. So this audio blog, Becoming the Queen of Blondes, is about my journey, the hero's journey, the fool's journey, my journey. And it's interesting because as I was embarking upon this journey, I had a tarot reading with somebody, and it literally began with the fool card. First card was the fool card. Last card was the world card. And at the time, I did not know the significance of that, and now I see the significance of it, and it's pretty cool. So I will begin to break these segments out. Some of them might be longer than others. Some might be really long, so it'll take a while to get through them, but ultimately, it'll hopefully be 21 segments. Or actually, it's 22 if the fool is the zero card, so it's actually 22 total segments, where I break this out and explain all of it with my ultimate goal being to have somebody out there because I had so many books that were so helpful for me and so many YouTube people who were helpful to me, and I'm going to give utmost props to all of them because they deserve it. And so you'll hear me say names of books and people who I've followed over the years who, for me at least, and for many, certain people resonate with you at a certain time, and then you will reach a new layer of healing on your journey. And I say this all the time. It's like a watch gear clicking. You click forward, and once you click forward, it's there. You've clicked. You've made that leap forward, and you don't go backwards. You've created a level of healing where you can't go back. I also use the analogy of a video game, and it reminds me of playing, I always say Donkey Kong, and it's interesting because I never really played that much Donkey Kong as a kid. I played Pac-Man and Q-Bert. I had a Q-Bert watch that I played constantly. I mean, hours on end playing that darn Q-Bert watch. I don't know how I did it because it was tiny, and I'm not sure how on earth my eyesight could have handled that, but it's the blessing of a child's eyes. I equate healing also with a video game where you start at a certain level, and then you finally master that level. And you keep losing your players, but you master that level, and you're pretty battered, but you get to the next level. And by the time you get to level two, you're great. You've got level one down. You've mastered that level, but you get to level two, and then level two, of course, is so hard. And you lose some players, and you have to get back up to level two and get there where you need to be to keep learning and growing. It's much like that. This journey is much like that, that watch gear clicking. It's getting to that level two. You can't unlearn that knowledge. Once you get that knowledge and you get that healing, it's embedded in you. And there might be times when you've got new layers that you have to work on, and you have to start at ground zero with it. But you're always a step forward. And so part of my goal with this audio blog and in teaching about this is helping others sort of get themselves to that, to continue to move forward in their journey and have that resonance with what I speak about here so that as we all continue to click that watch forward, and for myself, I've clicked so many gears forward, but I still have so much to do. We all do. And so there will be moments when, as I said, I might learn something new in the context of doing this. For all we know, I'll have all new insights six months from now. But my goal is to ensure that hopefully my insight will help others. And as it relates to those watch gears clicking forward, there are certain people who I've worked with, certain healers, certain authors, whatever it might be, when my watch gear clicked forward, they then fell away because I got everything I needed from them. And then somebody else came in to teach me something new to replace it. And I very well may be that. I might be just a part of somebody's journey because they get what they need to get. For me, their watch gears clicked forward, and that's all they need, and off they go. But if I can help in any way, then that's really my goal. And I want that because there's so much that I feel and believe and see, and I don't speak it. And then I hear somebody else say it, and I'm like, you know what? I thought of that 10 years ago, and I didn't say it. So I'm finally just going to say it. And my hopes are that it will benefit somebody and that I'll get it out there and be for somebody what others were for me and help them on their journey. So with that in mind, it's been an hour, just an hour perfectly. So I will call it a day on this segment, and then we will start kicking off formally with the full card, so to speak, in the Tarot's journey with the next segment. So I will chat with you then.