An Energetic No

My life has changed so much in the 5 1/2 years since I moved back here, to the place where I grew up. I walk taller than I used to around bosses and bullies. I live more comfortably.  I can run for so much longer than I ever have before in my life--a whole mile, where I continue jogging nonstop and keep my lunch in my belly! (Baby steps, okay?) And if real life had experience points, I'd have gained a bunch of them, between bucket list activities and just plain life happening.

Yet there are other changes that aren't quite so happy. I got fat again after all those years, for instance.

Worse, I also got foggy in the brain. That's what really bothers me.

At first I blamed the fog on stress, sleep patterns, perhaps something I was consuming.

As of the other day, I figured it out.

It started with four innocuous words: 'I'll pray for you.'  These words, although they were meant well, were given with absolutely no thought for my own opinion of them.

While I wasn't excited at the prospect, I left it alone. I didn't do workings or even set specific intentions of my own (in certain areas, anyway) for a very long time. This was mostly because I wanted to see how far I could get with plain old physical and mental effort. It would have felt like cheating otherwise--right?

Well, not so much.

Turns out that if you leave others to their own devices where your own life is concerned, you get what they wanted for you, instead of what you want.

Elementary though that may be, I hadn't realized what a big deal it was to leave that particular cord uncut, that boundary unset. It means my life wasn't a control group after all. It was being controlled, by others, who do not have the right.

So finally, after 5 1/2 years, I took that right away from them.

As soon as I put that declaration into words, in my own mind, something amazing happened.

It got quiet all of a sudden. Where I had previously been engulfed by a smooshy pink cloud of static anywhere and everywhere I went, the cloud vanished instantly. Then I realized it had been there in the first place.

I found it easier to take care of myself, to go to bed earlier, get up earlier, let the daydreams about my book characters flow, and then--wonder of wonders!--write a little bit more about them. Every day I am learning more about that other world where they live. Every day, I am singing the body onto the bones of my story.

Someday soon, my precious story-person will be more than a skeleton, and I will introduce the world to her joyfully. But for now, I drum, I sing, I create the flesh and the hair of the wonderful living creature she is becoming.

That is a very big deal to me.

So now, when someone says 'I'll pray for you' or even 'I'm praying for you whether you like it or not' (which has happened repeatedly), I have already decided to refuse it. Even if I get tired of refusing it out loud, I have drawn a line psychically that no one shall cross. I have said no, energetically, so it doesn't matter if my verbal No is above a whisper. I have spoken.

And now that it's nice and quiet and I can think, I get to decide what to do next.