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Balance

Last updated on: October 4, 2014 at 12:47 am   by CJ Blackwood

Balance 2014-10-03T22:50:16-05:00 CJ Blackwood

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I love being a fighter. I went into journalism so I could nail bad guys to the wall for being corrupt and immoral. This category of subjects would include anyone committing hate crimes or discrimination, people causing damage to the environment, the terrible people behind animal abuse, etc.

I learned to be a fighter, to subjugate my actions to my will, no matter how I feel. And I have kind of a funny spiritual set-up. Maeve and Scathach are two rival Celtic war goddesses, and Maeve has brought me great confidence in myself as a woman, while Scathach has only recently made herself known, though not as powerfully as Maeve. The funny thing is that two rivals are working with me at the same time.
Some others that I work with regularly are Athena, Morrigan, Freya, and morena, the Russian goddess of winter, and more recently Sekhmat and Lilith. I’ve learned creativity, wisdom, and strength from them all. The first two I mentioned are most prevalent in my life, and recently they’ve told me something interesting.
I am debating going back to school and getting a second BA, possibly in political science, so I can take my activism to a major level, put myself in position to do some real good. I feel the universe accepts I’m releasing a lot of anger, and that I’ve learned to love a good fight, but a balance has to be struck.
I ended up asking my best friend to help me figure out how to be more patient and tolerant of people’s ignorance of what seems obvious, both in simple situations as well as moral ones. It goes against my grain, because in my mind there’s no excuse for ignorance, especially the variety that is willfully permitted to continue by the person with the windswept mind. If you’re good at catching the threads or making intelligent efforts to catch up, or you weren’t at fault because there was too much going on or because of anxiety, I can pretty much always be counted on not to be bothered by that.
It runs to a deeper issue. What mildly irritates most people actually infuriates me. I’ve always been like that, and the myriad of solutions presented by friends, family, and therapists haven’t solved the problem. If I care about someone, or I know why they get scattered, I can be pretty cool. But I’ve always struggled with patience, especially strangers, classmates who just couldn’t seem to grasp something the third time when they are as smart as I am, that kind of thing. So I have no idea how this is going to work.
I’ve also been instructed to learn a healing art. So we’ll see how that goes.
I have two very active blogs, and an eclectic group I run, plus I have the traditions anthology through Immanion Press for which we published a call for papers a while back. My life is settling down. It’s autumn, the season in which I feel the best about life in general. I’m too harsh, too cold, I guess. That’s become my nature, though if I look at you as family it doesn’t really feel that way. It’s just my response to a world that seems just as cold and harsh. I’m trying to figure out who I am, and balance out a bit more.
It’s the dagger versus the cauldron. The fighter versus the scholar. I know I could be happier if stuff didn’t ruffle me so easily, but to me right now, there is no excuse for those things to happen in the first place, but I can’t say what I really think because it would be so not called for. So I’m ruffled and can’t do anything about it. Especially when I spell something out in the simplest of terms and it still goes over the head of a perfectly intelligent adult as if I spoke Martian. That’s a really big one, that mostly happens with strangers. And I just have to shut up so I’m not being unnecessarily vicious.
Anxiety makes my ability to tolerate just plummet, as well as hypoglycemia, which usually also boosts anxiety. So it can turn into a cycle. I carry a vial of jasmine patchouli oil in my purse that helps with calming, as well as a tumbled clear quartz that seems to suck the tension out of me.
I’m glad I’m getting to this point, where all this anger and upset can be addressed. I think it’s coming to the point of really facing those issues, and coming out far more balanced.
And the funniest realization just struck me. If I can get a grip on this stuff, balance it out with a little warmth, it will make future fights a little easier to win. The desire to work on these things really surged up in the past few weeks, though I knew from the start of my little group that if i wanted to have anyone I don’t already know join, I have to be able to keep a cool professional head. The challenges of leadership with emotional disorders…What FUN!…Except not.
But I like a good challenge. That’s why I am the way I am.

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