I have a medical issue that I have been trying to completely clear for a very long time. Over the years, I have looked at it from every direction / every angle I could think of (clearing emotional root causes as well as trying to address it nutritionally, etc) yet still not seeing the lasting results I was hoping for. The discouragement I have felt over the years, each time it flares up, has often brought me to the point of frustration (bordering on depression).
With my most recent resurgence of symptoms, I decided to try approaching it in a new way. Rather than trying to figure it out myself, the other night before I went to bed, I told my guides that I would love the issue to be healed while I slept, if that was possible and if it was something I needed to work through myself, I asked that I at least be shown what I hadn't been able to see on my own.
When I woke the next morning, I kept hearing "TSA. TSA." At first I felt frustrated by that - saying to myself "What's TSA got to do with it?" and then giggled to myself as I heard Tina Turner singing "What's TSA got to do with it, got to do with it" in my head. Then like a movie playing in my mind, I saw my last experience with TSA and with it, a flood of memories from a pretty awful weekend I had many years ago. As each piece of that weekend came back to mind, I thought "Oh, I forgot about that" and "Wow, I forgot that happened too."
I liken it to finally dealing with that closet in your house - you know, the one you stuff all the things you don't know what to do with or where you stow things away when you have company coming, to the point where you can barely close the door anymore. After laying there for a few minutes, recounting all the details of that weekend, I felt the way you might if someone had emptied the closet and strewn the contents all over the floor (and you are wondering how all 5,000 of those items could have possibly fit in that tiny coat closet). LOL
It was the year that my best friends from college and I were all turning 40. When I was in college, there were a group of 8 of us that were absolutely inseparable. Four of us girls and four guys. We did everything together and a party wasn't a "party" until all of us were present and accounted for. In the years since then we still managed to get together a lot, usually requiring me to fly up north since almost everyone had settled in the same general area. With everyone but me married and having children, we had drifted a bit but I had managed to remain in close contact with almost everyone.
On that particular weekend, I was invited to attend the 40th birthday bash of one of the gals and much to my disappointment, she had only invited me and one of the other girls from the old gang to her party. Several of the other members of our group lived in the area but weren't invited, which I understood was her choice, but it put me in an awkward position. I could fly into town and either tell them why I was there and risk them feeling uncomfortable / upset that they weren't included or lie to them about why I was in town, which felt equally gross. I decided to go with the third option which was to fly up there for the party and not tell any of the others that I was in town (which didn't feel good either but it felt like the best of the unpleasant options I had).
I reached out to a guy I had dated briefly about 5 years earlier to see if I could stay with him while I was in town. He had just moved there and didn't know many people, so I figured I could bring him with me to the party and give him a chance to meet a bunch of new people. Well, I had forgotten what it was like to be around him until I was there and in less than 24 hours, I deeply regretted the choice I had made. He was one of those people who would switch back and forth between being the kindest, most thoughtful person to being insensitive and borderline mean, then back to thoughtful and kind again. The pendulum of his behavior never stopped swinging so being around him threw me off kilter so much I didn't know which way was up. It left me feeling increasingly raw and out of balance.
By the end of the weekend, all I could think about was how much I wanted to just get home. The time I had spent around him pushed just about every button I had. The party wasn't all that much fun. The music was so loud you couldn't carry on a conversation and it was raining so hard that you couldn't step outside to talk. The birthday girl was so busy being the host of the party, we didn't even get a chance to visit. I felt guilty about being in town and not seeing my other college friends. It felt like a whole weekend of bad choices on my part.
As I was making my way through security, TSA decided "something" in my luggage was a threat to national security but they wouldn't tell me what. I said to the guy a couple times, "If you can tell me what you are looking for, maybe I can tell you where it is" but he just ignored me. With the line of people waiting to go through security growing longer and longer while the TSA agent haphazardly pulled everything out of my neatly organized carry on bag, I could feel the frustration of the travelers waiting to get through the check point and to their gates.
Being a seasoned traveler, I had a pretty good system worked out for packing at the end of a trip. Clean clothes were neatly roll up to keep them from wrinkling, dirty clothes were folded on the other side of the bag so it was much easier to unpack and know what needed to go straight into the laundry basket. But as I stood there helplessly watching my dirty clothes being tossed into a pile with the clean clothes, feeling a growing sense of violation as my bras, underwear and other personal items were pulled out of the bag and thrown on the conveyer belt for all to see, I felt my own frustration as well.
On top of that when I was packing that morning I couldn't find the rubber band I used to secure the lid on my little box of jewelry, which concerned me as I had about 15 different sets of small delicate earrings in there along with a myriad of rings, bracelets and necklaces. I had rolled it snuggly inside a pair of slacks to keep it from spilling out inside my bag. so when he unrolled the slacks with the little box of jewelry, I instinctively reached out to touch the box while saying "Ooh, please be careful with that, the lid isn't secure and it's my jewelry." He freaked out because I had "touched him" in the process and he began yelling at me about how I needed to BACK UP, that I wasn't allowed to TOUCH HIM, etc. At that point I lost my temper, yelling back, "I just don't want you to spill my "#^&$%*" box of jewelry!" The next thing I knew, TSA agents had swarmed the security check point and were threatening to not allow me on the plane. Fighting back tears, I couldn't wrap my head around what was unfolding. All I wanted was to go home.
He finally found what he was looking for . . . Apparently, I had put a lighter in the pocked of the pants I had been wearing the night before and didn't realize it. After removing that "incredibly dangerous item" from my bag, several security guards pitched in to shove all my belongings from the conveyer belt back in the bag, once again handling all of my undergarments, balling up my clean and my dirty clothes, in a rush to "get the line moving."
As I sat there in the waiting area, I felt all eyes on me as I dissolved into tears and attempted to repack my carry on bag. Was it really worth it? The aggravation of following the rules, along with the violation I just experienced, all in an attempt to find a lighter, which was going to "keep everyone safe?" It was in that moment that I vowed to never get on another plane. Granted I was feeling very raw and unbalanced because of the weekend I had just had, but I was sure that it was time to stop participating in things that felt so out of alignment with my soul.
On the flight home, I tried to process all that had occurred over the weekend as well as the frustration I felt over the TSA requirements that kept coming out . . . rules and regulations that kept changing and made no sense. I couldn't bring water on the plane, I couldn't just throw a shampoo and a conditioner bottle into my bag, I had to transfer them into small bottles under a certain amount of ounces, I couldn't have eyebrow tweezers in my carry on, etc. And it was all meant to keep the world SAFE?? I was sickened by what we had accepted as the new "normal." None of it made sense to me and I couldn't understand why everyone just kept accepting the new "rules" and carrying on with a "business as usual" attitude.
Well, being true to my word, that all occurred 16 years ago and I haven't been on a plane since. My own little protest of one, which obviously hasn't changed anything in the grand scheme of things but it was the right decision for me and it does show how determined I can be to respect and honor myself and my own beliefs. I refused to bend and mold myself to meet requirements that offered no real value, while infringing on my personal freedoms. This feeling has once again been growing in me for the last year so it's no wonder the medical issue is back again as I have felt much the same way as I did 16 years ago.
While sitting with this "remembrance" I could see a pattern emerge . . . "something" occurs and we are encouraged to be very fearful as well as hateful towards a select group of "others". Then we are told we will be "safe" if we just follow along with some new rules. Meanwhile more of our freedoms are stripped away. If people question the new rules or express concern that our freedoms are being lost, we are encouraged to shame them with new labels like "unpatriotic" or "selfish and uncaring."
The parallels between then and now were hitting me squarely in the face and for a while I wasn't sure what to do about it. I just kept breathing into my heart and exhaling deeply. Then some of my own words, from my own blog posts began coming back into my head . . . the importance of being compassionate with ourselves and what we've been through (so I spent a little time "chatting" with my 40 year old self, offering some much needed empathy about how cruddy that weekend truly was) and offering compassion to myself for the number of times I have been told I was a bad sibling/friend for refusing to get on a plane. I reminded myself how important it was that I still find ways to be ME and honor my own soul. (Song lyrics played in my head . . . "I want to thank you for lettin' me be myself, again."
Then I looked at how this applies to now. Maybe I need to be more forthcoming about why I haven't been participating in things that are out of alignment with my soul. Maybe it's about finding ways to more courageously enjoy MY life regardless of what everyone else is choosing to do. Maybe it's also about honoring and appreciating myself for choosing to love myself over pleasing (or trying to fit in) with others.
I acknowledge that this started out as a post about another option for healing something that keeps recurring and it seems to have morphed into a post pointing out that we are once again having our freedoms taken away from us. At first glance they may not seem to be connected and yet, in many ways they are. Things will keep showing up in our bodies (and in our reality) until we really look at them and decide if it is something we want to continue to experience. From there the choice is ours.
And I don't think that it is any accident that while working on this blog post, I received an email from one of the "gang of 8" from college, sharing his favorite song in response to an email I sent a few days ago with a link to my new favorite song. And his song just happened to be: "Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way" by U2.
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