Dreaming Big: Unleash Your Power

Nov 23

My Time With Chelsea

“I LOVE YOUR HOUSE!”

Chelsea is a breath of fresh air, the kind that runs through your open windows on a spring day. Her short blond hair and big sunglasses remind me of old Hollywood Glam.

We cruise through the streets of Clearwater and Dunedin to a Starbucks drive thru. I haven’t been in a convertible since high school. Those were good times. We would smoke but be cautious the wind didn’t steal our menthol cigarette. We rebelled because life was constricting. No time to dream. Life as the grown ups said was about being getting good grades and getting into college.

No one asked what our dreams were.

Dreaming reminds people of their missed opportunities they stole from themselves. So they get mad you remind them of their hidden dreams. ‘They’ as in the grown ups. You know a kid’s on his way to boring adulthood when he dashes the dreams of another kid. My six year old just told me that I can easily get the biggest YouTube award. If I work at it every day and get the 200 million plus subscribers needed for the rare achievement. He has no doubts.

But once kids cross the weird thresh-hold from childish aspirations into adult survival mode, they stop daydreaming.

Chelsea’s telling her story as she pulls out cash to pay the cashier. Convertible, coffee, conversation. We’d actually been planning this for months.

She’s shared some of her most painful experiences, leaving me in awe of her ability to tell a story with so much zest yet remain focused and lively, far from boring.

I’d be lost - sidetracked with traffic and having to order coffees and tell my story. It’s like she’s meant to be moving, like wind.

She doesn’t even know how impressed I am.

Finally at her home we go upstairs to the living room. It seems so natural to lay on the floor. Feels like high school, two girls talking about everything on the floor despite a large plush couch just a couple feet away. Our bellies to the ground while we huddle around her natal chart on my laptop.

“I just feel this connection with you.”

She’s said this so many times. It hits me she’s probably an Aquarius rising. Her arched eyebrows and this energy that seems to be exchanged between us and very comfortable. Definitely Aquarius and Uranus energy. These are the big dreamers of the zodiac.

Uranus in my first house gives off eccentricity so the unique ones feel it. If you’re more prone to go with the grain it will rub you the wrong way. That dreaming would really annoy you. It definitely annoyed the adults in my childhood.

The Aquarius and Uranus energy is just zany. It’s different…hates that it sticks out from the group. That’s the irony. Know the group well enough to serve it with innovation but be detached from needed it’s approval. That’s Uranus and Aquarius for you. It’s the dreaming of big ideas and inventions.

Dream. Big.

But that’s what we have in common, dreaming but no one told us to dream big, dream hard.

I put her birth date info into my astrology software.

“I was right! That’s why we have that crazy connection!” We dive deep into her chart. The more I do the reading the more emotional she gets.

It’s crazy when we realize we are supposed to be right where we are. Life does that. It’s also unfair like that.

After a few hours we pack up and she drives me home.

This conversation is different than the last drive. Instead of painful childhood stories it’s about hopes and dreams. Crazy dreams. The kind they tell you not to dream so big.

I think the craziest thing we can do is dream.

Especially if you never had someone telling you…you were the dream all along.

**Chelsea L., Dunedin, FL**

Photo by Linawa Shaffer

Dear Reader,

You may have a preconceived notion of what you’re about to read. One perspective on sobriety is typically one that reads like a winning lottery ticket, and the other tends to lean towards self loathing deprecation, both often found in a tug of war or sorts in our early stages of recovery. Only after time has passed do we learn how to dance with this paradox of existing. The light and dark, yin and yang, the coming and going of the tides, seasons. Arriving to the realization that finding, and maintaining this balance, learning how to regulate and healthily express our emotions, will be our life’s work.

As I write this, just 3 months shy of 5 years alcohol free, I have a range of emotions that I’ve found only writing can sift through and make sense of.

I will spare you the pretentious bragging rights of how “together” my life is today. I will however tell you that I am living a daily existence I only thought was possible for other people. To give you insight on how my drinking began, I like most had a turbulent childhood. One filled with two manic parents determined to live a better life than the impoverished back country roads they came from.

We traveled the world, and went on adventures most children dream of, but it all came at a price. You see, I was the only biological child between my parents, and with another daughter my mother tricked a man into giving her by secret pregnancy, my mother had no room for anymore dreams in her life, and to her I screamed attachment and responsibility to my father. The man who funded her trips and shopping sprees was nothing more than a ball and chain she ultimately wanted nothing to do with.

She reminded me often that I was my fathers child and that I was never meant to be here. That she lay on the abortion table waiting to have the curse removed from her body and with my father in the room accusing her that I was in fact not his, he supported the termination of the pregnancy, and for whatever reason at the last moment she decided to get off the operating table and not continue with the abortion procedure.

She lovingly explained this story to me in detail for the first time when I was about 5. I remember this night at the beach house in Gulf Shores, Alabama because I can remember puking from the migraine I had that night on my green and pink blanket. I often had severe migraines, especially when my parents became violent, so much so I eventually was put through numerous tests and cat scans to see the possible cause of these terribly painful episodes.

They never found any tumors putting pressure on my brain, and the source of my migraines remained a mystery. There was no way the source of my physical stress was due to the free radicals in my environment, and I dare not share with any doctors what I thought could have actually been the cause.

It wasn’t until 8th grade when my mother scalded me in the face with hot coffee for missing the bus that I opened up to my school counselor and was temporarily removed from my home by child protective services. Unfortunately this only caused a greater deal of physical and emotional pain upon my return home. I was terrified to tell anyone the truth, I was scared Charlotte would accidentally kill me in one of her violent rages and so I began my tumultuous love affair with alcohol.

I found resolve, relief, and false hope in those liquor bottles I snuck into my room and into water bottles. Alcohol told me she would love me forever, that she would make me funny, heal my aching wounds, and give me all the answers I longed for.

As children, we have no concept of addiction and the pernicious effects alcohol has on the human body, and so began my 18 year career as an alcoholic.

I did everything in my power to protect my alcohol, after all she was the one who brought me comfort, who protected me, who loved me, and promised never to leave.

Fast forward to an unhealthy marriage with a fellow addict and becoming a mother. Surely, the fact that I could give up alcohol for 9 months meant that I was not an alcoholic. Also, I only drank alcohol, I didn’t do hard drugs like my husband so I wasn’t the problem.

Alcohol is legal, and greatly championed in American culture. Besides, if you knew what I went through and what I was going through you would pour me a drink.

I wish I could tell you that there was one defining moment that made me get sober. There wasn’t. I had been in and out of jail, the hospital, psyche wards , & outpatient rehabs by the time I was 30. I was never able to maintain any length of sobriety because I was unwilling to take a deep look at myself and how my own actions and behavior had led me down this road. I was still very much in victim mode and it kept me sick.

Dr. Joe Dispenza refers to this moment as the dark night of the soul and its precisely what it was. I don’t know why 02/09/19 was the day I decided I needed to finally break up with my abusive lover named alcohol but, by miracle, god, whatever higher power you attribute unexplained blessings to, I quit that day and never looked back.

I was physically ill for a period of time, my immune system was so weak, I had a bleeding ulcer in my stomach and shingles in my face scalp & eye, almost losing sight in one eye. My body had to go through the withdrawals a synonym for a more attractive word “hangover”, and recalibrate to existing without daily alcohol use. I later found out that 02/09/19 was the day my late maternal grandfather passed years prior. I never met any of my grandparents but for the first time it felt like a loving nudge from a family member, maybe it was just in my head, but it felt like love I had never received, almost an acknowledgement from the universe.

As I sit here today roughly 90 days short of 5 years sober, writing this to you from the comfort of my bed, looking out the window to the ocean, sipping my hot tea, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude and the excitement of possibility.

I was the statistic, the girl who came from a broken home, the one who by all accounts should have died with my alcoholism. The one that everyone said would.

And yet, here I am.

Do I have moments of panic still? YES.

But, without pouring gasoline on the fire, today I am able to breathe through those moments, often times cry until my face appears it is in anaphylactic shock and I come out the other side every single time. It’s almost humorous when we come to the realization that reality is built upon our dominant thoughts and the things we think will kill us, emotionally, physically, and mentally, are all mere thoughts that we are not at the mercy of.

Each day we have a choice. We have a divine birth right to build the life of our dreams, and with each passing day we have the opportunity to begin again and invest in ourselves. My life is far from perfect, but it is also far from the little girl hiding in her closet choking on liquor in search of some sort of relief.

Our lives will always present us with adversity and with each experience we have the choice to learn from it, albeit the actual growing pains it brings forth. But I am here to tell you, the pain of growth far outweighs the pain and torture of the ever revolving hamster wheel of victimhood and poor choices.

We are not what happened to us. We are not our trauma. I want you to know, whomever is reading this, that you are not what has happened to you. You are not all the mistakes you’ve made. You are a precious gift of human life with a story and a reason.

If you’re reading this, it’s not too late, you haven’t gone too far, and your life matters.

There is a whole great world of existence outside of alcohol, it takes time and mental practice like everything worth having in life, but I promise you, what I’ve found is an endless well of abundance outpouring for each and every single one of us.

I am grateful to be alive today, and to be in the drivers seat of my life, experiencing the joys of motherhood and being able to navigate the difficulties not only parenting, but life itself throws at us. I commend you for seeking a greater life for yourself and I can’t wait to see you win.

XO - Chelsea Langley