Meadows are beautiful. They have always been my safe place, a yellow field of flowers draping over rolling hills. This was one of my first childhood memories, and to this day even more cherished than the cherry blossoms that arched over the streets of Japan.

I had a wonderful dream last night and a nightmare. It all started again when I met Beatrice. Not only did she recall my first entry in our healing session prior to the full moon when she asked me to journal, she recalled the fields of rolling meadows I so desperately hope to return to. I am a light worker, and I am still figuring out what that means. I am rainbow aura, and it has been told to me I come from the Pleiades constellation. They are the seven stars in the universe so compactly concentrated that no natural burst of the big bang could have caused the constellation to be arranged in such an abstract way. That’s because they are God’s work, not man’s and not those of science.

Beatrice told me that a bird had come into her house two days prior, on Saturday, a day after I connected with her. My grandfathers manifest in an Eagle and an Egret, and it was no coincidence that a bird refused to leave her house that Saturday. I had told her nothing about me, only that I was struggling with anxiety and depression and wanted to jump off of a building four months prior, which heightened two months ago. I told her about my manifestations and that is when she relayed the story of the bird – as validation, as knowing that the bird was meant to be in her home for a reason. She felt the urge to gift something to me, the first, a birdcage – the second a feather – the third, a book from her own grandfather who had died in a fire on Easter Sunday. She explained that I am wrapped in a societal package, but what is truly beautiful about me is my heart, and that I lead with it.

Only the books were saved on that Easter Sunday. How precious she shared Treasure Island with me. I am not a victim but an easy target. My angels showed her a red carpet rolling out in front of her, so beautiful she cried. As a fellow lightworker, she offered to mentor me. She said I not only have dreams that manifest with my family, but there will be larger dreams that manifest with complete strangers.

Contrary to my last post, I do not enjoy being the center of attention.

She said that since I don’t like attention or being the center of it; I just like being a part of it, that my biggest fear will be letting people down. Everything she said about my life rings so true to who I am. As someone who now has validation, and a mentor to see energies and not only feel them, I am encouraged. My angles showed her tapping or reiki as a way to heal others. She said I hold the key to my destiny. I later saw an Instagram post on the same message by another healer. Every block that my angels were giving me is an opportunity for faith in the collective WE.

I started losing weight when I studied abroad in September of Paris in 2008. I dropped from 125 pounds to 103 when I returned home to California in December of 2008. I still don’t know why I think so fondly of Paris. In part, because I think of Paris externally, not internally. There is also magic in the city that cannot be denied. I was surrounded by art; my major was Art History and it connected me to that spiritual dimension.

During my anorexia in Paris I realized who my true friends were. They were the girls in my sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, that I was originally so intimidating. They didn’t say much, but they always included me. I met Tucker, one of my dearest friends and a person I feel I was supposed to meet on my creative journey. He had just spent the summer as a glass blower in Chicago. We took a trip to Interlaken together where we stayed in a hostel with a nude man and later para-sailed together. I lost those pictures when I lost my facebook and phone, but that a story for a later day.

My friends including Tucker knew there was something wrong with me, yet they never did anything intentionally harmful to remind me of it. I bonded with my sorority sisters as much as I could but I was in a full time relationship with my eating disorder and you cannot have a relationship with anyone else once that strikes. I would show up late to dinners and occasionally throw up in the bathroom. The two people who knew what was going on were Michelle and Katrina. Both whom I still consider my best friends today. They loved me through the hardest parts of my life, and still today when I have been freed from an eating disorder for over ten years.

An eating disorder is a difficult thing to explain. Someone once said to me, Gina, in an outpatient eating disorder program at Chicago that “you can’t explain it from the inside, and you can’t understand it from the outside.” This still rings true for me today. Other than the loss of who I thought were my best friends at Northwestern – I cannot attribute my loss of weight to anything other than the desire for attention.

Northwestern was the first time I had attention from boys, I got into the best sorority class, and was part of the coolest kids on campus. Three of those people in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences literally and figuratively turned their backs on me when I walked into my own college graduation. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life on the day that would have been my proudest.

I wonder how long it takes to write a novel. In short, the novel is never-ending because our own novel never ends. I’m encouraged yet disconcerted to tell you my story and how I got here. I am still in the process of deconstructing and rebuilding myself. My hope is this novel helps one of you to do the same. Or at least to imagine that there is another way. Your dreams can come true, they are not just a figment of the imagination.

I grew up in a very loving household. I was sheltered from the world. When a professor once asked me, would I rather live in blissful ignorance or the pain of knowing, I chose blissful ignorance. Yet one like me can’t live in blissful ignorance, because my soul lives in the pain of knowing. Over and over again in my life, I had to learn this lesson; that pain is inevitable, it is how we handle it that either builds or destroys us. It destroyed me.

Born in Chicago but raised in Tokyo, my life was blissfully ignorant. I easily gave in to others expectations, listened to what even a first grader would tell me, and life seemed fine. I remember climbing to the top portion of the jungle gym and Lola told me no – you can’t climb to the top, it is only for my friends. I thought Lola was my friend, but clearly even then I rationalized it by ignorance. I was hurt but I was ok. I didn’t understand, but I didn’t want to understand. It reminds me now of the first boy I had an almost friendship with. I was less than four years old; in pre-k, and my friend Stephanie said no I like him, you can’t like him. Later after moving back to the United States the same events and emotions happened. Marcy had a crush on John, and even though he “liked liked me” as a later Suzanna would tell me, I didn’t yet understand the difference between men and women, even in second grade. I easily conceded to Marcy and John turned out to be one of the most popular kids in elementary, middle, and high school – playing with Klay Thompson in high school and later even growing up to play basketball with Kevin Love at UCLA. He was quite a star, I always thought of him as the one I missed out on, but I somehow never built confidence in my blissful ignorance to even decipher the world around and inside of me. Maybe our second-grade dilemma was always why he was kind to me, even when later when I never seemed to fit in with the popular crowd in high school.

Living in blissful ignorance got me into lots of trouble. When I was young and old that story seemed to repeat itself. I hope to change that now, knowing that a world of blissful ignorance is simply impossible except for those people in life who proceed with blinders.

As I go through my journey, it constantly surprises me. In part, because I do not know myself. Instead I am defined by the stories around me. The ones you grow up with. The ones people tell you about yourself that become so engrained in your soul you start to believe them to be real. The ones you think are your identity. The ones that become your identity. Letting go of those projections, those fairytales, those judgements leaves nothing.

That is in part how I feel, a nothingless being attached to the world by a balloon string. Rediscovering who I am for the first time at 31 is a daze. Everything I once was is no more. Yes, there is excitement, but ultimately I am attached to an infinite universe that has no attachments. Paradoxes have always filled my life, and my heart. The trite statement of a double edged sword doesn’t feel trite in this context.

As I discover for the first time who I am, potentially just connected to the universe instead of a part of it, I’m encouraged by writing. The infinite combinations of letters and words and syntax have always fascinated me. Unfortunately, I not only listened to stories told to me by other people; I listened to stories that I told myself. One of them was that I’d never have enough money to support myself as a constructer of the words I carefully craft.

Sometimes I am too careful. That is a pitfall we all fall into. Perfectionism. As I grow, I realize this too is an illusion. Just like the stories that surround my very being.

As I deconstruct these notions, I hope I find solace. Harmony is my ultimate motivator. For 31 years, I’ve been motivated by fear.

I have to thank certain creative spirits who seemed to come into my life at opportune moments. An artist, a hairdresser, a dog, a matchmaker, a spirit. All of them called me to a quest to uncover what I thought was the universe, but is really myself.

There are certain people who go through life with blinders. I am not one of them. My earliest spiritual memory was sneaking into a church, playing the piano and crying in front of the Virgin Mary on the floor. No one knew I was there. Except the universe.

It was then I cried for the universe. For the pain that existed in villages in Africa that didn’t have clean running water and whose crops were extorted by even bigger entities.

In fact, aren’t we all entities? Society and cultural constructions make us believe that we are people. But we exist in time. We are unbelievably indescribable though I try to somehow place words together so others and myself can find meaning. Recently someone told me that I needed a body of work to show to those if I really wanted to pursue writing. I am hopeful but not persistent enough to know if that will materialize. Though not in retrospect, everything can materialize. But it materializes in the present. My grammar is not Joan Didion, I was not taught by Vogue. My sentences don’t always have a cause and effect, a noun and a verb. But they are real to me. And in the end, isn’t that all that matters?