In the confusion of my strictly personals, the Breach of Contract litigation has progressed to the place where I have an actual job on my plate today. It is time to call in the trash haulers to get the contractor's craftsmanship off the property. As soon as it is gone, I will be off on the 14 hour drive to party with the Grands (2 and 4 years old) for a month. It has been around a year since I have been back to the Urban Homestead. As the return begins to look more real to me in the grand scheme of things, I find old anxieties about the family dysfunctions popping their ugly, gooey snot knots into the anticipation. Today's read from "Hope for Today" is resonating. Thought I'd share. I believe typing it into a post helps drive it through my trauma-conditioned habits. Sometimes others benefit from the sharing.

Begin share, gently edited to fit current circumstances:

"I found a carrot and two lumps of coal on the sidewalk and wondered what they were doing there. I thought it odd. Suddenly remembering that a snowman once stood on that place, I chuckled at my own suspicious thoughts. Even so, I had an eerie feeling of something strangely familiar. I kept staring at the coal and the carrot as I unloaded groceries from my car. A snow man --cold, frozen, hard. I hadn't noticed his melting. I only noticed what was left, which wasn't much.

"I thought of how I had built frozen layers around myself to cope with the terror and chaos of mental illness. I had grown up encased in the iciness of disease. Then the warm and loving members of my therapy support network encouraged me to let the healing mysteries thaw the icy layers until, like the snowman, there was but a speck of me left. It was a genuine speck, however, and I trusted my therapy program to build upon it until I became the healthy person I was meant to be.

"I've learned that becoming healthy requires a melting away of my old self. If I feel empty during this process, I shall not permit myself to want the disease back. Instead I will trust the healing mysteries to help me bring forth the genuine me. I'll trust the emptiness I feel is because healing has left some room for my true self to develop.

"Thought for the Day

"The empty spaces I feel during recovery will become filled as I allow myself to heal. The desire to grow and heal has brought me to an uncomfortable point. . . I need only trust that, when the time comes to move forward, I will know it."

End of share. Thanks for the space to type it out for the extra chew power.