The Butterfly Effect

My mind never turns off.

Even in my sleep I can’t seem to escape reliving memories or stop thoughts from wandering. 

I do my best to make sure they don’t fall so far from the edge that they get lost into a black abyss and suck me in with them. But at times, that part has never been super hard to do, because I spent so much time daydreaming and disassociated in my childhood years that my made up happy lands kept my mind protected. 

But now that I know what it is that my brain did in order to protect me, it’s not something that I can really allow to continue to happen. 

Escaping my reality as a kid was the only way I was able to survive through the things I saw and endured growing up, but I am not in those situations anymore. 

Now some might think “Well Alyssa you are still going to have bad experiences in life so what about using those mechanisms for when those instances come into your life”? This is a fair point to ask.

But what you have to understand is that once it became part of my awareness, disassociating becomes a CONSCIOUS choice. 

A choice made to escape my reality instead of finding a way to overcome the obstacle in my path. 

Because the bigger picture is that everything happens FOR us, not TO us. There is a lesson from most things we experience, both good and bad.

“But what about people who get abused, are murdered, those that are homeless, etc??” 

Also a valid point. 

I do NOT believe every single thing happens for a reason, because I believe there are some forces, both good and evil, that are way beyond our knowing, control, and reason as to why they happen. So in instances where horrific and extremely unfortunate circumstances happen to people like that, I don’t particularly believe those things were meant to happen to a being for them to “find a lesson” from it in their life.

BUT if they still do find a lesson from it and find some positives in such events, then I believe it can make it all even more beautiful, no matter how awful the situation at the time was.

Anyone who is able to pull themselves out of any sort of darkness is so much stronger than the negative forces that tried to keep them down. 

Now…while I am not a religious person, I find that certain teachings from the Christian religion can be interpreted in a way that simply applies to that natural unfolding balance of the Universe and existence of humanity.

So with that being said;

I once saw a video of a man who said, “I asked for strength and God gave me difficulties to overcome”, “I asked for wisdom and God gave me problems to solve”, “I asked for courage and God gave me dangers to face”, “I asked for love and God gave me troubled people to help”.  

And it just…made…SO. MUCH. SENSE.

I think there is so much truth in those words and how life is.  

You cannot ask for wisdom, courage, or love, etc. from God, or the Universe, without experiencing the negative opposite of said thing. You must face the fears and bad of all the good you want in life. That way you KNOW the difference.

If we did not experience the negatives and hardships in life, we would not know balance. We would not know true courage, or wisdom, or love.

All it would do is leave you blissfully ignorant. 

And maybe some want it that way, if so that is each individual's choice. 

But I asked for the truth, and for the Universe to help me shed all the layers of myself that are not truth; but conditioning from the exterior world. And allow me the grace, wisdom, and protection to find my most authentic self. 

So in asking for that, the Universe HAS to throw hardships into my life. If it didn’t I would not be able to differentiate between truth and deception of all things in my world. Therefore leaving me trapped in an eternal cycle of trauma and toxicity. 

Trauma enslaves you in every way. Physically, emotionally, and most of all MENTALLY. 

Whether trauma is present in an external form on anyone, it strikes the mind first and always. 

Trauma is then stored inside the deepest parts of our minds and the longer it sits there, neglected and un-nurtured, over time we become it. 

We become walking trauma sacks. 

And while I am no licensed psychologist, I have grown up ENTIRELY immersed in trauma since before I even left my birth mothers’ womb. 

So while I don’t have the largest scientific understanding of all the complexities that accompany trauma and mental illnesses, what I DO have is an EMOTIONAL and SPIRITUAL awareness and understanding of these things and how they have affected and shaped me. 

In order for this to make more sense, I’m going to share a little story;

My birth mother experienced so much suffering in the first few years of her life, that it would undoubtedly leave the biggest imprint, and neurological change on a child that I can only begin to imagine. And things over time got better for her, in certain ways at least. She and her brother were adopted into a wonderful and loving family, who I have the blessing to call a family of my own now as well. But from stories growing up, I also know the teenage years were rough and became increasingly harder to navigate.

I firmly believe that the teenage years are the first stages of one coming into a personal state of awareness. A time where we learn we truly have our own thoughts and own our own bodies. Possible rebellion sets in for some in this stage of life. (A natural reaction I suppose.) But what also can happen is that in these stages of life where we are learning to have freedom of our own choices; about the relationships we want or the life we want to live, can cause trauma to be triggered and brought to the surface.

I know for my mother, she never forgot the things that happened to her. So to have never had a moment, even in what were safe spaces, where that danger and evil wasn’t stalking her, could only make it extremely difficult for someone to make healthy independent decisions when they are finally in a part of life where they have more ability to do so. 

And so the older my mother got, the more she rejected the help given to her because (I believe) she was too scared to face the evil that happened to her, for fear of feeling she would be transported back into those very moments, feeling that she would be truly reliving it. 

I get it. It really is a scary thing. No one WANTS to face those things because of the fact that in ways, yes we do have to relive it. But there will always be times in life where we must do things we don’t want to do, but we NEED to do them. 

My mother didn’t know it at the time, but rejecting that help made for a cosmic bomb to go off and set forth a chain of events that would affect herself, and others, both already existent and not yet existent. From her own lifetime in the collected lifetime of all living things. 

And so...here I was, forming inside the belly of an eighteen year old girl, encapsulated and fueled by fear and hatred for the forces that hurt her. And having eighteen years to solidify in her mind, became such a part of her that it wasn’t something she was aware of had hold on her. Rewired pathways in the brain, warping the decisions she would make. Her personal perception of the world was poisoned by anger and violence, and it seeped its way into the pores and veins of her body. And because I was (quite literally) attached to her, and being nourished from this being, I had no control in the absorption of it into my own belly, soul and mind. 

Anddd once I was birthed from the space of a womb, into an overwhelming external environment, there was no undoing any of it. The effects had already been imprinted into, and onto me. So what would happen to me, how I would feel and think, and now be in present day time was never in my hands to be able to change.

Now being in present day, I reflect on so much of my childhood. All the times I watched violence unfold under the roof(s) I lived in. The screams and uncontrollable crying. The blood. The holes in walls. The tainted-ness of everything that should have been kept protected in me, and for me. And throughout it all, I never expressed how much it was damaging me, but the hardest part was not being able to have a healthy and safe person to tell my feelings to. Not even my own mother. I spent my life being afraid of my birth mother, in terms of telling and expressing my true emotions. I was so extremely quiet and passive from the environments that raised me. I yearned for that place or person I could find safe solitude in, to just let out what I felt. I didn’t even need someone or something to try and fix it. Being able to talk about it, and let it OUT would have been enough. I mention this a lot in most of my writings, but 1) it’s how I was and 2) it’s because I so badly wanted for things in my life to become and stay stable. For her to become and stay stable. 

Painted images of violence forever glued to my mind.

It is part of me, just as every other memory of violence and pain that came to follow in my growing adolescent years. 

I know deep down my mother had no want, nor knowing of these things that would happen to all of us, but they did. And for a very long time once I hit my own teenage years, and gained my own first sense of personal awareness, I became angry. More and more I started to resent her. How could she allow my brother and I to endure such atrocious events as children? How could she not demand better for herself, so as to inevitably better her children? How? How? HOW? 

I couldn’t stop that question from burning inside of my mind.

Until one day, my soul couldn’t hold it in any longer. I spent so many years holding so much in, that I feared I would start to become the very things I spent so much time wishing to escape from as a child. And because I also spent so much time making sure I would never embody those awful things, it poured out of me.

I set off my own blast, that would, and is currently, creating its own changing ripple effects in my life, as well as all of the lives of those that know me. And it will shape the lives of those I have not met yet, both born and unborn, just as it did with my mother.

But the difference is that I am allowing my explosion to be the catalyst that sets me into a completely different energy. 

An energy I have not known frequently in my childhood years, but one that I wish to be the best of friends with from now on and the rest of eternity; Love.

A shift in both my ancestral timeline, and the quantum timeline.

They say we all have a destiny, but we do have a choice in what our destiny is. (The show The Avatar taught me that. If you know you know.) 

So I’m choosing my destiny. 

I am freeing myself from the enslavement of trauma I already endured, all of the trauma of my ancestors I carry with me in my own veins, and redirecting any of the “what could have been” trauma I may have continued to experience.

I have been given the biggest gift of this lifetime.

The power and courage to rewrite my life. 

To make it a beautiful, blissful, peaceful, emotionally and spiritually fulfilling life for myself. And to let all of these things embody me, and flow out and back in me, sharing it with all the beings that intertwine with me.

Everything bad that has happened to me, gave me knowledge I need in this present moment to make the most metamorphosing changes to my psyche and soul. 

My anger and sadness served its purpose when I needed it to, but it is no longer time for that.

Now I am thankful, and grateful for the life I lived, as hard as it may be for some to ever comprehend, but I wouldn’t be who I am without any of it. 

We all each have so much baggage and hidden things that come from and with our lives, and not everyone wants, or is capable of finding some good out of it in the way I have. And that is OKAY. My path is different from the beings I share this Earth with, and not everyone will heal in this same lifetime. 

So for every act of violence I saw, I’m using it to drive me to be so tender and gentle.

For every scream of hatred I heard, I am using it to fuel my own voice with compassion.

For every time I felt neglected and unseen, I am using it to be there for those who felt/feel the same, and myself as well. 

If one thing in my life had been different; having my sperm donor in my life, my mother finding peace sooner, possibly turning violent myself as I got older, literally ANYTHING, even the smallest detail down to the color shirt I had chosen to wear, would change the events that unfolded from that moment on to this present moment.

And while some possible outcomes may have led me to experience less traumatic instances earlier on, I cannot dwell on the “what if” of that. I can’t go back and change it, nor do I want to since I have found comfort and peace in my childhood finally.

Have you ever heard of the theory of The Butterfly Effect??? 

It’s a theory by Edward Lorenz that; the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. 

To paraphrase if you don’t understand the wording of that, is that if you went back at any given moment, no matter how long ago, and changed even the TINIEST of things, it will send out the biggest ripple effect through the entire Universe, shifting not only your life, but the life and events of every living being on this planet up back to the present. 

So because I believe in this theory, and have since the moment I knew this theory existed, I WOULD NEVER change a single thing that happened to me. For it led me to this very moment. 

This moment of me sitting here in an airport. 

Twenty-one years old. 

Getting back from my very first trip alone, waiting for one of my older, wise, and beautiful “adoptive” brothers’ to pick me up. 

Filled with so much calmness and peace from visiting a place so magical, freeing, liberating, and healing in just one weeks time.

Knowing that no matter what happens to me from this moment forth, good and bad, it is only what is meant to be, and that it serves its purpose to transform me into the butterfly I am, and was always meant to become.

Life is not easy, and there will still be many more fears and challenges for all of us to face, but if you are brave enough, you can break yourself out of the cycles that hold you back from who you are, and want to be.

I hope you find your wings, and choose to spread them and take that leap towards peace.

All my love, -A.