SOULMATES

Updated: Jan 23

I have been in need of a soulmate all my life. I refused to settle. I am not one to "lower my expectations". (That phrase right there ignites such a visceral reaction in me that I instinctively rise up in rebellion to it. It's just there and I try to tame it but mostly I just work with it.)

I married late(ish) and I married someone different, free, kind, rebellious and steadfast in justice. A perfect fit to my puzzle. I was old enough to know where I needed unconditional support and where I needed to be challenged.

Sweet. The end.

I have a sister who is three years older than me. We were essentially brought up as twins. Looking at old photos, we were subjected to the same- dress, different -colours thing, and we were lumped together as a unit whether we liked it or not. Turns out we liked it.

Sweet. The end.

I have friends, oh my God, my friends are amaze-balls - kind, irreverent, fierce, sensitive, creative alchemists (I can't wait for you to meet them). I am close to them, I love them. But I think I kept myself a little distanced from them because my soul's puzzle was complete.

Holy shit.

Was I mistaken.

As we delve into my experiences in this website, my big life picture will begin to take shape but for now I'll say that immigration, menopause, the death of my father and the end of my career as I knew it all amalgamated into an identity crisis of mammoth proportions. I could deal with it all until I also lost my soulmates.

Lying crumpled in different stages of brokenness, I waited for my soulmates to rally: to fight for me, to pick me up and put me back together. To tell me who I was and what to do.

For many varied reasons the shitstorm was unleashing itself on us all - and my soulmates were not only busy, but saw things differently.

I was incapable of understanding. These people were my only sanity and they were betraying the soulmate trust. (MY soulmate trust).

Why weren't we completing the same puzzle?

Adulting is hard. And there is a certain point in it all when you're waiting for the adult to come in and sort things out - only to realise that YOU are the adult. I had that same punch-in-the-gut realisation about soulmates: I had relied on others to complete the puzzle, never realising that that job was mine and mine alone.

A lot of this website is about me building me. Working out what I unquestioningly accepted and how that played out. And how that is playing out. Oh my God, could this sound any more cheesy but I swear to you, we only have one soulmate - and its ourselves. We also have infinite soulmates - and it's everybody else. No one person can be the rest of the picture. Maybe we should embrace infinite puzzles with infinite soulmates completing infinite pictures.

Maybe it's not even different puzzles, maybe it's a mosaic - one big picture made up of broken, different materials making one perfect whole.

What do I know....