I get emails from Project Happiness - nice daily reminders of something I need to hear, but I don’t always open the emails. My inbox is sitting at around 17K emails right now. 😬 Most of those are from retail stores reminding me that everything they have is on sale today.
Anyway, I can’t sleep tonight. So, I’m filtering through email and I inadvertently touch the one from P.H.
It says…rather it screams at me…
“Don’t feel guilty for doing what’s best for you.”
Hmmm.
My Spirit guides (I have 6 that I know of) are not even *trying* to be sneaky with this one.
Of all the ones I have skipped, this one they made sure I saw. Now. In the middle of the night. When I’m most likely to remember the ER where I used to work…where I spent nearly 13 years of my professional life.
I never trained for it, I didn’t go to school to learn how to do that job in that trauma center ER, in the same hospital where I was born.
It is by far still the most unusual job I’ve ever heard of. I know I will never again have anything close to it. In some ways it was spectacular. I felt completely unprepared when I was hired. For crying out loud, I had a masters degree in “something else…not this.”
But I was prepared. Looking back, I can trace my finger along the lines of a path designed by Spirit for me. So that I wound up there. So that I helped all the dead patient’s families with their shock and grief, so that I learned how to deal with all of the trauma that affects people. So I could be with them in those moments when they were hurting. I came up with words to comfort, and when I had no words, I held on to them. A shoulder, a hand, a look in the eyes, to keep them grounded and not disassociated. It’s easy to fly away when your entire world has crashed down.
I think over the course of those years I carried 4 babies to the morgue. Each time something awful shifted inside of me. All deaths are not the same. Some deaths are “good” - when someone suffering in a body gets to be free of pain and fly their soul into the Light, that’s okay. When a person who is thriving, no matter what the age, goes unexpectedly and traumatically, there are casualties left behind. All those who loved them are in shock.
That’s where I thrived. Taking care of the impossible. Holding hands with people who’d metaphorically had their guts ripped out. But it wasn’t always easy. There were consequences for me. Anxiety, stress, grief, the accumulation of micro traumas because of all I’d been witness to…hearing and seeing and feeling all that loss. One night after a particularly god-awful death of an elderly man, my ears started ringing. They haven’t stopped.
I lost count of the bodies I saw.
At one point along the way I remember very clearly coming home to a dark and sleeping house, and I sat weeping in my bed. It was one of the rare times I allowed myself a release. I only cry when I’m pissed, and that night I was pissed at God himself.
“Why me!?” I seethed through quiet sobs. “This is *not* what I went to school for! This is not how I planned my life!”
I heard a voice inside my mind very loud and clear.
“Wait for it.”
I knew that meant that I had to wait. That God would make sense of it for me one day. I felt a peace creep over me. My sobs came to a stop. I slept.
Four years ago, I accepted into my consciousness what I had subconsciously known since I was a kid. I was a medium. I made the very scary decision to begin studying mediumship in an educational, practical, and deliberate way with a very good teacher. She taught me that mediumship is HOLY. That mediumship has the power to help heal hearts broken by grief, and that I could do this.
It made sense. I had waited. I’d hung in there. Now I understood why God had me in that ER for so long. Not only did I have a supreme respect for people’s grief process, I knew all about how people died.
But then, once I finished studying and was tested and certified, and began taking on clients, I had to make a decision.
You see, working in a place like the ER requires a certain kind of emotional barrier to be in place. Anyone who has spent any time on the front lines of emergency services can tell you that the wall is necessary for them to react and save you. We must hold back part of ourselves when we’re in the weeds.
When I began to work in mediumship, that wall had to come crumbling down. Mediumship is very open hearted work. Every single session with every single client has my undivided mental and emotional energy on full blast.
In other words, doing both those jobs, like I did for more than a year, was incompatible.
I had to walk away from the ER, because it had begun to sting me, like a hundred little bees a day. But I left in the middle of a literal pandemic. Death was increasing. And the family of coworkers…and I do mean FAMILY…that I had built would still be there, slogging their way through the most ridiculously difficult and challenging time of their careers.
I FELT GUILT. And I still feel it, ten months later. There is not a single day that passes when I don’t miss the ER. It was part of the fabric of who I was, of how I saw myself as a contributor to society. I had never been part of a team in that way before. I may never feel that again.
But this work now is ultimately what I signed up to do as a soul and I know it. So I will. And I do. With joy even. I am so grateful to be able to help in this very unique way, because of the people who come back and tell me “You have no idea how much peace you have given me.” This is what I never could do in the ER. Holding shoulders and expressing condolences goes a long way, but bringing the loved one through in Spirit is an out-of-this-world kind of peace and healing you just have to experience to understand.
So, I’ll work on my guilt today. And I will do my best to remember that sometimes not knowing where I’m headed or why, is actually the whole point.
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