When I decided to leave Bonaire, my psychic medium friend, Amanda Brown texted me, “Do you need me to pull some cards for you?”
(You gotta love it when your psychic friend is so psychic you don’t even have to text her when you need help -- she just texts you!)
When I said, “yes,” one of the cards she pulled read, “Now is the time to integrate all that I have gathered.”
That made think. What exactly had I gathered?
Sure, I'd gathered writing skills and instructional design skills. (To supplement book sales, I write eLearning courses and in person and instructor led trainings. That means I can create big fancy slide presentations, workbooks, video scripts, and things like that.)
I was just starting to flex my travel skills and learn about different countries and cultures. And I have all my experience healing from Lyme disease, healing trauma, and exploring all things woo woo.
When I started thinking about ways to integrate those things, I realized I’d already subconsciously started. In FINGERPRINTS, Savanna experiences emotional, physical, and sexual abuse in her relationship with her boyfriend. Her journey is learning how to get out of that relationship and heal from it. In my second novel, CHOOSING TALLY, Savanna’s best friend, Tally, goes on a healing journey of her own after an intimate moment is videoed and blasted all over cyberspace.
In ALL THE MOMENTS IN BETWEEN (currently querying), when Kate discovers she is pregnant and is diagnosed with estrogen driven breast cancer, she is faced with the hardest decision a woman might ever have to make. After she chooses to save her life, her fiancé leaves and she’s left to heal by herself. Her healing journey is messy, ugly, full of bad choices, and oh so beautiful.
Integrating all I've gathered is already happening. And now that I'm conscious of it, it will happen more and more and in different ways.
One thing is clear; for me, integration will always revolve around sharing stories. Whether it’s through characters in my novels, talking with Lyme and trauma victims and telling them all I know about how to get through it, listening to them share their fears, writing blog posts about my own experiences, or building courses on how to heal trauma.
Now is the time to integrate all that I have gathered.
What about you? What do you feel when you read that sentence? What have you gathered that you would like to integrate?
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