I get caught between the energy healing, Law of Attraction way of thinking and my own emotions. I feel vague guilt about not being able to feel my way into prosperity or happiness. I get it – it makes sense. I’ve watched “What the Bleep Do We Know?” I’ve even lent it out.

Where the rubber meets the road, though, I just cry a lot. About dolphins in captivity and pictures of butterfly eggs.

This is a microscopic photo of a butterfly egg. An astonishing look at nature: http://t.co/UmsAvmu6pa pic.twitter.com/D5xfibtfei

— TED Talks (@TEDTalks) April 9, 2014

The world is too big and beautiful and loud and it feels like this because I have been shut down for so long that the stimulation overwhelms me. The challenge to participate in it alternately creates a siren call toward my power and a compulsion to binge watch Netflix. I am afraid of my power. Still. I am afraid that am being asked to be bigger than I can stretch to accommodate. I am afraid I might miss ‘the thing’ that I feel like all of this wrenching reidentificaiton is preparing me to integrate with.

My Paid for Friend says this is a sign that my emotional reserves are growing. I have the capacity to feel and it is safe to do so.

If our intuitive intake machine is supposed to look like a bowling ball with a couple of holes on the top to filter information through, my hard exterior is non-existent and I am left with the string ball inside and nothing to protect it from overwhelming overload of sensory input. I retreat to sleep to provide the buffer I need between the world and my overactive brain.

Whether I’ve turned into a blazing introvert or whether I’ve just come to terms with the idea that I’ve always been one, the idea of people exhausts me. Telling me I think too much and am too much in my head is 1) true and 2) dismissive. Come be in my head with me and help me make sense of the landscape.

It is miraculous. My intuitive soul knows the rational string ball of my mind is preoccupied with the room of mirrors and it continually leads me into the version of me I am careening toward. And someday they will integrate, says My Paid For Friend – the powerful intuition and the blazing intellect.

She says I am perfectly at the wrenching part of the journey where I utterly destroy the container that got me here and reconstruct an identity out of meaning and symbol, feelings and compassion. If the journey to mental health and integrated living is a bell curve, I am on the tail end of the fire swamp and getting ready to start living through the Intuition and not quite so much sabotage. The Mind that has held the reigns doesn’t yet trust the Intuition and so the battle in all the areas one expects: love, creativity, life management.

It’s fucking messy. And I cry a lot.