It’s been twenty-one days. I had to start counting when the first week felt like a few months and I was forcing myself to recover ahead of the prescribed grieving period. Twenty-one days! And in the name of emotional alchemy, I have condensed all the emotion from those twenty-one days onto twenty-one pieces of shimmering cardboard, in an attempt to define all the positive aspects of the relationship in terms of the negatives.

I have a little blue bag with a colourful button heart and a beaded drawstring. It was given to me by my healer. I had to get creative, she said. Grieve fully because it is necessary for cellular memory, but use it constructively. So each day for twenty-one days after He left, I have had to write a negative aspect of our relationship on a card, to ultimately use as flash cards or in meditation to work through a particular issue … the point, I think, being that I chose the man who contained all these aspects in order to take me on a very important journey.

I used to wonder why I always chose guys who want to wrap me up in cottonwool and put me on a pedestal where they don’t have to deal with the real me but only the parts that are fragile and make them want to take care of me. Through experience, reading, connections and disconnecting, I am learning to identify the wounded parts of my Inner Child and I can’t help but wonder if it’s perhaps those wounded parts in me that seek out the nurturing … or if I am seeking out the wounded parts in others who need to satisfy in themselves some unresolved need to nurture. Do they feel I am satisfied by empty promises or are they simply satisfying some need within themselves, trying to appease me by making them.

Anyway … what I now have is twenty-one flash cards. And each time I feel I can’t walk through the fire of loss, I can hold onto all the positives and at the same time see with incredible clarity just how much personal good can come from all the negatives. After all, why does one have to get over such beautiful love? Surely, if we learn from the negative aspects we don’t ever have to get over the rest. We can just carry it all with us through every glorious love affair because we are awakened. I can keep loving him and when I meet my next great love (yes, I trust I am not done with love), I can use the flashcards to help discover the patterns in my pathology when it comes to attraction. I need to begin with Available (duh!), move on to Less Complicated, followed closely by Open and Honest … and go from there. Although, right now it’s way more tempting to just stay single! What you see is what you get. I am not special, I am unique. Authentic me is just gonna have to be enough for now.