The Excavation: My Journey Toward Greater Authenticity

I didn’t know I’d started digging. In early 2020, it felt like everyone was holding their breath — and I was, too, for reasons that would only reveal themselves later.

That year was a slow unearthing: a string of family losses, a friend who died at the hospital where I worked, and then COVID. Home became the place where grief and a thousand small fractures met. Weeks after we were sent home, my heart dog got cancer and was gone within a month. Inside, I froze; outside, I kept functioning — I took jobs I didn’t want and finished a degree, each choice a way to keep moving while the ground shifted beneath me.

What I first called “excavation” started as a small shovel. Over time it became power tools. Menopause, chronic stress, and the body’s physical alarms forced my questions to change. I discovered the Enneagram and learned how habitual patterns — adaptive at first — can harden into traps. Gabor Maté’s The Wisdom of Trauma helped me name what my body had been trying to tell me for years: surviving isn’t the same as living.

I felt like an animal molting: exposed and vulnerable while new skin hardened. That’s the humbling, awkward in-between — the liminal space where nothing quite fits, and yet everything is possible. It’s like the image of Linus’s blanket in the wash: that period of anxiety and vulnerability that occurs during a profound transition and illustrates the feeling of being stripped of a familiar source of comfort and security.

Now I’m in the clearing phase — learning to stand without the blanket, making space for what comes next. I’ve started new reflection practices (yes, with a little help from AI — as a tool, not a replacement). I’ll be sharing what I learn about patterns, workplace dynamics, cultural perspectives, and practical ways to live more honestly and intentionally.

If you’re in a liminal moment, or simply curious about the slow work of becoming yourself, stick around. I’ll pull up a chair. Let’s dig together. Sometimes, there are hidden treasures buried.

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