bringing me to my knees

There are days when the fragility of life and the anguish of day-to-day living squeezes at my heart so tightly that I am uncertain I want to keep going. Sometimes it all feels too much.

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There are days when the fragility of life and the anguish of day-to-day living squeezes at my heart so tightly that I am uncertain I want to keep going. Sometimes it all feels too much.

This morning I wake before my alarm that I set specifically to get up and move my car from the illicit parking spot I had left it in late last night after not finding any parking in my neighbourhood. I slide on a pair of shorts and run out to find that already a €90 fine had been thrust under the windshield wiper.

The third one in the past few months. It’s Spain and summer and high season and there’s not much parking when I return home at the wrong hours.

It’s fine. It’s just money.

But when I come back inside I kneel down on the living room floor and begin to cry. Big exhausted overwhelmed sobs burst from my chest as tears fall down my face.

The bureaucratic logistics of living in Spain are so convoluted that they spin my head around. Add on top of that, the unique complexity of me as a human in this world with uncertain roots: an Italian car from the UK driving on the wrong side of the road in Spain, with an Australian driver’s licence and an Austrian passport, make things become even more complicated.

I am slowly getting my paperwork in order since my arrival 9 months ago. A process that comprises many appointments in many different offices with lots of paperwork where everyone tells you to go to a different office and after 5 offices you end up at the original one and they finally send you away with a new piece of paperwork and a stamp.

I have discovered that to continue driving in Spain I have to redo my theoretical and practical driving tests but not until I have had my residency for 6 months which I will receive on the 22nd of August. That is if — and Spain being the wild west of bureaucratic practices where nothing is certain — I get it on that date.

I have a hard decision to make.

Drive my car back to the UK and sell it there before my insurance runs out on September 1st.

Or store it away somewhere for 6 months or more until I am legally allowed to drive it again, and then pay the €2,500 fee to have it legally registered in Spain.

This is what brings me to my knees.

I have an overpowering sense of being completely alone and untethered when it comes to making choices that are so confusing and illogical to me. I’ve bypassed this element of ‘adulting’ my entire life, or always had partners who handled these things, and for the first time find myself faced with life challenges that I feel unequipped to address.

My heart aches as an old wound resurfaces. This deep sadness of not feeling supported. I look around and see so many generous, loving, supportive people in my life so I know this wound is not true but arising in its healing.

That’s the gift this island is giving me. She is guiding me back to my wholeness. Every ache, every pattern, every wound is being fleshed out. She is teaching me how to stay with the heartaches and emotional sensations that are part of this extraordinary season of growth I am moving through.

When my comfort zone is the wild, unknown spaces in-between, where I have always found comfort with unanswered questions, she is offering me another life, another world. One that wants to bring me to my own edge of evolution. It is the reason I am willing to do the hard things and put myself through the practical challenges that allow me to build a life here. The ones I would have normally run from.

Enjoy today’s journaling practice —> finding your centre when life feels out of your grasp: